Xi Who Smelt it, Dealt It: How America Caught A Chinese Communist Cover-Up Fever

Filed under: COVID RESET

Ben Hu, a scientist working at the Wuhan laboratory, was “patient zero” in the global Covid pandemic. Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag confirmed the story with US government officials last week after years of rumor and speculation. The Wall Street Journal has also confirmed the reporting.

“Three unknown Chinese scientists working inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus unit fell sick with Covid-like symptoms around November 2019,” Sharri Markson reports at The Australian. Hu, a pretege of “batlady” Shi Zhengli, was doing “risky gain-of-function research, that can make viruses more transmissible and more virulent to humans” when he was the first person to become ill.

Markson, who was first reporter on the story more than two years ago, writes that “Ben Hu and Shi Zhengli’s team had taken bat samples from 22 provinces in China, detecting 200 positive samples of SARS-like coronaviruses” as part of the project. Results of their study, including details on the novel viruses they had discovered, were scrubbed from the internet.

Starting in Hubei province, China was the first country to impose Covid restrictions. The communist regime in Beijing then kept restrictions on movement and public life in place longest of all industrialized nations. Xi Jinping only lifted Covid measures when the patience of the Chinese, ordinarily tolerant of authority, ran out, and riots began.

Lockdowns were always unpopular in the west and did not last very long. The “Covid theatre” of masking and social distancing grated on free peoples and lasted only marginally longer. Disease heuristics are powerful, however. Americans did not like what they were doing, but still did as they were told because humans fear plague more than centralized power structures. In the aftermath of the pandemic, and the vaccine issues that have emerged since 2021, Americans distrust “the [official] science” and its faces of authority more than ever.

People who are not free to discuss these grievances will seek other remedies. Silencing dissent and discussion in the Chinese mode — through social media bans on inconvenient, yet factual information, for example — turns out to be an ineffective and counterproductive public health measure in either a free or unfree society.

This censorious approach has degrading effects on democratic discourse in a republic and it is intrinsic to the hegemony of a communist despotism. An increasing number of westerners are inclined to see the “Great Reset” desired by the World Economic Forum as a transition from the one state to the other, a deliberate Chinafication of the United States and Europe, in order to tame capitalist societies for profit. It is hard to blame them.

Capitalism and communism colluded in the Covid enterprise. That much is clear. Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield tells Fox News that Anthony Fauci bears the blame for directing Americans’ attention away from a probable lab leak.

“Tony and I have been friends for a long time, but I'm very disappointed in how he's responded to this,” Redfield told John Roberts. “Largely, I think it's grounded in his advocacy for gain-of-function research,” which Redfield opposes. “I think, as you know, he's a strong advocate for gain-of-function research, and I'm a strong advocate for a moratorium on gain-of-function research.”

Early stories about the Wuhan wet market were a “ruse” to direct attention away from the Wuhan laboratory, Redfield thinks. Indeed, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market did not even sell bats, the supposed animal vector behind the pandemic.

Nevertheless, “a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause was linked” to the market. This fact is mentioned in the very first sentence of the very first research paper reporting the appearance of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan during December 2019.

While this explanation only accounted for two-thirds of those earliest cases, and it was always consistent with lab scientists shopping for dinner after work, it served many interests, so it became the monolithic explanation from the beginning.

Challenges to this preferred explanation met with cancellation, firing, harassment, and public ridicule — Maoist humiliations, but in the United States.

“The Wuhan coronavirus is believed to have emerged from illegally traded wildlife at a seafood market, with experts suggesting the virus was passed to humans from snakes or wolf cubs,” the Daily Mail reported on 24 January 2020. In this typical example, the reporters were focused on “disturbing videos [that] have emerged purporting to show people collapsing in the streets of” China.

Xi and the CCP wanted other nations to take Covid seriously. Despite their internet controls and social credit scores, these videos emerged to terrify the outside world, somehow, because that served their interests. A world of lockdowns would not hear western lectures about authoritarianism.

The wet market monomyth also served their interests, whereas transparency about the origins of the virus did not serve Xi or the CCP, or Fauci, or the Centers for Disease Control.

Journalists have disappeared and been put in prison for reporting on Covid. At the same time, CCP propaganda broadcast scenes of the pandemic taking place everywhere else but China.

“Chinese media and social media talk about the crisis and despair around the world except for China,” Chen Wei (not her real name) wrote in a diary smuggled out of the country. “But no one in China dares talk about the origin of the virus starting from Wuhan or early mistakes caused by the local government in Wuhan.”

“The only things allowed to be discussed about this pandemic is how the well the government has done and how thankful the Chinese people should be to the government.”

Combined with video shot inside Wuhan during the days that lockdowns began, Wei’s diary was used to construct a 2021 Al Jazeera documentary, Three Days that Stopped the World.

Wei’s partner Yang Jun (also not his real name) was in a crowded night bazaar when he started getting “strange looks from the crowd” because he wore a mask. “A store owner asks me to take it off. He says, ‘You are obviously an overworried outsider.' Everything is fine here. You should not believe in those online rumors.’”

Within three days, the entire mood of the city had changed. Live animal food markets were shut down as scientists told Chinese television viewers that the source of the novel virus was a badger, or a racoon dog, or a pangolin, or some other animal by way of contaminated meat.

While it made no sense to the shop owners at the time, and always made less sense as the source of a respiratory illness, this explanation has nevertheless enjoyed the advantage of western stereotypes about Asian culinary excess. Put simply, many Americans were prone to believe it, while a significant oppositional segment of America was ready to scold them for being racists.

Again, from the perspective of Xi and the CCP, this was a very convenient story. Markets were less important than the emergency. Economic and social life were less important than the emergency. Fauci resisted mask mandates for a time but as with the closure of wet markets, a demonstration of authority came to matter more than any science — because this was an emergency, after all.

In the sense that Americans obeyed the new rules and argued out the confusing new ettiquette of plague panic, mandates and lockdowns worked. These measures also empowered the wokescold segment of America like nothing else ever had before. They clearly miss this power today. Some of them are still trying to blame a red panda or an anteater for the whole affair.

Some questions are unlikely to ever have answers. Did the man who filed the first patent for a Covid vaccine in February 2020 really fall from the roof of the Wuhan Institute of Virology by accident? Or did he jump in despair? Or was he thrown? We will probably never know, and a lab leak will likely never be confirmed by science either. Three sick Chinese scientists is still only circumstantial evidence of negligence. We lack witness testimony. None is forthcoming.

Three years ago, I was open to the possibility that Covid leaked from a lab, though I would have placed the odds at 3:1 against it. Two years ago, I would have placed the odds at 2:1. A year ago, the odds seemed better than even that Covid-19 escaped from the lab. Now it is clear to me that the Wuhan Institute of Virology “was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” as one US investigator told the London Times.

Neither the lab, Xi, or the CCP had any incentive to disclose that American taxpayer money paid for the gain of function research that likely created the virus in the first place. They had every incentive to blame a wet market and expect that Americans would then turn on each other.

What began as a conspiracy theory is now getting close to an historical consensus. It was distressing to see the most fair-minded discussion of the Wuhan lab hypothesis framed as a lunatic fringe for so long, to the discredit of so many respected people.

This has been an ordeal. People lost their jobs for refusing a vaccine they probably did not need unless they were old, overweight, or immunocompromised. Many of the same people who decried Donald Trump as a clear and present danger to American freedom cheered for the most restrictive measures the longest. Had he been reelected, many of the same media figures who wanted the most oppressive measures against vaccine skeptics would right now be pointing to all the complications and shortcomings of Covid vaccinations to denounce ‘the failed Trump vaccine.’

To his credit, Trump questioned the motives of Anthony Fauci and pointed to the Wuhan lab. To his credit, Joe Biden has so far supported a full investigation and disclosure of Covid’s origins. To Trump’s discredit, it was “his” vaccine program. To Biden’s discredit, he questioned the ‘Trump vaccine’ during the presidential race calling for “honest answers” about safety and efficacy and now wants it injected into toddlers.

Both of these people are forever tainted by the Chinese fever. A rematch appeals to their partisans but that would not be the same thing as accountability or transparency. Politics once again conceals more than it reveals.