By Aaron Kesel
A new report from Yahoo News details how a document from the FBI discusses a suspicious encounter in November 2018, one year prior to the suspected first case of COVID-19. According to the FBI report, an unknown Chinese man was caught transporting biological vials of MERS and SARS labeled “antibodies” after being stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro airport.
Yahoo News reports:
“Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials,” says an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News.”
The report which came out more than two months before the World Health Organization learned of COVID-19 in China and was written by the Chemical and Biological Intelligence Unit of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD), identified the case as suspicious. As Yahoo News notes the “FBI concluded that the incident, and two other cases cited in the report, were part of an alarming pattern.”
“The Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate assesses foreign scientific researchers who transport undeclared and undocumented biological materials into the United States in their personal carry-on and/or checked luggage almost certainly present a US biosecurity risk,” reads the report. “The WMDD makes this assessment with high confidence based on liaison reporting with direct access.”
Yahoo News further reports:
“In the case of the suspected SARS and MERS vials, the intelligence report cites another classified document that is marked “FISA,” meaning it contains information collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Another case cited in the report appeared to involve flu strains, and a third was suspected E. coli.”
This doesn’t include the case in January, where the head of Harvard University’s chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was federally charged with failing to disclose funding from the Chinese government, after he hid his involvement in China’s “Thousand Talents Program,” along with other Chinese nationals. It also doesn’t include an incident in a Canadian lab in Winnipeg where coronavirus samples were smuggled to Wuhan’s lab in July of last year by a couple. Typically, Canadian and U.S. authorities work hand in hand; in 2001 after the September 11 attacks the agency established a permanent presence in Ottawa, Canada for terrorism and cross-border related cases.
A husband and wife Chinese spy team were recently removed from a Level 4 Infectious Disease facility in Canada for sending pathogens to the Wuhan facility. The husband specialized in coronavirus research. #coronaviruschina #CoronaOutbreak https://t.co/f2MpCZgkHX
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Kyle Bass
The FBI’s report also specifically uses the words, “biosecurity risk” when describing China, which is typically used to refer to the intentional misuse of pathogens, such as for bioterrorism and biosafety, which covers accidental release according to the World Heath Organization.
Meanwhile, morons on the internet including journalists seem to be preaching that COVID-19 can’t be a biological weapon because we lack the capability to create a synthetic virus. A blatant and blunt lie that is easily debunked by official government statements, ironically the same year as the incident occurred at Denver airport. The major U.S. government report from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine warned that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body.
There is no evidence that these incidents are what caused the warning.
The Guardian reports:
In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, “enhances and expands” opportunities to create bioweapons. “As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinize where harms could come from,” said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible.
The Guardian references one of the first believed cases 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer of Stony Brook University in New York recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Also occurring in 2018, a team at the University of Alberta built a vaccine for their infectious horsepox virus. “The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century,” reports The Guardian. “Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized.”
Further evidence debunks the claims that viruses can’t be made in a lab. In 2017, scientists at the University of Alberta put together from scratch a relative of the smallpox virus, the horsepox virus, Scientific American reported. Although not deadly to humans, or horses for that matter, the fact remains that such a feat can be accomplished by scientists.
In 2014, another scientist – Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison – genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu virus H1N1 Swine Flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralizing antibodies, effectively making the human population defenseless against its reemergence, Independent UK reported.
That same year, scientists at the same University in Wisconsin-Madison headed by Kawaoka created a life-threatening virus that closely resembles the 1918 Spanish flu strain that killed an estimated 50 million people, which was condemned by their colleagues as “crazy.”
Alas, it’s important to note that there is no evidence the current coronavirus was created in a lab and the above information isn’t causation, but it’s of further importance to express that China has not provided much information on patient zero. As a result, we will never know definitively if COVID-19 or the coronavirus is man-made synthetic virus. There is, however, evidence that Chinese scientists were working on “using bats to research the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” as ZeroHedge reported showcasing a job post.
Scientists have repeatedly been stating the virus is not a biological weapon, either from the United States or China. “There’s no basis to suspect it’s a laboratory construct,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University told Yahoo News. “It has none of the expected signatures that would be present for deliberate construction.”
However, Ebright didn’t leave out the possibility that the virus’s spread started from poor biosecurity in China. “Therefore, it’s also a possibility that this virus entered the human population through accidental infection of a lab worker carrying out field collection, or an accident by a lab worker characterizing the sample in a laboratory,” Ebright told Yahoo News.
Biowarfare experts like Francis Boyle disagree with Ebright, calling COVID-19 a bioweapon, which is a big deal since Boyle wrote the anti-bioweapons act of 1989. Boyle isn’t the only one to raise the possibility, Washington Times reported that Wuhan is the site of two Chinese biological labs according to Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare. The report suggests the virus was either accidentally let out or deliberately, but at the time there was no evidence for either scenario.
When the Washington Times asked Shoham whether the new coronavirus may have leaked, Mr. Shoham said:
In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.
Although there remains the counter argument against the use of a deliberate biological weapon versus accidental release thereof, the possibility still makes sense that the virus was allowed to incubate inside bats infected with SARS and evolved to COVID-SARS2 then escaped in some kind of freak lab accident. This is exactly what South Chinese scientists suggested in a now-deleted report as Activist Post previously highlighted.
In the study done by the South Chinese scientists, they concluded that two separate lab accidents could be what caused the coronavirus outbreak but added that more solid proof was needed. Lancet medical journal recently published a study finding that many of the first cases of the novel coronavirus, including patient zero, had no connection to the wet market, leading many like Boyle to speculate with supporting evidence that the virus may have been a bio accident. The Lancet study corroborates the study published by South China University of Technology indirectly.
What’s more, the lab in Wuhan was officially working with different strains of coronavirus, as well as other deadly illnesses like Ebola, beginning in 2018. This lab is just 20 miles away from the Huanan wet food market where the first case of the coronavirus is believed to be transmitted, and where scientists are claiming it jumped from animals to humans through pangolins.
Interestingly enough, in 2004, China punished five top officials of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the outbreak of SARS. The investigation found that the release of the virus was due to the negligence of two CDC employees who were infected and was not deliberate, China Daily reported.
In fact, in the past SARS escaped out of a laboratory setting 3 out of 4 times; and following in 2003, there were several biological accidents where viral material leaked from a lab. Beyond that, going back all the way to 1977 there have been lab accidents which were “self-fulfilling prophecies” as the Bulletin – which is famous for the infamous Doomsday clock – reported.
In 2015, the National Library of Medicine published a paper warning that a “SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus pose threat for human emergence.”
Before the lab opened, scientists all over the world were voicing concerns about the potential dangers. An article was even published in the science journal Nature in 2017, detailing the plans for the lab and sharing expert opinions about how a dangerous bug could leak from the facility. In fact, the SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times.
If the coronavirus is an experiment escaped from the lab, we need to rethink allowing BSL-4 labs to continue operating worldwide. It would also explain how the coronavius evolved so fast to jump from animals to humans and why its so incredibly deadly in some cases, attacking various organs of the body including the heart, lungs and liver as Dr. Hakim Djaballah expressed to Korea Times. Although Dr. Djaballah didn’t state in the interview the virus was a bioweapon, he noted that COVID-19 – or what he called cryptic virus – was very unusual, spreading rapidly and more lethal compared to other viruses in our past.
Another report by the South China Morning Post even stated that scientists have found in preliminary small studies that COVID-19 might cause testicular malfunction according to blood samples. Those researchers have taken the initiative to conduct a larger study to confirm their potential findings.