Wuhan is the capital city of China’s Hubei Province. It’s not only the largest city in Hubei, with over 19 million inhabitants, it’s the most populated in all of Central China.
Figures on the number of pneumonia cases Wuhan gets every year are hard to come by. But around 4,700 people died of pneumonia in New York State in 2018, which has about the same population.
So you’d think a couple dozen of Wuhan’s 19 million residents catching pneumonia in the middle of the peak season for respiratory illnesses couldn’t possibly be a big deal. Especially if none of them even died.
Yet, for some reason at the beginning of 2020, the Chinese Communist Party’s official media outlet decided to make a very big deal, indeed, about just that.
On January 1, the People’s Daily reported that 27 people had contracted pneumonia in Wuhan. Though none of the details it revealed suggested anything at all remarkable, for some reason the Chinese Communist house organ went out of its way to leave the impression that these 27 pneumonia cases might portend the outbreak of some terrible new disease.
But what’s really strange is their target audience. The report wasn’t aimed at the people of China. The CCP was trying to alarm Westerners. The article appeared on their official media outlet’s English language website, not the one in Chinese, under the headline:
27 Quarantined in Wuhan Due to Viral Pneumonia.
Another oddity is that, sometime after March 1, the url was redirected to an entirely unrelated article about a UK court halting some construction at Heathrow Airport. Thankfully, someone archived the original link. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to track it down.
The People’s Daily reported that the “main symptom” experienced by the 27 patients “is fever, though a few of them also have breathing difficulties.” They also said that 7 were in critical condition. But since pneumonia is a very serious ailment, there’s nothing very remarkable about that either
It’s not clear the extent to which isolating pneumonia patients may be common in China. So it’s tough to know whether there was anything unusual about the People’s Daily reporting that these 27 cases were quarantined.
But their report that “[s]o far, no person-to-person transmission has been found as the investigation continues” is very odd.
The patients are described as being “infected with viral pneumonia.” Viral pneumonia is frequently caused by the seasonal flu. So why would it be particularly noteworthy if there had been person-to-person transmission? Why did the “media release from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission,” from which the information in the report allegedly came, even mention the issue?
For that matter, why did the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission even send out a press release about a small number of perfectly unremarkable cases of viral pneumonia at the height of flu season, in a city that must see tens of thousands every year?
And why did Wuhan authorities say – and the People’s Daily make it a point to repeat – that “the investigation continues”? Why were 27 cases of viral pneumonia at the height of flu season in a city with over 19 million inhabitants being investigated at all?
But it’s even more puzzling why the Chinese Communist Party wanted English language speakers to know this:
White-clad medical workers were busy spraying sanitizer in the market with their faces masked, as shown in some videos uploaded on Tuesday morning. The operation of the market, however, has not been interrupted.
Why on earth do they mention that videos of this extraordinary scene straight out of some Hollywood movie about a killer virus can be found on the internet?
And what about that last line saying that, even though people in protective gear had sprayed the place with disinfectant, they hadn’t bothered shutting it down? That’s exactly how a movie would signal to its audience that they hadn’t seen the last of the killer virus born in that market.
The stage setting is straight out of the movie Jaws, where the greedy mayor sends a couple of guys out on a boat but refuses to close the beaches down.
It’s tough not to conclude that the Chinese Communist house organ was trying to make Westerners alarmed about these 27 cases of viral pneumonia, none of whom had even died.
They even included the most frightening visual representation of a scientific concept I think I’ve ever encountered.
2⃣ For some reason, these 27 cases were quarantined & that’s reported at *ENGLISH* CCP site too. They even provided a helpfully disconcerting graphic. However, link in previous tweet is to archived version since at some point it was redirected to article on Heathrow airport. pic.twitter.com/sBnWVg7RC4
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) September 17, 2020
The People’s Daily also reported that:
Without responding directly to online rumors that these cases may be related to severe acute respiratory syndrome, widely known as SARS, the release said viral pneumonia is “preventable” and “controllable”.
This quote is kind of funny since what alerted me to the existence of the article in which it appeared is that the earliest online rumors about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus in Wuhan got the idea from… you guessed it… a report in the People’s Daily.
However, they either ran a second story and did a better job of memory-holing it or made some changes to this one at some point. Many of the posts citing the People’s Daily contain a quote that doesn’t appear in their article from the same day I found archived.
We cannot confirm it is what’s being spread online, that it is the Sars virus.
It would be impossible to come up with a sentence better suited to create the very rumor it’s supposed to be smothering.
In the next week, more and more media reports of a possible SARS-like outbreak in Wuhan began appearing.
But instead of being based on the People’s Daily article, they all cited another Chinese government source; a series of statements posted on the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s (WMHC) website. But I was only able to find a link in one article, which is now dead.
The BBC ran what seems to be the very first story citing the WMHC’s website on January 3, headlined:
China Pneumonia Outbreak: Mystery Virus Probed in Wuhan
The reason the cause of the pneumonia was now labeled a “mystery virus” is that Chinese officials were claiming they’d “already ruled out a number of infection sources – including influenza, avian influenza, and common respiratory diseases – but did not mention Sars.”
The COVID-19 virus is a different strain of coronavirus than the SARS virus that, despite all the hysteria the comparison is clearly meant to incite, only infected around 8000 people worldwide and killed less than 800. And we’ve been assured that PCR testing for viruses uniquely identifies individual strains. So, it’s odd that Chinese authorities didn’t simply test for SARS and rule it out as well.
Or maybe it’s not so odd at all, given that they seemed to be doing everything possible to not only invite comparisons to the 2003 SARS outbreak but also make the comparison seem nightmarish when, in fact, it’s anything but.
Most of the other outlets who reported what was on the WMHC’s website also mentioned the 2003 SARS outbreak and, like the BBC, that there “has been speculation on social media about a possible connection to the highly contagious disease.” That would be the highly contagious disease that only infected 0.0001% of the world’s population, give or take 1/100,000 of a percent.
But don’t judge too harshly. The 2003 SARS outbreak had only killed 0.0000102%, give or take 1/100,000,000 of a percent. So they could hardly call it a “deadly” disease. The fact is that SARS didn’t give much to work with in terms of creating nightmarish comparisons, and they had to make due.
Of course, like all the others, the BBC either didn’t know or didn’t feel like saying that whatever speculation there was about a resurgence of the spectacularly lame SARS outbreak of 2003 seems to have been fueled by the Chinese Communist Party itself.
At this point, I don’t even need to say that Chinese officials would later announce that the “mystery virus” the CCP made every effort to create alarm about in early January was a novel strain of coronavirus and the disease it allegedly causes would get the name COVID-19
Last night a virologist who worked for the World Health Organisation in Hong Kong named Li-Meng Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson‘s show claiming that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that China’s government intentionally released on the world.
But, if what Dr. Yan is saying is true, the enthusiasm Chinese authorities showed for hyping the virus is tough to explain.
You’d think that they’d want to keep their bioweapon a secret, so it does as much damage as possible before it’s detected.
Why would the CCP want to identify the bioweapon they’d unleashed and its Chinese origins months before it even struck its targets? For that matter, why would they release it in China first and let it make its way to the West, instead of starting it off in one of the countries they were targeting?
In fact, the efforts Chinese authorities immediately made to publicize COVID-19 before it had even caused any real harm are tough to explain, even if it isn’t a bioweapon. And, surprisingly, though she presents herself as the sworn enemy of China’s government, Dr. Yan is actually doing more to promote the narrative China has been pushing on the world than she’s doing to refute it.
And that might explain why Dr. Yan seems to not only show no real concern about her own safety… She doesn’t appear to be at all worried that, by exposing an act of biological warfare she claims the Chinese government committed against the entire rest of the world, she’s endangered the life of anyone she cares about back in Hong Kong.
Your mileage may vary here, but I personally didn’t detect any sense from her interview with Carlson that this was a person who felt she was in any danger at all, let alone one living in hiding 24/7 knowing that at any minute she might be assassinated, or worse, taken alive by the CCP. If I hadn’t known she was supposed to be on the run because the CCP wanted to kill her and might very well be taking their wrath out on her family or friends, nothing about what she said or how she said it would have clued me in.
But regardless, the content of her remarks alone suggests a different story about what she’s up to than the one she’s telling.
Carlson started out by asking Dr. Yan to give “a non-scientific audience a summary of why you believe this virus came from a lab in Wuhan.”
Instead of doing so, however, Dr. Yan started out the interview by reinforcing the idea of how dangerous COVID-19 is:
Okay, briefly from my first report, I can present assorted scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, Covid-19-Covid-2 virus is actually not from nature. It is a man-made virus created in the lab based on the China military discover and own the very unique bat coronavirus which cannot affect people but after the modification becomes a very harmful virus like now.
But the problem here is that, even if you buy all the official stats, COVID-19 just isn’t very harmful at all. And it’s not just a problem for Dr. Yan’s first response to Carlson. It’s another reason on top of the fact that China tried their damnedest to make us anticipate their bioweapon that shows COVID-19 can’t be any such thing.
As a biological weapon, COVID-19 is basically like those “bombs” that couldn’t possibly explode the so-called “MAGA bomber” sent out to leading leftists in the run-up to the 2016 election, not the fully-functioning bullets Bernie Bro, James Hodgkinson fired into Steve Scalise when he was trying to massacre him and a couple dozen other GOP congressman plus assorted family and friends.
As I pointed out last week, COVID-19 isn’t merely less deadly than the seasonal flu to the young and healthy. Even if you buy the official stats, the only reason it turned out to be more dangerous for the elderly and frail is that we took the focus off of them with our lunatic lockdown policies:
The governors of New York, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all forced patients diagnosed with COVID-19 into nursing homes. If you remove just those four states from the data along with Illinois, Massachusetts, and Connecticut – who also reported extraordinarily high nursing home fatalities – COVID-19 never even reached the CDC’s threshold for an epidemic!
If we add nursing home deaths from CT to the graph it would reduce all other states to below the “epidemic threshold” showing that this is a government problem not a plague. pic.twitter.com/OiI6bJJBiU
— Tommy Salami (@tmoran711) July 6, 2020
Data released by the Texas Department of Health in July shows that COVID-19 is less lethal in their state, regardless of age, than the flu was just two seasons back!
Interesting comparative data on seasonal influenza in Texas 2018 & 2019 vs. 2020 Covid-19 pic.twitter.com/oxxr2GjEIn
— Andrew Bostom (@andrewbostom) July 14, 2020
The research paper Dr. Yan wrote stating her evidence that COVID-19 is a bioweapon lists some features of the virus’s genome which she claims are signs it was man-made. Other biologists have claimed her arguments are weak. And like most everyone else, I’m not in a position to say who’s right here.
Moreover, the dawn of COVID-1984 and all the blatant lies we’ve been fed that made it possible has left me very disinclined to trust all but a select few academic researchers. So I’m not moved all that much by the chorus of college professors who claim Dr. Yan is talking nonsense. Indeed, in at least one such case, her attacker’s identity, if anything, actually increases her credibility for me.
However, when Dr. Yan finally did respond to Carlson’s request that she explain her reasons in laymen’s terms, she gave a comically over the top frightening description which had nothing to do with what’s in her research paper and, once again, took the opportunity to reinforce the false idea that COVID-19 is super deadly:
This is very clearly that this virus is like Frankenstein. So he create his own things, like basically a cow has deer’s head, rabits ears, and monkey’s hands, so they can never get it from nature. It harmed everyone in the world, lead to the historic pandemic, involved everyone.
Dr. Yan’s paper doesn’t say that the COVID-19 is some kind of pathogenic chimera constructed out of mismatched parts from different viruses. It simply points out features that she claims don’t naturally occur.
It’s like the difference between a human being having a tattoo and having parts from other animals grafted on to his body. One is merely a sign that another human being has altered the guy. The other is that plus an indication he’s been altered by grafting on parts from other species.
Dr. Yan’s paper only claims that something analogous to the former happened. As such, her use of the latter as an analogy misrepresents what she’s saying in a deliberately grotesque way that can only be meant to invite horror.
The CCP’s own efforts to invite horror about a virus we now know to be no worse than the seasonal flu by no means stopped with the early ones reported above.
China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign
Senger extensively documents that the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a shockingly wide-ranging and coordinated propaganda campaign to convince western countries to lockdown in response to the panic they started about a virus that’s no worse than the flu.
By promoting fraudulent data, aggressively deploying disinformation, and flexing its institutional clout, Beijing transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” crippling rival economies, expanding its influence, and sowing authoritarian values.https://t.co/VdC2DkDckG
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) September 16, 2020
The CDC co-opted our scientists and academics to help push America into suicidal lockdown policies without a shred of scientific justification and directly pushed their toxic quack medicine on us themselves.
8/5 Though CCP's influence operations in media, politics, and academia were surreptitious, its stance in support of global adoption of COVID lockdowns was explicit. Here is China's foreign spokesperson promoting strict social distancing among children:https://t.co/4I0JYfZ8Ej
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) June 17, 2020
According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Chinese government directly tried to pressure local U.S. politicians into implementing lockdowns.
10/5 "in fact, we have heard from federal, state, and even local officials that Chinese diplomats are aggressively urging support for China’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Yes, this is happening at both the federal and state levels."https://t.co/B8Z8a6ISZs
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) July 8, 2020
The CCP tried to portray Sweden as weak for not making the disastrous mistake every other western country made by heeding China’s aggressive campaign for deadly policies that have never before been so much as even been suggested let alone implemented in all of history.
15/5 “Sweden—partly due to its own COVID-19 response—has been a prime target of a Chinese campaign portraying Western democracies as weak against the threat. Sweden is one of few countries that ordered no lockdown and put its faith in herd immunity.”https://t.co/4PbDS0QGKx
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) July 24, 2020
They mounted a social media campaign using fake accounts to attack South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for not adopting the suicidal policies they were pushing on the world and to heap praise on western politicians who foolishly did.
20/ By contrast, the accounts heap praise on governors who tighten lockdowns, like Dan Andrews, gov of Victoria, AUS.
Andrews' long-time staffer attended a high-level CCP academy. An MP leading Andrews' Belt & Road negotiations with Beijing lauded China's handling of COVID. pic.twitter.com/nVd8O7XiYj
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) August 10, 2020
The Chinese even sent hundreds of doctors to Italy who then pushed the Italians into locking down.
Reminder that the Chinese government sent doctors to Italy who then helped talk Italy into a lockdown. https://t.co/zidAmJWwHs pic.twitter.com/ZvGzrm30ea
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) September 17, 2020
One of the many unbelievably salient facts the press has kept from us is that Italy’s hospital system was completely overrun by the flu just two years back.
And, as I pointed out last week, one thing nobody seems to have noticed is that our lunatic anti-science response to COVID-19 together with the relentless state of national panic that made us vulnerable to those who pushed it was bound to have the most horrific consequences.
Virtually no one has considered that depriving the frail and elderly of all human companionship and leaving them with just the TV terrorizing them 24/7 about a virus that’s wiping out humanity and coming straight for them was bound to kill many already hanging on by just a slim thread.
For how many were weekly visits by family, friends, or even mere strangers kindly volunteering to relieve the loneliest among us of that awful burden the only thing sustaining their will to live?
We also locked them up inside with no fresh air, giving aerosol particles carrying ordinary respiratory viruses from sick fellow inmates more of a chance to infect them. Everything we know about how they spread tells us that, if viruses could also laugh, imposing idiotic heretofore-unheard-of “social distancing” rules requiring us to keep six completely arbitrary feet away from each other while locking the elderly inside with recirculated air would have provided unlimited amusement for influenza specimens the world over.
But the abject cruelty visited on the frailest among us didn’t stop there.
Even the few staff members who became their sole link to humanity appeared less often. When they did they wore masks and gloves, trying to avoid getting close as much as possible, in a contagious state of dread themselves. And that finishing touch of terror was added even though literally dozens of research studies plus our understanding of how viruses are transmitted made it impossible that wearing masks would do a damn thing to stop one.
It’s significant that the CCP put so much special effort into getting Italy to adopt the deadly policies they were pushing. The death toll that any fool could see lockdown was going to inflict on the frail and elderly was sure to overrun Italy’s healthcare system, which had proven itself incapable of handling such a crisis just two years back.
2/5 The fact that CCP’s disinformation campaign focused on Italy is crucial. Italy was the first country outside China to lock down. The rest of the world followed Italy’s lead.https://t.co/cZconliF2V
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) June 11, 2020
But this time Italy’s strained medical resources wouldn’t go mostly unreported as they did in 2018. The press would be waiting for any signs of disaster and use it to stoke fear that would, in the cruelest possible irony, cause other nations to adopt the very policies that had pushed Italy over the brink.
Imagine a witch doctor tells a village evil spirits will kill them unless they flee. In the ensuing stampede, old & frail villagers get trampled to death. But the rest, captivated by the WD's story, don't even notice they caused the fatalities &, instead, blame the evil spirits.
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) September 7, 2020
Though there’s no question that Anthony Fauci and many other despicable U.S. officials helped push us into these suicidal lockdowns, it’s just as clear that the Chinese Communist Party not only conducted a coordinated campaign to convince the western nations to do something that had never been done before, had no scientific justification whatsoever, and would obviously bring a mountain of misery and death down on our heads.
They also created and worked to spread the totally false idea that COVID-19 is some kind of especially dangerous virus to create the phantom threat that the heretofore unheard-of disastrous lockdown policies they were pushing were supposed to save us from.
Last week I pointed out that, even if you buy the official stats, COVID-19 only turned out to be worse than the flu for the elderly and frail because we took our attention from them and focused on locking down the entire population, the vast majority of whom were in no danger even according to the official numbers.
However, I closed that article by linking to an interview with a researcher named Denis Rancourt, who’s conclusively shown that it was the lockdowns and not some new virus that was responsible for the real excess burden of death some, but by no means all, areas in the world experienced in 2020.
I’m currently finishing up a sequel in which I explain Rancourt’s findings and the complex way certain misinformation we were fed worked to convince us to provide a body count that could be blamed on the virus by stupidly going into an inevitably disastrous lockdown.
But, the fact is that, though COVID-19 is at worse no deadlier than the flu, the Chinese Communist Party went to great lengths to convince us that we were facing an extraordinarily more deadly pathogen. And when she appeared with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Yan did exactly the same.
Her statements won’t in any way harm the CCP since so many biologists have come out against them. But she’s succeeding in getting a lot of people skeptical of the official narrative about the virus to keep believing the completely bogus CCP story that it’s deadly just when the idea that the lockdowns are really what’s been killing us is finally starting to be heard.
As such, we ought to be suspicious that, instead of being a whistleblower risking her life and the lives everyone she cares about to tell the world about the Chinese Communist Party’s evil plot as she claims, Dr. Yan might be working to make sure their true plot remains unexposed.
It’s hard to see how COVID-19 can be both relatively harmless and a lethal bioweapon. And we know for a fact not only that it’s definitely the former, but also that Dr. Yan is working hard to convince us it isn’t.
