Showing posts with label Covid-19. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Covid-19. Show all posts

TOTALITARIANISM N.S.W.

 

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Dominello emerges as NSW’s most dangerous

IN AN admittedly crowded field, Service Minister Victor Dominello is rapidly emerging as the most dangerous politician in NSW. 

It is Dominello, more than anyone else, propelling the State towards the now almost inevitable vaccine passport tyranny, a new and especially vile form of COVID insanity engulfing the world. 

Dominello is a totalitarian technocrat who has been given the power to run our lives…

It is as if lockdowns, mask mandates and contact-trace people detectors weren’t enough.

He is doing it all-but-silently and doing it without anyone’s knowledge, and certainly not with their consent. In other words, just like with the QR code mandates, by stealth.

MANDATE

(Daily, manic press briefings about a casedemic certainly have their uses. They hide other things going on).

Dominello has been driving the NSW vaccine mandate in order to lock in a vaccine rollout intended to save his colleagues’ political hides.

But it is becoming clear his approach will not work. A vaccine quota is not needed for public health and will not, in any case, return people’s freedom.


It might be enlightening for the citizenry of the Premier State to know a little about those who are making the decisions that have crushed our freedoms. Their histories, backgrounds and belief systems.

Let us start with Mark Latham’s recent statement on what is afoot with vaccines: “With no public consultation, the NSW Minister for Customer Service Victor Dominello has announced his plan for the introduction of vaccine passports.

“For the first time ever, adults will have to reveal their private health information to strangers just to go shopping for food and live a normal life (cafes, restaurants, cinema, sporting events, travelling around, children going to school). People without a vaccine passport will also lose their jobs in many workplaces.”

The privacy and freedom implications of this are huge. This goes well beyond QR codes, right to your private health information.

This is to force everyone to be COVID vaccinated, even though many people:

  • are waiting for clearer evidence about the safety of these vaccines, especially given that AstraZeneca has led to six Australian deaths, with a further 90 blood clot episodes and over 28,000 reports of adverse reactions (official Commonwealth TGA data);
  • do not want the vaccines pushed upon their children;
  • have conscientious objections to vaccines on religious and other grounds; and
  • do not support the government holding and controlling so much private information about their lives.

Dominello has not even consulted his own MPs about this dictatorial announcement.

To his eternal credit, Mark Latham is, along with Fred Nile of the Christian Democrats, emerging as a much-needed freedom fighter resisting vaccine tyranny.

Tanya Davies, a government backbencher with the annoying habit of espousing conservative causes and defending the underdog, has signalled a private member’s bill and has elicited open support from two other backbenchers (Nat Smith and Kevin Conolly) and, indeed, from a minister (Anthony Roberts).

SHAMEFULLY

The Labor opposition, we know, wants to crush COVID dissent. The protests were, Chris Minns said, “inexcusable”. Shamefully, Minns has said his Party would not support Ms Davies’s bill.

Ms Davies has an unnamed Labor supporter as well. That person is too scared to come out at this point.

As per The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper: “A person may not be vaccinated for any number of medical, ethical or religious reasons,” Mrs Davies said.

“We as a government should be protecting people’s individual rights and circumstances. Employees should not be forced into COVID-19 vaccination. This is an assault on an individual’s freedoms and civil liberties.”

Ms Davies’ bill has emerged in the context of the Premier’s own drive for mandatory vaccine passports for construction workers in COVID hot spots.

Another of the Premier’s ministers Attorney General Mark Speakman, the man responsible for pursuing the truly absurd sex consent legislation, claimed: “Why should vaxxed tradies’ freedom be held back by those who won’t vax?”

A cynical observer might just about conclude that the whole rigmarole with LGA-specific, tough lockdowns was set up solely to allow the Premier to wheel in localised and industry-specific vaccine passports as a trial run, under the radar.

No doubt, even to suggest this would be to invite the charge of “conspiracy theorist” in these fetid times.

Except that now we know the NSW government has mandated vaccines for teachers, other educational staff, and is beavering away in the dark in relation to other industries. Who on earth will be safe?

Since launching her bill, Davies has become a beacon of hope for all the freedom-fighters out there, not to mention workers.

BRAVE

She has built an enormous social media following on the back of her brave stance and now delivers nightly podcast updates on her progress.

Unsurprisingly to those who are familiar with the NSW government, Davies has been bullied in her Party room and traduced by the compromised media vaccine cheer squad. The “rogue” MP is at it again.

The bullies in chief have been the clueless deputy Premier John Barilaro and the unspeakable Speakman.

Some weeks back now, the Prime Minister claimed (according to Sharri Markson and Yoni Bashan): “…mandatory vaccination could breach discrimination laws, and that Australia’s policy remained that vaccines should be voluntary and free.”

He also (alas) stated: “…businesses could pursue their own vaccination policies as long as they were legal and reasonable.”

Ms Davies perceptively noted: “The Prime Minister’s comments in the past few days have left the door wide open for employers to force their employees to be vaccinated. The federal government has effectively privatised compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Indeed. Davies herself was heartened initially by Morrison’s statement, but has since come to realise that industry-mandated vaccines with Liberal governments working hand in glove to achieve them, and rolled out via Victor’s app, prove Morrison’s initial statement to have been a self-serving lie.

As always, he has simply outsourced the hard bits to the Premiers and to their industry association mates. Our rights get crushed while he sits in the corner.

So, back to Victor Dominello. Who is he, given that most people have probably never heard of  him?

Well, he has held a number of ministries within the NSW government, none of great consequence before he was appointed Minister for Digital and Minister for Customer Service after the 2019 election.

PASSPORTS

Dominello is armed with all the innovation and management-speak buzz words. The technocrat’s technocrat, a man of totalitarian bent, clearly, as anyone in favour of vaccine passports surely must be, and now he has been given the power to run our lives.

One definition of technocracy is: “…the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts.”

Technocracy is not simply rule by experts, which we clearly have already in this age of governance by unelected chief health officers.

It also has overtones of the coming new order of artificial intelligence, of rule by algorithm, of Beijing-driven “smart cities”, of the sinister “internet of things”.

Of government knowing everything about us, including – thanks to contact-trace – where we are at any given moment. (Much of the march towards technocracy is clarified by Patrick Wood’s excellent books, including Technocracy Rising).

The whole tyrannical management of COVID by government is only possible with surveillance technology. None of this could have happened fifteen years ago. So Dominello is “following the technology”.

It is said that Dominello is a geek. This is a polite term for technocrat.

An article in the Financial Review newspaper last year was headlined ominously as follows – “Victor Dominello’s Brave New World of Citizen Control”. Aldous Huxley, indeed. With a soupcon of Orwell, and a dollop of William Golding (Lord of the Flies).

The same article linked Dominello’s alleged “innovation” to the State’s “gold standard” approach to managing COVID. Perhaps a little premature on the part of the AFR. Or perhaps the price of gold has slipped.

Says Dominello: “The models I look to in terms of innovation are Apple and Google.”

SURVEILLANCE

So, his heroes are the kingpins of what Shoshana Zuboff, in her ground-breaking book, has termed “the age of surveillance capitalism”.

This is, indeed, a creepy man to have making decisions about people’s (until now) inalienable human rights.

Then there is this: “Relentlessly challenging centuries of plodding Westminister-style government and vested stakeholders interests, Dominello is an intriguing mix of evangelist, political philosopher, change agent and pragmatist.”

This would be the “plodding Westminster-style government” that has formed one of the core pillars of Western liberal democracy.

Just what we need in office – a techno-evangelist out to trash traditional caution in government. A tool of the technocracy class that now runs the world from Davos, Beijing and Surveillance Valley.

The man again: “The changes [to a single app Service NSW] are more than simple digitisation of services, he says. The technology for QR codes, used to track people in retail and hospitality venues, has existed for years making their implementation ‘relatively easy’.”

Tracking us down. Inflicting harm on innocent people. Ushering in the deep State. Telling the burly coppers of the NSW Police State where we are. So they can hunt us down and harass us some more.

How did they do it? As Shoshana Zuboff outlined in her book, they hid what they were doing, they made much of it free and easy to use, they argued it was all about customer focus, and they made it all fun! Especially appealing to the clueless generation, aka millennials.

Dominello argues consumers will “always gravitate towards a better service delivery”.

“It’s like water and gravity. [People will] quickly find the easiest point. That’s transformation in action.”

Clearly Dominello doesn’t get irony. He is lying to himself as well as to us: “The world is splitting between autocracies and democracies,” he says. “What is one of the fundamental rights or freedoms in a democracy that we wish to protect that you just don’t get in autocracies? Privacy.”

REBELLION

Technology should be used to enhance privacy, he says!

Really? Almost single-handedly, he is, with the health bureaucrats and with his ally the Premier, turning the once great State of the Rum Rebellion into a fascist super-State, with blighted lives strewn across the land.

Perhaps in his techno-innocence, Dominello thinks that surrendering our medical privacy to government is okay, so long as it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands (outside of the government).

Where does Dominello stand philosophically? Is there anything in his world view or background to hint at an inner-authoritarian? Here is Victor speaking to a journalist in 2013:

Is Dominello at the smaller-l end of the Party? “Some people would typecast me that way, but some would see me as very conservative on some topics. I’m a lawyer, so traditionally I’m a civil libertarian…

Whoa … He says he is a civil libertarian! A civil libertarian now responsible for progressing within the NSW government the most far-reaching attack on civil liberties in the history of this State.

A member of State cabinet that is sanctioning shocking new police powers, bringing in the army, arresting business owners, crushing dissent, using every form of surveillance known to man, putting whole sub-regions of Sydney under house arrest.

A government that is now a global laughing stock. A government criticised by the Chinese for being too draconian on COVID.

Now Dominello is attempting to ensure that those who are resisting vaccine tyranny, for whatever reason, when they see it, are prevented from living normal lives, from going to the cricket, from clubbing – if you are into that sort of thing – from having a beer at the local, from travelling interstate for a holiday or to see family. Or travelling to work if you are employed in one of the now-targeted industries.

He has already mandated (from July 2021) QR code-only entry to just about every institution across NSW. Schools. Shops. Universities. Clubs. You name it. Under Victor’s regime, you may shortly need a vaccine passport to go to Mass.

HOLY COMMUNION

I wonder how Victor’s “deeply Catholic” mother would feel about that. QR codes at the altar rail for Holy Communion.

This is tyranny and surveillance by stealth – again.

This evil has been creeping up on us very quietly during 2021. This covert operation mirrors the approach taken by the political class in other Western countries. Recently the French President broke cover, and has copped a shellacking on the streets.

Hence the normal practice of COVID politicians prevaricating, speaking in riddles, feinting, effecting a sense of decision-making agility, dodging questions, avoiding giving straight answers, calling “passports” something else, and backing and forthing on one’s attitude according to the political breeze, an approach perfected by the British Labour Opposition and its leader, Keir Starmer.

Sky News reported in March 2021: “Discussions are underway for a vaccine passport-style plan for NSW residents which may prohibit a person from entering a venue if they have refused a COVID-19 jab.”

Certificates would become readily accessible on the Service NSW app, and data sharing arrangements between the federal government and Service NSW are underway.

The government predicts airlines, clubs and entertainment venues may mandate the vaccine.

Hence in March, Dominello was treading very warily: “A spokesman for Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello, who is responsible for the Service NSW app, added that ‘a range of options will be canvassed to ensure the vaccine rollout is implemented effectively’.

“We will work closely with the federal government to determine the best way forward,” he said.

A range of options. Implemented effectively. Vaccine rollout. Keep the voters guessing.

Damon Rees is the public servant in charge of customer service for Service NSW.

Damon Rees assured [us] that once a vaccine passport was officially decided, cybersecurity would involve ‘a range of people and a range of organisations’.

CAHOOTS

“We would engage a range of external organisations from the start in the design and delivery,” he said.

“Once a vaccine passport is officially decided,” he said. Not much doubt, then, about the direction of travel. Well, we are there already.

It is clear that the government has been in cahoots with the corporate class on vaccine passports.

We also notice that NSW public servants have learned from their political masters to never give any real information away, and to speak in riddles.

But Rees did let the cat out of the bag, by accident. “Once a vaccine passport was officially decided…”. They have been planning this a long time.

Dominello has revealed by his vaccine passport plans that the man who once (allegedly) heavied a local councillor over a development matter remains a bully. (He was referred to ICAC in 2017 but they didn’t pursue the matter).

Now he is seeking to bully every single soul who refuses the jab, worker by worker and industry by industry. Still a bully. But, alas, not still a liberal.

So, we can see that Dominello is assuredly following the technology. Pity he isn’t following the science on COVID. If he had been, he might know some of the following facts:

  • Vaccines are not needed, since over 99 per cent of those who get COVID recover fully;
  • Vaccines do not work, as ever mounting overseas evidence shows, if the objective is to prevent transmission of the COVID virus;
  • This vaccine is not, actually, a vaccine;
  • There are tens of thousands of cases, only a small minority of them reported, of COVID vaccines causing great harm to those who take them;
  • Vaccines seem to help reduce symptoms and death, though by how much is highly contested and yet to be fully measured, and in any case there are drugs around that do the same job without the side effects.

In which case, the whole case for vaccine passports evaporates.

And no, Minister Roberts, those who refuse the jab are not “idiots”, as you suggest.

These facts lead, inevitably, to people asking the not unreasonable question – why, then, in God’s name are they doing all this? And where does this leave the NSW government and the Service Minister?

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the politicians running the COVID show in this State, as elsewhere, are not stupid. Also assume, for the sake of argument, that they are not evil, and not part of a global conspiracy to effect a new world order.

That would leave a third possibility. That they are trashing the rights and freedoms of their citizens for no good reason – other than for the sake of their own political hides. If this is the case, it doesn’t make for a pretty picture.

It is to be hoped that the resistance in the Parliament continues and gains strength.

To date, the main arguments have been about privacy and potential other uses of vaccine passports (the slippery slope argument).

IDIOCY

While these arguments are admirable, it is equally to be hoped that they are augmented by reference to fundamental human rights and the general idiocy and evil of the COVID State.

Oh, and they also have the ultimate power – a power that, sadly, was threatened but not used during the abortion debate – if only they would threaten credibly to use it.

They have the numbers to cross the floor and so consign the appalling Berejiklian government to the dustbin of history.

Only then will the full force of the Dominello technocracy push be crushed. As it now stands, this is probably the only way out now for the Premier State.

David Flint’s recent claim was wrong. NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean is not the most dangerous politician in Australia.PC

– Paul Collits

COVID ORIGIN [Latest in series 18.6.21]

 

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“…..we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory (and) was designed as a bioweapon… China was the intended target (and) America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment… The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives… would have been sent to Wuhan to release it.” Ron Unz, Editor of The Unz Review; from the text

Question 1– What makes your theory about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so controversial, is not that it suggests that the pathogen was created in a lab, but that it is, in fact, a bioweapon that was deliberately released by US agents prosecuting a secret war on presumed enemies of the United States. Here’s the “money quote” from your article titled, “American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”:

“…..we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory along with a good possibility that it was designed as a bioweapon, yet we lack serious indications that any lab-leak occurred. So if the original Wuhan outbreak was due to the deployment of a powerful bioweapon but not one that had accidentally leaked from any lab, then surely China was the intended target, the victim rather than the perpetrator….

Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it…. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.” (“American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”, Ron Unz, The Unz Review)

So, here’s the question: Do you think recent developments lend credibility to your explosive theory or do you now believe that Covid-19 was merely “accidentally” leaked through human error?

Ron Unz– As everyone knows, over the last month the entire “mainstream narrative” of the Covid outbreak has been completely overturned. Just a few weeks ago, anyone suggesting the virus was artificial was denounced and ridiculed as a “conspiracy theorist” and any such statements were automatically banned by Facebook.

But exactly these same prohibited ideas are now widely accepted and promoted by leading figures in the media and political establishments. The 45-year veteran of the New York Times who spearheaded its Covid coverage has now admitted that he was completely mistaken, and that the virus probably came from a lab. The three billion Facebook users can now openly discuss this possibility.

The total collapse of this “natural virus” propaganda-bubble was produced by a self-published 11,000 word article by longtime science journalist Nicholas Wade. Yet the astonishing thing is that almost none of the crucial facts he cited in his article were new. Nearly all of Wade’s important evidence had been publicly available for a full year, but was simply ignored by our entire political and media establishment, partly because Trump took that position and they all hated Trump.

So the virus probably came from a lab. But the question now becomes “which lab?” Just as the MSM had promoted the totally unsubstantiated belief that Covid was natural, the MSM has now begun promoting the equally unsubstantiated belief that Covid accidentally leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the evidence of any such Wuhan lab-leak is so thin as to be almost invisible.

It’s true that Chinese researchers at that lab were experimenting with related bat viruses, but many American researchers were doing very similar experiments, and for decades bat viruses have also been the central focus of America’s huge biowarfare program.

Wuhan is an enormously large metropolis of 11 million, much larger than New York City, and the Wuhan lab is located 20 miles(!) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was the earliest epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak. A distance of 20 miles seems pretty far for an accidental lab-leak.

Immediately after the initial Wuhan outbreak, the virus began infecting Iran’s top political elites, and killing a number of them. Isn’t it implausible that a random lab-leak in Wuhan would so quickly jump to the Holy City of Qom on the other side of the world?

There are many other aspects of the timing of the outbreak that seem very inconsistent with a random, accidental lab-leak.

Until a few weeks ago, the MSM and Facebook shut down anyone who disagreed with the “natural virus” theory, even though the evidence for an artificial virus had always been much stronger. They’ve now said “Oops! We were wrong. The virus probably came from a lab.” So I think they’ll now have a much harder time shutting down any debate about which lab.

Once people became aware of the basic facts of the virus, belief that it was artificial natural quickly collapsed. And once people become aware of the basic facts of the initial Covid outbreak, I think that belief in an accidental lab-leak will also begin to collapse.

Question 2–You seem to have anticipated my next question, but I’ll go ahead and ask it anyway. In another one of your articles, you say this:

“As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?”

My question is this: Is this the smoking gun? In other words, do these two “attacks” on enemies of the United States strongly suggest Washington’s involvement?

Ron Unz– Well, it’s certainly an *extremely* odd coincidence for those who claim the global Covid outbreak was caused by an accidental, random lab-leak of a virus in Wuhan, China.

Iran is on the other side of the world from China, and very few Chinese visit the Holy City of Qom. So it’s extremely strange that the Covid virus would have jumped so extremely quickly from a Wuhan lab-leak to Iran’s top political leadership, which suffered the next major outbreak.

A few weeks afterward, the third major world outbreak began in Northern Italy, but 200,000 Chinese live and work in that region, and many had just returned from their Lunar New Year holiday in China. The Chinese population in Qom is absolutely negligible by comparison. The Italian outbreak makes perfectly logical sense while the one in Qom does not.

None of this constitutes proof, but it raises huge doubts about the likelihood of the random lab-leak hypothesis. By contrast, the deliberate release of a viral bioweapon seems a much more plausible explanation of both these outbreaks.

America has the world’s largest and most comprehensive biowarfare program, and America’s two leading international adversaries—China and Iran—were almost simultaneously hit by a mysterious, deadly virus. Suspicion seems to point in a pretty obvious direction.

If the Colombo crime family of NYC is locked in a bitter feud with the Genoveses, and two capos of the latter are found shot to death in a 24-hour period, maybe they both suddenly decided to commit suicide. But most sensible observers would also tend to consider other possibilities.

Question 3– Shortly after you published your explosive piece suggesting US Intel agents may have been involved in releasing Covid-19 among the Chinese and Iranian people, your website was deplatformed by Google and banned on Facebook? Would you briefly explain what happened and will you also tell us whether you think that your alleged offense was:

1– Suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab?
2– Or, suggesting that Washington might have used SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon directed at its geopolitical rivals?

In my opinion, ruling elites don’t really care if people think Covid was man-made. What they’re concerned about, is that people will think it was intentionally released. That is the thought they don’t want us to think.

Ron Unz– Obviously, all this is entirely speculative. But for six years our website had been publishing a wide variety of extremely controversial articles on all sorts of different subjects, and we had never had any problems with either Facebook or Google.

Then in late April 2020, I published my first long article laying out the substantial evidence that the global Covid outbreak might have been due to an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and that article got very strong early traffic, with more Facebook Likes in the first few days than anything I had previously published.

But about ten days after it ran, our website was suddenly banned by Facebook. A few days later, our entire website was deranked by Google, so that all our web pages would appear near the very bottom of Google searches and almost no one would see them. The coincidental timing of these actions seems very suspicious.

At that point, I think we were one of the most popular websites to have ever been banned by Facebook. For example, our traffic far exceeded that of the venerable New Republic, a century old publication that had spent decades as America’s most influential opinion magazine. Although Facebook did publish an official report explaining that month’s bans, our name was barely mentioned, with almost all the pages of discussion devoted to obscure foreign websites in Georgia, Mauritania, or Myanmar, or those located in America’s major geopolitical adversaries such as Russia or Iran. The report explained the reasons for banning VDARE, “a website known for posting anti-immigration content” and then banned our own website for being “similar.”

This explanation seemed very strange. We do regularly republish VDARE articles, but since the beginning of 2020, these had only amounted to 41 of our 1,751 total articles and posts, representing just 0.2% of our content, and few of these VDARE pieces had anything to do with immigration. Meanwhile, Google provided no explanation at all for our sudden purge from their search results.

It seems likely that the sudden purges by Facebook and Google were due to our very extensive Covid coverage over the previous couple of months, culminating in my major article. Among English-language websites, the vast majority of mainstream outlets had been reporting that the virus was obviously natural and denouncing anyone who suggested it came from a lab as “crazy conspiracy theorists.”

Meanwhile, large numbers of right-wing, anti-China, or pro-Trump websites regularly claimed that the Covid outbreak was due to a lab-leak in Wuhan, and sometimes suggested that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon. I think we almost alone in focusing upon America’s huge and well-documented biowarfare program, sometimes publishing important articles that had been rejected elsewhere, and pointing suspicion in that direction.

Because we were banned by Facebook and Google, what should have became a debate over three origin Covid possibilities—a natural virus, a Chinese virus, or an American virus—became a year-long debate between only the first two.

Given enormous negative impact the Covid epidemic has had on America and the rest of the world, it’s easy to understand why our political leadership would be extremely concerned if people merely began to even consider the possibility that the virus may have been produced by an American government lab, let alone deliberately released. And persuading Facebook and Google to block such theories would make perfect sense.

Question 4– There’s a part of your theory I have a problem with. You say: “CIA operatives or members of special forces (may) have been sent to Wuhan to release “(the virus) This could be true, but why do you exclude the possibility that Chinese scientists may have been working either secretly with their US counterparts (Baric, Fauci?) or that the Chinese leadership is cooperating with foreign elites and Intelligence agencies to help them implement authoritarian policies in their own countries? Is that too far-fetched for you to even consider?

Ron Unz– Well, anything’s possible, but there’s simply no evidence of that.

Given the extreme recent hostility between the American and Chinese governments, I think it’s very unlikely that any senior officials of the two countries would be secretly cooperating behind the scenes in releasing the Covid virus.

Since the Trump Administration spent much of the Spring claiming that the Chinese had “covered up” the outbreak, large teams of investigative journalists from our top media outlets devoted many weeks of effort to tracking down the facts. Based upon all available evidence the Chinese government only discovered the existence of this mysterious, unsuspected new virus near the end of December, and almost immediately informed the World Health Organization.

Once the Chinese realized that Covid was highly contagious and spreading around Wuhan, they reacted very quickly. Some local officials tried to ignore or minimize the problem, costing them about a week, but once the national government discovered the danger, it quickly ordered massive public health measures, locking down the entire city of 11 million, and soon expanding the lockdowns to the region and then the entire country, confining 700 million Chinese to their homes for several weeks. This allowed them to completely stamp out the virus, and within a few months, the country was almost back to normal.

Meanwhile, the American government mostly ignored the entire potential problem and the possibility that the virus would back into the U.S. Our CDC botched the production of testing-kits, so for many weeks we had no way of knowing if the virus was starting to spread here. Trump and his supporters engaged in wishful thinking, claiming that the virus wasn’t dangerous and might disappear “like magic.” The American government only started to take the problem seriously after the horrific outbreak in Northern Italy.

Since the American government was harshly denouncing China during this entire period and reacting so differently to their Covid outbreaks, I think it’s very unlikely that American and Chinese leaders had planned the Covid outbreak together or were secretly cooperating in any way.

On the other hand, it’s certainly true that for many years Chinese scientists and American scientists had worked together on viral research, and jointly published papers. But that’s true of scientists all around the world, and until the last few years, China and America had generally been on pretty friendly terms. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that the American NIH provided some funding to the viral research of the Wuhan lab, and until the Covid outbreak, nobody would have cared about that. As far as I know, America provides research grants to scientists all around the world, and other countries, including China, do the same thing with American research.

And despite all the media hype, I also didn’t see anything particularly surprising in those Fauci emails that were recently released. American financial support for the virus research of the Wuhan lab had never been a secret, and I’ve been reading about it for over a year. However, once Trump and Pompeo began claiming that devastating Covid epidemic had been caused by a Wuhan lab-leak, the situation obviously changed. If they were correct, then everyone in America even somewhat associated with the Wuhan lab could share some of the gigantic blame, including Fauci. So it’s hardly surprising that Fauci and all the others began hiding their connection and also using their influence to try to (dishonestly) persuade the media that the virus was natural, thereby protecting the Wuhan lab and also themselves.

That worked for about a year, and nobody paid attention to the issue. But now that the media has come around to the virus being artificial, the Wuhan lab has become a prime suspect, putting Fauci and the others back in the hot-seat. Fauci seems a dishonest federal bureaucrat, but our entire government is filled with such people, and the focus on Fauci seems ridiculous. I think it’s quite unlikely that Covid was produced in Wuhan or leaked out, so Fauci’s dishonesty was totally unimportant.

Finally, while it’s remotely possible that America intelligence agencies had some spies in Wuhan or even the Wuhan lab, there seems no evidence of this. In fact, the only secret intelligence we allegedly received about events in Wuhan came from a third-country source, which demonstrates our own total lack of information and agents. If we did release the Covid bioweapon in Wuhan, it’s pretty unlikely that we were able to recruit local Chinese agents to carry out the operation.

For about a year, most experts had agreed that the Covid outbreak in Wuhan probably began in late October or early November of 2019. By a remarkable coincidence, there were 300 American military servicemen visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games, which ended in late October. That visit would have provided perfect cover for America to slip a couple of operatives into the group, and have them release the virus in the city. With thousands of foreign military personnel traveling around and doing sightseeing, any risk of detection would have been minimal. That seems much more plausible than the risk of finding and using local Chinese operatives.

What would Americans think if 300 Chinese military officers paid an extended visit to Chicago, and immediately afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral epidemic suddenly broke out in that city?

Question 5— Alot of people who read this interview are going to think, “The United States is not capable of crime like this.” But, over the years, US-funded laboratories have created, modified and stockpiled all manner of toxic agents including “six mass-produced, battle-ready biological weapons”, namely, anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever, VEE, botulism and God knows what else. The United States has also authorized highly controversial human research programs that involved people and groups who were never informed that they were being used as guinea pigs in a government lab experiment. As Jeanne Guillemin said more than three decades ago:

“The entire experimental legacy is dismaying, from the hundreds of dead monkeys at Fort Detrick to … the vaccinated volunteers in Project Whitecoat, strapped to chairs amid cages of animals in the Utah sunlight as Q fever aerosols are blown over them. Most chilling are the mock scenarios played out in urban areas: light bulbs filled with simulated BW agents being dropped in New York subways, men in Washington National Airport spraying pseudo-BW from briefcases, and similar tests in California and Texas and over the Florida Keys.”

US biological weapons were allegedly used in Korea, Vietnam and Cuba although the evidence is not conclusive. The history of these weapons does increase the probability that rogue elements in the national security state, could put them to use if they thought there was some advantage in doing so.

So what do you say to those people who think that the United States would never use a bioweapon, like SARS-CoV-2 , against an enemy?

Ron Unz– Sure, many Americans might regard it as “unthinkable” that their country could have used a biological weapon against China. But it is very widely recognized that for decades America has had the world’s leading biological warfare program, and in fact during the 1950s, it received government resources comparable to our nuclear weapons development efforts.

There seems quite a lot of evidence that those American bioweapons were used during the Korean War, though the claims have been disputed and they anyway turned out to be rather ineffective compared to conventional weapons. There are also claims bioweapons were used against Cuba and perhaps Vietnam.

In any event, our biological warfare capability certainly does exist, with the Ft. Detrick facility being our leading lab. Trump’s lackadaisical response once Covid began leaking back into the U.S. hardly suggests that he initially realized it might be a dangerous bioweapon, so he seems to have been entirely ignorant of the facts. Therefore, the attack against China (and Iran) would have been a rogue operation, probably carried out by elements of the national security apparatus associated with the Deep State Neocons at the top of his administration.

If someone sufficiently senior had been behind the plot, I think it would have been easy for the conspirators to have drawn upon America’s military resources to carry out the operation, with all those lower-level participants believing that they were part of a fully-authorized strike against America’s leading geopolitical adversaries, just as our government soon afterward assassinated Iran’s top military commander. Probably someone such as such as Secretary of State (and former CIA Director) Mike Pompeo or National Security Advisor John Bolton would have had been able to orchestrate the attack.

Such individuals had the means, motive, and opportunity, so it seems absurd for the media to so totally ignore this possibility.

Here’s something to consider. The worst biowarfare attacks in American history occurred just after 9/11, with Anthrax mailings to important political and media figures stampeding Congress into the passing the Patriot Act. The Anthrax attacker attempted to implicate Islamic terrorists in his attacks, but the FBI soon determined that the Anthrax came from our own Ft. Detrick facility, and eventually declared that a government biowarfare researcher named Bruce Ivins was responsible and closed the case, just after he supposedly committed suicide. Whether or not Ivins was actually guilty may be disputed, but the attack was almost certainly carried out by rogue elements of our national security apparatus. So it hardly seems impossible that the Covid outbreak had somewhat similar origins.

As a rogue operation, the Covid attacks could have been organized by a very small handful of individuals, with virtually none of the exhaustive bureaucratic planning that would normally take place. Under such circumstances, the plotters might have casually minimized the possible risk that the disease would leak back into America or our NATO allies, resulting in the disaster which eventually occurred. After all, the previous SARS and MERS coronavirus epidemics had left both America and Europe almost totally unscathed.

There’s one particularly telling clue that has been almost entirely ignored by both the mainstream and alternative media. Most experts believe that the Covid outbreak in Wuhan probably began in late October or early November, but since infections took some time to spread and the virus was initially undetectable, no one in the Chinese government was aware of the outbreak until the end of December. However, several American government sources later revealed to ABC News that as early as November 2019, our Defense Intelligence Agency had distributed a secret report to government officials warning that a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak was taking place in Wuhan. The Pentagon afterwards denied the story, but Israeli TV independently confirmed that the report indeed existed and had been distributed to our NATO allies and Israel. The secret DIA report was prepared in “the second week of November,” at a time when probably only a couple of dozen people were starting to feel a little sick in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, and more than a month before anyone in the Chinese government discovered the outbreak. These facts seem almost impossible to explain if the virus was either natural or was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab.

I think that the combination of all this evidence, together with additional material, strongly supports the hypothesis that the Covid outbreak resulted from an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), probably a rogue operation orchestrated by the Deep State Neocons in the Trump Administration.

Whether or not others agree with me, it seems absurd and ridiculous for this very serious possibility to be so completely excluded from virtually the entire mainstream and alternative media. I suspect that the reason for this total silence is that the evidence supporting this theory is sufficiently compelling that merely presenting it would quickly convince much of the Western public that a biowarfare attack was the most likely scenario. Therefore, the reaction has been a total blackout of these facts, which have remained unmentionable.

The Biden Neocons have now replaced the Trump Neocons at the helm of our government, but very little has changed in our dangerously anti-China foreign policy. And with the mainstream media wholeheartedly in the Biden camp, their attacks against China on all sort of dubious grounds have intensified. Indeed, the huge outpouring of current media support for the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis—which argues that Covid was secretly developed by the Chinese, possibly as a bioweapon—only became possible after their hated enemy Trump had left office.

America has the world’s largest biowarfare program, the Trump Administration focused on China as our greatest geopolitical threat, and the Deep State Neocons whom Trump hired were notoriously reckless individuals. It would hardly take a great deal of thought for the media to connect these dots and begin at least considering the obvious possibility they suggest.

SERIES of eBooks on the Subject: https://www.unz.com/ebook/covid-catastrophe-ebook/