Was Covid-19 a bioweapon the US used to attack China and Iran?

California tech entrepreneur and free-wheeling intellectual Ron Unz says if revealed to be true, it could bring down the 'ruling regime' in the United States

Tehran at night (photo by Mohammad Amirahmadi)

Ron Unz of the Unz Review is pushing for more independent journalists to focus on the possibility that Covid-19 was an American biowarfare attack on China and also Iran.

Yes, an attack on China, not by China.

And yes, an attack on both China and Iran.

Unz reminds his readers in his Dec. 25 article “Collapsing Conspiracy Coverups” that China was not the only epicenter of the virus, and that Iran appeared to be a second epicenter, as reported in this New York Times article published on February 24, 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/world/middleeast/coronavirus-iran.html

I remember the Iran story and, in particular, the reporting that several members of Iran’s leadership had died of the virus, which was in this New York Times story from February 27, 2020 and updated on March 4, 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/middleeast/coronavirus-iran-vice-president.html

This immediately struck me as suspicious. No, not just suspicious. That’s understating it. I thought it was almost proof that the United States was involved — that the United States was responsible for the attack, probably along with Israel.

After all, the United States and Israel had together launched an attack on Iran with the Stuxnet computer “worm” less than 10 years earlier, in 2010 — a cyberwarfare attack that spread through Microsoft Windows and targeted Siemens industrial control systems in Iran and in particular, Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

I was also suspicious because from 2012 to 2014 I’d worked closely with a former CIA analyst who was obsessed with Iran — obsessed with Iran in the way that he fervently believed and wanted the American public to believe that Iran was the No. 1 threat to U.S. national security.

I edited his writing for a website called LIGNET (the Langley Intelligence Network). The main thrust of all of the pieces he wrote was that Iran had to be stopped at all costs in its drive to develop a nuclear weapons program, and that if it wasn’t, we were risking annihilation, or something close to it.

This former CIA analyst had worked under John Bolton, who — of course — was also obsessed with Iran and was relentless in his push for the United States to intercede to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

I’d watched over the years as this Iran obsession played out, with people in our government often making it plain that the goal of the United States was regime change in Iran — something that could be achieved by a violent coup, as it was in 1953 — or by other means, I suppose.

In November of 2019, when the coronavirus called SARS-Cov2 first is known to have emerged in China, John Bolton had just resigned as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor about eight weeks earlier.

In addition to Bolton, of course, there was another Iran hawk in the Trump White House — the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who’d been put in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East and who, Trump reportedly joked, was “more loyal to Israel than to the United States.”

Iran, of course, is Israel’s chief rival in the Middle East, and enemy.

As for China, of course Trump had campaigned in 2016 on taking on China and defeating China, at least economically.

I think there’s no real possibility that President Trump would have known of any plan to launch a biowarfare attack on either country.

But perhaps people close to President Trump knew, or even gave the nod for these attacks to be carried out.

But back to the Ron Unz article from Dec. 24….

Unz calls the Covid epidemic “one of the most important world events of the last hundred years” with only World War I, World War II and the Great Depression ranking higher in importance.

He complains that he’s been writing for two years about the “overwhelming evidence” that the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak was the result of an American biowarfare attack on China and Iran, but that few people have paid any attention or raised similar suspicions.

But this, he says, may be starting to change with the December 21 article in the Daily Sceptic, a British web magazine, which focused on reports that seem to show that the U.S. intelligence community knew about the virus outbreak in Wuhan before the Chinese did, saying that this would only be possible if the United States were responsible for the attack.

I’ve read the Daily Sceptic piece a couple of times and am not persuaded by the evidence that is presented in it. I don’t think it’s possible to know when the Chinese really knew about the outbreak.

The most notable thing I draw from the article is the disclosure that the U.S. intelligence community briefed Israel about the outbreak in China the second week of November of 2019 when the vice chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, told NBC News that he did not see intelligence reports on the outbreak until January of 2020.

We went back and looked at everything in November and December. The first indication we have were the reports out of China in late December that were in the public forum. And the first intel reports I saw were in January.

Why would U.S. intelligence agencies be briefing Israel the second week in November about a new virus outbreak in China when U.S. military leaders weren’t briefed until two months later?

Why would the CIA be keeping this alarming information, about a virus that could launch a worldwide pandemic, from the U.S. military?

It will be up to congressional investigators to dig deep, to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, and to find the answers to all such questions.