Do not “pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued”. This was the instruction given by the US State Department to its investigators over a year ago, as reported by Vanity Fair in a long piece on Lab Leak. State Department investigators were warned against “digging in sensitive places” and repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box”.

What were they afraid of? They were afraid that someone might reveal that the deadly virus was cooked up by Chinese cooks under American guidance. The hands were Chinese, but the voice was that of Uncle Sam (Gen 27:22). In plain words, if the Chinese altered (Gain-of-Function’ed) the natural coronavirus, they did so on the orders of their American partners and according to their instructions.

It is even more probable that the Chinese contribution was secondary, for they do not possess the know-how necessary to alter a virus. Whether it was an accidental leak of a bioweapon or the intentional deployment of bioterror (as Ron Unz expounded), in either case the US is the leading actor in the story.

President Trump threatened to sue Beijing for ten trillion dollars for the Wuhan lab leak. Good idea! But this princely sum should be charged to Washington (or rather New York with its Wall Street) as well as to Beijing. Actually, we didn’t have to wait until the end of May 2021 for this revelation. The basic facts were covered in the viral videos Plandemic and Plandemic II, released almost a year ago and promptly banned. Here you can watch a condensed (7 minutes), yet very convincing version of these two long videos, published last August. The creators conclude their story with ‘a plague on both your houses’ statement: “The US could say China did it, China could say the US did it. And both were right.”

The video (narrated by Dr David E. Martin and released by London real, the company owned by Brian Rose, a Jewish businessman from San Diego, CA, who is closely connected to the City of London) shows that work on Coronavirus began in 1999; the CDC filed a patent application on SARS-CoV in 2004; it was granted in 2007. They kept tampering with the virus for a few years, trying to make it more infectious and more deadly. After gain-of-function research was forbidden by the US government in 2014, it was promptly offshored to Wuhan lab.

The research was quietly continued with US grants coming (partly) from the notorious Dr Fauci via the equally notorious Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance, the beneficiary of  $39 million grant from the Pentagon. The Pentagon is a great humanitarian organization known for its love of mankind, right? If they forwarded so much money to Wuhan, they surely had our good in mind. Probably it was out of sheer modesty that they hid the grants, via a web of multiple transactions, passing money from one NGO to another until reaching its final destination in Wuhan. In 2017, the work on weaponising the virus was resumed in the US, while President Trump stopped the grants to Wuhan.

The united media and social networks unleashed their ferocious fact-checkers against the video and its conclusion that the Chinese did it on US orders. And for a long time the story disappeared. But now that the Lab Leak story has been unbanned (thanks to Nicholas Wade’s impactful story) we can check the fact-checkers and find them sorely missing actual arguments. Their main reasoning, beside labelling different opinions “debunked” or “discredited”, was based on an article in Lancet that was commissioned and produced under the guidance of the very same Peter Daszak who admitted (in 2016) that he commissioned and funded Chinese scientists to create a ‘Killer Coronavirus’. Thus the debunkers were debunked and the discrediters were discredited.

The conclusion that the virus was made by Chinese under US instructions was also reached over a year ago, in April 2020, by Tsarfat, a French-Jewish blogger, who claimed that Ralph S. Baric was the man who weaponised the virus in 2015, “and described without any inhibition how he took what appears to be a natural strain of a bat virus and altered its properties by adding HIV strains (the Spike Protein in question). The original virus that Baric manipulated in his team’s 2015 work was provided by a team of Chinese scientists which  claimed its discovery in a 2013 Nature article.” What about suing Dr Baric and Gilead Sciences for some of the billions? Or Facebook for blocking this important information? Or, indeed, Dr Fauci, who covered up for Baric and for Daszak?

The Russians agree with Ron Unz. They think the virus was crafted by US scientists. While Putin avoided answering this question directly, Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin and a minister of the Eurasian Commission, provided the whole script. In his view,

… The virus was synthesized in a well-known US laboratory by order of a scientific foundation closely associated with certain structures of the American financial oligarchy, then moved by ethnic Chinese to a Wuhan laboratory and released into the environment there. The purpose of this operation was to destabilize the socio-political situation in the PRC in order to create the prerequisites for a revolutionary situation. It fully fits into the logic of the global hybrid war, unleashed by the American financial oligarchy in order to maintain world domination in the confrontation with the rapidly growing China.

The Wuhan institute, says Glazyev, worked closely with a more advanced American laboratory. The Chinese scientists who worked in Wuhan had previously trained and conducted research in the United States. The United States is the only country in the world that has the necessary competencies to create such a virus. The United States is the only major country that has not signed the international convention on bioweapons. The Chinese specialists who worked at the time in the Wuhan laboratory came from the United States, where they conducted experiments on the synthesis of coronavirus using quasi-secret American funds.

Glazyev, a leading economist by trade, explained why the people behind creating a novel Coronavirus didn’t mind that it might spread all over the world. They needed to deflate the global financial bubble that had been inflated by the US Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Banks of England and Japan through a decade of quantitative easing. Throughout the decade the volume of the dollar money supply increased fivefold, and the euro increased fourfold. Financial collapse was inevitable. Thanks to the global pandemic, the bubble deflated peacefully and manageably, without any unpleasant excesses. A million or two million dead is reasonable collateral damage in the eyes of the American super-rich.

If the 2020 pandemic did not exist, it would have to be invented. And it was invented: back in 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation published the Lock Step report, a scenario for the deployment of a pandemic; all measures of social isolation and violation of the citizens’ civil rights were predicted and actually implemented last year, says Glazyev.

I looked up the “fact checkers”. Like Wikipedia, it can be a useful source as long as you are aware that it is a hostile source. It’s like reading a well-sourced Nazi apology for their own atrocities. Not a stupid essay claiming there never were any atrocities, but a clever report full of half-truths. The fact checkers say this report (technically speaking, The Rockefeller Foundation, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development included a section called Lock Step) has been removed from the Rockefeller Foundation site, but they did find it somehow. And indeed they declared it was

… a scenario of authoritarian control in the wake of a hypothetical novel influenza pandemic similar to COVID-19. Lock Step envisions “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback,” according to the report. Another excerpt on the “mandatory wearing of face masks” and “body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” parallels ongoing practices to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The Lock Step scenario describes a continuation of authoritarian policies after the pandemic “fades”…

Despite the eerie similarity to reality ten years later, the Fact Checkers pronounced it fake news, because “The report makes no reference to COVID-19, a vaccine against the disease or plans to introduce a police state during a pandemic.” Well, they are hard to please!

Russian Vaccine

Russia is living like there is no virus. Last week, there was the International Economic Forum in St Petersburg, SPIEF, probably the biggest international gathering since the beginning of the pandemic anywhere in the world. The US delegation was the biggest of all. They made deals by the hundreds of billions. St Petersburg, definitely the most beautiful and most European of Russian cities, was overflowing with Forum participants and sundry tourists. It is a wonderful time of White Nights, when sun is hardly going down in this city on the Northern 60th parallel like Alaska and the Yukon. Lilac is blossoming now, and the city is full of its sweet and delightful scent.

The city was established by Tsar Peter the Great on former Swedish territory in the delta of the Neva River, and it consists of many islands and islets connected by bridges. The Russian Tsars embellished their capital with wonderful palaces and cathedrals, making it into the Venice of the North. The local people are calm, predominantly dark-blonde and blue-eyed; there aren’t many southerners, as there is in Moscow, for the city is not as prosperous as the Russian capital and offers fewer opportunities to those seeking decent wages. However, it is a very pleasant city, with tourist boats sailing its canals and rivers while the sun shines on the golden domes of its churches. It is also a city of great museums, and it is the base for the Baltic Fleet. It is but a short ride away from the Finnish border; though that border is still shut down by the pandemic.

There is no outdoor mask mandate, but masks are recommended on public transport, and many people choose to use them. In a few days, St Petersburg will host seven postponed UEFA EURO 2020 matches, and a lot of people are expected, though probably less than they had two years ago - before the pandemic. Russians go through the motions of the global pandemic response: current tests are required for Forum visitors, temperatures are checked; but the fear is gone, and that is a good thing.

The Russians decided to allow vaccine tourism: visiting foreigners will be able to get vaccinated with the Russian vaccine for a small sum (for locals it is free). The Russian Sputnik V vaccine is NOT mRNA experimental therapy, and that is a strong selling point. mRNA vaccines have been around for many years, but never have they been used on humans, for they kill ferrets right away. Sputnik V is a traditional vaccine; it is cheap and does not need to be stored at minus 70 Celsius. Its efficacy is over 90 per cent, so it is good stuff, just like the other Russian Covid vaccines. I am not a vaccination fan, but I think Russian vaccines are the safest, if you already decided you want one.

But its fate outside Russia depends on the local bureaucracy. In the EU, the licensing authorities took huge bribes from Pfizer (according to Putin at the St Petersburg Economic Forum) and that is the only reason why Sputnik V is not recognized in Europe. Western companies are eager to preserve their market share and want to keep all poachers out. Americans are as generous with bribes as European politicians and experts are keen on graft, no matter if the people of Europe would love to get access to Russian vaccines.

“We have only one disagreement with the United States: their desire to hold back our development,” said Putin. Indeed, the refusal of the EU and WHO to recognize the Russian vaccine can be seen, beyond bribes, as more of the standard US policy of hindering development in other countries. (Israel has a similar policy of de-development applied to Gaza). Wherever they come to conquer, they work to keep all other countries (Russia included) limited to supplying raw materials, while the expensive final products are made under US licence, bringing the maximum profit to US corporations.

After the fall of the USSR, US advisers to then-president Boris Yeltsin led Russia onto a quick road to de-industrialisation. They envisaged its future as a Gas Pump State. But Russians rejected the idea. They are active, well-educated folks; they like science and technical innovations; they are good workers, probably less diligent than Germans or Swedes, but head and shoulders above Eastern Europe. Putin sees the vaccine as a way to promote modernisation and a new industrialisation of his country. Still, he does not want to force Russians to ‘get a jab’, as they say in England. There are Russian adepts of mandated vaccination, among them Dmitry Medvedev, the former President and Prime Minister, and Sergei Sobyanin, the powerful Moscow City Mayor. Offering vaccines to tourists seems a good way to bypass the EU officials’ reluctance to recognise it.

The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, also offers the Russian vaccine to the citizens of its neighbouring countries. He placed vaxx points at border crossings so that Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians will be able to come and get vaccinated inexpensively. For Lukashenko, it is a way to endear Belarus to its NATO-leaning neighbours. Perhaps it will work. The old fox is a smart politician, full of tricks, and he may be able to break the blockade NATO is continuously trying to impose on this small nation.

However, Russia needs its vaccine to be recognised in Europe; otherwise all cross-border tourism will remain in abeyance for the second year in a row. Switzerland refused to let Russian journalists vaccinated by Sputnik V cover the Putin–Biden summit. This is part and parcel of the many indignities the West unleashed upon disobedient Russia, like banning its national flag and anthem from sport events. Unwillingly, Russians recognise they are at war, a hybrid war, but still a war. In this war, Russia supports the American people against the American authorities. They loudly wonder whether summits make any sense at all. We shall know the answer in a week, but expectations in Russia are very low.

In collaboration with Paul Bennett. Courtesy Israel Shamir

https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-can-of-worms/