by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
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.
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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.
