Hearing on Covid-19 origins omits term 'bioweapon' and ignores possibility of intentional release

Is the Congressional subcommittee on the pandemic not going to probe the theory that the pandemic was a biological warfare attack by China...or on China?

Former CDC director Robert Redfield testifies before the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Capitol Hill on March 8. (screenshot from C-Span)

At the first congressional hearing Wednesday on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, nothing was said about the possibility that the virus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, was developed as a bioweapon or that it may have been released intentionally.

The subcommittee heard from just four witnesses. The most notable was Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC in the Trump administration, who said at the start of his testimony that there are “two competing hypotheses about the virus’s origins” that must be investigated:

1. A “spillover event” from nature.

2. The virus “evolved in a lab involved in gain-of-function research.”

“Under this theory,” he said of the second hypothesis, “Covid-19 infected the general population after it was accidentally leaked from a lab in China.”

But it is not true that there are only these two hypotheses.

There are at least THREE, and maybe four.

From the very start, there was discussion about the virus as a bioweapon — a weapon of biological warfare produced only for the purpose of an attack by one nation on another, and not really for any other reason.

Redfield is surely aware of this because it was first raised by renowned national security reporter Bill Gertz in theWashington Times on January 24, 2020 in an article in which Gertz quotes an Israeli biological weapons expert talking about China’s biological warfare program and the work being done on bioweapons at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, near where the pandemic began.

A second article, also by Gertz, ran on Jan. 26.

Here is that article:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This was followed by an interview Francis Boyle gave to a website/podcast called Geopolitics & Empire just four days later in which Boyle said it appeared that the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, China, produced the virus and that it is an “offensive biological warfare weapon” that probably leaked out of the lab.

Here is that interview:

https://guadalajarageopolitics.com/2020/01/30/francis-boyle-wuhan-coronavirus-is-an-offensive-biological-warfare-weapon-131/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Francis Boyle is a Harvard-educated law professor at the University of Illinois who is best known as the person who wrote the federal law that implemented the Biological Weapons Convention — the 1972 agreement among nations of the world to never develop, produce, acquire or stockpile any biological agents to be used as weapons.

In the interview with Geopolitics & Empire, he said:

“All these BSL-4 labs are — by the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel — are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There’s really no legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs…it’s clearly all weapons-related.”

Boyle called bioweapons research “death science” work that amounts to an “international crime” as it violates the Biological Weapons Convention.

He pointed to the extraordinary amount of money the United States has invested in this area, calling it “an offensive biological weapons race by the United States government” and says other countries, including China, have “responded accordingly” by setting up their own bioweapons labs.

The lab in Wuhan is China’s first bioweapons lab.

In a second interview he gave on the topic, to Alex Jones of InfoWars on Feb. 7, 2020, Francis Boyle went further and described articles from scientific journals in which Prof. Ralph Baric and researchers working under him at a lab at the University of North Carolina described how they had manipulated coronaviruses and shared information about this manipulation with a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — pointing to a U.S. origin but release from the lab in China.

Prof. Francis Boyle gave an interview to InfoWars on Feb. 7, 2020 in which he pointed to the University of North Carolina as the origin of the coronavirus. (Screenshot from Rumble video)

Here is that interview:

https://rumble.com/v22ume0-feb-7-2020-bioweapons-expert-coronavirus-is-a-biological-weapon-never-encou.html

At the hearing on Capitol Hill on March 8, there was no mention of the University of North Carolina.

There was also no mention of Ralph Baric, whose lab at UNC was involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses to make them transmissible human-to-human.

When questioned by members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday, Robert Redfield said he supports a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but he defended those who want to continue doing it, saying:

“I think the people that are advocates for gain-of-function research do believe that by doing this research they somehow get ahead of the curve. I’m of the point of view that we don’t need to make pathogens more transmissible or more pathogenic in order to get ahead of the curve. We can begin to deal with those pathogens as they evolve.”

He agreed that taxpayers, through the National Institutes of Health and its contract with EcoHealth Alliance, funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that appeared to have produced SARS-CoV-2.

He cited three pieces of evidence to support the theory that the virus had leaked out of this lab:

1. Chinese scientists deleted genetic sequences of SARS-SoV-2 from an online database.

2. China changed control of the lab in Wuhan from civilian to military.

3. China had a contractor change the ventilation system at the Wuhan lab.

The topic of the origins of Covid-19 has been explored at great length by tech inventor and former California U.S. Senate candidate Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review, who says he thinks the lab leak theory is now being pushed to shovel all blame onto China for the Covid-19 virus and deflect attention from the most likely scenario: That SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon the United States used to attack China and Iran.

Yes.

Not an attack by China, but an attack by the United States — on China.

His main argument is that there is no real evidence of a “leak” from a lab in Wuhan and considerable motive and possibly evidence of an attack.

Here is what he offers up:

“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.”

Who would have given the order?

I’m not sure I can think of anyone in the Trump administration who was involved with foreign policy and national security issues, was a war-loving neocon and who also had close ties to a foreign nation that hates Iran and sees China as a rising economic competitor.

But if you give me a little while, I might be able to think of someone...

But back to Ron Unz… Unz also offers as support for his “It’s a U.S. bioweapon” theory the information that Israel and our Defense Intelligence Agency appear to have known about the pandemic in Wuhan before the Chinese were aware of it…which does seem strange.

“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,” Unz writes.

Hmmm….

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You can watch the full March 8 hearing “Investigating the Origins of COVID-19” before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?526520-1/house-subcommittee-examines-origins-covid-19&live=

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