Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media

Our 2020 post on the origin of Covid-19 cited a Wuhan lab as a possible source for the global pandemic, but it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory — until now.

Early in the global pandemic, on May 6, 2020, I wrote a post for Beyond These Stone Walls entitled “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.” What readers did not know at the time was that I had a vested interest in the subject. While writing that post I was recovering from a month-long bout with Covid-19 that made me wonder toward the end whether I would actually survive. It is difficult to keep a highly contagious virus from spreading through a contained, crowded environment.

Obviously, I did survive and did so without treatment. However, the above post did not fare quite as well. It addressed with much doubt the origin of Covid-19 that had been settled upon in the official account of the Chinese Communist Party. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has conducted its own investigation with conclusions that conveniently matched those of China’s communist regime.

However, the cooperation of the Chinese government was sorely lacking, and some WHO investigators were not satisfied that the whole truth had been uncovered and told to the world. I am certainly no wild conspiracy theorist, but the science part of me had doubts about the reigning dogma: that a Wuhan wildlife market was the source of the virus despite evidence that the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology had been handling that same virus since its initial quiet discovery in an abandoned mine in Southwest China in 2012.

It was discovered then when six Chinese citizens entered a mine in Yunnan Province to gather samples of bat droppings. All six became quite ill within days. Three of them died. Now new evidence has emerged from a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that in November 2019, a month before the world even heard of Covid-19, three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became ill and were hospitalized. The Biden administration, which had earlier shut down any inquiry into a possible laboratory source for the virus, has now and only reluctanly called for further review. There is a lot more to this story.

I have written that there was zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory that this is a weaponized virus intentionally unleashed on the world. I can only wish that were still true. However, newly released emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci reveal that he was warned in early 2020 by immunology expert Kristian Andersen that “the virus had some unusual features hinting at manipulation in a lab setting.” Dr. Andersen stated that the virus was not compatible with evolutionary theory leading him to believe that it was manipulated in a lab. Four other experts in his team agreed with that assessment. Then suddenly it was withdrawn without explanation. From 2014 to 2019 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology culminating with a note of thanks for sticking by the “natural origin" theory.

Evidence that something is amiss here continues to mount. In recent weeks, Kristian Andersen has deleted thousands of tweets with information related to his initial assessment of the virus. In early June Dr. Andersen deleted his Twitter account and as of this writing has declined to respond to media questions.

According to a June 4, 2021 Wall Street Journal report, the NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, “and it is likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious.” In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy a paper about this gain-of-function research. The email instructed the deputy, “Read this paper. You will have tasks today that must be done.” His deputy replied that he would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” Dr. Fauci has said to date that his organization did not fund gain-of-function research, but “I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab.”

Dr. Steven Quay and physics professor Richard Muller have an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2021) reveal that the gene sequence of a virus that has been subjected to gain-of-function adaptations is not typically naturally occurring. And yet it does appear in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. “The scientific evidence,” they say, “points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.” If true, the world is left to determine whether the leak was indeed an accident.

There have always been many reasons to question China’s official explanation — for which there is also zero evidence — that humans visiting a Wuhan market contracted the virus from an animal that had been bitten by a bat, and then it spread from Wuhan across the globe. Again, the science part of me concludes that there would be many other examples of a similar natural transmission of deadly viruses if this scenario were so. Given the stakes for humanity and for the future, the truth must be uncovered. However, in both China and the United States this inquiry has been suppressed for political bias having nothing to do with scientific truth.

After I and others wrote about the origin of Covid-19 in 2020, the concept of a possible laboratory leak as the source of the virus was widely and quickly dismissed. A New York Times reporter recently admitted that the Times dismissed the theory only because it was the Trump administration that first raised it. CNN dismissed it as an unhelpful conspiracy theory in 2020, but now reluctantly calls for further investigation. Also early in 2020, 27 leading scientists signed an open letter condemning conspiracy theories that suggest Covid-19 did not have a natural origin like the one officially proffered by the Chinese government. Now several of the signatories have withdrawn that position.

The People’s Republic but Not the People’s Pandemic

In early January 2020, international news media began reporting on a viral outbreak of unknown origin in Wuhan, China. On January 30, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton warned that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately dismissed this suspicion of a laboratory involvement as “absolutely crazy.”

Much of the mainstream U.S. news media immediately took up representation of the CCP denouncement, not because Senator Cotton’s idea was not worthy of scientific inquiry, but because of an unspoken media mandate to disparage the people who proposed it: Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald Trump. The Washington Post declared, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was absolutely debunked.” The New York Times followed with the headline, “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origin.”

We should never again have a global pandemic during a U.S. presidential election year. From that point on, anyone who published any evidence for why the posssibility of a laboratory connection should be considered was labeled on CNN and MSNBC and most major news networks as “fringe” or “a conspiracy theorist.” I was hit with those same labels after my May 2020 post linked above.

On February 6, 2020, Botao Xiao, a molecular biologist and researcher at South China University of Technology, published a paper in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Under pressure from the CCP, he quickly withdrew that publication.

Now, over a year later, a group of 18 scientists from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities have signed an open letter in the journal, Science, calling for a more serious consideration of the theory that the virus could have been of natural origin that, after discovery in a cave, was brought back to a laboratory intentionally or by accident, and then escaped.

Now the CCP has obstructed any further investigation. The mine in Yunnan Province set up a checkpoint that bars journalists and investigators from entering. Dr. Anthony Fauci has also gone on record, now, to state that he no longer has a firm conviction that the natural origin source is the truth.

The body of evidence gathered by the World Health Organization investigation is not at all compelling and is not supported by newly emerging evidence. It is important to get to the bottom of this to prevent an outbreak like Covid-19, or something even far worse, from ever occurring again. There is now evidence that the virus has mutations, and if those mutations continue, Covid may become a serious seasonal illness like influenza, but more deadly, that will plague us for decades to come.

I invite readers to review again my initial post on this matter. Keep in mind that it was written from a place with few resources and limited freedom to find them. It was also written months before the presidential election of 2020 and reflects all the uncertainty of that time. It is linked again at the end of this post.

But its most important point is one that I must stress again. The Chinese Communist Party and government are not a reflection of the will, minds, or hearts of the Chinese people. Anti-Asian bigotry is not an acceptable response to this pandemic. The good people of China exist under an oppressive Communist regime. China is called the People’s Republic, but Covid-19 is not the people’s pandemic.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that there has been a cover-up of the true origin of Covid-19. If so, the cover-up has been the work of some of our highly partisan American news media as much as that of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also be interested in the following links:

The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong by James W. Harris

RejectCCP.org (Sponsored by The Epoch Times)

The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Conspiracy theories abound about the new coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic. Evidence now points to an origin other than what the Chinese Communist Party has claimed.

March 5, 2023 — Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Early in 2020, I wrote the post below about the burgeoning pandemic of Covid 19. My post rejected the Chinese Communist Government’s explanation of its origin. The CCG claimed, and still claims, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by natural means through an animal sold at the Wuhan, China open market. I laid out a case for why this is likely not so, and why it is much more likely that the virus escaped from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research and other experimentation was being conducted since 2013. This week, a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress concluded, along with the Department of Energy and the FBI, that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a Wuhan laboratory.

If the Chinese Communist Government had been transparent from the beginning, the world may have had a better response to this pandemic. But please remember: China is by force the People’s Republic, but Covid is by no means the people’s pandemic. The good people of China had nothing to do with this.

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My niece, Emily is a Registered Nurse in the specialized Covid-19 treatment unit of a large inner city hospital near Boston. Working many 16-hour days, she and many of the other RNs from that unit were told weeks ago that they cannot go home. Between grueling double shifts they have been staying at a local hotel because of their daily exposure.

Emily has two small children at home where her husband, a native of Hong Kong, is now caring for them while working from home. Recently, Emily took a quick break for a ten-minute virtual Face-Time visit with her family. A still from the visit was sent to my GTL tablet. Emily is masked, covered in her protective gear, and looking tired but resolute. Emily is a warrior on the front lines of battle. I am most proud of her and all medical staff working tirelessly to help contain a pandemic.

I am among those who bristle when some refer to the virus that causes Covid-19 as “the China virus.” I knew that some lurking in the darker corners of America would thus see a new enemy in the many Asian Americans who contribute to the welfare of this nation. Pointing fingers of blame at them is an ignorant and inhumane response to a pandemic that needs unity much more than it needs a fraudulent place to level blame.

There is no evidence to support some of the wilder theories that the virus behind Covid-19 was created and unleashed to destroy the economies of America and other democracies. That is nonsense. There is no economy more imperiled by this global pandemic than that of the People’s Republic of China.

But even among some of the wilder conspiracy theories there has emerged some grains of truth. The official story told by the Chinese Communist government has been that the virus originated entirely by accident at a wildlife market in Wuhan, central China and it likely began with a bat that was either sold at the market or infected another mammal sold at the market. I recently wrote of the plausibility of this in “Holy Week, Coronavirus, Loneliness, Politics, Yikes!”

That official account now seems only partially true. In a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley — a science writer from the United Kingdom where he is also a member of the House of Lords — wrote an intriguing and eye-opening account in “The Bats Behind the Pandemic” (WSJ, April 11-12, 2020). Here is his stunning revelation:

“RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species, Rhinolophus affinis, or rather a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China [over 1,000 miles from Wuhan]. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January [2020], the sample … contains the virus that causes Covid-19.”

As Lord Ridley points out, bats are sold in markets and provided to restaurants across China. The horseshoe bat, however, is a small species that is not typically consumed by humans nor is it sold in Wuhan’s now infamous wildlife market or “wet market.”

It is thus a “horrible coincidence” that China’s Institute of Virology, where the virus that causes Covid-19 has been studied since 2013, just happens to be in Wuhan, the origin of the current pandemic that the Chinese government is blaming on a marketplace. The Washington Post has reported that U.S. officials are now investigating whether the Wuhan lab is the actual source for the global pandemic.

A Global Pandemic from a Communist State

Such an investigation is very difficult to conduct without the cooperation of the Chinese Communist government which, like all such regimes, seeks to preserve itself more than its people. In China, the government filters all information through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Early in the viral spread, the government expelled foreign journalists from The Wall Street Journal  and The Washington Post, first from Wuhan and then from the nation.

In 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to visit and assess the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The result was a pair of cables sent to Washington warning of inadequate safety measures and “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians” at the lab. The diplomats called for additional funding for the lab from the Chinese government to address these safety concerns. The funding recommendation was ignored. The Chinese government continues to cite the wildlife market as the accidental origin of the virus.

In December, 2019, a team of Wuhan CDC researchers were the subjects of a documentary film about their collection of virus samples from bats in caves across China. The researchers expressed concern about the risk of infection from the samples they obtained. The government then silenced under threat of arrest several local journalists and scientists who began to voice concerns over the emergence of the new virus.

In January, 2020, well after the virus was discovered and began its viral spread, the government allowed an immense banquet with 40,000 families in attendance to take place in Wuhan. At 11 million inhabitants, Wuhan is larger than any U.S. city. Its airport and train depots transport thousands of people per day to points all around the globe.

Of interest, Chinese researchers reported as recently as January 24 that the outbreak had no connection with the Wuhan market. The bat species now known to cause Covid-19 is not found anywhere near Wuhan. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton reported that Yuan Zhiming, a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, denied any connection with the lab and accused the Senator of “deliberately trying to mislead the people.” Yuan Zhiming also serves as Secretary for the lab’s Communist Party Committee.

It is also a “horrible coincidence” — horrible for the people of China, at least — that this global pandemic originated and was spread just in time to terminate the growing pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong that were beginning to spill over into mainland China. I am not suggesting that this coincidence is evidence of intent, for all that I have written here is merely circumstantial evidence. But there are rumblings now in Hong Kong to resume the pro-democracy movement. Never has there been a more important time to lend Western voices in support of them.

There is growing evidence that the whole truth has not been told. China has misled the world about this pandemic in other ways by continuing to falsify vital information. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that China has severely underreported the number of deaths related to the virus and its incidence of transmission.

There is evidence that the total number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number reported throughout the rest of the world. This deceit, according to Wall Street Journal  columnist Walter Russell Mead, “allowed a local outbreak to turn into a global disaster on a massive scale.”

The People’s Republic but NOT the People’s Pandemic

None of this, however, is the fault of the Chinese people. There is a vast difference between the Communist Chinese government (CCG) which is imposed on the people, and the people themselves. They are subjects of the People’s Republic of China but this is clearly not the people’s pandemic. Assessing a pandemic requires accurate knowledge of its origin, timeline, and rate of contagion but in a communist regime, truth is filtered through an agenda more interested in preserving the regime than its subjects.

Since childhood, I have had a fascination with and high regard for China and its people. The first urban community among the Chinese people dates back to the Xia Dynasty in pre-history. When Yu, the last of the ancient Chinese kings died, the people acclaimed his eldest son to take his place.

This was the first example of hereditary “dynastic” leadership. The Xia Dynasty survived for fourteen generations beginning two centuries before Melchizedek blessed Abraham in the 21st Century B.C. (For some historical context, see “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek”).

The stories of Chinese history that I treasured the most in my youth, however, were those told by Marco Polo thirty-four centuries later. Marco Polo’s father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, left Venice in 1260 on a commercial venture to Constantinople (now Istanbul). They were forced by an outbreak of war behind them to continue moving east along the Volga River into present day Russia where they were trapped for three years. Then they joined a diplomatic mission to China to the Court of Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan, grandson of the great Mongol warrior-king, Genghis Khan, received them warmly. The Khan (which means “ruler”) had embraced Buddhism and made it the Chinese state religion. But his reign also tolerated other religions. The Khan was fascinated with Christianity. He asked the Polo brothers to return home and persuade the pope to send scholars to China so he may learn more.

In 1269 A.D., nine years after their departure from Venice, the elder Polo brothers returned to present the Khan’s request to Pope Gregory X. The pope agreed to fund another journey to China to include two missionaries and Niccolo’s son, Marco Polo. Five years later, in 1275, the group reached the court of Kublai Khan where they spent the next 17 years.

The Khan took a great liking to Marco Polo whose stories of his adventures in China would later fascinate the Western World and open the Asian continent for trade with the West. During his time with Kublai Khan, the emperor sent Marco on several diplomatic missions to represent him in Sichuan province in the south of China and Yunnan province in the southwest.

Marco asked several times for the Khan to grant him leave to return to Venice, but the Khan would not agree. Finally, he asked Marco to escort a Chinese princess to Persia (now Iran) to marry its Mongol ruler and then return to Europe. Marco Polo arrived home in 1295, twenty years after leaving. Five centuries after Kublai Khan and Marco Polo brought China to the West, in the 17th Century Ming Dynasty, the Emperor Kangxi invited Jesuit priests to serve as astronomers and allowed them to instruct Catholic converts.

The relationship ended, however, when Pope Alexander VII ruled that the Jesuits must not permit converts to also practice their ancient Chinese ancestral rites. This did not irreparably disrupt Catholicism in China, however. Converts continue to be drawn to it up to the present day, but a threat to religious liberty is China’s other contagion, a story told in my recent post on the “Vatican-China Deal.”

What We Obtain Too Cheap, We May Esteem Too Lightly

Thanks for indulging me in all this history. It is told for a reason, and the reason is to convey that the Chinese people lived for nearly four millennia in a culture rich in honorable customs and openness to the world, including openness to science, faith and technology.

Communism and socialism were once seen as interchangeable terms. There are differences, but their goals remain the same. The socialist doctrine demands state ownership and control of all fundamental means of production and distribution of wealth. Unlike communism, socialism achieves its ends not by violent revolution, but by reconstruction of capitalist political systems through peaceful, democratic, means.

Communism and socialism advocate for the nationalization of natural resources, public utilities, banking and credit, and industry and trade. These are the tenets of the Socialist Party of the U.S., the Labour Party of the U.K., and the labor or social democratic parties of various other democracies.

What they advocate is a slippery slope. Americans and the Western World would do well to remember that the rise of socialism is not historically conducive to the preservation of individual rights and freedoms, including and especially religious freedoms. Like the Chinese Communist Party, in a socialist system the state is always in danger of becoming its own religion.

In China, it was not until the rise of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong in 1949 that communism became the official state religion of what from then on became the People’s Republic of China. Like all oppressive communist regimes, the real battle is over the minds and souls of the people. The Party views all competing loyalties — especially religious ones — with contempt.

But there is one result of the global pandemic unleashed in China that might today bring another snicker of contempt to the faces of the ruling regime. At Holy Week and Easter, 2020, State governments across America — the Cradle of Liberty and self-proclaimed bastion of the Freedom of Religion — ordered churches closed while the liquor stores remained open.

America may not be entirely free of government self-interest either. In the place where I live in captivity — though not by choice or by any act that justifies it — the state just happens to own all the liquor stores.

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Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong

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