On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the People’s Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.
The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweeted an article from the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of “disinformation”, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a “conspiracy theory.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Civil Defense Chief also said the coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhao’s posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.
Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags like The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well as The Epoch Times of the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has close ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagon’s largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.
When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 1950–1953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject is divided. However, an unredacted report from 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many “former” Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.
Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing “plague bombs” by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the Korean War. According to Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:
“…Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.”
Frank Olson , one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama series Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIA’s activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.
Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspended amid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detrick’s germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.
Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagon’s own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism — though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Army’s Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland has cooperated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.
Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfully recreated the avian influenza flu virus in a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the ‘Spanish flu.’ The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemic’s effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the world’s population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.
Soldiers ill with the Spanish flu at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918
There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.
If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is already partnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus which would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.
One of the WHO’s other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his ‘charitable’ private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in “fixing” the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congo which forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.
More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gates stated:
“First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
To put it another way, one of the world’s wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of ‘overpopulation’ pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.
Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by a short list of fossil fuel companies and the world’s largest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the world’s poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such as BirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular “progressive” politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). ‘AOC’ is also the face of the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for “achieving a more sustainable population.”
The false notion of “overpopulation” became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of American scientist Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb in 1968 , an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Today’s doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlich’s false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlich’s eco-fascism. As much as today’s ‘population bombers’ like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.
Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regime’s programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefeller’s grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in “reproductive health” (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.
In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominously wrote that the world should “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war.” The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise caused tens of millions of deaths and set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself has stepped down from Microsoft to focus on his philanthropy while his foundation is busy working on a vaccine.
Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which won an award at last year’s Sundance film festival , puts forth a chilling theory that a South African white supremacist organization deliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjöld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is a recorded confessionfrom a former SAIMR soldier to having deliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africans through immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.
Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow press’s version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a ‘patient zero’ in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elite’s eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the world’s population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elite’s potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
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