A new study from renowned University of Hamburg researcher Roland Wiesendanger concludes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the “cause” of COVID-19.
The February study argues against two prevailing theories that COVID-19 was transmitted to humans either via a wet market or a lab accident.
“To date, there is no scientifically based rigorous evidence for either mentioned theories,” Wiesendanger, a three-time recipient of the prestigious European Research Council grant.
Wiesendanger’s 105-page report continues, asking: “is the current global crisis actually the result of a coincidence in nature — a coincidental mutation of a coronavirus a bat with the assistance of an intermediate host — or the result of a Scientist carelessness when carrying out the project is high-risk research with global pandemic potential?”
To answer the question, Wiesendanger cites 600 incontrovertible facts to bolster his theory that “the number and the quality of evidence clearly indicate a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
A summary of the report outlines the primary arguments in favor of Wiesendanger’s case, emphasizing the fact that the host has still not been identified; the virus can “couple surprisingly well to human cell receptors”; The Wuhan lab “carried out genetic manipulations on coronaviruses for many years with the aim of making them more contagious, dangerous and deadly for humans”; and that there were “significant safety deficiencies” at the facility . . .
Read the whole thing. What we are looking at is this result of a Chinese experiment in developing a biological warfare weapon. Wiesendanger believes evidence indicates that the COVID-19 virus escaped the Wuhan lab as the result of carelessness by the lab’s staff. That is to say, China did not cause the pandemic intentionally, even though the virus was developed for malign purposes. You don’t manipulate a virus to make it more contagious and deadly just for the theoretical scientific value, eh?
When Chinese agent “Christine” Fang first befriended Eric Swalwell, he was just a city councilman in a suburb of Oakland, California. So how did she know to target him specifically? Swalwell challenged incumbent Rep. Pete Stark, who had Obama’s endorsement, in the 2012 Democratic primary. Out of all the local politicians in the San Francisco Bay area, why would Fang make Swalwell a target of her influence operation, unless Fang’s Chinese spymasters had some inside knowledge?
Not to get too paranoid here, but it has been reported that Fang raised money for Swalwell, and you have to wonder if Beijing’s influence was a “thumb on the scale” of that 2012 election. In other words, Fang targeted Swalwell because China knew he would beat Stark — the fix was in.
That’s just a theory, of course, but it is a reasonable inference, given what we know about Swalwell’s pro-China/anti-American agenda.
The Bay Area offers ideal conditions for a foreign intelligence operative aiming to identify and target ambitious local politicians with national aspirations. . . .
Some of America’s most powerful politicians got their start in Bay Area politics, and China recognizes California’s importance. The MSS has a unit dedicated solely to political intelligence and influence operations in California.
Silicon Valley is also the world’s most important center for the technology industry, making it a hotbed for Chinese economic espionage. Russian intelligence has also long targeted the Bay Area. . . .
Democrats dominate the Bay Area, from mayors to its numerous U.S. congressional districts, and anyone seeking proximity to power needs to be in their political circles.
“It shows how the Chinese Communist Party operates inside this country. It shows how they infiltrate local politics, how they identify young, in some cases soft targets, people who don’t have a lot of staff around them, who don’t have experience, who don’t actually understand the tactics of the Chinese Communist Party, and then they follow them up … In Eric Swalwell’s case, he has become a very, very powerful, important member of Congress with access to the nation’s top secrets. So it’s a very important story just to understand how China is operating … right now in this country.”
It is certainly not a coincidence that a Chinese agent targeted Swalwell who, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, was an outspoken advocate of the anti-Trump “Russian collusion” hoax.
The Democratic Party is now controlled by Communist China. Democrats are the anti-American party. They will do nothing to protect us from China, because what is bad for America is good for Democrats.
Democrats in Congress are compromised by Chinese embeds, specifically those tied to intelligence committees like Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., according to former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell on Newsmax TV.
“They have infiltrated academia as well as politics, and something needs to be done,” Grenell told Thursday’s “Stinchfield,” making a call for both the House and Senate Intelligence committees to be investigated for China espionage in classified settings.
“This is extremely deep. This is not the only case. I can assure you, there are many members of Congress and Democrat governors and local officials who have been targeted by the Chinese and the Chinese have pushed leverage.”
The massive foreign espionage campaign influence “has picked up” amid the global coronavirus pandemic, Grenell added to host Grant Stinchfield.
“The Chinese have seen their reputation completely tank because of what the intelligence community made clear that COVID-19 started in China.
“So, we have a crisis on our hands.”
Joshua Philipp of the Epoch Times has spent weeks reporting on the pandemic of COVID-19, and this video — nearly an hour long — is full of facts about the case I hadn’t known until I watched it. The official explanation, that the disease originated in a “wet market,” looks very dubious when you consider evidence indicating (not proving, but indicating) its origin in a government research laboratory. This not a conspiracy theory, and Philipp is not saying that China’s Communist Party intentionally inflicted this pandemic on the world. What he is saying is that you shouldn’t trust anything Beijing says about it.
The first five known cases of COVID-19 in the United States were all patients who had recently traveled to Wuhan, China.
Case No. 1 was in Snohomish County, Washington. Case No. 2 was in Chicago. Cases No. 3 and 4 were in Orange County, California, and Case No. 5 was in Maricopa County, Arizona. However, Case No. 6 was different. It was “the first instance of person-to-person spread with this new virus here,” as the CDC reported:
Previously, all confirmed U.S. cases had been associated with travel to Wuhan, China, where an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by this novel coronavirus has been ongoing since December 2019. However, this latest 2019-nCoV patient has no history of travel to Wuhan, but shared a household with the patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV infection on January 21, 2020.
Recognizing early on that the 2019-nCoV could potentially spread between people, CDC has been working closely with state and local partners to identify close contacts of confirmed 2019-nCoV cases. Public health officials identified this Illinois resident through contact tracing. Both patients are in stable condition.
“Given what we’ve seen in China and other countries with the novel coronavirus, CDC experts have expected some person-to-person spread in the US,” said CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, M.D. “We understand that this may be concerning, but based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.”
One of the repeated lies of the anti-Trump media is that the president failed to do what was necessary to prevent the spread of this disease. We are told, by Democrats and the media, that President Trump “wasted” six weeks during which he should have been . . . Well, doing something more than what he did, which was actually quite a lot.
The claim that Trump is “anti-science” has become part of the media’s narrative about the COVID-19 outbreak. Supposedly, a bias against science explains why the president didn’t do whatever it was that his critics, with the benefit of hindsight, say he should have done. What he actually did, however, was entirely in keeping with what the medical experts would have advised, given the circumstances. With only six known coronavirus cases in the U.S., five of them were people who had just returned from Wuhan, and the sixth was a household member of one of these travelers. So the first thing to do, obviously, was stop the arrival of more infected people from China, where the pandemic began and at the time had just been recognized as a “global emergency” by the WHO.
OK, so what happened next? As of Feb. 26 — nearly a month after Trump had created the coronavirus task force — there were still only 15 known cases of the disease in the United States. It was on Feb. 28 that Case No. 16 was identified in Santa Clara County, California:
Santa Clara County confirmed the second case of “community spread” of the new coronavirus in the United States, on Friday.
It is also the third novel coronavirus case in the county — and officials said it is not tied to the other two cases.
The individual tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. They had no contact with a known infected person and did not have any relevant travel history. . . .
The first case of community spread was reported just a day prior on Thursday in Solano County. The patient was transferred to the University of California, Davis Medical Center for treatment from NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville, California.
Business Insider reported that the UC Davis patient also did not have a relevant travel history or have any contact with known infected people. A leaked internal memo showed that the woman was transferred to UC Davis on February 19, but initial efforts to have her tested for COVID-19 were rejected because she did not meet the previous CDC requirements.
At that point — where the 16th case had just been identified — there was not a single known COVID-19 case in New York or New Jersey. The only known case on the East Coast up to that point, was a man who had recently arrived in Boston from Wuhan, China, in late January. At that time, Boston Public Health Commission director Rita Nieves said, “The risk to the general public remains low.” And this continued to be the case throughout February, so that if you want to cherry-pick quotes by President Trump during that time saying that he believed we had the problem under control, and that the Wuhan coronavirus posed no serious risk to Americans, so what? This was the consensus of the medical community at the time. It was not until the first week of March that the outbreak began to escalate rapidly. New York Times, March 1:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday confirmed New York State’s first case of the coronavirus, saying that a woman contracted the virus while traveling in Iran and is now in New York City isolated in her home.
“The patient has respiratory symptoms, but is not in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving to New York,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement.
The 39-year-old-woman is in Manhattan, according to state officials. She returned from Iran last week, and was tested after going to a hospital in the city; she has since been staying at home, officials said.
Early on Monday, the governor said the woman was a “unique case.” Appearing on CBS This Morning, he said she was a health care worker so “she knew to take precautions and stay in a controlled situation.” He added that she had not ridden public transportation since returning to New York.
Later, on CNN, he said he anticipated that “there will be community spread” but that “there’s no reason for concern.”
Andrew Cuomo, March 1: “There’s no reason for concern.”
How is it that Trump is being blamed for supposedly ignoring the danger of this disease, when the governor of New York — whose state now has thousands of residents dead from COVID-19 — described the news of the first case in the state as “no reason for concern”? At that point in time, Cuomo’s confidence seemed justified. There were still but a few dozen known cases of this disease in the country, and almost no one realized that, in a certain percentage of cases, people infected with the disease were asymptomatic, but still transmitting the virus to others.
One thing that did go wrong in the early federal response to the coronavirus pandemic was that the CDC and the FDA bungled the development and approval of testing, hindering identification of people with the virus. That was a bureaucratic snafu, for which Trump was not to blame, but because hindsight is always 20/20, we now know that COVID-19 was already spreading far beyond the known cases in late February and early March. For example, the outbreak in Dougherty County, Georgia, which is now one of the worst per-capita of any in the country, was spread at two funerals that took place on Feb. 29 and March 7.
Here we are, then, on Good Friday, with all the churches empty because of lockdown orders inspired by the pandemic, and the media continues promoting the narrative that Trump is to blame, because he is “anti-science.” Yet we see that many other officials — including the director of the CDC and the Democratic governor of New York — were not expressing fear of a widespread pandemic in January and February. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York City was telling residents to go on with life as normal as late as March 11: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.”
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign released a new ad on Thursday attacking former Vice President Joe Biden for his past support of China.
“During America’s crisis, Biden protected China’s feelings,” the text of the ad reads.
The ad features Biden’s past positive comments about China, as more Americans suffer from the coronavirus that first came from China.
“It is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper,” Biden says in the ad.
The ad also features Biden toasting Xi Jinping at dinner and questions on Biden’s son Hunter’s investments in China.
Dr. Anthony Fauci also has a cameo in the campaign ad, praising the president enacting the China travel ban to help fight the virus.
Democrats who want to play politics with this virus are likely to discover, to their regret, that they cannot win that game.
An Illinois Democrat who accused President Donald Trump of killing Americans by lying to the public about the coronavirus also spread pro-China misinformation about the deadly disease during a townhall with constituents.
As COVID-19 spreads across the nation, Rep. Sean Casten (D., Ill.) has repeatedly attempted to blame Trump and Republicans for the death toll, accusing them of spreading fatal misinformation about the pandemic. Casten himself, however, has misinformed the public about China’s role in the pandemic. When one of his constituents asked about the early Chinese response to the outbreak at a March 21 electronic town hall, the congressman refused to talk about the regime’s coverup of the virus. Instead, he incorrectly said that China had successfully isolated the outbreak in Wuhan.
“China, to their credit, once they realize they had a problem, shut down the entire province that this was in and they seem to have largely isolated the cases in China,” Casten said. “We have missed that window in the United States.” . . .
Casten also asserted the United States shut down its pandemic response team in the National Security Council, a false claim repeated by many Democrats and mainstream media outlets. Trump merely consolidated several redundant teams, including those tasked with the pandemic response, into one office while retaining much of their original staff, according to Tim Morrison, who previously led the consolidated office.
Via Instapundit, who asks: “Why are Democratic members of Congress covering up for the Chinese government’s misbehavior?”
Answer: Because Democrats hate America, that’s why.
And the same goes double for our journalistic elite. They have an arrogant sense of their own superiority to the rest of us, particularly the “deplorables” out in flyover country who vote for Trump. Therefore, the media establishment makes a calculation: Anything that we redneck hillbillies like (e.g., the internal combustion engine) is bad and must be destroyed, whereas anything we don’t like (e.g., communism) is good and must be encouraged. This is why, for example, the liberal media are so enthusiastic about transgenderism. They figure, “Yeah, the Trump voters are gonna hate having their daughters share a bathroom with some deranged pervert, so we must support policies that mandate this.”
Because of their reflexive partisan bias, our media are now actually cheering for the Chinese virus to kill the maximum number of Americans, because the more people die, the more they can blame Trump. This is why the media hate chloroquinine, and want this potentially life-saving treatment to fail, because a drug that saves Americans lives might be good for Trump, and anything that is good for Trump is wrong.
Hat-tip to Kurt Schlicter for giving this pandemic a memorable name. It’s going to get worse — perhaps a whole lot worse — before it gets better, but in the meantime, we can figure out what went wrong, and caution about what’s still going wrong. The first and most important thing President Trump needs to do now is to halt domestic flight departures from New York City-area airports:
New Yorkers who flee to Florida during the coronavirus outbreak will have to self quarantine for two weeks when they arrive — or risk facing criminal charges, the Sunshine State’s governor said Monday. Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was issuing the executive order that would apply to all travelers from New York City, which, as of Monday, has recorded 12,305 cases of the virus. By comparison, Florida so far has 1,100 cases.
The order also applies to areas surrounding the Big Apple, but DeSantis didn’t specify the exact perimeter.
The Florida governor said about 100 flights from New York City and the surrounding area arrive to his state daily. He said he believes at least one person aboard each flight is infected with the illness.
DeSantis at an earlier Monday press conference said, “We are getting huge amounts of people flying in. We are looking at how to address those flights.”
“In New York (City), when they did the stay-at-home order, what did people do? A lot of people fled the city and they are going to stay with their parents or fly (out),” DeSantis said.
With a large elderly population, Florida is uniquely vulnerable, and New York is now the U.S. epicenter of the Chinese Bat Soup Flu pandemic. New York and New Jersey combined have 23,719 reported cases of the virus, which is more than half (55.6%) of all U.S. cases (42,663). It is irresponsible to allow residents of such a “red zone” to hop on a plane and fly anywhere in the country, taking the virus with them. If you have 100 people on a plane leaving LaGuardia, JFK or Newark, chances are at least one of those passengers will be infected. Do you want them flying to your state? Ground those planes, Mr. President.
If we can just maintain quarantine conditions another week or two, there is every reason to believe that we will be past the the worst of it:
Those of us trying to predict what direction the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic will take in the United States have been paying close attention to reports from Italy. And until Sunday, the outlook there kept going from bad to worse.
For nearly two weeks after the Italian government imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 9, the daily number of coronavirus deaths mounted rapidly. On Friday, it was reported that 627 Italians died from the disease, as the country’s cumulative death toll passed 4,000. This was shocking, but then on Saturday, Italy reported that 793 more people had died from the virus.
If, like me, you have been laser-focused on this situation for the past week, you mentally braced yourself for Italy to report an even larger number on Sunday, but then breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported that only 651 Italians died of coronavirus. This was small consolation, as Italy — a nation with a population about 60 million — has already suffered more than 6,000 dead in this pandemic, with a total of more than 60,000 coronavirus cases and thousands of new infections still being reported every day. Yet Sunday’s numbers from Italy were a much-needed cause for hope, and this was followed by a further decrease in Monday’s reported deaths — down to 602, a 24-percent decline from Saturday’s peak. . . .
For too long, my podcasting partner John Hoge and I have attempted to downplay the dangers of the Deadly Chinese Menace.
We tried to be voices of prudent skepticism amid the hysterical outpouring of Fear and Loathing unleashed by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. It seemed to us irresponsible — and perhaps even racist — to suggest that this viral plague from the Far East could infect millions of Americans, killing thousands, overwhelming our health-care system, wrecking our economy. And what was the reward for our caution?
“Oh, you’re just being right-wing apologists for the Trump administration,” they said, accusing us of partisan bias because we didn’t give into the climate of apocalyptic doom-saying. And after careful consideration, I’ve decided our critics were right. So tonight — for an entire hour beginning at 7 p.m. ET — we’re going to surrender to fear.
Anything less than the worst-case scenario is wrong — that’s what responsible people like Rachel Maddow are saying, and therefore it is obviously time for everyone to give in to abject panic. We are all doomed, destined to die and be overrun by hordes of bat-eating Chinese!
You want fear-mongering? Why, I’m prepared to monger fear of such depths as not imagined since the days of Lothrop Stoddard. How foolish we were to imagine our pathetic “science” and so-called “democracy” could save us from these cunning Asiatics and their Oriental diseases!
Tonight — 7 p.m. ET on The Other Podcast — and if you want to help us usher in the New Era of Helpless Panic, call in at (646) 668-2541.
And, as usual, our greedy capitalist scheme requires us to remind you that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:
It proved nearly impossible to find mainstream media reports on this. The only mention I found was by Robert Fisk in the U.K. Independent, and that column was behind a paywall. So I was forced to go digging into the archives to verify what the alternative source had reported:
As the United States prepares for a second week of lockdown to slow the spread of the Chinese coronavirus (COVID-19), hundreds of people in Italy are dying every day from this disease. And the reason why Italy now has more coronavirus deaths than any other country can be summarized in a single word — luxury.
In the world of fashion, the “Made in Italy” tag has a distinct value associated with luxury and status. Merchants can charge higher prices for clothing, shoes, handbags, and other fashion goods manufactured in Italy, and that value was coveted by certain Chinese entrepreneurs. During the past three decades, more and more Chinese investors bought into textile and leather-good factories in northern Italy, and they brought over Chinese laborers to work in those factories. By 2010, there were reportedly 60,000 Chinese in Prato, an industrial suburb of Florence. To accommodate Italy’s new foreign labor force, nonstop flights were established between China and Rome.
None of this was a secret. . . .
