COVID REALLY WAS ANOTHER CHERNOBYL
Updated: Aug 12
After years pursuing answers to what happened during the pandemic and how it came about, US senator Rand Paul and his team have disclosed plenty of troubling documents, mostly to do with the dealings of Dr Anthony Fauci and his shambolic performance. Most amazingly, the first Trump administration is largely to blame for not booting Fauci from his role despite knowing how badly he was performing, and yet many of those most vigorously explaining away the findings and defending Fauci are Democrats and fierce opponents to Donald Trump. That makes this story almost irresistible. Add to it what we already knew about the world’s media dropping the ball, failing to investigate and just ask the most glaring questions while also being unwilling or unable to defend free expression and the whole thing becomes what should be one of the biggest stories of our time. Doesn't it look far more like Chernobyl-style incompetence, mendacity, corruption, and cover-up than the partisan attack or the nah-we're-moving-on nothingburger that too much of pundit class is presenting it as?
DODGY PEOPLE, DODGY RESEARCH, AND DODGY ACTIONS
Some of what we got from Paul were documents showing US border protection intercepted undeclared biological materials connected to a network of American and Chinese coronavirus researchers. Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Zhengli Shi, Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, was coordinating with University of Minnesota's Fang Li, Director of Emerging Viruses, to move live pig coronavirus (PEDV) and SARS. In November of 2018, border protection found three undeclared vials concealed in paper towel and wax paper on a courier. The man was a professor of genetics from the biochemistry department at Zhengzhou University with a degree from Wuhan University and he named China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences as the source of the materials. According to a Department of Homeland Security field report, border protection was so alarmed at the contents of the vials (even still a full year from the pandemic outbreak) that all of it was immediately handed off to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. A DHS/FBI laboratory then determined the vials held antibody genetic material, precursor mRNA, and coronavirus spike-protein material.
For added context, the same Chinese military research network (working on gain-of-function research with bat coronavirus in Wuhan) attempted to smuggle another ten vials out of Canada’s highest-security bio lab in Winnipeg around this same time. Xiangguo Qiu, the Winnipeg scientist found by Canada’s intelligence community to be covertly working for Beijing who organized shipments of Nipah and Ebola viruses to China, also had connections to Zhengli Shi, named above.
If that wasn't enough, still prior to the pandemic, three others were charged with similar activities. One of these folks was a Chinese national and doctoral student who was busted, found with and lying about 21 vials of stolen biological materials he hid in a sock in his luggage. Another was a People’s Liberation Army Lieutenant and member of the Chinese Communist Party who falsely identified herself while lying about her ongoing military service with a top military academy, the National University of Defense Technology. While studying at Boston University’s Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering from 2017 to 2019 she was found to have completed numerous assignments for PLA officers, including conducting research, assessing US military websites, and gathering information about individuals in the US with expertise in robotics and computer science. The other person was Dr Charles Lieber, a nanoscience pioneer and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. He was found to have received more than $15 million in grants from America's National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense while failing to disclose that he was employed by the Chinese government as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (paid $50,000 USD per month) and was given $1.5 million to spend nine months per year there establishing a research lab. Most interestingly, Dr Lieber was found guilty and convicted on six criminal charges related to his failure to disclose, making false statements, concealing his Chinese bank account from investigators, and being in receipt of millions of dollars from China. But Lieber didn't like that. Neither did China. Though he was looking at 26 years in prison and $1.2 million in fines, instead Dr Lieber up and moved to China in December of 2021, taking a position in Shenzhen, China's Silicon Valley, as founding director of the state-funded Institute for Brain Research Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies (i-BRAIN). How cute.
But back to the smuggling. The smuggling didn't stop. It actually got even more bold. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and as Lieber was off to China, the same professor-courier found with coronavirus spike-protein in 2018 was stopped once again at a US airport, his name having pinged the system for his prior smuggling attempt. When taken aside he was asked if he’d had a run-in with border patrol previously. He told them he had not. He was then asked if he was carrying any biological materials on him. He declared that he was not. When they told him he could be committing an illegal act by lying to border officers he did not change his story. Then when his bags were inspected border protection found 132 undeclared vials of biological materials as well as a laptop that was not his own. When questioned, he offered all kinds of conflicting information regarding his current and past work, connections to different people and institutions including coronavirus researchers and People’s Liberation Army institutes.
I find all of this particularly interesting not only because the dodgy dealings with China look to have redoubled in the middle of the pandemic but because every bit of it should have been impossible prior to Wuhan researchers, working with their US counterparts, gifting the world a new globally circulating flu-like virus that would kill untold millions. Back in 2014, the Obama administration’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy coordinated with key groups within the US to pause funding for selected gain-of-function research and shut down key labs. Targeted were projects deemed too dangerous, specifically those projects reasonably anticipated to confer enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility via the respiratory route in mammals to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses. That we know of, this action was not motivated by prior incidents but it was most certainly accelerated when in 2014 there were several significant lab accidents at federal facilities involving avian flu and anthrax as well as the discovery of “forgotten” vials of smallpox. This research pause ended in 2017 after the imposition of new and stricter guidelines requiring, among other things, better risk/benefit analysis and evaluation of scientific merit as well as a multi-level review for any research with the potential to create “enhanced” pandemic pathogens. So there had just been effectively a moratorium on and strengthening of rules around work with coronaviruses and other dangerous pathogens in the US immediately prior to authorities catching these key labs smuggling materials related to coronavirus research in and out of the country and their mule repeatedly being caught lying about who he was, who he worked with, and what he was up to.
How much more reckless and incompetent, then, does this combined picture make top researchers and institutions as well as key authorities appear? Still, somehow, even now the press seems mostly uninterested in this story. To me, it looks like the movie version of the pandemic would pretty closely approximate the HBO series Chernobyl. And it looks only more so as we learn more.
LEADERSHIP TROUBLES
I would normally be turned off by a story about Dr Anthony Fauci, except that his actions during the pandemic as well as his dealings with the public and press so closely matches his analog here in British Columbia. That frames this whole thing as far less idiosyncratic and far more cultural and systemic.
Sure, many were happy to grant that there was a certain amount of universal ignorance at the start of the pandemic (which turns out to have never really been the case [see above]). Too, most seemed happy to accept that there could very well be reasons for authorities to deliver noble lies to the public, said to help prevent panic, reduce harms, combat the shortage of essential equipment, or to buy time, which to me is totally indefensible, both disregarding history and psychology (elite panic is real and really gets people killed) while also being unethical.
Along with that, here in British Columbia, just as in the US, the public, press, and major institutions were all inordinately keen to celebrate our top public health and medical “experts” [sic] for doing their astonishingly well-compensated jobs — and, it became clear, even more eager to do so after they demonstrated they were continually failing to do their job, which would be plenty bad, and also endlessly going on record proving they lacked basic knowledge of their own area of expertise while contradicting themselves with almost every new public appearance. As these newly released emails and journal entries of Dr Fauci's now show beyond question, while failing to make sense even to laypersons, the most trusted and critical voices were too often just lying through their teeth and making stuff up. I wonder how the pandemic response would look if we had the same insights into our provincial authorities?
