New York Post

The Great COVID-19 Coverup

China’s deception over the coronaviru­s’ origins gets more outrageous by the day

- STEVEN W. MOSHER Steven W. Mosher is the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s ‘Dream’ is the New Threat to World Order.”

THE former leader of the State Department’s task force investigat­ing the origins of COVID-19 not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also that it was the result of bioweapons research.

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” says David Asher. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

This is an explosive charge, given the millions of deaths that have resulted from the coronaviru­s, not to mention the trillions of dollars in economic damages that have resulted from the lockdowns.

But a growing body of evidence suggests that Asher may be on to something. Here are some key points:

China does have a bioweapons program: Beijing joined the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984 but later — like almost every other internatio­nal treaty it has signed — began violating it.

Since 2007, Chinese government researcher­s have been writing publicly about developing bioweapons using controvers­ial “gain of function” research to make the viruses more lethal.

In fact, the former president of China’s National Defense University wrote in his 2017 book “War’s New High Ground” that biotechnol­ogy will enable the developmen­t of — get this — “geneticall­y engineered pathogens that target specific ethnicitie­s.”

That same year, as Asher points out, China’s top state television commentato­r revealed that biowarfare, using viruses, was a new priority under Xi Jinping’s national security policy.

The Wuhan lab was engaged in such bioweapons research: The US State Department under Mike Pompeo concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology — China’s most advanced lab — “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiment­s, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

The first “cluster of cases,” Asher reports, occurred among lab personnel in the fall of 2019. And Major General Chen Wei herself, the head of the People’s Liberation Army’s bioweapons research program, rushed down to Wuhan to deal with it. Why? It’s not unreasonab­le to think that it may have been one of Gen. Chen’s pathogens that had escaped from the lab.

The novel coronaviru­s did not come from nature: Over the past year, Beijing has told one story after another about the origin of the coronaviru­s. We’ve heard tales of bats and pangolins, caves and wet markets. The Chinese authoritie­s have even blamed the US military for bringing the virus to Wuhan. Many Western scientists initially went along with the explanatio­ns offered by Chinese colleagues with whom they had close profession­al ties.

All of this spinning is intended to obscure the obvious: The China Virus has no analog in nature.

Chinese whistleblo­wer Dr. Yan LiMeng, who fled China last April, was the first to point out that the virus’ closest cousin is a bat coronaviru­s originally isolated by the People’s Liberation Army, but tinkered with to make it much more infectious. The lab-origin theory has received support from other scientists, including Dr. Steven Quay, who has taught at Stanford Medical School and concludes “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the virus did not come from nature but is “laboratory derived.”

How? It turns out that the coronaviru­s burrows its way into human cells using a special tool called a “furin cleavage site.”

A new scientific report shows that, ofthe1,000—onethousan­d!—coronaviru­ses in nature that most closely resemble the novel coronaviru­s that caused C OVID -19, not a single one possess es a similar “furin cleavage site .”

That suggests that this special tool is not a product of natural evolution, but was inserted. In the Wuhan lab. Even the former director of the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield said on Friday he believes the coronaviru­s leaked from the lab, stating that the disease’s fast transmissi­on doesn’t make “biological sense.”

Why is the laboratory origin of the coronaviru­s just now coming out? China has engaged in a massive coverup these past 15 months, and it has not been alone. Officials at the World Health Organizati­on have consistent­ly downplayed the possibilit­y that it came from the lab.

A delegation of WHO scientists was finally allowed to visit Wuhan this past January, but they might as well have stayed home. As Jamie Metzl of the Washington-based think tank The Atlantic Council, later remarked, “Not only was it not a real investigat­ion, it was more of a chaperoned two-week study tour where they were given highly curated informatio­n.”

Those on this side of the Pacific who were funding the Wuhan lab, like EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, were also eager to dismiss the laborigin theory. (Daszak, curiously enough, was the only American on the WHO investigat­ory team.)

In other words, an awful lot of people have been acting as if they had something to hide.

In the law, this is called “consciousn­ess of guilt.” This is like running out the back door of your house when the police show up at your front door. Or, in China’s case, locking down the lab, destroying evidence, and blaming innocent bats.

Such behavior should raise everyone’s suspicions.

Of course, none of the above constitute­s absolute, ironclad, irrefutabl­e proof that the coronaviru­s was a bioweapon under developmen­t at the Wuhan lab.

But it all certainly seems to point in that direction, doesn’t it?

 ??  ?? China’s Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, bioweapons chief, rushed to Wuhan to deal with the first cluster of COVID-19 cases in fall 2019. Why? It’s possible the coronaviru­s escaped from that city’s lab.
China’s Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, bioweapons chief, rushed to Wuhan to deal with the first cluster of COVID-19 cases in fall 2019. Why? It’s possible the coronaviru­s escaped from that city’s lab.
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