The Wuhan lab: Chekhov's Gun or Red Herring?

Musings about the role of China in Pandemic Act 3

Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously observed that “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

I started following the Corona story on January 8, 2020. Around that time the New York Times (no longer a subscriber) began regular reporting of corona cases and deaths in China. As the numbers rose, seemingly exponentially, during that month, I couldn’t help but follow the story to see what would happen. I became an “early adopter” of the obsessive corona scoreboard watching that would become our national fixation in the spring. On January 29, 2020 ZeroHedge posted an article detailing the likely lab origin of the virus, and highlighting the close proximity of the both the WIV and Chinese CDC to the wet market. Two days later Twitter permanently suspended ZeroHedge’s account; the first salvo in what would become an “information war” of censorship and narrative control that continues to this day. While ZeroHedge eventually got their Twitter account back, discussion of the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” was relegated to the fringes of the internet for over a year. The dam finally broke on May 11, 2021, during Rand Paul’s Round One with Fauci.

As our country set about the task of self-immolation in the spring of 2020, my mind would often wander back to the Wuhan lab. If one virus escaped, what would prevent others from escaping? If the virus was released intentionally, wouldn’t the intent be to provoke us into an ultimately self-defeating response? Can we trust anything that comes out of China?

As it happens, there was more than one ‘rifle on the wall’ during Pandemic Act 1. On January 13, 2020, one week before the first covid case in the US and just two days after China posted the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, Moderna’s vaccine design was completed.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was also designed “over one weekend” in late January 2020, based on the same genetic sequence provided by China.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-designed-in-hours-one-weekend-2020-12

It is often said that the US and China face a Thucydides Trap; wherein the US as the ruling power is challenged by the rising power China. The combination of the rising power’s growing entitlement and demand for more influence, and the ruling power’s insecurity and desire to maintain the status quo, often lead to war. Some make the argument that we are already in a cold war with China.

China isn’t exactly subtle with their fuck-yous: In August 2020, while America was struggling through our “second wave” of covid and BLM protests in the streets, the Chinese were throwing raves in Wuhan.

It is certainly possible that China is a red herring. Martin Armstrong has suggested that the virus could have been released there for the purpose of creating a conflict between China and the US. Whatever the truth ultimately turns out to be, the possibility China released covid strategically should have been ruled out before our covid response was crafted. Consider some of the risks that remain on the table as we enter Pandemic Act 3:

1. Under Fauci’s direction, Ralph Baric taught the Chinese how to manipulate coronaviruses via serial passaging using humanized mice. This involves passing the virus from host to host at rapid intervals; allowing it to mutate along the way (just as it now continues to mutate from human host to human host.) If SARS-CoV-2 was created using this technique, it is not necessarily the result of the “final” passaging. China may possess many of “stages” of the virus throughout its evolution. This information disparity could be leveraged against the US and other countries in surprising and “novel” ways.

2. The Chinese-supplied coronavirus genetic sequence was used to design our covid vaccines. We have now injected Chinese spike protein code into over 200M Americans. It seems reasonable to wonder whether China might have included a little something special in that sequence; only time will tell.

3. Most Americans, and especially most of our military, now have identical antibodies to the coronavirus spike protein. While (possibly) protective against one strain of coronavirus, the same antibodies could enhance disease from a different strain of coronavirus. Chinese scientists could work backwards from the antibody to develop a “variant” that causes paradoxical disease enhancement.

Responding at “warp speed” to the China virus could turn out to be a fatal mistake in a cold war with a patient enemy. As Pandemic Act 3 unfolds, let’s hope the rifle stays on the wall.