CCP-PLA Biological Warfare & Information Operations

In the more than three years since the SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Wuhan, China, there has been minimal attention paid by the global media, but also by the governments and legislative bodies of key Western countries most affected by the pandemic it caused, to the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in their “civilian-military fusion” offensive Biological Weapons (BW) program. This article intends to address that failure by summarizing some of the key indicators available in the Open-Source realm that demonstrate just how the CCP-PLA unleashed a BW agent against the world and then deployed sophisticated Information Operations against governments and people not well-prepared to discern, expose, or counter them.

Here are some of the questions to be addressed: When did the U.S. Intelligence Community and National Security Council Know that SARS-CoV-2 Emerged Out of the CCP-PLA Offensive Biological Weapons (BW) Program and What Did They Do/Have They Done About It? How did the U.S. Government (USG) come to accept and implement virtually unquestioned advice and Courses of Action to deal with the COVID pandemic that its top officials knew or should have known came directly from the CCP? How can the USG’s official relationship with our public health agencies and organizations be improved to ensure this level of co-option by the CCP can never happen again?

This piece touches barely the surface of this devastating episode for world health, but it is hoped that it might open a discussion long overdue and much needed to ensure that the CCP-PLA never again are able to unleash such a global pandemic on the world and get away with it with virtually no accountability.

Background

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in collaboration with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has had an offensive BW program since shortly after the end of WW II, when Mao Zedong seized control of China. China, with the help of the Allied Powers, had defeated the Japanese invaders of their country and inherited their Unit 731, a base of covert biological and chemical weapons operations the Japanese Imperial Army established in Manchuria and from which it conducted horrific human experiments and lethal attacks against the Chinese people during the war. Unfortunately, instead of eradicating Unit 731 and bringing its Japanese operators to justice, Mao picked up where the Japanese had left off to establish his own BW program, likely with assistance from the Soviet Union/Russia. The U.S. government for its part sent Gen. Douglas MacArthur to Japan to oversee the post-war rebuilding of Japan but also to gather information about Japan’s wartime BW program. Many of the senior commanders of Unit 731 were offered full immunity and even payments in return for providing data about their experiments. Bottom line here is that the U.S. government (USG) and U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) have known about China’s BW program for many decades.

Citing from my October 31, 2022 guest essay for Dr. Robert Malone’s Substack:

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/long-history-of-chinas-ccp-and-biowarfare

“Long history of China’s CCP and Biowarfare” by Clare M. Lopez, October 31, 2022

“Writing in her 2021 book, ‘What Really Happened in Wuhan’, Australian author and investigative journalist Sharri Markson noted that “Intelligence agencies and Western governments have known for decades that China has a bioweapons program…Chinese military-affiliated scientists were discussing the weaponization of coronaviruses publicly and openly—and they did so five years before the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Along these lines, there was the 2015 document entitled (in English translation) ‘The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons’ that was co-authored by a group of Chinese scientists, including bioweapons experts and PLA scientists. The Department of State reportedly has this document but has never spoken openly about it or done anything to hold the CCP regime accountable. Neither has any USG administration, Cabinet, or Congressional leadership.

The Phone Call

In his 2022 book, “The Lies My Government Told Me”, Dr. Robert Malone writes about a phone call he received from Dr. Michael Callahan, whom he identifies as a “brilliant infectious disease and intensive care specialist” and also as a sometime “CIA employee”. On 4 January 2020, Callahan called Dr. Malone’s cell phone from Wuhan, China, where he was then participating in a Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School academic exchange program with an unnamed Chinese university “sister school”. Callahan told Malone he was calling him to warn him about a new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and to urge him to prepare his U.S. colleagues to get ready to deal with it.

Callahan’s position at that Chinese university (NFI), which gave him access to information about the SARS-CoV-2 then already spreading in Wuhan, also likely was a position from which he reported to the U.S. IC. That he stepped outside of those reporting channels to alert Dr. Malone in the first week of January 2020 would seem to indicate a level of alarm about the virus but perhaps also concern that the USG/IC were not responding with the level of seriousness or speed that he could see was needed. That Callahan had reached that level of concern himself by 4 January 2020 seems to indicate that the virus had been spreading inside China already for some time—some reports indicate months, since mid-2019.

It seems unlikely that Dr. Michael Callahan was the only U.S. scientist, affiliated with the CIA or otherwise, who was working in an academic/scientific capacity inside China’s laboratory network in 2019. Others must have been reporting something about the well-known “civilian-military fusion” model that binds the CCP and PLA together in China’s BW program. They must also have gotten early warning about the new coronavirus that began spreading in China sometime in 2019. What did those academics/scientists do about that knowledge? Did they report it back to their U.S. academic connections and/or the USG/IC? There is no publicly available information to suggest that they did.

Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci

On 11 January 2021, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a letter signed by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky) and Member Jim Jordan (R-OH) that included many pages of notes about emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Buzzfeed News and the Washington Post. First published in June 2021, the emails were heavily redacted; but later, Oversight Committee staff were permitted to see the full text of the emails and take notes, but not take copies with them.

Of particular note for our discussion here is that the emails included details of what appears to have been an emergency telephone conference call, convened on 1 February 2020 among National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) then-director Anthony Fauci; his then-boss, former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins; and a number of leading world virologists. What perhaps may have triggered the call was an email the previous day in which Scripps Research infectious disease expert Kristian Andersen told Fauci that, because the virus genome seemed inconsistent with expectations from natural evolutionary theory, it could have been engineered in a lab. On the call the next day, virologists told Fauci and Collins that the virus might have leaked from the BSL-4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that it might have been genetically engineered, and that it could have been artificially evolved in the lab through serial passaging.

All of this should have been completely consistent with decades of prior reporting about the Chinese BW program. Indeed, the French, who had built the BSL-4 facility at the WIV in 2014 reportedly were “kicked out” (or perhaps chose to disengage) in 2017 after having warned the U.S. in 2015 that the Chinese were cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab amid concerns the lab could be turned into a “biological arsenal” according to France’s Le Figaro. Nevertheless, it would appear that Fauci and Collins (who had entered the NIH into a collaborative agreement with the Chinese Academy of Military Science in 2015) succeeded in squelching any mention of a lab-engineered or laboratory source for the SARS-CoV-2. On 17 March 2020, the paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published in Nature Medicine by some of the same scientists (including Kristian Andersen) who’d just weeks before told Fauci and Collins the virus looked bioengineered.

The cover-up had begun in earnest.

The USG Response 

Something else happened in the weeks between the 1 February 2020 phone call and the 17 March 2020 “proximal origin” paper. On 13 February 2020, Dr. H. Clifford Lane, a deputy director and right-hand man to Anthony Fauci at NIAID, was re-directed from a planned trip to Japan to go to China instead. He joined colleagues from the CCP-dominated World Health Organization (WHO) on a joint mission from 16-23 February 2020 to get a first-hand look at how China was handling the pandemic. In reporting upon his return, Lane appeared completely taken in by the seriousness and effectiveness of the CCP’s draconian lockdown measures.

In lawsuit testimony under oath in late November 2022, Fauci said that Lane was “very impressed” with the way China was dealing with the virus. Lane told Fauci that China “has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost”. Lane, on his first trip to China, apparently accepted CCP officials’ claims that the Beijing regime was already bringing the outbreak under control and that the extreme measures being used there should be implemented in the U.S. as well. For his part, Fauci, already in the midst of a desperate cover-up, then passed Lane’s observations and recommendations on to the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Neither Lane nor Fauci seemed to question whether the CCP officials who were promoting this picture of the way things were going in China were telling them the truth (of course, they weren’t). Lane and Fauci fell hook, line, and sinker (perhaps quite willingly) for CCP propaganda, intended to promote coronavirus response measures in the U.S. designed to destroy our economy, education system, and societal trust in public health. Any mention of the CCP-PLA BW program was totally suppressed.

There was another USG official who helped ratchet up alarm and pushed draconian lockdown policies in the U.S. That was Matt Pottinger, who was appointed by Gen. Mike Flynn to be Asia Director at the NSC and eventually became Deputy National Security Advisor to NSC Advisor Robert O’Brien. Known as a China hawk, Pottinger earlier spent seven years in China working as a journalist before joining the Marine Corps and serving as a decorated intelligence officer in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In early White House meetings on the virus, Pottinger, who’d realized from Chinese social media posts that things were far worse over there than publicly admitted, recommended immediate banning of all travel from China to the U.S.

Relying on information from sources inside China, he also conveyed to President Trump that asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus (now known to have been virtually non-existent) would massively magnify infection unless drastic measures were taken immediately. Additional information he acquired from Chinese sources indicated that Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was being completely locked down and authorities were enforcing universal masking and social distancing. Of course, as we now know, the masking, social distancing, and mass testing were completely made-up measures with zero efficacy data to support them, but no one seemed to question that Chinese sources had a handle on things and the U.S. could, too, if only we followed CCP advice. Dr. Deborah Birx was brought onto the WH Coronavirus Task Force at Pottinger’s urging and quickly took on the task of orchestrating the devastating nationwide lockdowns across the U.S. The ultimately disastrous, widespread use of Remdesivir for COVID patients in hospitals likewise was a policy imported from China on the advice of a doctor there who recommended it over the phone to Pottinger.

In this way, any potential focus on the actual origins of the SARS-CoV-2 inside of PLA military labs—or U.S. direct involvement in funding and participating in such research, including Gain-of-Function research—was brushed aside as draconian societal lockdown measures imported directly from the CCP took center stage instead. To his credit, though, Pottinger did push the correct idea that the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese lab and tried to get the U.S. IC to search for the evidence that would confirm this. The IC, however, reportedly was not responsive and did not provide evidence about the CCP-PLA BW program or that it was the most likely source for the bioengineered SARS-CoV-2.

Smoking Gun USG Documents 

On 27 January 2020, the President’s Coronavirus Task Force was formed and charged with leading and coordinating the USG response to the impending pandemic. Initially led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and coordinated with the National Security Council (NSC), by 28 February 2020 the Task Force was transitioned to the Office of the Vice President (Mike Pence). On page 16 of the USG’s March 13, 2020 report “PanCAP Adapted U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan”, an organization chart diagram of the “US Government COVID-19 Coordination and Response” showed a new category under the “Policy” heading. In the org chart boxes underneath Policy is a sub-divided section with the header “National Security Council”. Under that are three boxes: WMD is one of them. WMD is the acronym for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Biological Weapons are a category of WMD. Clearly by this time, March 2020, the USG and Intelligence Community realized that with the SARS-CoV-2 they were dealing with a CCP-PLA biological weapons agent. But still, not a word to the American people.

Another document dated March 14, 2020 (the day after the Response Plan above) was issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is administratively within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The text related the President’s emergency declaration for the entire U.S. under the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. At this point, therefore, the USG clearly knew it was dealing with a BW/WMD attack and was going to panic stations.

Conclusions 

The net effect of importing unquestioningly and wholesale to the U.S. and many other countries coronavirus pandemic response measures that demonstrably came directly from the CCP has been to wreak absolute havoc on U.S. and other societies. Economically, educationally, in health outcomes, and in terms of the erosion of trust by the American public in our public health institutions and government itself, these CCP-inspired policies have been devastating.

And even as the CCP succeeded in getting the U.S.—and much of the world—to self-destruct without the deployment of a single plane, ship, tank, or troop, its information operations also managed to divert all attention from its “civilian-military fusion” offensive BW program, from whence the SARS-CoV-2 likely originated.

This marks a stupendous success for our foremost adversary in the world and a remarkable failure on the part of our own national security leadership. We can still remedy at least some of the harm done by taking lessons learned from the experience and by diligently now investigating, exposing, and countering China’s BW program. For if we don’t, they will do it again. And the next time could be even more devastating than this beta test they’ve just run.

This article was originally published at Red Star Six