by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Although much of my research and writing over the last three years has been devoted to the global Covid epidemic, I’ve paradoxically paid very little attention to most of the various Covid-oriented websites.
That’s because I have narrowly concentrated on the origins of the epidemic while they have focused almost entirely upon the details of the disease and the controversial public health measures adopted to control it. I’ve had only slight interest in those latter topics, and partly for that reason most of my views have been vaguely mainstream, not too different from what I have regularly read in the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist.
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However, the daily lives of billions of individuals around the world have been tremendously disrupted by these government-imposed policies, which included lockdowns, masking, and social distancing, mandates that were often tremendously unpopular and had enormous social and economic consequences. Moreover, faced with a life-and-death situation, substantial portions of the public together with some medical professionals claimed that various treatments for Covid such as the use of HCQ and IVM were safe and effective but wrongly suppressed, a position loudly attacked and denounced by the outraged medical and media establishments. These battles grew even fiercer once a massive Covid vaccination drive began at the end of 2020, with critics noting that the mRNA vaccines being employed were based upon an entirely new biotechnology and had required the use of emergency waivers to circumvent what would have otherwise been a long and cautious clinical trial process.
During this entire period, the establishment media provided nearly lockstep support to the governmental positions on all of these hugely controversial issues, and this naturally fostered the growth of what might be called the alt-Covid community, a network of websites, bloggers, and podcasters who argued that many of these official policies were completely incorrect, often based more upon propaganda than science.
One of the more prominent nodes in this dissenting ecosystem was founded in April 2020 by Toby Young, a longtime British journalist and public intellectual, conservative-leaning but generally well-regarded. He launched Lockdown Sceptics, an Internet newsletter critiquing what he considered an ill-conceived public health measure as well as other Covid-related issues. Over time, he gradually expanded and extended its coverage, also taking on board Will Jones and Noah Carl, a couple of younger Ph.D.’s, with the former eventually serving as editor. By the time the British lockdowns finally ended in July 2021, his readership and impact had expanded to the point that he decided to rechristian his publication the Daily Sceptic and keep it in operation, providing careful analysis of other public policy issues, especially those avoided or mishandled by the mainstream media, though still with a strong emphasis on Covid-related matters.
Although I might not necessarily agree with all of his webzine’s conclusions, the articles that they run seem very sober and carefully reasoned, often based upon published scientific papers or quantitative analysis, a welcome change from the wild speculation and fear-mongering found on these subjects across much of the Internet. My impression is that the website has become quite influential within alt-Covid circles, while also being taken seriously by many mainstream journalists and scientists. According to SimilarWeb, its traffic has been growing rapidly, recently reaching over 7 million pageviews and 200,000 hours of readership per month, totals that are several times larger than those of Quillette, where Young had once served as Associate Editor, and substantially greater than our own.
Despite its growing visibility, the website’s subject matter and British focus meant that I’d been only slightly aware it until a few weeks ago when someone brought to my attention one of its articles that had been republished on Alex Jones’ conspiratorial InfoWars website, hugely popular but hardly reliable.
To my considerable surprise, the very solidly argued 3,200 word piece by Daily Sceptic Editor Will Jones directly addressed one of the absolutely critical questions that had been scrupulously avoided for nearly three years by our entire mainstream media, an issue that podcaster Kevin Barrett had appropriately dubbed the “Smoking Gun” of the Covid epidemic.
The opening paragraph asked an obvious question.
Here’s something that’s been bugging me. How did U.S. intelligence analysts pick up on what they deemed a dangerous novel virus in China at a time when there’s no good evidence China had picked up on it or was concerned? How did they spot the signal in all the noise of a normal Chinese flu season?
After carefully analyzing all of the fragmentary and somewhat contradictory evidence, the piece closed by very courageously presenting an explosive possible answer, highlighted with a telling quote from Dr. Robert Kadlec, a senior Trump Administration official and longstanding biowarfare advocate.
There is, it should be noted, one straightforward way to explain all of this, but it’s implications are disturbing to say the least. It is that the virus was deliberately released in China by some group or groups within the U.S. intelligence and security services. The purpose of such a release would be partly to disrupt China and partly as a live exercise for pandemic preparedness – which is, as we know, how the pandemic was in practice treated by those in the U.S. biodefence network. While shocking, this is not outside the bounds of possibility. Consider what Robert Kadlec wrote in a Pentagon strategy paper in 1998.
Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.
If this were the case, it may be that the addition of the furin cleavage site to the virus would be to enhance its infectiousness in order to increase the chance of a pandemic occurring (perhaps they’d tried before with a less infectious virus and it hadn’t worked so well). The virus would be deliberately relatively mild so it didn’t do too much harm, but severe enough to have the desired impact – at least when assisted with psyops and propaganda. Very few individuals would likely know the origin – most would be part of the live exercise.
Such a scenario would neatly explain how U.S. intelligence personnel were closely ‘following the spread’ in November despite China being oblivious. It would also explain why U.S. biodefence people were far more alarmist than the Chinese authorities from the get-go; why they have denied the virus could be engineered and squashed all efforts to investigate origins (and clung to discredited theories); and why they have followed through on the whole lockdown-and-wait-for-a-vaccine biodefence plan despite the virus plainly not warranting it (and the measures not working), and generally treated the whole thing like a live exercise. It’s uncontentious to point out that the pandemic was a golden opportunity to put their long-prepared plans into practice. But what if it was an opportunity they didn’t leave to chance?
None of us wants to draw this conclusion, of course. To disprove it, at least as far as this argument is concerned, we would need to see considerably more detail about what U.S. intelligence analysts were seeing and saying in November 2019, which would explain how they knew what China did not and why they were so concerned when China was not.
Short of this, it’s hard not to wonder: what if releasing the virus in China to disrupt the country and see how the world responds could have been some hare-brained scheme cooked up in the deeper recesses of the U.S. biosecurity state?
- How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • December 12, 2022 • 3,200 Words
I passed this important article along to a few friends of mine, noting that it had been Tweeted out by Young to his 240,000 followers. As it happens, one of them knew Young and introduced me, so I was soon directly in touch with the author and we began a fruitful correspondence. Not long afterwards, he published a strong follow-up piece, which concluded by noting the extremely implausible aspects of the claims made by the analysts at America’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
