An investigative analysis takes apart a hackneyed piece of propaganda authored by an international alt-right clique with links to the Pentagon.
by Raul Diego
A now-deleted fact sheet published by the U.S. State Department on January 15, 2021, claimed that for over a year, “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin.” The official release of that fact sheet focuses on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV); a controversial research lab in the Hubei province of China which has been the target of well-earned suspicions over its work on bat-borne zoonotic diseases like SARS-CoV-2, better known as the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Missing from the State Department’s missive is the intimate bond that this particular laboratory has to American scientific institutions and to a tight-knit group of individuals with direct links to the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the biodefense establishment. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci’s funding of gain-of-function (GoF) research in 2014 at the Chinese lab is just one example. The highly polarizing GoF studies, which entail turbo-charging a pathogen’s virulence through the “generation of viruses with properties that do not exist in nature” present considerable biosafety hazards, which led the Obama administration to issue a federal moratorium on GoF research. The study Fauci funded at the WIV in 2014 was done so in contravention to the moratorium then in effect.
Deeper and more disturbing ties to outfits like USAID-funded Ecohealth Alliance have been covered by independent journalists like Same Husseini and others, revealing the WIV’s close relationship to people like David R. Franz – former commander of Fort Detrick, the pre-eminent biowarfare and biodefense facility in the U.S. and the source of the anthrax spores used in the infamous 2001 anthrax attacks. In July 2020, this author carried out an investigation into the nexus between the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), USAID and zoonotic disease research in Asia.
Recently, some of these facts have seeped into mainstream news outlets as the “lab-leak” hypothesis, which suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen escaped from a laboratory in China. Careful to avoid drawing attention to links between American scientific institutions and their Chinese counterparts, a narrative is gathering momentum as the idea of a ‘cover-up’ by Chinese authorities is promulgated on prime time television news magazine shows like “60 Minutes,” which ran an expose the promoted the idea that China is “weaponizing” the pandemic. The narrative is not new and has been lingering in the background since the pandemic was declared.
But, as the Biden administration rolls in, there is a renewed push to vilify China and move it straight into the crosshairs as America’s next great enemy in the style of the Soviet Union, which dominated American foreign policy and global capital intervention for half a century. From reports that China is attempting to “steal” Americans’ DNA through firms tied to the Chinese military to borderline racist tropes about Chinese wet markets, predictable plotlines are being hashed to usher in a new global order based on the concept of so-called “stakeholder capitalism.” This reimagining of capitalist exploitation will rely on biometric identification systems tied to financial markets through the burgeoning AI-enabled Internet of Things (IoT), ‘smart’ cities, and blockchain technologies.
Dragon blood harvest at the dawn of human capital markets
In this multi-part investigative analysis, we will dissect a daring piece of propaganda titled “The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraud” published on Medium which has been making the rounds on social media purporting to demonstrate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is behind the global lockdowns and, by implication, the pandemic itself. The heavily-annotated “open letter” is addressed to the FBI and calls for an “expedited federal investigation into scientific fraud in COVID‑19 public health policies.”
The 10-point document exploits widespread fears and the economic hardship many are suffering as a result of the ubiquitous lockdowns and related policies adopted by governments around the world in the wake of the pandemic crisis. MintPress will dissect each point to reveal the fallacious arguments that underpin them and will examine the multiple authors’ background to uncover their ideologically-driven agendas and direct links to the U.S. Military establishment as well as other factors that render their case against China suspect, to say the least.
Request-for-Expedited-Federal-Investigation-Into-Scientific-Fraud-in-COVID-19-Public-Health-PoliciesThe second part of the series will focus on how the lockdowns and the campaign to demonize Xi Jinping and China are, in actuality, both designed to serve the goals of the U.S. national security state and its partners in the race to AI “supremacy,” providing the perfect backdrop for the rapid scaling of 5G and other elements of the Information Technology Infrastructure (ITS), such as sensors and data-aggregation centers that are necessary to bring forth the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and implement the dynamics of stakeholder capitalism that will underpin its economics.
Pioneering researcher and activist Alison McDowell, who has been exposing the corporations and individuals that are laying the groundwork for this new modality of capital accumulation and exploitation in her blog, Wrench in the Gears, spoke to MintPress about the chilling programs that are both already in place and in the offing to produce the first large scale models for a burgeoning human capital market that will make the slave plantations of eighteenth-century America seem quaint by comparison.
CFR for dummies
An open letter published on the web in early January called on “the federal authorities in Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States” and the FBI, specifically, to investigate the claim made by the authors that the worldwide lockdowns that have decimated small businesses and left millions unemployed, yet lined the pockets of the richest people and sent stock markets soaring, have been “inspired” by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Their ‘case’ begins with the argument that as a result of China’s implementation of a lockdown on the city of Wuhan after the novel coronavirus was deemed a threat to public health by Chinese authorities. and the ostensible iron grip the communist nation has on the World Health Organization, it was able to stealthily transpose its draconian measures on the rest of the world.
Relying on a quote by the WHO’s representative in China taken from a press conference given in Wuhan on the very day the lockdown order was issued, the action taken by China’s central government is posited as “unprecedented” in American history. The authors’ position is uncontroversial and obvious since quarantining “a city of 11 million people” had never been done anywhere else in the world, either.
Quoting at length from a federal judge’s decision in Pennsylvania that invalidated that state’s Covid restrictions on constitutional grounds, the authors are able to side with a growing sentiment among Americans and, indeed, with many people around the world who see the lockdowns and other intrusive public health measures as a bridge too far. If they had just focused on the actual limits placed on constitutional powers by the American justice system, itself, and how such measures were able to be rolled out and enforced here in the first place, the writers of this screed might have more credibility.
Instead, the setup is used to usher in a convoluted and politically charged condemnation of Xi Jinping and his supposed lackey, WHO Secretary General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, who together were able to trick every Western nation into implementing lockdowns on their own populations. Adhanom’s rise to the WHO’s top job is wholly attributed to China’s influence by the authors; a narrative that also conveniently aligns with the one being pushed by establishment mouthpieces like the CFR’s “Foreign Affairs magazine,” which contributed to laying out the foundation of this plot in the summer of 2020 in a piece titled “China’s Troubling Vision for the Future of Public Health.”
Painting China as the villain when it comes to worldwide public health initiatives is a picture that has been in the works for a while now. The push to institute a global biosecurity regime to sustain the coming human capital markets envisioned by the likes of World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab and company needs an anti-hero in order to pull it off. This letter is only one of many exercises intended for a gullible public that is more impressed by the volume of footnotes than by actual content.
Footnotes don’t make it real
After a poorly executed introduction, the other arguments become even more transparent. Perhaps none more than the one that immediately follows the opening salvo, where a visit by Xi Jinping to Imperial College London in 2015 to announce a collaborative research project involving “nanotechnology, bioengineering… and public health” between the UK and China ostensibly portends another public health coup by the Asian superpower.
Citing the publication of a study five years later reporting the “initial” efficacy of social distancing in the fight against the disease, the authors insinuate that, once again, China has bested the West by introducing the idea of social distancing.
Yet the Bush administration was already discussing social distancing and other pertinent public health control measures in the White House as early as 2003. Former special assistant to President George W Bush and senior director for bio-defense on the Homeland Security Council, Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, claims to have come up with the concept himself in this virtual press briefing of Big Pharma CEOs in March 2020.
In their efforts to cast Neil Ferguson, the scandal-plagued epidemiologist of Imperial College who shaped much of the UK’s initial Covid response, as Xi Jinping’s stooge, the authors cite a Business Insider article that refers to assertions made by the “U.S. intelligence community” directly contradicting the results of the aforementioned study. A closer look at the citation shows that the article refers to a Bloomberg piece, which in turn revealed the identity of the intelligence official behind the claim to be none other than Mike Pompeo, still CIA director at the time and possibly the biggest China hawk in the Trump administration.
Adding intellectual insult to injury, Pompeo’s beef revolved around the exclusion of asymptomatic cases for the purpose to bring the number of reported cases down. A fact left unmentioned in the letter as it would not only undermine the prior assertion but also another accusation further down in the write-up; namely that the CCP was the driving force behind the asymptomatic furor that justified the ongoing mask frenzy, which Anthony Fauci has continued to fully, even doubly, endorse.
Enter the dragon
Much of the letter’s thesis revolves around the bold assumption that the World Health Organization is nothing more than an appendage of the CCP. Once you accept this premise, the rest of the toxic concoction goes down rather smoothly. From the race to produce enough ventilators to treat hospital patients to the PCR testing protocols controversy to the idea of asymptomatic spread – all of it, according to the authors, came from the bowels of the red-tailed leviathan in the East.
On the question of ventilators, the authors proclaim that WHO’s March 2020 guidance to healthcare workers recommending “escalating quickly to mechanical ventilation as an early intervention for treating COVID-19 patients” was based on Chinese research calling for “invasive mechanical ventilation” as the “first choice” for people with moderate to severe respiratory distress.”
The omissions are telling, as the paper cited in reference to the WHO guidance clearly refers to patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), which is not mentioned in the letter once, leaving the reader to assume it regards any Covid-infected individual.
Furthermore, the paper distinguishes between existing Chinese guidelines, which recommend a technique known as High Flow Nasal Cannula (HFNC) or other noninvasive ventilation methods, and the WHO’s recommendation of “escalating to invasive mechanical ventilation [if standard oxygen therapy fails].”
Regarding the recent PCR test cycle threshold scandal, WHO’s guidance once again serves as the jumping off point. But, of the three Chinese studies purportedly “cited” by WHO, only one deals with PCR testing cycles. Belying their claims, it was the study itself, which relied on WHO guidance to conduct the laboratory tests that resulted in the 37 to 40 threshold. The other two studies relate to the clinical characteristics of the virus and molecular and serological investigation of patients with the virus, respectively.
The authors run into some murky waters they know to stay clear of. The former, in particular, represents a Pandora’s box that will only unleash a barrage of connections to the global biowarfare mafia covered in the Engineering Contagion series I co-authored, that go back decades and sheds light on some of the darkest corners of the emerging biosecurity state. The letter’s focus on the Corman-Drosten Protocol used in the most common PCR test available was developed with “in silico (theoretical) genome sequences used to create their PCR protocol by Chinese scientists including Yong-Zhen Zhang and Shi Zhengli, Director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Wuhan’s best friends
The passing mention of one of the central figures and research labs in the entire Covid narrative reveals a reluctance to pry further into the WIV and its close connections to American health, scientific and intelligence circles, including direct funding from Fauci’s NIAID, as mentioned in the introduction of this series. These links, however, extend far beyond a few research contracts and tie back into the actual laboratory work done on bat-borne coronaviruses over decades in collaboration with agencies like NIH, DARPA, and USAID. Shi Zhengl, a.k.a ¨Bat Woman¨, herself was a protagonist in both the initial discovery of the virus and the first to offer up her laboratory (and her government, by inference,) as its source when she publicly admitted early on to the possibility of the pathogen escaping the WIV lab by accident.
More significantly, virtually all of the coronavirus research conducted at the WIV is tied to USAID and EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that partnered with the U.S. agency to collect tens of thousands of coronavirus samples from sites in Southeast Asia through a program called PREDICT. As the moniker implies, the 10-year program ending in 2019 was part of an initiative to develop early warning methods to detect viral pathogens – a project that followed closely in the footsteps of a similar program created by Michael Callahan at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called PROPHECY. Callahan was also intimately involved in the coronavirus research in Southeast Asia at the same time.
A recent Washington Post editorial revealed that the WIV holds the most important bat coronavirus database in China, with 22,000 virus samples including over 100 unpublished sequences. EcoHealth Alliance, both via PREDICT and working directly with the WIV helped gather most of the pathogens contained in the coronavirus database. According to information supplied by DRASTIC, an independent team of researchers and scientists, that has been studying the WIV database, EcoHealth Alliance took part in the vast majority of the coronavirus samples collected for the laboratory, and its president, Peter Daszak, has participated in numerous U.S.-funded bat coronavirus studies together with WIV.
Daszak’s role in the emerging narrative vis-a-vis China and the pandemic is problematic, to say the least, given the fact that he is part of the WHO’s Covid-19 origin investigation team, which began its work in China on February 6 and also chairs the Lancet’s Covid-19 origins Task Force.
None of these salient conflicts of interest are mentioned by the authors of the letter in their disingenuous invectives against the CCP, as it would severely weaken their case. After all, how would they explain the fact that American institutions not only played a leading role in the collection of 10,000 bat coronaviruses via PREDICT but also funded much of the research including GoF studies by Fauci’s NIAID? Answering these questions can only shed uncomfortable light on the extensive ties between the WIV and the highest reaches of the Western scientific establishment.
Symptoms of a tall tale
Cherry-picking WHO literature to make the claim that the notion of asymptomatic spread came from China, the authors rely on a quote from a July 2020 scientific brief: “Early data from China suggested that people without symptoms could infect others.” The data in question came from a WHO-China joint mission that “consisted of 25 national and international experts from China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, the United States of America and the World Health Organization (WHO). The Joint Mission was headed by Dr. Bruce Aylward of WHO and Dr. Wannian Liang of the People’s Republic of China,” according to the mission’s report cited in the paper quoted in the letter.
Further, in the same July brief, multiple reports from Western sources were cited as evidence of asymptomatic spread, including a study conducted by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 Emergency Response in Atlanta, GA and a study carried out in Singapore, which references the Atlanta paper.
The letter cites a number of Western studies that also concluded that asymptomatic spread was occurring, but the authors inexplicably excuse these as “dubious” or judge their findings to be “considerably weakened” and for some reason, failing to contribute to the justification for lockdowns in the West, which they insist is China’s fault.
True laboratory-confirmed asymptomatic spread, defined as “a person infected with COVID-19 who does not develop symptoms” was virtually dismissed by the WHO in a Situation Report that the organization published in April 2020, wherein it concedes that despite the fact that “Asymptomatic cases have been reported as part of contact tracing efforts in some countries,” there have been “no documented [cases of] asymptomatic transmission.”
Lastly, the asymptomatic spread narrative was put to rest by a Chinese study in December 2020, in which a mass screening of 10 million people concluded that asymptomatic people are not infectious.
The authors
A look at the authors´ backgrounds is enough to discern the real interests lurking behind the China-bashing document. American tax attorney Michael P. Senger tops the list of authors on the paper, itself. Senger claims to have advised the US on the “domestic and international provisions” of Trump’s corporate giveaway known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 in his Alston & Bird bio – the tax firm he left in April 2020, according to his Linked In page.
The firm’s clients include Amazon, Microsoft and a host of other transnational corporations with considerable interests in China, especially in the realm of Alston & Bird’s core competency of intellectual property; notably, also at the center of Trump’s “trade war” with China.
Since leaving Alston & Bird, Senger has been dedicated to mounting the anti-China Covid propaganda, which he has been peddling since September 2020. In an appearance on Sky News that month, Senger declares that the basis for his theory that China is leading the global lockdown “fraud” is a “huge ring of tweets” uncovered by an unidentified Israeli company. It was these “thousands and thousands of tweets, using essentially identical language, denigrating all these other governments”, that apparently convinced Senger to embark on this crusade. Senger has been the most visible among the paper’s authors and has used his own personal Twitter account to disseminate it.
Joining him on the document’s credits is another former attorney, Stacey A. Rudin, whose prolific blog posts on the Koch-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) form much of the basis for the denigration of WHO Secretary General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, painting him as a puppet of Xi Jinping. Rudin also keeps a page on Medium, where she also rails against China and the lockdowns she claims are the Asian superpower’s “new concept weapon in the post-nuclear age”, which perfectly aligns with American Chinahawk’s Cold War revivalism.
Moving down the list we find Dr. Clare Craig, a former Head of Pathology at a company called Panakeia. Notably, Dr. Craig also left her position recently to embark on this anti-China mission. Her former employer specializes in the distribution of “innovative medical products, services and modalities to the Military Health System worldwide for active duty men and women”, as well as opening the door to companies looking “to enter the Federal Government, VA, Department of Defense and Military markets”. In November of last year, Dr. Craig was featured in lockdownsceptics.org, an online anti-lockdown website run by an associate editor of the libertarian/alt-right online magazine Quillette, Toby Young. In the interview, Craig takes issue with the scientific literature regarding asymptomatic transmission, which “were all published in China,” according to her.
The libertarian-right wing associations of the paper’s authors are irrefutable and continue down the line with individuals who have displayed disturbing xenophobic tendencies, such as Canadian politician Randy Hillier, who twice was embroiled in very public racism scandals while he was serving in the Ontario legislature. Hillier also contributed to a bilingual libertarian online journal called Le Québécois Libre between 2003 and 2010. In 2019, Hillier was expelled from his own party’s caucus – led by the infamous Doug Ford – over insensitive remarks made to the parent of an autistic child, among other matters of incompetency.
British activist and radio presenter, Maajid Nawaz, comes in second to last on the list. The controversial founder of a counter-extremism think tank called Quilliam made his name through a “transformation” from a one-time extremist who went from embracing Islamist militancy to advising David Cameron and George W. Bush on Muslim extremism and making a career in the media. Nawaz’ family and former friends accuse him of embellishing and lying about his past, with one saying that Nawaz is an opportunist who “is whatever he thinks he needs to be” and “neither an Islamist nor a liberal”. Researchers recently uncovered Nawaz’ ties to Republican ‘dark money’ that funneled $3 Million to the Quilliam Foundation.
Next, we find Indian economist Sanjeev Sabhlok, PhD, who has been writing about Xi Jinping’s “use of hysteria of warfare” on The Times of India, outright calling lockdowns a “Trojan Horse”, despite admitting in the very next sentence that “there is no evidence, however, to suggest that Xi Jinping had planned the lockdowns”. Sabhlok is yet another one of the authors who has recently exited his day job in the government of Australia, the country he made his adoptive home after leaving his native India over policy disagreements there. Another proponent of libertarian economics, Sabhlok regularly shares his thoughts on Covid and lockdowns, as well as his love for Hayek in his personal blog.
Keeping with the theme, Francis Hoar is a Barrister specializing in commercial law and contributes to a Brexit Central, a pro-Brexit website run by Matthew Elliot, who was the CEO of Vote Leave – the organization that created the campaign to leave the European Union in the first place and who is considered to be the “mastermind” behind Brexit. Such links to the top of the UK power structure and the commercial aspect surrounding Brexit, in particular, should be noted as tensions rise between the government of Brexit poster-boy Boris Johnson and China.
Completing the British connection is Simon Dolan, a businessman, entrepreneur and founder of the anti-mask Keep Britain Free (KBF) movement. Ironically, one of Dolan’s side businesses over which he exercises significant control as its director and company secretary is a charter airline called Jota Aviation, which has been delivering personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks to the NHS, and masks are required for all passengers on Jota Aviation flights. The hypocrisy does not seem too surprising since Dolan admits that “the only British politician he admired was Margaret Thatcher“.
Capping off the anti-China lockdown propaganda authors’ list is none other than retired United States Air Force brigadier general and current senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Robert S. Spalding III. A true Chinahawk, Spalding’s area of focus is U.S.-China relations, economic and national security. The General spouts a level of anti-China rhetoric that would even make his new Hudson colleague Mike Pompeo blush, blaming everything from the destruction of the working class in America to the problems of the 2020 presidential elections on China. Spalding’s 2019 book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept”, purports to detail China’s “most brilliant ploys”, which include inculcating insidious communist narratives among “unsuspecting American students” and funneling American technology to China. Spalding has been at the cutting edge of technological advancements in the U.S. military, developing a biometric data collection program at the DoD as early as 2006, according to his Linked In profile.
A classic case of projection
The remaining points are remarkable on several counts. One is how the already copious amount of references increase in frequency and the other is the sheer mendacity as the authors engage in the tired and familiar pattern seen in 2016 when Russia was alleged to have carried out a massive social media campaign that threw the election for Donald Trump.
Furthermore, the authors not only accuse China of the same type of meme bombardment capable of turning water into wine but also have the audacity to portray the giant mainstream news outlets – from the New York Times to the Washington Post – as helpless victims of a vast Chinese state propaganda machine.
By and large, the document concludes by listing scientists, politicians, and a few advocates, who they consider to be either unwitting accomplices of the Asian menace or outright supporters of the Chinese Communist Party in their macabre undertaking to rule the world through a totalitarian health dictatorship.
A breaking scandal in Germany shows just how far Western leaders, fully free from Chinese influence, have gone in order to justify the lockdowns and other restrictions. Emails obtained in a lawsuit revealed that scientists from the country’s disease control center and a number of academic institutions were commissioned by the German Minister of the Interior, Markus Kerber, to “develop a model on the basis of which preventive and repressive measures can be planned” at the outset of the pandemic in March. The scientists worked closely with the ministry and in just four days came up with a paper distributed in secret to other members of government, which contained a “worst case scenario” of one million dead if social activity was not drastically curbed.
The lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates have had severe socioeconomic consequences for millions of people who are witnessing the erosion of their civil liberties, human rights, and even mental health. But, to suggest that the government of China has orchestrated what has evidently been a coordinated response by virtually every nation in the world is misleading, at best.
Considering that the Pentagon has been moving away from counterinsurgency efforts in places like Afghanistan and is “preparing for high-intensity conflict” against China and other nation-states, it behooves us to prepare against the onslaught of propaganda headed our way to justify another century of perpetual war.
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
i honestly think you don’t know what Alt-right is. It is the opposite of neocon right.