Game on: what's behind the COVID origins report
The House Committee on COVID-19 has released a report on the origin and treatment of the disease. It states that research on modifying the virus was conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with money from American non-profit organizations and agencies that are part of the national health care system. Its leak, however, was the result of a violation of biological safety rules. The topic of the "Chinese virus," which has been promoted by Republicans for several years, is becoming relevant again. Only now it is acquiring a truly international status. Izvestia has analyzed where this story is leading.
The main conclusions
In a 557-page document prepared on the results of a year and a half of investigation, congressmen come to several conclusions. The first is that COVID-19 is of artificial rather than natural origin. According to U.S. lawmakers, it was created at the Institute of Virology in the city of Wuhan. There, scientists investigated the possibility of "improving" the coronavirus through the use of reverse cloning and genetic engineering.
It should be noted that the above thesis is not a sensation. The Congress stated about the man-made nature of COVID in December 2022, when the interim report of the Intelligence Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives was published.
However, like that time, the recent report emphasizes that the creation of COVID-19 was not part of a biological weapons program. And its leak was the result of blatant unprofessionalism on the part of the lab's staff.
The second conclusion is that the Wuhan Institute worked under funding provided by the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization, as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), both agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Moreover, officials have deliberately concealed the truth about both the origin of the virus and where and with whose help it was developed. The focus is on Anthony Fauci, the immediate past director of NIAID and health advisor to the last seven U.S. presidents. The authors of the report actually put him in charge of an operation to misinform the American taxpayers, moreover, carried out with their own money.
In addition, the U.S. government's oversight bodies failed to substantiate and calculate the risks from the hasty licensing of Pfizer vaccines, the introduction of a mask regime for two-year-old children, "social distance" and lockdown. In general, the entire health care system was unprepared for a pandemic. As a result, the US budget losses amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars, at least 64 of which went to various criminal elements.
The third and most important conclusion is the actual (though not literally formulated) accusation of collusion between representatives of democratic elites and the Communist Party of China. The report devotes an entire chapter to the latter. It is devoted to Beijing's alleged pressure on the World Health Organization to conceal the true nature of COVID.
Next steps
It should be noted that for the Republican voter, whether moderate or even more so a QAnon supporter, Anthony Fauci is a living symbol of the "deep state" and BigPharma and various lobbyists are the most telling expression of it. Therefore, for the Trump-supporting electorate, everything described in the report is a formal confirmation of long-known facts. However, according to experts, it is much more important that it is also a justification for further actions.
The confrontation with China will have an economic and geopolitical dimension, but it needs information support. In this sense, the topic of the "Chinese virus" may become not only another proof of the rightness of Trumpists in the fight against the domestic opposition and the "deep state", but may also help the U.S. to declare its mission - the fight against a new global adversary. And this is a project for years to come, emphasizes Vladimir Vasiliev, chief researcher at the Institute of the United States and Canada.
- Trump has been talking about the "Chinese virus" for the past four years. By then, the official number of victims in the US had reached 1.2 million. We are facing a strategic game, the beginning of which is accusing the PRC of developing COVID. This is not election interference, but a far-reaching game that will be expressed in trade, economic and military confrontation. A lot depends on Trump's subjective factor, but my sense is that he is as serious as possible. What is happening may well turn into a global crisis. The second trace leads to the American establishment and pharmaceutical giants. And accusations against the latter are already a classic story for the United States, which has existed for decades and on which it is possible to make a lot of political capital today," Vasiliev says.
The choice of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health is not accidental in this sense either. Since entering the presidential race, he has repeatedly criticized the system and questioned the competence and transparency of its actions during the pandemic. For Kennedy, this issue is of fundamental importance, emphasizes American political scientist Malek Dudakov.
- He questioned the official version many times, and it is very important for him to get the truth. A separate topic of his research is the consequences of COVID-19 vaccination. And I think that representatives of the "deep state" are unlikely to deny the gradually opening circumstances of the pandemic, even despite the efforts of lobbyists. First, information about the artificial origin of COVID-19 has already made its way into the media. Second, shifting the focus to confrontation with China suits many in DeepState quite well. They will probably try to disguise the fact that the research was conducted with American money and shift all responsibility to Beijing," the expert believes.
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