Tag: china

NYT: We Were ‘Badly Misled’ on Covid Lab Leak. But Guess Who’s to Blame?

An Opinion piece in the New York Times by Zeynep Tufekdi made a shocking admission: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

Actually, it’s not shocking at all to anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years. 

Tufekdi, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and a New York Times Opinion columnist, wrote on Sunday: 

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.

She goes on to detail how scientists and public health officials went to extraordinary Orwellian lengths to cover up any information that pointed to a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the cause of the global pandemic that shut down schools, social lives, and the economies of the worlds most powerful countries, including the United States. 

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Tufekdi describes high-ranking members of the scientific community using burner phones and making “emails disappear” to keep the bat soup narrative going. Scientists discussed on Slack how they believed the lab leak theory to be plausible even while endorsing the infected bat theory publicly. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen exclaimed in one message, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” 

This wasn’t just a case of reporters being tricked into dismissing the lab leak theory — it was a combination of willful blindness and disinformation. 

Keep reading

“Beyond Reasonable Doubt”: Former MI6 Head Told Boris Johnson COVID-19 “Was Engineered In The WIV”

Last week we noted reporting by journalist Alex Berensen, who cited two large German newspapers in revealing that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has long had evidence that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a US-funded lab in Wuhan, China.

According to these reports, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe in 2020, the German government commissioned a secret intelligence operation under the codename of Saaremaa to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2. When they concluded that a lab leak was most likely, the German Chancellery ordered that the results were to be kept hidden from the public.

The UK Knew Too…

Now, the Daily Mail reports that “a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.” 

Except that Patrick Vallance, the UK’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci, quashed it.

A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: ‘It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’.

The file, marked ‘Secret – Recipient’s Eyes Only’ argued that Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus had originated in an animal market. The dossier, compiled by a group of eminent academics and intelligence experts and seen by The Mail on Sunday, said China even retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.

But the argument is said to have been dismissed by Patrick Vallance, who was a familiar face during the pandemic as he flanked Mr Johnson at No 10 news conferences.

In a new statement from Dearlove, he writes that “Boris himself was persuaded by its argument. But the weight of the Government’s scientific establishment, already signed up to the Chinese narrative, prevailed.”

Last night, a source close to Mr Johnson pointed the finger at Lord Vallance for rubbishing the lab-leak theory in order to appease the Chinese government. The source said: ‘Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as simply too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.

Keep reading

Brookfield’s Deep Ties To Chinese Land, Loans & Green Deals

A review of corporate documents reveals that Brookfield—the influential $900 billion Canadian investment fund from which Liberal Prime Minister-to-be Mark Carney stepped away from in order to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s leader—maintains over $3 billion in politically sensitive investments with Chinese state-linked real estate and energy companies, along with a substantial offshore banking presence. One of its major real estate ventures, a $750 million entry into high-end Shanghai commercial property in 2013, involved a Hong Kong tycoon affiliated with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—which the CIA labels a central “united front” entity of Beijing.

The investment occurred while China’s real estate bubble was peaking. Last year, as China’s market crashed, and vacancies soared in Shanghai, Brookfield under Carney secured hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from the Bank of China to refinance its Shanghai commercial land holdings. According to The Bureau’s research, this emergency loan came a decade after Carney, serving as Governor of the Bank of England, aided Beijing by facilitating the Bank of China’s expansion of its global financial footprint. In his 2013 speech, UK at the Heart of Renewed Globalisation, Carney announced that “The Bank of England [has] signed an agreement with the People’s Bank of China … Helping the internationalisation of the Renminbi is a global good.”

While Brookfield had already amassed well over three billion dollars in estimated investments and managed assets in China before Carney took the helm in 2020, research indicates that he played a role in expanding the firm’s footprint there. This included refinancing its 2019 acquisition of Shanghai commercial real estate—initially valued at approximately CAD $2 billion at the peak of China’s real estate bubble—though its actual worth was likely significantly lower when Brookfield secured nearly $300 million at four percent interest from the Bank of China last year.

Given that his history of deep investment in China—if not his holdings, reportedly now placed in a blind trust—could potentially color Carney’s plans for Canada, these developments are especially notable as a trade war between the United States and Beijing escalates.

Carney and his cabinet members will be sworn in at 11 a.m. this morning at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s official residence. The timing of Carney’s appointment as prime minister adds urgency to ongoing questions about potential conflicts of interest, with matters further complicated by reports that his first international meeting will be with European leaders next week—who are themselves grappling with sweeping tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration.

Brookfield’s substantial investments in China—directly or indirectly involving state-linked entities—include hundreds of millions in renewable energy assets acquired through TerraForm Global in 2017, a $750 million real estate stake in China Xintiandi since 2013, a 2019 Shanghai land purchase valued at approximately $2 billion, a $100 million joint venture with GLP for solar projects launched in 2018, and reported plans to raise hundreds of millions more in both real estate and China green sector investments.

Keep reading

300 Beagles Per Week!? US Continues To Fund Dog Experiments in China

Topline: A Chinese lab is continuing to receive funds from the U.S. to conduct cruel studies on beagles, according to contracts obtained by the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project and shared with the New York Post.

Key facts: The $124,200 contract was awarded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences using money from the Pentagon, for the experiments on beagle puppies — as well as mice and rats — at the Beijing-based company’s lab from September 2023 until May 2025.

The Chinese company Pharmaron uses the funds to test pharmaceuticals for neurological disorders on 300 beagles per week, as well as mice and rats, White Coat Waste found. Some of the dogs are as young as eight months. Those that suffer organ dysfunction are euthanized, the contract states.

Pharmaron’s proposal to the NIH promises to comply with the Animal Welfare Act and notes that “Beagle dog is docile, cute and easy to domesticate.”

It describes how the hundreds of dogs, some as young as eight months, “will be reused” throughout the study “to save animals and decrease cost,” while saying those suffering organ dysfunction will be “euthanized.”

The DOD’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit in June, citing Pharmaron, as well as the Chinese biotech firms WuXi AppTec and Genscript Inc., as so-called “companies of concern” and blacklisted from doing business with U.S. firms. A bill to this effect passed the U.S. House of Representatives but was not voted on in the Senate.

Background: The research contract is just one example of how the U.S. and China fund each other’s medical research, often resulting in payouts for government scientists and potential national security concerns at taxpayers’ expense.

In 2023, 139 foreign companies licensed medical technology invented by NIH scientists, compared to only 102 domestic companies. The businesses included Pokrov Biologics Plant, which researched the weaponization of smallpox for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and WuXi AppTec, a Chinese firm with alleged military ties and alleged access to American genetic information.

Keep reading

Chinese Spy Ring busted At Ft. Lewis, Washington

It looks like this is the tip of the Iceberg – and this is what happens when DEI takes over counterintelligence.

Counterintelligence is a vital but weird career field. I always say that “Jesus James Angleton was wrong. There wasn’t a spy inside the CIA. There were actually four”. Those four were Aldrich Ames, Larry Wu-tai Chin, Robert Hanssen, and Ana Montes. The last two were FBI and DIA, but were inside the intelligence community and part of the problem.

Ever since Jesus James Angleton, the MAGA Spy Catcher inside CIA, retired, counterintelligence has become a cesspool of dysfunction with extreme over reliance on the cult of the polygraph.

The poster children in the failure of the polygraph and the victory of DEI is NSA’s Reality Winner and CIA’s Asif Rahman. They passed their full scope polygraphs, yet had deep seated anti-Americanism in their blood. But they passed and immediately started spilling Top Secret information.

Now at Ft. Lewis Washington we have a serious problem.

“Sgt. Jian Zhao and Lt. Li Tian are soldiers based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, and Ruoyu Duan is a former U.S. soldier who was active between 2013 and 2017, according to federal court documents. All three were arrested this week on charges of handing over classified information to Chinese agents for as much as $50,000.”

Keep reading

Fauci cabalist, top gain-of-function scientist raise alarm about dangerous new experiments

One the world’s most prominent gain-of-function researchers — whose methods were adapted by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for work on chimeric viruses — and one of the scientists who helped furnish Anthony Fauci with what he needed to downplay the lab-leak theory are now sounding the alarm about dangerous new coronavirus experiments conducted by the Chinese.

Criticism may have been easier this time around, given that the critics and their friends do not appear to be directly linked to the dangerous research in question.

Ralph Baric and W. Ian Lipkin expressed concern in a March 3 New York Times op-ed that Chinese scientists “are experimenting with viruses in ways that could put all of us in harm’s way.”

Baric, a professor in the departments of epidemiology and microbiology at the University of North Carolina, is a leading proponent of gain-of-function research who successfully fought for an exemption from the Obama administration’s moratorium on the dangerous practice in order to keep manufacturing artificial SARS-like viruses. He became an especially controversial figure during the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 7 million people worldwide.

Keep reading

Federal Judge Imposes $24 Billion Judgement Against China For COVID Cover-Up As Missouri Moves To Seize Assets

A federal judge in Missouri has found that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) covered up the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and hoarded protective equipment – costing the world precious time and lives. Now, Missouri officials are vowing to go after CCP assets.

Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. on Friday ordered China to pay a staggering $24 billion for their role in the disaster, a ruling that could pave the way for Missouri to seize Chinese-owned assets – including farmland, the NY Times reports.

The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri attorney general’s office in April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, accused the Chinese government of withholding information about the existence and spread of the virus and then of cutting off the supply of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., from the rest of the world. Chinese officials said Friday that they did not accept the judge’s decision.

Limbaugh wrote in his decision that “China was misleading the world about the dangers and scope of the Covid-19 pandemic,” and had “engaged in monopolistic actions to hoard P.P.E.,” which hampered early response to the pandemic.

The ruling in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri imposed the judgement against China, the ruling CCP, local governments in China, a Chinese health agency, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Limbaugh, a Bush W. Bush appointee, had initially dismissed Missouri’s lawsuit, only to have it returned to him by an appellate court – after which he held a bench trial in January at the federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. China did not show up to the hearing.

Keep reading

DOJ Identifies Chinese Nationals and Companies Directly Aiding Mexican Drug Cartels and Supplying Fentanyl Precursors to Mexico

The Department of Justice has identified Chinese nationals and companies that have been directly aiding the Mexican drug cartels. This raises troubling questions, especially if the cartels are designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

One of the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 is called “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” This order was a presidential direction to add the Mexican drug cartels to the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The scourge of fentanyl can be traced directly to the cartels and is killing thousands of Americans per month. Combined drug overdoses in the United States leave about 120,000 people dead per year. At this rate, if no action is taken to address it, the number of overdoses will surpass the number of Americans killed in World War II—407,000—within a couple of years.

In the executive order, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was given the lead to develop the final list of groups to be designated as terrorist groups. The State Department is reported to have created a tentative list of eight groups to be placed on the formal terrorist organization list.

On “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast on Jan. 30, Rubio said Mexico has significant amounts of ungoverned territory.

“They’re controlled by drug cartels,” he said. “They are the most powerful force on the ground, and they are plowing into the United States. … They’re facilitating illegal migration, but they are also bringing in fentanyl and deadly drugs to our country.

“That’s a national security threat, and that needs to stop.”

Keep reading

U.S. Indicts 12 Chinese Nationals in ‘Hackers-for-Hire’ Conspiracy

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday announced 12 Chinese nationals have been indicted in a global “hackers-for-hire” scheme to “inflict digital harm on Americans who criticize the Chinese Communist Party.”

Court documents unsealed on Wednesday accused China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and Ministry of State Security (MSS) of directing and financing the hackers to “conduct computer intrusions against high-value targets in the United States and elsewhere.”

“Victims include U.S.-based critics and dissidents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a large religious organization in the United States, the foreign ministries of multiple governments in Asia, and U.S. federal and state government agencies, including most recently in 2024,” DOJ said.

“By employing these hackers-for-hire, the PRC government further allowed these same hackers to profit by committing additional computer intrusions around the world with impunity, and then to sell stolen data through Chinese data brokers,” DOJ added.

The first two Chinese nationals indicted in the case, Yin “YKC” Kecheng and Zhou “Coldface” Shuai, were allegedly linked to a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group known as APT27, “LuckyMouse,” or “Emissary Panda.” 

The group has been active since 2010, with an early emphasis on cyber-espionage attacks against corporate and government systems in the Western world, the Middle East, and Taiwan. APT27’s later exploits included profitable cyber-crimes.

DOJ charged Yin and Zhou with “sophisticated computer hacking conspiracies that successfully targeted a wide variety of US.-based victims from 2011 to the present day,” inflicting “millions of dollars worth of damages.” Both Yin and Zhou have previously been named in multiple-count indictments for fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

A second announcement from DOJ on Wednesday added indictments for two MPS officers and eight employees of an “ostensibly private” company called Anxun Information Technology Col. Ltd., also known as i-Soon.

Keep reading

FBI Arrests Three U.S. Service Members for Treason, Allegedly Selling Military Secrets to China

The FBI made a major announcement on Friday, revealing that three U.S. service members have been arrested and charged with treason for allegedly attempting to sell classified military intelligence to agents of the Chinese government. 

Two active-duty U.S. Army soldiers and a former soldier were arrested after they were accused of conspiring to transmit sensitive national defense information to Chinese agents, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). 

The DOJ identified the suspects as Jian Zhao and Li Tian, both active-duty soldiers stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Ruoyu Duan, a former U.S. Army soldier. The three were accused of conspiring to transmit sensitive national defense information to Chinese agents, endangering U.S. national security.

The indictment alleges that Zhao began planning to sell classified intelligence in July 2024. He is accused of transmitting “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET” materials to individuals connected to China, including sensitive data related to U.S. military capabilities. 

Keep reading