Consider, for example, the global Covid epidemic that began in early 2020 and dominated all the world’s headlines for the following couple of years. According to the careful analysis of the Economist, “excess deaths” due to Covid probably totaled around thirty million, and the disease certainly disrupted the lives of many billions more, while most of the American population spent much of the next year or two living under intermittent lockdowns.
The massive Covid coverage in the Times was led by Donald G. McNeil, Jr., a 45-year veteran of the newspaper, whose byline graced countless front-page stories during that period. But in 2021, the Times organized a lucrative Peru outing for wealthy high school students and the reluctant McNeil was cajoled into leading it.
Unfortunately, some of those students reported McNeil for the “politically incorrect” language he had casually used, and despite his illustrious career the journalist was summarily purged from the Times, later telling the shocking story in a widely-discussed, four-part essay on Medium.
As the world suffered under the pandemic, the Times and every other Western media outlet had declared that Covid was a natural virus, denouncing as “conspiracy theorists” anyone who suggested otherwise, with Facebook enforcing that consensus by banning anyone who dissented from it.
But in May 2021, that established narrative was suddenly transformed by Nicholas Wade, a very distinguished science journalist who had spent decades at the Times including serving as its Science Editor. Wade self-published an 11,000 word blockbuster article pointing to the overwhelming genetic evidence that Covid was artificial and arguing that it had likely leaked from a lab.
- Origin of Covid — Following the Clues
Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
Nicholas Wade • Medium • May 2, 2021 • 11,000 Words
As I explained later that same month:
Despite such extremely inauspicious beginnings and the cautious and subdued tone of his text, the consequences were dramatic. Although nearly all the facts and evidence that Wade discussed had already been publicly available for most of the past year, his careful analysis and considerable journalistic credibility quickly transformed the intellectual landscape.
He began his long article by explaining that from February 2020 onward a huge ideological bubble had been inflated by political propaganda masquerading as science, a bubble that was afterwards maintained through a combination of journalistic cowardice and incompetence. President Donald Trump had proclaimed that the virus was artificial, so our media therefore insisted that it must be natural, even if all the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.
Wade’s careful presentation immediately punctured that bubble, and upended the public discussion of an epidemic that had killed millions around the world. By May 28th, the Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made,” so that in less than one month a self-published article had already changed what nearly three billion individuals around the world were allowed to read and write.
This illustrates the totalitarian control of information on the Internet held by American’s huge Tech monopolies, which determine the limits of permitted discussion worldwide at the flip of a switch. Can there be any better example of the ridiculous, Stalinesque climate of intellectual censorship currently enforced by those corporate giants?
The impact of Wade’s article was considerably enhanced by an important column by McNeil that soon followed, in which the latter completely reversed his own position and seconded the conclusions of his former colleague. Thus, the Times journalist who had spearheaded his paper’s entire Covid coverage now endorsed the theory that he and every other mainstream writer had spent more than a year dismissing as “far right” lunacy, with that volte-face obviously having a great deal of impact upon the public debate.
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory
Donald G. McNeil, Jr. • Medium • May 17, 2021 • 4,700 Words
The rapidity of this dramatic sudden shift in the public media narrative struck me as almost Orwellian, and I applied that metaphor in the article I published discussing all these developments.
- American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 31, 2021 • 5,200 Words
Perhaps because Times had defenestrated its leading Covid journalist in 2021, the fifth year anniversary of that gigantic epidemic has so far passed without any notice in that newspaper. Meanwhile, a week or two ago, the rival Journal published a lengthy front-page article revisiting the hotly debated question of whether Covid was natural or had instead leaked from a lab.
- Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak
The idea that the pandemic’s origins lie with a research facility in China was once labeled a conspiracy theory
Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel • The Wall Street Journal • December 26, 2024 • 2,800 Words
The Important Covid Origins Research of Jim Haslam
Throughout 2020 and 2021, the overwhelming focus of my work had been the Covid origins controversy, and this had substantially continued into 2022. But over the last couple of years, my interest has shifted toward the Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza conflicts, and I’ve only occasionally covered Covid matters, which have anyway largely faded from the headlines along with the disease itself.
As a consequence, I failed to notice the later arrival of an important new participant in the Covid origins debate. In October 2022, an independent researcher named Jim Haslam began posting on that topic. His Substack account was entitled Reverse Engineering the Origins of SARS-CoV-2, and over the last couple of years I’d very occasionally seen reference to his work, which claimed that Covid was a bioengineered virus that had leaked from the Wuhan lab.
But since I was preoccupied with other matters and his views seemed entirely similar to those of so many others whom I’d encountered from early 2020 onwards, I didn’t pay much attention to his work. Every now and then I’d see it mentioned or cited somewhere and would resolve to take a look, but I never got around to it.
However, Ukraine’s unexpected December assassination of a top Russian general named Igor Kirillov at his Moscow home suddenly revived the issue. Lt. Gen. Kirillov had been in charge of Russian biowarfare defense and very soon after the Russian invasion, his organization claimed that America had established dozens of biolabs filled with illegal bioweapons on his own country’s border.
Many Western analysts have suggested that these dramatic accusations drew permanent Ukrainian enmity and eventually marked him for death. But aside from myself, no one else mentioned that Kirillov had attracted far greater attention later that same year when he suggested that Covid had been an American bioweapon unleashed against China and Iran, so I published an article discussing his killing and recapitulating some of my own evidence that strongly substantiated Kirillov’s accusations.
- Assassinating a Top Russian General
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 23, 2024 • 5,600 Words
That piece attracted many responses, one of which mentioned that Haslam had recently published a Covid origins book that came to very different conclusions. Given my renewed focus on the subject, this seemed the perfect opportunity to finally explore his work, so I quickly ordered the book and read it.
Independent researchers who present a Covid analysis not aligned with that of the mainstream media obviously face huge difficulties in getting their manuscripts into print, and this is especially true of a topic such as Covid that faded from the headlines a couple of years ago.
Therefore, I was hardly surprised that Haslam’s book was self-published on Amazon, nor that it lacked any endorsements or favorable cover-blurbs.
This was compounded by the explosive nature of his conclusions, which went far beyond those of the various lab-leak advocates whose work I’d previously read. Back in late 2021 I’d published a review of a half-dozen such Covid origins books, most of which were released by major publishing houses and reviewed in mainstream media outlets. But I now found the analysis and information contained in 90% of Haslam’s book far superior to any of those, although the remaining 10% unfortunately fell into an extremely different category.
- American Pravda: Confronting Covid Crimestop
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 13, 2021 • 6,400 Words
During his long March discussion with Tucker Carlson, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University had made some controversial statements about the origins of Covid, and he reaffirmed these a second time just a few weeks ago, with these two interviews together generating tens of millions of impressions on Twitter and millions more views on YouTube. Sachs’ ideas apparently relied heavily upon Haslam’s research findings, so although the very highly regarded chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission never mentioned Haslam’s name, he seemed to have tacitly provided a strong endorsement of the author’s analysis.
Although reasonably well-written and edited, Haslam’s book lacked any index, severely reducing its value, and although I assumed that I could use the text search feature of the Kindle version for that purpose, the latter suffered from some sort of indexing problem that rendered it useless, so I hope that the author will soon correct this.
An even more serious problem was inherent in any printed work. Haslam’s controversial Covid analysis relied upon a vast number of references, sources, and documents, which would normally be provided as online links.
However, the analogous footnotes or endnotes of a print edition are obviously much less useful, so Haslam did not even bother including any of those, any more than had the earlier Covid origins books released by major publishers. This forced his readers to take almost all his statements on pure faith, a huge difficulty as I began reading through a book whose chapters were filled with so many extremely controversial claims.
Fortunately, the many lengthy posts published on his Substack largely solved this problem, linking to all the hundreds of source documents that he had relied upon. Therefore, I think his book should best be regarded as a mere overview of his ideas, while anyone interested in exploring those in any depth should instead rely upon his online writings. Furthermore, his online analysis also provided a multitude of diagrams, charts, and other graphic images totally lacking in his book, as well as numerous videos that also contained information important for his conclusions.
His book consisted of thirty chapters and his Substack contained fifty-odd different posts, so associating those two sources of information would have been much easier if each chapter suggested the post or two that best documented its claims, and perhaps he will add such a feature in a future edition.
On the more positive side, seven of his longest posts from late 2022 and 2023 were labeled #1 through #7, with these totaling nearly 60,000 words and apparently providing much of his core analysis. So after finishing his book I carefully read all of these, along with perhaps another 50,000 words of other posts, though I skipped over the dozen or more short ones that were labeled “Weekly lab leaker.” Providing some sort of road-map to his most important posts and a brief summary of their contents would be a helpful addition to his Substack.
The central thesis that Haslam set forth can be summarized in just a couple of sentences. Just like all the other lab-leakers, he believed that the Covid virus was bioengineered, but argued that its creation took place in an American lab rather than in Wuhan.
According to him, the Chinese virologists who were so heavily demonized in the Western media from 2020 onwards had almost no role in that process and were completely innocent, even being unaware that Covid had been created.
Thus, the virus that killed tens of millions and devastated the world was an American virus, and this remarkable conclusion surely explained Prof. Sachs’ striking March 16th column suggesting that America owed the world gigantic financial compensation.
Given Haslam’s hypothesis, it’s easy to understand why his book needed to be self-published and will almost certainly be totally ignored by every major Western media outlet.
Although there are several separate strands to Haslam’s analysis, I thought he made a pretty strong case for most of these, while also solving some of the strange mysteries that had puzzled so many observers.
His analysis seemed to straighten out a number of the mistakes, unintentional or otherwise, that earlier lab-leak advocates had quoted back-and-forth so many times until they became widely accepted truths.
But Haslam’s important work can only be properly understood when placed in the context of what so many Americans and others around the world had originally come to believe about the origins of the Covid disaster.
The Demonization of China for the Wuhan Lab-Leak
When word of the outbreak of a mysterious new viral disease in the central Chinese city of Wuhan reached the world’s media in the first few days of January 2020, American tensions with China under the Trump Administration had been at a very high level, and right-wing activists had already spent years heavily demonizing China, portraying our main geopolitical competitor as a global font of evil.
Almost immediately, our CIA-affiliated propaganda outlets such as Radio Free Asia began emphasizing that the city was home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), one of China’s most advanced viral research facilities.
Some journalists and activists even promoted the theory that the Covid virus had been a Chinese bioweapon that had accidentally leaked from one of its labs. Indeed, as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News journalist Sharri Markson later recounted in her 2021 book What Really Happened in Wuhan, some influential anti-China activists argued that a faction of the Chinese government might have deliberately released the deadly virus in one of their own largest cities as part of a murky political power-struggle, though she herself claimed never to have been convinced by that suggestion.
While these sorts of anti-China theories soon became widespread within the conservative wing of the mainstream media, far more extreme beliefs began circulating in less respectable venues. For example, within a few weeks numerous Internet websites began republishing the alleged text of a 2005 speech by a top Chinese general in which he declared that China planned to use biological weapons to exterminate most of America’s population, then conquer the world and send forth hundreds of millions of Chinese to colonize our own newly depopulated territory along with that of many other countries.
Although such outrageous notions were hardly endorsed by mainstream conservatives, Alex Jones eagerly promoted them to his audience of many millions, and through social media they probably somewhat filtered into the consciousness of many ordinary Republicans and conservatives.
With so many right-wingers having become convinced that Covid was a leaked Chinese bioweapon, related propaganda soon attracted huge attention on the Internet.
Anti-China activists and anti-China websites began promoting anti-China propaganda-videos allegedly showing large numbers of ordinary Chinese suddenly dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan as a result of the fearsome Chinese bioweapon now uncontrollably circulating in that city. In those early days, even respectable mainstream analysts wildly over-estimated Covid’s fatality rate.
As a result, a powerful narrative took hold among many Americans of that ideological ilk. The evil Chinese had created a devastating biological weapon that they had probably been planning to unleash against America and the rest of the world but they were so incompetent that they had instead allowed it to leak into their own society. Thus, their malevolently fatal own-goal might bring down America’s most powerful global rival.
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