President Donald Trump isn’t the only one spouting covid-19 conspiracy theories. There are many out there. Here are 15 factual and scientific reference points that may help you build your own theory.
Back in January 2019, then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified before Congress and admitted that a large-scale outbreak “could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” The Conversation reported.
So, why, with national-security intelligence agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency having this information, did the U.S. fail in its response to covid-19? Is it any coincidence that Coats, who often clashed with Trump over 2016 Russian election interference, is now out as national intelligence director. Trump replaced him with GOP congressman and fierce loyalist John Ratcliffe, The Chicago Tribune reported.
Following 9/11, the U.S. government began funding a massive new biodefense research effort. The government poured up to $10 billion into projects related to biological weapons, Mother Jones reported.
Now, nearly 20 years later, some are wondering if covid-19 is a biological weapon that started in China and spread around the world. The mission? To crush China economically. Sabotage?
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to believe this is possible. He tweeted sympathy to the people of China for the “#Corona lab-made virus.” According to Ahmadinejad, the virus was created deliberately as a biological weapon by China’s enemies to halt the country’s progress.
Bioweapons have been released before — even if by accident. Take Russia’s deadly lab accident that revealed a secret Russian bioweapon.
In April 1979, the people of the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) were suffering from a mysterious plague. “At least 66 people and an unknown number of animals were struck with a vague illness and then swiftly died,” Ars Technica reported.
Soviet officials weren’t quick to supply the real explanation. Instead, they said the illnesses were due to tainted meat sold on the black market. Years later, a 1992 investigation by a Harvard researcher revealed the real reason for the outbreak: anthrax spores had been accidentally released from a clandestine bioweapons plant in Sverdlovsk, known as Compound 19.
It’s no secret that Russia’s Vladimir Putin got his start as a spy for the infamous KGB. It was his job to steal secrets from other countries. He served 17 years as a mid-level agent in the KGB’s foreign intelligence wing, rising only to the rank of lieutenant colonel, The Washington Post reported.
Though he didn’t rise to the top of the agency, Putin was described as “prompt, disciplined and conscientious,” Bloomberg reported.
Putin joined the KGB in 1975 after graduating from the law faculty of Leningrad State University. After leaving the KGB, he headed the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the KGB, in 1998-to-1999.
Has Putin used his spy skills to possibly help unleash covid-19?
Prior to the covid-19 outbreak in China, the U.S. cut its U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staff inside China. Did the U.S. know the virus was coming, or did it help it come? The timing is more than intriguing.
Trump cut staff by more than two-thirds at the CDC operating inside China, Reuters reported.
Most of the reductions were made at the Beijing office of the CDC and occurred over the course of two years. The CDC has worked in China for 30 years.
The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the global relief program which helped China monitor and respond to outbreaks, also closed their Beijing offices under Trump.
Not only would having people there in China been a help to China, but it would have also given the U.S. a firsthand glimpse of what to expect from the outbreak. This was not the case as Trump gutted the safety nets.
Forever in power. This seems to be what Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping want. In February 2018, China’s communist party moved to abolish term limits on the presidency, The New York Times reported.
“As soon as China announced it would remove term limits on the presidency, its censors and propaganda machine kicked into gear. The surprise move would clear the way for Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely. It’s a break from China’s decades-old rules to prevent power from being too centralized around one person,” The Times reported.
Meanwhile, over in Russia a series of constitutional amendments solidified Putin’s hold on power. Right now, he will stay in power until 2036.
“The referendum could also affect how Washington deals with Moscow. One amendment gives Russian leaders the option to ignore decisions and rulings from international bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights, according to Maria Snegovaya, a fellow with the Center for European Analysis. That will make it harder for the United States and allies to use international bodies to pressure the Russian government to adhere to international law,” Defense One reported.
These moves by China and Russia mean the leaders can basically do what they want including withholding information about important information such as the pandemic.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trump played down its significance and impact. Even today, when asked about the number of American deaths from the virus he remarked “It is what it is.” The question begs, why is the president of the U.S. so caviler about covid-19? Could he know something we don’t know? After all, he is consistently denying experts’ claims of dire consequences.
Back in late January, Trump declared on CNBC, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” But it wasn’t contained in China. It had already spread to other countries.
Even on Feb. 27 as the number of U.S. cases was going up daily, Trump downplayed the pandemic by saying things like, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows,” The New York Times reported.
Along the way Trump promoted conspiracy theories and disregarded the scientists’ warning of the need to wear masks, The Washington Post reported.
Trump went on several rants about the virus coming from China. Not long after that, the State Department released an internal cable from 2018 detailing the concerns of U.S. Embassy officials in China about a lack of adequately trained personnel at a virology lab in Wuhan, the city that later became the epicenter of the covid-19 outbreak, The Washington Post reported.
And what about the bats? According to at least one World Health Organization (WHO) scientist, covid came from bats. So is it a coincidence that Wuhan, the global epicenter, is also the world epicenter of covid-19-bat research?
“The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has been collecting large numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2003, including collecting more in 2016,” Independent Science News reported.
Trump has been credibly accused of working with a foreign government — Russia — while showing deference to President Xi and Putin.
Trump’s relationship with Putin has come under scrutiny a number of times. Some observers say that Trump not only shows deference to Putin but also China’s Xi.
During former FBI director Robert Mueller’s Capitol Hill appearance on his two-year Russia probe, he condemned Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks, which released Democratic emails stolen by Russia, AP News reported. Mueller said interference by Russians and others was not a thing of the past. “They are doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”
During the start of the pandemic, Trump continually praised China. Although Trump claimed WHO was overly deferential to China, he was praising the Chinese government himself. He touted China’s government for its transparency and hard work to defeat the coronavirus that causes the illness, Politico reported.
Also on Twitter Trump posted, “One of the many great things about our just signed giant Trade Deal with China is that it will bring both the USA & China closer together in so many other ways. Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!”
A Jan. 24 Trump tweet read, “China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
And the list of praises went on.
Rumors swirled when the Chinese doctor who blew the whistle on a strange new virus contracted covid-19 and then died. People in the U.S. were wondering if the Chinese government found a way to permanently silence Dr. Li Wenliang.
There had been attempts to silence him before.
On Dec. 30, 2019, Dr. Li posted a warning in a chat room about a new virus that said it resembled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an earlier coronavirus that hit China nearly two decades ago, the New York Times reported. He was reprimanded by the government.
In early January, Li was called in by medical officials and the police and forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor.
The next news about the doctor was that Dr. Li “had the misfortune to be infected during the fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, and all-out efforts to save him failed,” the Wuhan City Central Hospital said on Weibo, the Chinese social media service. “We express our deep regret and condolences.”
Li had contracted the virus while treating a patient in January and died on Feb. 7.
Li was 34 and expecting a second child. To the people, he was a whistleblower. “We will not forget the doctor who spoke up about an illness that was called rumor,” one person posted in reply to the hospital’s announcement. “What else can we do? The only thing is not to forget.”
Sure, mistakes by the U.S. officials look so bad, but what if the bad policy could have bad intent to hurt America? The latter scenario would suggest Trump is compromised by at least one foreign power.
The U.S. Army has been accused of being involved in the outbreak in China. According to Chinese officials, the U.S. Army is responsible for the coronavirus even though there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from U.S. service members visiting Wuhan.
The accusation was made by a Chinese official who has a history of attacking the U.S. online. The theory is that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to China when 300 U.S. military members arrived in the Wuhan region for the Military World Games in mid-October and infected the local population, The Scientist reported. According to the U.S., none of the servicemembers who made the trip have tested positive for the virus.
Some believe covid-19 is a bioweapon.
“Gram-for-gram, biological weapons are the deadliest weapons ever produced. Germs don’t respect borders, so biological threats—manmade and naturally occurring—can quickly have global impacts. Although only a few countries are suspected of having biological weapons, rapidly producing and weaponizing biological agents is surprisingly easy,” according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
In short, biological weapons use microorganisms or natural toxins to produce disease in humans, animals, or plants.
There are 16 countries plus Taiwan that have had or are suspected of having biological weapons programs: the U.S., Canada, China, Cuba, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Libya, North Korea, Russia, South Africa, Syria, the U.K., the NTI reported.
In 2012 Russian leader Vladimir Putin shocked U.S. military experts with a pledge to develop novel kinds of weapons to counter the West’s technological edge. According to Putin, armies of the future would need weapons “based on new physical principles” including “genetic” and “psychophysical” science, The Washington Post reported.
“Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons,” Putin said in an essay published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record, “but will be more ‘acceptable’ in terms of political and military ideology.”
These statements raised questions and concerns, but Russian officials at the time insisted that the research in government-run labs is purely defensive and perfectly legal. Does the research involve covid-19?
Russia claims that the U.S. is itself pursuing offensive biological weapons. In fact, reports posted on Russian state-sponsored news sites and amplified over social media have accused U.S. scientists of being behind recent outbreaks of the Zika virus as well as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa that began in 2014, The Washington Post reported.
If Russia is correct, did the U.S. play a part in creating covid-19?
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
Russia has recently weaponized military labs to poison critics
The poisoning of a Russian ex-spy has shone a light on Moscow’s secret military labs used to develop novel kinds of weapons.
“Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons,” Putin said in an essay published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record, “but will be more ‘acceptable’ in terms of political and military ideology.”While Russian officials insist that the research in government-run labs is purely defensive and perfectly legal, the labs came under increased scrutiny in the wake of allegations of Moscow’s involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain. Both were poisoned with Novichok, a lethal nerve agent uniquely developed by Russian military scientists years ago, The Washington Post reported.
The poisoning of a Russian ex-spy has shone a light on Moscow’s secret military labs used to develop novel kinds of weapons. What kind of weapons, no one knows for sure.
“Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons,” Putin said in an essay published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record, “but will be more ‘acceptable’ in terms of political and military ideology.”
While Russian officials insist that the research in government-run labs is purely defensive and perfectly legal, the labs came under increased scrutiny in the wake of allegations of Moscow’s involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain. Both were poisoned with Novichok, a lethal nerve agent uniquely developed by Russian military scientists years ago, The Washington Post reported.
If Trump loses the 2020 election, what will happen next? This is the question many have. He escaped impeachment but will he escape criminal prosecution?
The U.S. Supreme Court recently revoked Trump’s immunity, deciding that a president is not immune from criminal investigation.
The Supreme Court’s opinion in “Trump v. Vance held that a sitting president is not immune from a criminal investigation by a state grand jury. All nine justices agreed with the basic proposition that a sitting president can be criminally investigated and subpoenaed while still in office, the Washington Post reported.
So if Trump is found to have been received foreign campaign assistance — or other possible illegal activity– he could go to jail.
