Primer for the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party Part 2: The U.S. Joins China’s Cover-Up of the Laboratory Origin of the COVID-19 Virus
On January 10, 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 365 to 65 in favor of a resolution to establish the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI). The following information is worthy of further investigation by that committee.
If COVID-19 was simply a blameless natural transmission of a disease from animals to humans, then why the intentional cover-up?
Why the heavy-handed attempts to control the narrative regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, largely by the deliberate dissemination of disinformation and the censoring of open, science-based discussion?
SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Wuhan for at least six weeks before the Chinese government, on December 31, 2019, acknowledged there was an epidemic.
Astonishingly, the Chinese government initially claimed on January 14, 2020, at least two months from the onset of the outbreak, that there was no human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, an obvious lie, which China was forced to acknowledge less than a week later.
Chinese authorities also intentionally underestimated the number SARS-CoV-2 cases in Wuhan in January 2020 to hide the extent of the outbreak.
Another lie perpetrated by China starting in January 2020 was that SARS-CoV-2 was naturally transmitted from animals to humans and originated in a Wuhan market.
After months and endless regurgitation of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talking points by mainstream media outlets, China’s claim that the Wuhan Seafood Market was the source for animal-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was totally discredited, even by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The main Chinese lie that SARS-CoV-2 was a naturally-occurring disease transmitted from animals to humans has been more persistent, primarily due to the support provided by China’s allies within governments and among members of the scientific community, all eagerly propagated by the left-wing media.
In January 2020, at the same time the CCP was promoting its lie about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, scientists in the United States were plotting their own propaganda and censorship campaign to support China’s false claim and to hide their own potential culpability for assisting China in the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2.
On January 26, 2020, investigative reporter Bill Gertz, who had received the information from Israeli intelligence expert Dany Shoham and Chinese whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan, wrote in a Washington Times article:
“The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program.”
Undoubtedly, that statement set off alarm bells in both Beijing and Washington, D.C.
On January 31, 2020, infectious disease expert, Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Institute, a scientist who would eventually play a pivotal role in the cover-up of the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID.
In that email, Andersen said that COVID-19 appeared to be “engineered” and possessed a “genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was man-made.
It was then that the plot to conceal the true laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 by a groups of U.S. government officials and U.S. scientists was conceived.
In a recent series of ten Twitter comments posted on December 3, 2022, “Florin_Uncovers” provides smoking gun evidence for the collusion between U.S. government officials and scientists mentioned to cover up the laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Within days of his January 31, 2020 email to Anthony Fauci, Kristian Andersen would completely reverse his opinion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
In a February 4, 2020 email discussing a draft letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Anderson ridiculed “crackpot theories” that COVID-19 was “somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case,” opinions he himself expressed just days earlier.
Andersen’s adoption of CCP propaganda that SARS-CoV-2 was naturally-occurring played out within the context of a larger effort by U.S. government officials and U.S. scientists directly linked to China’s coronavirus research programs to control the narrative related to the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
No doubt encouraged by Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Kelvin Droegemeier, a product of the Republican establishment and then Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), wrote the February 3, 2020 letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, asking:
“the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to rapidly examine information and identify data requirements that would help determine the origins of 2019-nCoV, specifically from an evolutionary/structural biology standpoint.”
The motive for the subterfuge was likely a desire not to be forced to confront China for creating SARS-CoV-2 and to protect U.S. government officials and U.S. scientists from culpability for helping China do it.
Most of the scientists consulted for the National Academy of Science response had long histories of collaboration with China and/or were later associated with a robust support of China and the theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated as a naturally-occurring disease.
Based on the scientists enlisted to formulate a response to OSTP’s request, the outcome of Droegemeier’s inquiry was preordained, that is, the complete absolution of China’s responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subsequently, scientists consulted for National Academy of Sciences response began their own public relations campaign to support China and the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was a natural transmission from animals to humans.
On March 7, 2020, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance and a long-time collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led a group of like-minded scientists, who published an article in the British medical journal The Lancet, which stated “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 does not have a natural origin.”
On March 17, 2020, Kristian Andersen appeared as senior author on the article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was “not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
In parallel, there were separate attempts by Chinese scientists working in the U.S. to echo China’s naturally-occurring theory as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In contrast to the U.S. government officials and U.S. scientists, the efforts by Chinese scientists in the U.S. may have been influenced by direct or indirect instructions emanating from the Chinese Communist Party.
Even as recently as January 9, 2023, the far left-wing Daily Beast published an article by Peter Hotez entitled “Kevin McCarthy Is Already Inviting the Next Pandemic,” which was obviously intended to short-circuit any attempt by the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives to investigate the origin of the COVID-19 virus.
The drumbeat of propaganda supporting China’s claim that the COVID-19 virus was a naturally-occurring outbreak has continued uninterrupted over the last three years resulting in the complete political contamination of the scientific and medical literature.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a civilian career in international business and medical research. Dr. Sellin is the author of Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com
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