Putin Accuses Ukraine Of Weaponizing Coronavirus, Forgets China Was There First
The Evidence Against The Wuhan Virology Labs Remains Valid
Depending on which narrative one chooses to believe, US-funded biolabs in Ukraine were engaged either in “threat reduction” research to counter potential future biological threats, or in “bioweapons research” creating those future biological threats. If one rejects narrative to focus on the facts, one very plausible conclusion which can be drawn about these narratives is that they are a distinction without a difference.
Certainly Vladimir Putin subscribes to the latter narrative, employing it often as part of his rationale for invading Ukraine, most recently in his “angry” video address to Russian government officials and ultimately the country at large.
There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases. Frantic attempts are being made to conceal traces of these secret programmes. However, we have grounds to assume that components of biological weapons were being created in direct proximity to Russia on the territory of Ukraine.
Putin has two glaring substantive problems with this allegation: 1) While there is no doubt that the biolabs exist, the reason there is no doubt is because the labs are hardly secret, having been reorganized and funded by the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program since at least 2005; and 2) Nunn-Lugar funded similar research in Russia via the International Science And Technology Center for years, to the tune of millions of dollars per year. These facts are amply documented, as I presented in my last article on this topic. Putin must be presumed to have known about the Ukrainian labs literally for years because he was an active participant in the same multinational “threat reduction” programs—programs he now claims are an existential threat to Russia.
Moreover, in mentioning coronavirus as one of the pathogens allegedly being weaponized in these labs, Putin conveniently overlooks the lengthy and well documented evidence trail linking the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (as well as the other biolabs in the city of Wuhan), even as he implicitly concedes that coronavirus research is dangerous and not necessarily benign.
China Tries To Join In
Amazingly, China herself seems to have forgotten this, joining Russia in accusing the US of violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
China's Foreign Ministry has helped fuel the fire this week, repeating the Russian claim several times and calling for an investigation.
“This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Thursday.
“It is not something they can muddle through by saying that China's statement and Russia's finding are disinformation, and are absurd and ridiculous.”
In an opinion piece in the Global Times, China uses the bioweapon bandwagon to imply that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Ukraine biolab, and not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
With the revelation that US-funded biological labs in Ukraine were conducting experiments with bat coronavirus samples, the US owes the world an explanation.
Certainly there are questions that need answers. As detailed in my previous article, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Biological Threat Reduction Program has funded and supported a number of biolabs in Ukraine. The Science And Technology Center In Ukraine, established under the auspices of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, has recently funded at least one study of bat-related pathogens in Ukraine and Georgia.
The New York Post has established that the DTRA provided funding to EcoHealth Alliance for a program titled “Scientific Research—Combating Weapons Of Mass Destruction” from 2014 to at least 2020.
Beginning in fiscal year 2014, the DTRA began awarding funding to EcoHealth for a work program labeled “Scientific Research – Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction”. After three straight years in which awards were fewer than $1 million, the amounts sent to the program jumped considerably. In fiscal year 2017, $2.34 million of the $2.91 million EcoHealth received from DTRA went toward the weapons research. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, 100 percent of DTRA’s awards to EcoHealth went toward the program — $4.24 million, $2.99 million, and an eye-popping $21.33 million, respectively.
EcoHealth was also the vehicle Anthony Fauci used to fund coronavirus gain-of-function research in Wuhan even as the “threat reduction” activity was taking place, making it a curious common denominator linking China's “biological research" facilities to Ukrainian “biological research” facilities.
Moreover, EcoHealth has had an interest in bats since at least 2012, when it received a grant to study white nose syndrome, a fungal infection among bats.
Consequently, while the coronavirus connection with Ukraine does warrant extensive investigation, the presence of EcoHealth in the picture only highlights yet again the numerous ways the coronavirus pandemic traces back to China.
China Still Has The Bat Lady
While China is eagerly promoting the idea of covert and nefarious biological research at Ukrainian biolabs (which is only half true—the research is nefarious but not covert), it remains documented fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in particular Dr. Shi Zhengli (aka “the Bat Lady”), have been collecting bat coronavirus samples for at least the past 10 years.
It is also publicly documented that Dr. Shi worked closely with representatives from the EcoHealth Alliance in tracing and studying SARS related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV) in humans in 2018, long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our study provides the first serological evidence of likely human infection by bat SARSr-CoVs or, potentially, related viruses. The lack of prior exposure to SARS patients by the people surveyed, their lack of prior travel to areas heavily affected by SARS during the outbreak, and the rapid decline of detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV in recovered patients within 2–3 years after infection strongly suggests that positive serology obtained in this study is not due to prior infection with SARS-CoV (Wu et al. 2007).
Intriguingly, EcoHealth and Dr. Shi established that not only were viruses related to SARS already crossing over to infect humans long before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, but also that SARS-CoV antibodies do not last long—a fact that goes a long way to explaining the failure of the mRNA “vaccines”.
Yet the inescapable reality of geography is that this research occurred in China, and not in Ukraine.
Dr. Shi also figured prominently in the EcoHealth “Defuse" project proposal, which proposed, among other things, to infect bats with augmented coronaviruses:
Again, the testing site was to be in China, and not Ukraine.
Additionally the closest bat analogs to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in China and Laos, and not Ukraine.
Further, there are the documented ways in which China demonstrably and maliciously weaponized the COVID-19 pandemic, as numerous observers including myself established in early 2020.
What was documented in 2020 is not undocumented in 2022. China's coronavirus sins are not and can never be expiated merely by a subsequent revelation of American coronavirus sins in Ukraine.
Not A Binary Proposition
What both China and Putin would like to ignore is that the facts emerging regarding the Ukrainian biolabs not only raise significant questions that must eventually be answered, but they also establish quite emphatically that, in the realm of “biological threat reduction” research, China, Russia, and the US are a single swamp of corruption, amorality, and sketchy science. If Ukraine’s storage, handling, and research of coronavirus is cause for alarm, then so is China’s. If Ukrainian “biological research” is a threat, then so is Chinese “biological research”, and so is Russian “biological research”. Dangerous pathogens are dangerous everywhere, and the COVID-19 pandemic is grim testimony to the casual disregard disease has for national boundaries.
Russia’s biolabs have received funding through the same Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction infrastructure as the Ukrainian labs. The EcoHealth Alliance has been as big a presence in Wuhan as in Kyiv, if not bigger. China and Russia both have labs dedicated to the storage, study, and handling of dangerous pathogens: China has the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Russia has the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR. All of this is documented and indisputable.
Ukrainian biolabs, no matter the size and scope of the relevant questions surrounding them, do not erase either the Russian or Chinese labs. There are no “sides" here, and this is not a binary proposition whereby declaring Ukraine to be vicious renders either Russia or China virtuous. No one is virtuous where these labs are concerned, and we do ourselves no favors by allowing focus on one country to become the rationale by which another is given a pass for bad behavior.
Ukraine does not reflexively become the most probable origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus simply because one chooses to dislike either Ukraine or the United States instead of China or Russia.
Putin and Xi want an accounting of Ukraine’s biolabs. By all means let there be such an accounting, not just for Ukraine, but for China and Russia as well. Put all the “biological research” cards on the table and let the world render its own judgment on all of it. Let there be no more secrets regarding the research being done on dangerous and deadly diseases, wherever it takes place.