American Pravda: “If Anything Happens to Me…” Ron Unz
Elections have consequences and the remarkable return of Donald Trump to the White House has already led to a flurry of major reversals across numerous policy areas. The weekend newspapers revealed that these now included the longstanding Covid origins debate, which had largely disappeared from the headlines over the last year or two.
John Radcliffe, the new incoming CIA director, had long favored the lab-leak hypothesis, claiming that the virus had accidentally escaped from China’s Wuhan lab, and under the influence of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump himself had sometimes taken that same position during 2020. According to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the CIA has now reversed its previous position and declared that it favors that theory. Although that shift was not based upon any new evidence and was only expressed “with low confidence,” leading China-hawks such as Sen. Tom Cotton eagerly seized upon this announcement to demand that “China pay for unleashing a plague upon the world.”
Given our bitter ongoing Cold War with China, the practical impact of the new CIA verdict remains unclear. But coming as it did around the fifth anniversary of that huge global catastrophe, I hope the resulting news stories may refocus public attention on that important issue, which had otherwise vanished from the headlines.
My own longstanding interest in this topic had already been rekindled a few weeks ago by a sudden dramatic event of an entirely different type.
On December 17, 2024, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Defense Troops, was assassinated outside his Moscow home by an explosive device, with Ukraine immediately taking full credit for the killing and the assassin himself caught soon afterwards.
No one could remember the last time such a top-ranking Russian general had died under those circumstances, and given Ukraine’s total dependence upon Western financial and military support, few believed that its government would have undertaken such an extremely provocative operation without at least the tacit approval of its American and NATO paymasters. Indeed, leading British newspapers, closely linked to that country’s intelligence services, quickly celebrated the powerful blow that had been dealt to their Russian adversary.
Kirillov had no direct involvement in the bitter Ukraine fighting, so most assumed that he had been marked for death because of the controversial public positions taken by his organization early in the conflict.
Soon after Russian military forces poured across the border in late February 2022, Russia claimed to have found a network of dozens of biolabs mostly near their border, funded by the Pentagon and working with deadly anthrax and plague. Development of offensive biological weapons was blatantly illegal under international law, and Moscow declared that these posed an obvious threat to Russian society.
I had initially been uncertain whether to believe those accusations, which were so similar to the fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs that we used to justify our own 2003 invasion of Iraq. But a few days later, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy, seemed to confirm those facts in her Congressional testimony, with both Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald also noting the huge implications of her inadvertent public admissions.
Kirillov’s name had rarely been mentioned in that dispute, but then a few months later on August 4, 2022, he himself attracted even greater controversy when he held a public press conference to declare that there seemed strong evidence that Covid was an illegal American bioweapon, deliberately released against China.
According to many estimates, the Covid virus had already killed around 20 million people by that date, including more than a million Americans, so Kirillov’s accusations were momentous ones. Yet although his statements were heavily covered by the Russian media, they were almost totally ignored by every mainstream and alternative Western outlet, with my own article being nearly the sole exception. Twitter even launched a campaign of active suppression, taking the unprecedented step of suspending the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry when it Tweeted out some of Kirillov’s information.
Gen. Kirillov was hardly the only prominent foreign leader to declare that the Covid pandemic was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack, and the same tactics of near-total Western media suppression had been regularly employed to prevent ordinary Americans from hearing those claims and wondering whether they might possibly be true.
For example, in my original April 2020 article I had noted the very early Covid outbreak in Iran, erupting in the Holy City of Qom and heavily infecting that country’s ruling elites.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
This extremely suspicious combination of factors quickly led the top Iranian leadership and its media organs to accuse America of having launched an illegal biowarfare attack against their country, with Iran’s former president even filing a formal complaint with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
But just as in the case of the later Russian charges, almost none of these explosive accusations were ever reported in the American media or that of other Western countries, so that few people in the West became aware of them at the time.
China had obviously been the main victim of the Covid outbreak and some of its government officials soon suggested that the virus had been brought to their country by the Americans participating in Wuhan’s World Military Games. But the Chinese subsequently went silent after ferocious counter-attacks by the Trump Administration, perhaps also recognizing that making such accusations without solid proof would be counter-productive and leave their country looking weak if they failed to forcefully retaliate. By then, China had already successfully controlled the spread of the virus, while Covid had begun sweeping across America, so they may have decided that since our own country was suffering the blowback from its botched biowarfare attack, no further response was necessary.
Those public statements by senior Russian and Iranian officials, heavily reported in their own media, were hardly based upon overwhelming evidence and failed to prove the accusations were true. But it seemed entirely unreasonable that they were almost totally ignored by our entire mainstream and alternative media, which successfully kept nearly the entire American public in a state of ignorance.
Even more unreasonable was the behavior of the numerous journalists and researchers who had been hotly debating the origins of the the Covid virus since the early days of the outbreak.
The official, establishment position promoted by the bulk of the mainstream media had always been that the virus was completely natural and had randomly infected its first human victim in Wuhan during late 2019. Meanwhile, a small but determined group of contrarian researchers and journalists—the so-called “lab-leakers”—strongly maintained that the virus was artificial and had been bioengineered, accidentally leaking out of a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and starting the epidemic in that city.
But although those latter individuals always claimed that they were exploring all possibilities and sources of evidence, none of them ever extended their discussion to include the biowarfare hypothesis, even after leaders in Russia and Iran had publicly proposed it. Instead, the Western media debate remained rigidly restricted to either the dominant narrative of a natural virus or the insurgent scenario of a Chinese lab-leak, with the third possibility always excluded from any discussion.
That bipolar consensus on the origins of Covid—natural virus or lab-leak—still remains in place today, a consensus now reinforced by the sudden assassination of the most prominent public figure who had challenged it.
Kirillov’s death prompted me to revisit these issues from years earlier, and I recapitulated and discussed these in a December article.
With my attention to the topic now reawakened, I began exploring additional developments. Earlier this month I devoted a long article to discussing and summarizing the Covid origins analysis of Jim Haslam, an independent researcher who had written a lengthy series of Substack posts over the last couple of years, then recently collected his material together and published it as a book.
Over the last few years, most of the Covid origins debate had taken place on ephemeral Twitter threads, and Haslam very helpfully gathered together and analyzed a great deal of this accumulated mass of evidence, coming to some striking and persuasive conclusions.
First, he mustered the absolutely overwhelming evidence that the virus was bioengineered rather than natural. As he demonstrated, most of the top virologists had quickly come to that same alarming conclusion soon after they began examining its full genome and discovered its very strange structure, while they apparently only reversed that verdict under heavy pressure rather than as a result of any new evidence or strong analytical arguments.
Haslam’s conclusions were based upon a combination of published accounts, leaked information, and declassified documents, and he summarized his reconstructionin a 2023 post:
What started as KGA’s lab leak ‘report’ slowly evolved into a natural origins paper. On Feb 4th, Eddie submitted the first draft, which speculated about possible reasons for a natural origin…
By Feb 12th, the draft had evolved from KGA’s lab leak report into Eddie’s natural origin paper. Nature Medicine’s editor replied, “Yes, please!” but they had to edit it down to 2,200 words and 30 references. Little space was left for nuance, and by Feb 25th, Eddie had convinced himself and the others that SARS2 had a natural origin…
As Haslam emphasized, part of the “smoking gun” evidence that had quickly captured the attention of those virologists was that a very long stretch of the Covid genome exactly matched that of a natural Chinese virus that had been catalogued by the Wuhan lab, the sole difference being the insertion of a short furin cleavage site, an addition that hugely enhanced the infectivity of the virus. Furthermore, this exact bioengineering proposal had previously been suggested in published research papers and grant requests.
Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning. Bob Garry email to Fauci
However, Haslam sharply departed from the previous lab-leak consensus on several important points. Nearly all of those past advocates had claimed that Covid had been bioengineered at the Wuhan lab, but Haslam argued that this was extremely implausible. None of the virologists at that facility or anywhere else in China possessed the technical expertise to do such work, nor had any of them previously published research papers indicating interest in that sort of project.
Instead, the primary author of the papers and grant proposals that amounted to a recipe for producing Covid had been Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), one of the world’ foremost viral bioengineers, who had long collaborated with the Wuhan lab and therefore received the genome of the natural Chinese precursor virus so closely matching Covid. So it seemed highly likely that Baric’s lab had produced the Covid virus, without anyone at the Wuhan lab involved in the project, and the behavior of the Chinese virologists strongly supported their claims of innocence.
Haslam also seemed to have cleared up one of the strangest puzzles regarding the pattern of Covid infectivity. A natural virus is almost invariably found in one or more local animal species, whose populations constitute its wildlife reservoirs from which it eventually jumped to infect humans. Yet despite enormous efforts, no such Chinese host species has ever been found.
Meanwhile, without much effort at all, five different North American animal species were found to have been heavily infected, including deer, and particular species of field mice and bats. Yet based upon other factors, we certainly know that Covid was not a natural virus that had previously been circulating in North America, so this anomaly had long puzzled many observers.
Haslam’s skilled scientific detective work uncovered that exactly these species were used as lab animals in Dr. Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. This strongly suggested that after its initial bioengineering, the Covid virus had been tested and had its infectivity tuned at that facility, using those particular animals for that purpose.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University had served as the chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, and in 2021 he had co-authored the earliest scientific paper arguing that Covid was bioengineered rather than natural, then expanded on that highly-controversial claim in numerous public interviews. Haslam’s arguments seemed to have convinced Sachs, who mentioned the Rocky Mountain Lab in his long March and December interviews with Tucker Carlson, which drew many millions of views on Twitter and YouTube.
I felt that Haslam had made a very strong case that Covid had been bioengineered from a natural Chinese precursor virus, probably at Baric’s UNC lab, then tested and tuned at Munster’s RML facility, and I summarized and quoted much of his analysis in my long article.
All of this constituted perhaps 90% of Haslam’s work, and I found it quite solid and persuasive. However, I was very skeptical of the remaining 10%, representing his own hypothesis of how the virus then reached Wuhan and was accidentally released into that city. I felt that his scenario lacked any solid factual basis and seemed wildly implausible, while also being contradicted by a great deal of other evidence. But since the two issues were entirely independent of each other, my serious doubts on that score failed to undercut any of Haslam’s arguments regarding the actual creation of the virus.
After describing all of Haslam’s work, I summarized my own reaction:
I found all of this material quite interesting and persuasive, but hardly surprising. Based upon entirely different arguments, I’d already become convinced by the early months of 2020 that Covid had been produced in an American lab, but had never much known or cared about the particular lab responsible.
Therefore, as various leaked documents over the next several years roiled the Covid origins debate, leading more and more analysts to accept a major American role in its creation, I paid little attention to that controversy. All the facts that were coming out merely confirmed my own longstanding assumptions, so I smiled with satisfaction that the rest of the world years later was finally inching towards the same conclusions I’d reached just weeks after the epidemic first began.
Haslam’s analysis took this much further, arguing that not only had American funding and American biotechnology been involved, but that the Covid virus itself had actually been created in an American lab, probably through the joint efforts of Dr. Baric of UNC and Dr. Munster of RML. Once again, I found this quite interesting, but hardly surprising. As early as 2021, I had learned of Dr. Baric’s tremendous expertise in viral bioengineering, so I’d come to regard him as a leading suspect.
Although Haslam would surely not agree, I felt that his persuasive analysis of how Covid had been created in American labs actually dovetailed very neatly with my own entirely different analysis of how and why the virus had then suddenly appeared in Wuhan and Qom when it did.
One of the central figures in Haslam’s narrative was Sir Jeremy Farrar, the longtime head of Britain’s Wellcome Trust and thus one of the world’s leading funders of biomedical research.
Given the control that he exercised over such necessary financial support, Farrar possessed enormous influence over the field of bioresearch, and as Haslam demonstrated, he had played a crucial early role in the private discussions regarding the nature of the virus.
Most of the leading virologists had initially concluded that the very strange structural characteristics of Covid indicated that it had probably come from a lab, and although Farrar himself later stated that he was 50-50 on that question, he helped organize the key February 1st conference call on a private Slack channel that Haslam and many other leading critics have claimed marked the beginning of the Covid lab-leak cover-up. Under Farrar’s urging, Anthony Fauci participated in that call and he brought with him his nominal superior NIH Director Francis Collins as well as Ralph Baric. Haslam argued that the virologists were soon pressured into reversing their position and declaring that the virus was natural rather than bioengineered.
This led me to revisit portions of my own April 2024 article, which had been prompted by some of the surprising elements I’d noticed in Sen. Rand Paul’s own book on the Covid epidemic and his questioning of Farrar during the Senate hearings on the origins of the virus.
Paul’s assumption of sinister Chinese behavior also heavily colored his interpretation of some important elements in the account of Jeremy Farrar, a British M.D./Ph.D. who was a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and then served as CEO of the Wellcome Trust, perhaps the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.
In July 2021 Farrar published a short book on the early months of the Covid outbreak. Although Paul obviously disagreed with Farrar’s emphatically mainstream views on the efficacy of lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, he treated the scientist very respectfully and heavily cited his revelations, which constituted the candid account of a true insider to those momentous events. I’d also been quite impressed with Farrar’s material and in late 2022 I had briefly discussed his interesting book:
Jeremy Farrar served as Director of Britain’s Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest funders of public health projects, and he played a crucial role in organizing the immediate measures taken to contain the Covid epidemic. Spike, co-authored by journalist Anjana Ahuja, is his short narrative account of those important events beginning in the last days of 2019, and it provides the useful perspective of a leading insider. I was also particularly interested to discover that Wellcome’s chair was the former head of MI-5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, who may have helped provide the author with some important insights on certain matters.
In his account, Farrar repeatedly emphasized that the Covid outbreak had hit China at the absolute worst possible time, appearing on the eve of Chinese Lunar New Year, when 450 million Chinese might be traveling. This seemed likely to spread the disease to every corner of the huge country, and that gigantic, looming disaster was only averted by an immediate public health lockdown unprecedented in all of human history.
Farrar is the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, and I was surprised to discover that in the early days of the epidemic he and his circle of leading scientific experts freely discussed whether the virus had been bioengineered, with some of them thinking that likely, and he even mentioned the speculation that it might have been a bioweapon, deliberately released. But as the practical needs of the terrible public health crisis facing Britain and the rest of the West began absorbing all of his concentration, these theoretical issues understandably faded from their discussions.
However, Paul focused upon certain elements of Farrar’s narrative that I had failed to properly appreciate:
Farrar recounts that “by the second week in January [2020], I was beginning to realize the scale of what was happening. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.”
Farrar’s wife, Christiane, insists that he ring “people close to us, so they would understand what was going on in case anything happened to [you]” …Farrar also told his brother that British and American intelligence agencies were in the loop…Farrar painted a dangerous scenario: “‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’”
Based upon Paul’s interesting excerpts, I decided to reread Farrar’s book, focusing especially upon the earliest chapters, and drew some important conclusions.
Paul had been puzzled by some of Farrar’s striking statements, wondering whether the scientist was fearful that the Chinese government could somehow reach out and do him harm in Britain, but my own interpretation was quite different. Farrar emphasized that in those early days he and many other top researchers were convinced that the virus had been bioengineered in a laboratory. He also speculated that it might have been deliberately released, striking China at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transit hub of Wuhan just before the Lunar New Year travels, and he even raised the possibility that this sort of incident could lead to a world war. Just as Paul claimed, he repeatedly expressed considerable fears for his own personal safety and actually entitled his first chapter “If Anything Happens to Me…”
The Wellcome chair was Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain’s MI5 secret intelligence service, and Farrar discussed the alarming situation both with her and with Andrew Parker, her MI5 successor:
When I told Eliza about the suspicions over the origins of the new coronavirus, she advised that everyone involved in the delicate conversations should raise our guard, security-wise. We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts.
Farrar was shocked by those suggestions and even included a copy of the urgent email he sent to his staff requesting they provision him with a second, “burner” phone. But the date of that note immediately jumped out at me.
Paul has probably forgotten that in late January 2020, a dawn raid by the FBI suddenly arrested Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University’s top scientists and Chairman of its Chemistry Department, someone characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate. Prof. Lieber had long had close research ties with China and was an expert on virology, and although the charges against him were extremely obscure—alleged reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications—he was dragged off to prison in shackles and threatened with many years of federal incarceration. As I speculated in my original April 2020 article:
But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.
It may be more than pure coincidence that Farrar’s urgent request for a “burner” phone was sent almost simultaneously with Lieber’s sudden arrest. Unlike Paul, I very much doubt that Farrar was worried that the Chinese secret police could somehow threaten his safety in Britain. But other intelligence services might indeed constitute a very serious menace, especially if the private speculations of Farrar and his colleagues had extended far beyond the fleeting references he eventually published in Spike.
As everyone has acknowledged, Farrar was an absolutely central figure in the early Covid origins debate, someone whose importance was matched by few if any of the others involved. Moreover, unlike any other participant, he has also revealed his personal thoughts and behavior from that period in a published book, and I have bolded for emphasis some of the crucial passages in which I summarized or quoted portions of that work, whose tremendous significance seems to have been totally ignored or misinterpreted by Kennedy, Haslam, and all those other advocates of the lab-leak hypothesis.
Based upon Farrar’s statements, he was extremely concerned for his personal safety during the early weeks of the epidemic. His wife insisted that he pass along his dangerous ideas to friends as an insurance policy in case something happened to him, and he urgently followed the advice of the former and current heads of Britain’s MI5 intelligence agency to acquire a burner phone and take other measures more typical of the world of espionage rather than those of public health or scientific research. He even gave his first chapter the dramatic title “If Anything Happens to Me…”
But such personal fears make absolutely no sense under either of the two Covid origin theories that have monopolized virtually all public discussion in the West over the last five years.
Obviously, if Covid were merely a natural virus as the Western establishment and mainstream media have long maintained, Farrar would have had nothing to fear. But if the virus had been created in a lab and then accidentally leaked in Wuhan, it is also very difficult to understand Farrar’s personal concerns for his safety.
Haslam and other lab-leak advocates have long argued that the Covid origins cover-up was motivated by concerns that if the truth came out, Western governments would sharply restrict future viral bioresearch and also drastically cut their government funding. Such actions would have outraged the virologists and microbiologists impacted, and perhaps some of them might have blamed Farrar if they felt that he had helped to expose the facts prompting their loss of funding. But I can’t imagine that any of those respectable scientists would have hired assassins to kill him. So why was Farrar so apparently fearful for his own life in those early days of the epidemic?
The obvious explanation is found spread out across the text of the first couple of chapters in his very candid narrative account. Along with most of the top virologists, he believed that Covid seemed bioengineered. He mentioned the speculation among those individuals that Covid was a bioweapon, deliberately released. He emphasized that the Covid outbreak had hit China at the absolute worst place and time, in the major transit hub of Wuhan shortly before Chinese Lunar New Year, when 450 million Chinese would be traveling. He even raised the possibility that this sort of incident could lead to a world war.
None of these concerns were consistent with the hypothesis of either a natural virus or an accidental lab-leak. Instead, Farrar and those in his circle were obviously discussing the serious possibility that the Covid outbreak might have been a biowarfare attack against China.
Moreover, given his candid discussions with the former and current heads of MI5, he surely must have shared his serious biowarfare concerns with those top British intelligence officials. Rather than being told that his fears were groundless and ridiculous, they instead
advised that everyone involved in the delicate conversations should raise our guard, security-wise. We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts.
An illegal biowarfare attack against China that already seemed likely to kill thousands or tens of thousands was an exceptionally serious incident, and Farrar reasonably feared that the perpetrators might be willing to use deadly means to protect their guilty secret against public disclosure by credible individuals such as himself.
Perhaps Farrar may have even recalled the highly-suspicious 2003 death of Dr. David Kelly, a top British biowarfare expert who had confidentially revealed to the media some of the governmental falsehoods involved in promoting the Iraq War. Although Kelly’s death a few weeks later was officially ruled a suicide, Michael Howard, the former leader of the British Conservative Party, and numerous others were firmly convinced that he had actually been murdered.
As for the perpetrator of such a hypothetical biowarfare attack against China, the severe international tension between that country and the U.S. suggested an obvious suspect. But in addition, I noticed that Farrar’s frantic attempt to acquire a burner phone occurred almost simultaneously with the terrible misfortune that suddenly befell one of his highest-ranking American academic colleagues. As I described in my original April 2020 article:
Around the same time, I noted another extremely strange coincidence that failed to attract any interest from our somnolent national media. Although his name had meant nothing to me, in late January my morning newspapers carried major stories on the sudden arrest of Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University’s top scientists and Chairman of its Chemistry Department, sometimes characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate.
The circumstances of that case seemed utterly bizarre to me. Like numerous other prominent American academics, Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint appointments and receiving substantial funding for his work. But now he was accused of financial reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications—the most obscure sort of offense—and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by the FBI in an early-morning raid on his suburban Lexington home and dragged off in shackles, potentially facing years of federal imprisonment.
Such government action against an academic seemed almost without precedent. During the height of the Cold War, numerous American scientists and technicians were rightfully accused of having stolen our nuclear weapons secrets for delivery to Stalin, yet I had never heard of any of them treated in so harsh a manner, let alone a scholar of Prof. Lieber’s stature, who was merely charged with technical disclosure violations. Indeed, this incident recalled accounts of NKVD raids during the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
Although Lieber was described as a chemistry professor, a few seconds of Googling revealed that some of his most important work had been in virology, including technology for the detection of viruses. So a massive and deadly new viral epidemic had broken out in China and almost simultaneously, a top American scholar with close Chinese ties and expertise in viruses was suddenly arrested by the federal government, yet no one in the media expressed any curiosity at a possible connection between these two events.
I think we can safely assume that Lieber’s arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the concurrent coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing China of having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly research. But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.
From the distance of five years, the early morning FBI raid on Prof. Lieber’s suburban home seems even more peculiar and unprecedented than it did at the time.
As far as I can tell, no respectable academic in American history had ever been treated so harshly, let alone someone of Lieber’s international stature who was merely accused of paperwork violations. During the 1950s, the Rosenbergs had been executed for their involvement in a spy ring that provided our nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin, yet neither they nor any of their fellow Soviet spies had ever suffered such mistreatment.
Moreover, the true magnitude of the legal case against Lieber was indicated by his eventual fate. The top Harvard professor was ultimately convicted on all four of the counts of reporting violations and tax evasion lodged against him, resulting in a substantial fine and a sentence of two days in prison. Two days in prison!
Given Lieber’s trivial sentence, the extremely harsh action taken against him was obviously intended to intimidate all of his colleagues. Assuming that the timing of Farrar’s desperate acquisition of a burner phone was not purely coincidental, that exemplary lesson was received loud and clear.
Farrar’s book on the Covid outbreak was accurately subtitled “The Inside Story” and given both its major importance and its very short length, I read it again for a third time, fully confirming my previous impressions of what the author was describing.
All of the bioengineering and biowarfare speculations of the former Wellcome CEO were confined to the first couple of chapters. But that was entirely understandable since once the epidemic reached Britain, the purely theoretical question of Covid origins was completely overwhelmed by the desperate attempt to protect his country from the looming threat of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Farrar explained that despite his own efforts and those of other knowledgeable experts, the totally incompetent, ideologically-driven decisions of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson produced a gigantic public health disaster. Indeed, according to the analysis of excess deaths by the Economist, Britain’s more than 300,000 fatalities were second to Italy as the worst per capita result among the G-7 countries, even exceeding America’s own terrible performance in that regard.
Soon after the conference call Farrar had organized involving both Fauci and the top virologists, an official scientific consensus was established that Covid was a natural virus, and any talk of bioengineering let alone a deliberate bioweapon attack was relegated to the conspiratorial fringe. Farrar seemed to fully embrace these new conclusions, signing a February letter in the The Lancet to that effect, and I’m unaware of any later doubts he ever expressed. In March this natural virus theory was firmly nailed down after a group of the world’s leading virologists co-authored their notorious proximal origins paper in Nature Medicine.
Individuals who conform to establishment dictates on important matters often are rewarded for their acquiescence, and in late 2022 Farrar was appointed to the very prestigious post of Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization. But the crucial point is that during the early stages of the Covid epidemic, one of the best connected and most knowledgeable insiders seemed to consider the scenario of a biowarfare attack very plausible.
Moreover, Farrar was hardly alone in such beliefs, which remained in the thoughts of other top experts.
For more than a year after the publication of the proximal origins paper, the natural virus theory remained totally dominant in the mainstream media narrative, with any talk of Covid having been bioengineered in a lab marginalized and dismissed as “a conspiracy theory.” But then in mid-2021, longtime science journalist Nicholas Wade and others revived the lab-leak theory, and it quickly attracted a great deal of public attention in the media.
This renewed debate prompted an interview with Christian Drosten, Germany’s most influential virologist, who had also been a crucial insider in those early discussions with Farrar and others. I described Drosten’s important testimony in a long July 2021 article:
Similar conclusions had been made in an early June interview with Christian Drosten, a German virologist ranked as one of the world’s leading experts on both SARS and Covid. The discussion appeared in a small German-language publication and has received minimal attention, but the magic of Google Translate has made this important material available to a worldwide audience:
Although Dr. Drosten fully accepted a natural origin for the virus, speculating that the undiscovered intermediate host might be found somewhere in China’s huge fur-farming industry, he also gave his opinion on the possibility of a bioengineered virus or a lab-leak. In particular, he broached the idea that the virus was created and released as a bioweapon, but deliberately shied away from discussing it:
There are actually two laboratory theses. One would be malice that someone has intentionally constructed such a virus. The other would be the research accident, that in spite of good intentions and curiosity an experiment went wrong. The malicious thing, to be honest: you have to talk to the secret service about it. As a scientist, I cannot judge that.
He went on to say that the structure of the virus made it very unlikely that it would have been produced as the result of an innocent scientific research project, or that it came from the Wuhan lab and was accidentally released:
This idea of a research accident is extremely unlikely for me because it would be far too cumbersome. The idea of malicious use by some secret service laboratory somewhere: If anything, something like that would probably not come from the Wuhan Virology Institute. This is a reputable academic institute.
Although their reasons differ, the combined testimony of virologists Anderson and Drosten raises considerable doubts about the accidental Wuhan lab-leak scenario that now increasingly represents the conventional wisdom of the American mainstream media. Both experts are very skeptical that Covid could have been the product of innocent scientific research, and they also think it quite unlikely that the Wuhan lab either created or accidentally released it. Thus, although they both still prefer the natural virus theory, they seem to regard the likely alternative as an illegal or malicious project, seemingly implying the creation and deliberate release of a deadly bioweapon. But under such a scenario, the initial outbreak in Wuhan, one of China’s largest cities and a key transport hub, would obviously tend to exculpate that country, while logically pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction.
It is noteworthy that we have one of the world’s leading scientific authorities on Covid gingerly raising the possibility that it was a non-Chinese bioweapon, and doing so in a small-circulation German-language publication. Yet this very brief and glancing speculation seems to be the only time I have encountered this obvious idea anywhere in the 100,000 or more words of mainstream articles I have read on the possible origins of Covid during the last year or more. Surely many other journalists and scientists must have considered such a possibility, yet virtually none of them had allowed such an idea to appear in print. How can we best understand this complete intellectual embargo?
Thus, although Drosten declared that he was extremely skeptical of any lab-leak, he seemed far more willing to accept the possibility of a “malicious” release of Covid by an Intelligence service. That was obviously merely a euphemistic way of describing a biowarfare attack against China, though Drosten understandably chose to avoid discussing such a dangerous possibility in any detail.
Farrar and Drosten were certainly two of the most knowledgeable insiders in the Covid origins debate, and both of them went on the record to say that they suspected the outbreak might have been the result of a biowarfare attack against China, with the latter expert even ruling out the competing lab-leak scenario as wildly implausible. Given the extraordinarily controversial nature of the biowarfare hypothesis and its near-total exclusion from all mainstream or alternative media discussions, I think their extremely telling statements should be regarded as “admissions against interest.”
If both Farrar and Drosten considered a biowarfare attack a plausible possibility, they may not necessarily have been correct, but I do think that idea should be taken seriously and included in the range of scenarios.
It is important to emphasize that both of those scientists and insiders came to their conclusions without any access to the copious evidence supporting the biowarfare attack hypothesis that I subsequently managed to accumulate. Neither of them were aware of the Wuhan World Military Games, nor the Crimson Contagion exercise, nor the secret DIA report, and Farrar’s belief in a possible biowarfare attack was formed before the extremely suspicious outbreak in Qom, Iran had become apparent.
Another even more remarkable coincidence has received far greater distribution, becoming a staple of anti-American “conspiracy theories” and even resulting in a diplomatic incident involving the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
According to the widely accepted current chronology, the Covid-19 epidemic began in Wuhan during late October or early November of 2019. But the World Military Games were also held in Wuhan during that same period, ending in late October, with 300 American military servicemen attending. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized in my articles and comments for more than a year, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly erupted in that city?
It surely would have been very easy for our intelligence services to have slipped a couple of their operatives into that large American military contingent, and the presence of many thousands of foreign military personnel, traveling around the large city and doing sightseeing, would have been ideally suited to providing cover for the quiet release of a highly-infectious viral bioweapon. None of this constitutes proof, but the coincidental timing is quite remarkable.
Around the same time that scientific experts such as Farrar and Drosten had decided that a biowarfare attack was a plausible explanation for the Covid outbreak, a forty-year veteran of American biodefense had come to similar conclusions. As I discussed in my original April 2020 article:
Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.
Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness.
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.
I have also repeatedly cited some of those other, most striking pieces of evidence in many of my Covid articles:
For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…
From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.
With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious.
Although nearly all of these main points supporting the biowarfare hypothesis of the Covid outbreak have already appeared in my previous articles published over the last five years, many of them may have been lost in the blizzard of ongoing Covid-related revelations from other sources, and therefore had less impact than I had hoped.
But consider the simple fact that Russia and Iran both publicly declared that Covid was probably an American bioweapon, deliberately released, and such extremely knowledgeable insiders as Jeremy Farrar and Christian Drosten also regarded that scenario as quite plausible. The combination of all of these important declarations render the continuing near-total exclusion of that possibility from our entire Western media discussion absurd and ridiculous, much like the similar total avoidance of any mention of renowned journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelations regarding the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.
When framed in such terms, I think few reasonable people can dispute that conclusion. For example, a prominent figure in the Covid origins debate had always been very skeptical or even dismissive of my own biowarfare hypothesis. But upon recently considering these combined facts, he privately told me he now agreed that the biowarfare hypothesis should be included alongside the other two possibilities in future discussions. I regard this concession as a crucial step forward, and I hope that others may soon adopt the same position.
From the early months of 2020 onward, I’ve always regarded the biowarfare hypothesis as by far the most plausible one, best fitting all the available evidence and explaining the strange anomalies that the natural virus and lab-leak scenarios have each failed to do. So once it is finally given serious public consideration, I think it will inevitably begin to gain strong support. For example, in late 2022 I reviewed some of the most recent Covid origins evidence, and then summarized that material in a section entitled “Considering the Excluded Third Possibility”:
I think these exchanges demonstrate that to a considerable extent, the two main camps on the Covid origins debate have been talking past each other.
The testimonies provided by Quammen and Holmes strongly challenged the possibility of any lab-leak at Wuhan, suggesting that this proves the virus must have been natural, even though few arguments on that latter point were ever made; at most, they raised some doubts about the strength of the evidence for bioengineering.
Meanwhile, the articles and papers by Wade, Sachs, Bruttel, and others have provided strong evidence that the virus was artificial. All of this has usually been interpreted as support for the lab-leak hypothesis, even though very little evidence was ever presented that any lab-leak had occurred.
Yet the apparent vector-sum of these conflicting arguments is the conclusion that the Covid virus neither leaked from the Wuhan lab nor was natural, and this suggests that the public debate has been improperly restricted to just those two possibilities.
For more than 30 months I have emphasized that there are actually three perfectly plausible hypotheses for the Covid outbreak. The virus might have been natural, randomly appearing in Wuhan during late 2019; the virus might have been the artificial product of a scientific lab in Wuhan, which accidentally leaked out at that time; or the virus might have been the bioengineered product of America’s hundred-billion-dollar biowarfare program, the oldest and largest in the world, a bioweapon deployed against China and Iran by elements of the Trump Administration at the height of our hostile international confrontation with those countries.
The first two possibilities have been very widely discussed and debated across the Western mainstream and alternative media, while the third has been almost totally ignored, despite top Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government officials having publicly accused America of releasing Covid in a deliberate biowarfare attack.
Although I have access to the raw traffic metrics for my articles, I have no easy means of determining exactly who is reading them or whether the ideas they present may have penetrated into various political circles. But every now and then I see an indication suggesting that some of this may have occurred.
For example, all my articles promoting the Covid biowarfare hypothesis have emphasized that if such an American attack against China (and Iran) had indeed transpired, it was done entirely without the knowledge or authorization of President Trump, and was therefore a rogue operation, one that ultimately proved disastrous for our own country and all of our allies. The resulting epidemic also probably cost Trump his reelection in 2020.
I have argued that such an attack would probably have been organized by a small group of conspirators, with the most likely suspect being Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a very powerful figure in the Trump Administration and the leader of the most hardline anti-China/anti-Iran faction.
Unlike some other former Trump officials, Pompeo had subsequently remained on generally good terms with his erstwhile superior and strongly supported Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the former president praised Pompeo during his wide-ranging pre-election interview with Joe Rogan and after Trump’s victory, Pompeo was described as a top candidate for Secretary of Defense in the new administration.
But instead, several leading figures in Trump’s inner circle including Donald Trump Jr. successfully mobilized to block Pompeo’s appointment, and the former official was also quickly rejected for any other Cabinet post. Most recently, Trump took the harsh further step of removing the Secret Service protection from his former Secretary of State, an action that an angry former national security official described as “pure spite and pettiness.” Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton suffered the same fate, but unlike Pompeo, Bolton had spent the last five years ferociously attacking and denouncing Trump, much more easily explaining such retaliation.
Perhaps Trump’s sudden turn against Pompeo was due to entirely different factors. But if my speculation is correct, some important individuals around Trump may have concluded that Pompeo might well be guilty of enormous global crimes and that these could eventually come to light. Therefore, they took forceful steps to completely disassociate our new president from his toxic former subordinate.
If the CIA’s reversal in its determination of Covid origins now provokes a major new reassessment of the underlying factual evidence, perhaps journalists and researchers will begin to focus their attention upon the true culprits behind the global epidemic that inflicted so much damage upon our own country and the rest of the world.
James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.
Elections have consequences and the remarkable return of Donald Trump to the White House has already led to a flurry of major reversals across numerous policy areas. The weekend newspapers revealed that these now included the longstanding Covid origins debate, which had largely disappeared from the headlines over the last year or two.
