Wednesday’s Child: Sicilian Defense 7

The Chinese fortune cookie with a Russian message inside, which I strove to decipher in last week’s post, is beginning to crumble.  Last week Luc Montagnier, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the HIV virus, said in an interview that the killer contagion is undoubtedly the result of genetic manipulation by molecular biologists and in all likelihood a product of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A totalitarian regime, however, wraps its lies in falsehoods and ties them with a silk ribbon of prevarication.  Initially the Chinese announced, and the WHO dutifully repeated, that the virus could not spread; then, when it had spread, they accused the Americans of bringing it into China; then they launched the canard of it having come from horseshoe bats and spread through the Wuhan “wet market”; now, once they’ve been forced to admit that it’s a natural coronavirus-based, laboratory-engineered pathogen, they will have to deny that it was created as a bioweapon; and, even if they admit that it’s a bioweapon, they will need to lie again, swearing on Mao’s Little Red Book that its exit from the laboratory was an accident, rather that the deliberate use of a bioweapon; but even if they admit it was the latter, they will never admit that the purposeful release, rather than accidental escape, of the virus was a joint Sino-Russian action by the security services in a bid for power maximization.  Because, as I wrote last week, by then the ruling Communist Party of China will be no more, and all evidence of past crimes against humanity will be safe in its tomb.

Foundations for the accident theory are already being laid. Thus the same Luc Montagnier, who, apart from his position at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is a tenured professor of virology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has told an Italian interviewer that “la Cina è un grande paese e spero che sia in grado di riconoscere un errore” (“China is a great country, and I hope it will see its way to acknowledging a mistake”).  “Errare humanum est,” the interviewer quotes the professor as saying, “credo però che in questo caso è il governo di Pechino che ha nascosto le cose” (“though I believe in this case the Beijing government has been hiding things”).  A laboratory mishap, in other words, is being covered up by Communist Party bonzos, but surely the truth will out in the end.

The main pivot of the accident theory, however, are the 2018 visits to the Wuhan laboratory, first reported in the Washington Post, by two American diplomats, Jamison Fouss, consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, U.S. Embassy’s “counselor of environment, science, technology, and health” in Beijing. The pair are said to have voiced concern over a lack of safety protocols and the biosafety of the laboratory's research, and dispatched two “sensitive but unclassified” cables to Washington, asking for assistance to help the Chinese upgrade the security.  In other words, they asked Uncle Sam for money, which is not entirely surprising for a laboratory that became operational only six years ago and had been set up by the French, “as part of a 2004 cooperative agreement on the prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases,” with initial assistance from the Americans.  The laboratory was only too happy to upload the pair’s assessment of the situation as a news release to its website, where it stayed for almost two years until deleted two weeks ago. And Washington did nothing, which is likewise unsurprising in view of the fact that the U.S. had been pulling back from supporting various bioresearch laboratories around the world, notably the Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center at Alekseyevka, near Tbilisi in Georgia, which the Americans stopped supporting in 2017.

What is surprising is the spin.  How on earth could that pair of clowns, Jamie and Ricky, judge the Wuhan laboratory “unsafe”?  What expertise did the American guests possess that qualified them to draw such conclusions, unless these were dictated to them by their hosts over a nice plate of bat innards washed down with civet cat milk?  Jamie, before 2018, worked with refugees in the Philippines and spent a few years as “a country desk officer at Peace Corps headquarters.”  Ricky seems to have whittled his life away on Twitter, where one day he exclaimed that “Secretary John Kerry knows what true leadership means – calls for action on oceans.”  Another day, another twit: “To protect our ocean, I will not eat shark fin soup.”  And yet another: “Beijing smog at dangerous levels, hope all in Beijing have clean air soon!”  No such luck, Ricky.

So it’s 2018 and the two nincompoops are visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which three years earlier became China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety, known as BSL-4.  Neither speaks Chinese, and they find themselves in a country whose 2018 exports total two trillion four hundred ninety-four billion two hundred thirty million dollars, of which $650,000,000,000 is of high technology, including pharmaceutical products and scientific instruments.  Their ignorance of molecular biology is only second to their ignorance of research laboratory procedure, but they have a looksee anyway and conclude that the place is unsafe – so that two years later the Washington Post, the WHO, the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin, and now that Fidel’s gone, maybe Raúl Castro for good measure, can all whine in concert: “It was an aaaaaaccident!”

It was only in the 1990’s, after the defection to Britain of Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, that U.S. intelligence first learned of the existence of bioweapons research in laboratories like Russia’s Biopreparat, which had been operational for decades under the military classification of “Special Importance,” a higher grade than “Top Secret.”  Did Jamie and Ricky really think they knew what they were cabling Washington about?