I came of age during the late Cold War Era, and while the possibility of nuclear war was regarded as horrifying, it was hardly unthinkable, being the subject of countless films and stories and with the rival U.S. and Soviet arsenals regularly compared in newspapers and magazines.

However, biological warfare did indeed seem unthinkable. Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon had ordered the destruction of our entire biowarfare arsenal and soon signed an international treaty with his Soviet counterparts to outlaw those horrifying weapons. The release of deadly, self-replicating biological organisms that respected no national borders obviously raised uniquely dangerous risks, and I easily understood why such weapons could never possibly be used in combat, especially by our own government.

Preconceived notions sometimes crack and crumble a bit before they finally collapse. For years I’d begun to see claims about the past use of biological weapons floating around the Internet, but the collapse only began in early January when I read a remarkable 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine. The author was Nicholson Baker, a prominent writer and liberal public intellectual, and he made a detailed and rather persuasive case that instead of being natural, the Covid virus devastating our country and the rest of the world was artificial, the product of some lab. As an intelligent layman rather than a scientist Baker’s expertise on the topic came from the many years of research that he had undertaken for Baseless, his 2020 book documenting America’s own extensive biological warfare program.

Nearly all of Baker’s very long article concerned the Covid issue, but a few facts from that book were mentioned here and there, and these greatly surprised me. Apparently during the 1950s our biowarfare program had been assigned a priority and importance comparable to that of nuclear weapons development, and the project had also resulted in numerous accidents, many of them fatal, which was hardly something I’d ever seen mentioned in my introductory textbooks. So the actual history of the topic was apparently far more complex than I’d realized.

At the time, my focus was entirely on Covid matters and my analysis that our disastrous global epidemic was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). But after producing a long series of articles on that topic, I decided to take a closer look at the history of American biowarfare programs, with Baker’s own book being a natural starting point.

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Baker opened his volume by explaining that in 2009 he had begun to wonder about certain disputed events from the Korean War, a conflict that ended in 1953, years before he was even born. At the time, the Communist world had loudly accused the Americans of engaging in illegal “germ warfare” and the Americans had hotly denied those charges. Although never fully resolved during the decades that followed, most mainstream historians seemed to have come down on the American side, but Baker wondered who had really been telling the truth.

His initial exploration of books and articles led him to available government documents, including those found at a couple of presidential libraries and the National Archives, and he also interviewed some of the knowledgeable individuals and researchers. But none of the material he found seemed conclusive, so in 2012 he began using the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in hopes of obtaining some restricted documents that might finally resolve the matter.

He continued filing such FOIA requests for seven more years, and the nature of that landmark 1966 law, now seemingly honored as much in the breach as the observance, is a central theme of his book, almost as important as the particular historical question that originally prompted his effort, leading him to subtitle his volume “My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.” Such criticism seems warranted given that the original statute required that agencies should respond with their documents within twenty working days, and if another agency needed to be consulted, they should do so “with all practicable speed.” But in reality, years of delay are not uncommon, with one outstanding FOIA request now more than a quarter-century old. Furthermore, such documents when finally released are sometimes rendered almost unintelligible by the whited-out redactions of words, sentences, paragraphs, or multiple pages.

The alleged legal justification for holding back or heavily mutilating such documents is that their release would endanger our current national security, but we must ask ourselves how plausible this really seems. The events of interest to Baker took place during a war that ended almost seventy years ago, fought against a global Communist coalition that no longer exists, and it hardly seems likely that any of the operational plans or technologies from that era would have much relevance today, while surely even the grandchildren of the individuals mentioned are now quite elderly if they are even still alive.

After the fall of the USSR, the old Soviet archives were generally thrown open to the world, allowing Western historians to discover many important facts and resolve various longstanding controversies such as the Katyn Forest Massacre, but over the last couple of decades they have mostly been closed back up again. Can anyone seriously argue that keeping secret the minutes of Stalin’s old Politburo meetings is vital for protecting current Russian national security rather than merely preventing Russian national embarrassment? And the same must surely be true with regard to almost all our own secret documents from the early 1950s.

At one point in his quest, Baker described sitting in a reading room of the National Archives building knowing that just on the other side of a thin wall were the 21 unavailable documents that would conclusively resolve his long investigation one way or the other. Instead, he was forced to make do with what he had been able to obtain, massive redactions and all.

By 2019 Baker had spent more than a decade on his project, punctuated by writing several unrelated but successful books and novels, and having reached his mid-sixties, he felt sure that the patient government bureaucrats would successfully outlast him. He had accumulated thousands of pages of notes and many boxes of reports and other materials, as well as a great deal of important personal knowledge that would not survive him, so he finally decided to write a book telling others what he had learned and allowing them to use the information for themselves.

Lacking access to the documents he had spent so many years fruitlessly seeking, he abandoned any effort to produce a polished chronological narrative. The author is best known as a novelist, so rather than writing in a dryly academic style, he instead chose to produce several months’ worth of long diary-style entries, mostly discussing and analyzing the contents and implications of the various documents he had uncovered, but leavening his account by including brief descriptions of his personal life and activities. Although his style was unassuming and informal, the main text itself, running less than 150,000 words, was backed by more than fifty pages of detailed source notes. The credibility of his material is indicated by the glowing cover-blurbs from noted writers who had covered related subjects.

Question 1– Your views on the Coronavirus and Covid vaccine are very different than those of Unz Review writers, like Paul Craig Roberts, CJ Hopkins, Israel Shamir and myself. In your estimation, what are the main areas of disagreement and why do you think your analysis is more probable than theirs?

Ron Unz– I’d also put Gilad Atzmon in your group, as well as a few additional contributors.

I think the biggest area of early disagreement was regarding whether the Covid virus was about as dangerous as the mainstream media was making it out to be. I thought it probably was, while an overwhelming majority of the anti-establishment writers and commenters on this webzine and elsewhere disagreed, in some cases possibly fueled by the early public statements of President Trump and Fox News people taking that same position.

Although I can’t be sure, here’s my suspicion about why some of this misinformation took such strong hold. Soon after the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was first revealed to the world, various anti-China groups and websites began producing and promoting propaganda-videos claiming that Chinese society was collapsing from this deadly disease. Some of these hugely popular videos showed Chinese people supposedly dropping dead while walking in the streets, and sometimes suggested that Covid was a deadly Chinese bioweapon that had somehow escaped from one of their weapons labs and would wipe out much of China’s population. Also Covid was closely related to SARS, which had had a 10% to 15% fatality rate. So early on I think there were reasonably widespread rumors going around on social media that Covid had a very high fatality rate, perhaps in the 5% or 10% range, and that it might devastate the human race, naturally leading to a great deal of fear-mongering and panic.

Obviously, those numbers turned out to be completely wrong, and as a consequence many of the people who had been bombarded with such extreme nonsense reacted against it, arguing that Covid wasn’t really so very dangerous at all, which is entirely true, at least relative to those early, inflated figures. But perhaps understandably, they then went overboard in the other direction, starting to argue that the disease wasn’t dangerous at all, possibly as a form of wishful thinking.

I don’t much use social media and had ignored all those anti-China propaganda videos, instead getting my information from the NYT, the WSJ, and other mainstream news outlets. And most of these had always suggested that Covid seemed to have a fatality rate somewhere in the range of 0.5% to 1%, but containing an extremely sharp age-skew, with people over 60 being more than 100x as vulnerable as those under 40. And these numbers seem to have held up reasonably well over time.

Obviously, a disease that usually has a survival rate better than 99% doesn’t mean the end of the world, and lots of commenters have correctly pointed this out. But it’s still a very serious illness, and if it had completely swept through America’s population of 330 million would have produced at least a couple of million deaths, and probably more than that if the critical cases overwhelmed the hospitals and caused a breakdown in the entire health care system as nearly happened in New York City very early in the epidemic.

For the first month or two, our American government had almost totally ignored the Covid problem, apparently just hoping that the virus wouldn’t spread here, but when it did, they didn’t really know what to do. The reports out of Northern Italy were horrifying and showed the huge number of deaths that could be produced by a major outbreak. Since Covid was extremely contagious and there seemed to be no effective treatments, traditional public health measures were useless. China had very quickly and effectively stamped out the disease with minimal fatalities using an unprecedented series of local and national lockdowns, so America and most Western governments decided to try the same thing, but they did so in a very haphazard and disorganized way, that wasn’t very effective. Meanwhile, the lockdowns, mandatory masking, and social distancing were tremendously disruptive and unpopular, especially among libertarians and right-wingers, leading to a huge political backlash.

Public health became a bitter ideological issue, which didn’t help with its implementation. Once people stop believing the media, they turn to their own favored sources, which can become echo-chambers based upon wishful thinking. People started claiming that Covid wasn’t really dangerous at all and that very few people were dying from it, which is entirely incorrect but became widely popular in certain circles. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in classifying cause of death, leading people to argue that the Covid fatality figures were vastly inflated, and they sometimes misunderstood government statistics. I’ll quote a sobering comment I’ve repeated on a number of occasions:

But here’s a listing of TOTAL American deaths from all causes over the last few years, taken directly from the CDC website:

2014: 2,626,418
2015: 2,712,630
2016: 2,744,248
2017: 2,813,503
2018: 2,839,205
2019: 2,854,838
2020: 3,384,426

You’ll notice that the numbers are fairly steady until 2020 when they suddenly jumped by well over 500,000.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think that America had been struck by a dangerous disease epidemic that year.

It’s obviously just a matter of personal opinion whether an extra half-million deaths in 2020 is a big number or a small number…

So America had more than 500,000 “excess deaths” during 2020, and additional tens or hundreds of thousands so far during 2021. Our official Covid death toll is now well over 600,000 but the experts in public health statistics at the University of Washington argue that nearly a million Americans have already died of Covid. Those are enormous numbers, much larger than the combined death toll of all our foreign wars, and they came despite the unprecedented public health measures the government (poorly) implemented over the last year to try to control the spread of the disease. It’s easy to imagine that millions of Americans might have died if the disease had spread in completely unchecked fashion.

As far as I can tell, nearly all Western countries did a very poor job of controlling the Covid outbreak, while East Asian nations like China, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore, as well as Australia and New Zealand, did a much better job.

I come from a scientific background and I prefer to believe in reality. A disease that has already killed so many hundreds of thousands of Americans seems like a very serious problem to me.

Question 2– You say: “I come from a scientific background and I prefer to believe in reality.” That’s fine, but where exactly is the scientific evidence that supports lockdowns as a way to contain a highly-contagious virus like Covid-19?

I would argue that there isn’t any. Lockdown restrictions were unprecedented, capricious, desperate and thoroughly unscientific. Where are the studies, the experiments, and the clinical trials that proved that they would work?

Again, there are none.

Why were people instructed to stand 6 feet apart rather than 4 feet or 10 feet?

It’s ridiculous, and it’s always been ridiculous.

I don’t use social media much myself, but I try to monitor the activity on my own articles. About ten days ago, my most recent Covid piece suddenly caught fire on Twitter, with many dozens of Tweets that day, almost all of them from Chinese people. Most of these Tweeters had relatively few Followers, suggesting that they were far more active on Weibo than any of our own social networks and therefore probably lived in China rather than were immigrants to the West.

Entitled American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak, this article had been published more than a month earlier and had gotten the usual handful of Tweets plus some Retweets of its release announcement, with the activity soon tailing off to almost nothing. But the new wave of Tweeters came in a flood and continued for many days, soon totaling around 200, many times more than any of my other recent pieces. Something was obviously stirring up the Chinese Internet.

• American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 31, 2021 • 5,200 Words

The article itself might certainly interest the Chinese. It came as the latest installment in my fourteen month series strongly arguing that the worldwide Covid epidemic had been the unintended blowback of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). With the mainstream American media these days so heavily vilifying China for the alleged Wuhan lab-leak that unleashed a virus killing millions, my own writings stood virtually alone in making the contrary case. My evidence seemed strong even overwhelming, but how had those Chinese citizens discovered my work?

I soon learned that China’s second largest official news agency had run a brief summary of my controversial views on its English-language website:

U.S. publisher rejects random lab-leak theory of COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 is less likely to be the result of a lab leak than a biowarfare attack, a U.S. publisher has said in a recent article.

Existential evidence suggested the possibility of a coronavirus biowarfare attack launched by Washington more than the lab-leak theory, said Ron Unz in a review article published on the Unz Review website in late May.

China had been hit by various viruses right when the country was locked in a growing conflict with America for years, noted Unz, the website’s editor-in-chief and publisher.

Additionally, the outbreak of COVID-19 “appeared at the worst time and place for China,” referring to the Lunar New Year holiday with a travel rush, and the major transit hub of Wuhan in central China with a huge volume of passengers, said Unz, who believes the timing of the emergence of COVID-19 is “suspicious.”

“300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the Military World Games, providing a perfect opportunity for releasing a viral weapon,” he noted, calling the scenario “a strange coincidence.”

“The characteristics of COVID-19, including high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal in an anti-economy bioweapon,” Unz said, adding it’s odd to speculate that a Chinese lab would release a virus perfectly designed to damage the Chinese economy.

Although just a small first step, this development might eventually have major consequences. My original April 2020 article making the case for an American biowarfare attack had quickly provoked an unprecendented amount of interest and engagement on Facebook, but this immediately came to a halt when that social media giant summarily banned our entire website one week later. That purge was soon followed by a complete deranking of all our web pages by Google.

With those two primary gatekeepers to the Western Internet having slammed shut their doors and all our material already totally boycotted by the mainstream media, getting others to take notice of subsequent analysis had become quite challenging. But if the Chinese began discussing it, Western journalists might be forced to do so as well, and they would soon discover astonishing information, facts that had been entirely ignored by our mainstream media but in most cases were very well documented.

Much of this remarkable material is summarized in my most recent Covid article, released just a few days after that flood of Chinese Tweets began and at 13,000 words by far the longest piece in the series. The article was intended to tie up many of the loose ends that had already been generated during this past year of heated debate, involving 7,500 comments totaling more than a million words.

• American Pravda: the Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 12, 2021 • 13,100 Words

As early as April 2020, I had noted the very strange fact that after the Covid outbreak in Wuhan came to world attention, the deadly disease next suddenly appeared in Iran’s Holy City of Qom, more than 3,000 miles away, a very unexpected development given the near-total absence of any significant local Chinese population which might have served as plausible vectors for the virus.

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

The Alleged Wuhan Lab-Leak and Its Scientific Skeptics

During most of the last year theories regarding the origins of Covid, whether conspiratorial or otherwise, had disappeared from the public debate, pushed aside by the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and the final stages of the heated presidential campaign.

In early January, prominent liberal author and public intellectual Nicholson Baker had tried to revive the issue with a 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine, only to see his Covid lab-leak theory swamped and forgotten when the DC Capitol was stormed by a mob of outraged Trumpists two days later.

• The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
  For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?
  Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words

But then on May 2nd, a revolution occurred after former New York Times science journalist and editor Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article on Medium. His careful 11,000 word analysis mustered the strong evidence that the virus was the artificial product of a human lab, suggesting that it had probably leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most advanced viral research facility. That laboratory was known to have been working with those types of coronaviruses and was located in Wuhan, the site of the initial outbreak, raising all sorts of obvious suspicions.

• The Origin of Covid
  Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
  Nicholas Wade • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists • May 5, 2021 • 11,000 Words

The floodgates soon opened and over the next few weeks far more was written on that subject than had been produced during the previous twelve months combined. In just one example, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., the forty-five year veteran of the Times who had spearheaded his paper’s Covid coverage, published a striking mea culpa and embraced the lab-leak hypothesis, admitting that he and other Timesmen had previously dismissed the idea as “far right” lunacy, closely associated with “Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.”

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory
  Donald G. McNeil, Jr. • Medium • May 17, 2021 • 4,700 Words

McNeil had already retired from the Times the previous December after an unrelated controversy, but others at his former newspaper had also experienced a similar change of heart. For more than a year, the editors had been fiercely critical of the lab-leak theory, heavily promoted by Donald Trump and his allies, but with Trump now safely gone, their perspective changed.

In late June, Zeynep Tufekci, one of their opinion columnists, published a 5,500 word article harshly criticizing China and arguing that the global epidemic had probably been the consequence of a Chinese lab-leak. Prof. Tufekci’s field of study was sociology rather than the biological sciences and her expertise lay in social media, but the appearance of her long piece surely reflected a seismic shift in the views of her top editors.

• Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
  Zeynep Tufekci • The New York Times • June 25, 2021 • 5,500 Words

A far longer exposition of this emerging American media consensus had appeared at the beginning of that same month in Vanity Fair. The 12,000 word article strongly favored the lab-leak theory and focused upon the bureaucratic infighting regarding that issue within the national security apparatus of the Trump Administration. Based upon months of investigative reporting and numerous interviews, the piece seemed to heavily rely upon anonymous Trump intelligence sources, while generally taking our government claims at face value.

• The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
  Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
  Katherine Eban • Vanity Fair • June 3, 2021 • 12,000 Words

Moreover, although the suggestion was presented in a defensive, insinuating manner, the long article also raised serious suspicions that Covid had been developed as a Chinese bioweapon, with that particular word appearing nine times in the text. Millions had already died around the world, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, so some might find it troubling that such inflammatory accusations had appeared in one of America’s most prestigious general interest magazines, especially considering the near-total lack of any supporting evidence. This article demonstrated the drastic shift in elite media sentiment, with theories previously confined to the extreme anti-China ideological fringe now occupying the center of American journalism.

This situation carried disturbing echoes of how those same mainstream media organs had played a similar role twenty years ago in fostering the hoax of Saddam’s WMD and promoting our disastrous Iraq War. Indeed, I found it rather ironic that one of the main Trump Administration Covid experts quoted in that article and others was David Feith, whose father Douglas Feith had been one of the leading Neocons involved in that notorious Bush Administration intelligence fraud. Moreover, the lead author of the front-page Wall Street Journal story that helped to revive the lab-leak theory in late May was Michael R. Gordon, who had previously shared a byline with Judith Miller on most of the fraudulent Iraqi WMD stories that had propelled us into war. And in early 2020, former Mossad agent Dany Shoham had been one of the earliest figures suggesting that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon leaked from the Wuhan lab, with few remembering that in 2001 he had falsely fingered Saddam’s regime as the source of the Anthrax mailings. It almost seemed that members of the old Iraqi WMD cast were reassembling for a revival.

“…..we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory (and) was designed as a bioweapon… China was the intended target (and) America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment… The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives… would have been sent to Wuhan to release it.” Ron Unz, Editor of The Unz Review; from the text

Question 1– What makes your theory about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so controversial, is not that it suggests that the pathogen was created in a lab, but that it is, in fact, a bioweapon that was deliberately released by US agents prosecuting a secret war on presumed enemies of the United States. Here’s the “money quote” from your article titled, “American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”:

“…..we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory along with a good possibility that it was designed as a bioweapon, yet we lack serious indications that any lab-leak occurred. So if the original Wuhan outbreak was due to the deployment of a powerful bioweapon but not one that had accidentally leaked from any lab, then surely China was the intended target, the victim rather than the perpetrator….

Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it…. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.” (“American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”, Ron Unz, The Unz Review)

So, here’s the question: Do you think recent developments lend credibility to your explosive theory or do you now believe that Covid-19 was merely “accidentally” leaked through human error?

Ron Unz– As everyone knows, over the last month the entire “mainstream narrative” of the Covid outbreak has been completely overturned. Just a few weeks ago, anyone suggesting the virus was artificial was denounced and ridiculed as a “conspiracy theorist” and any such statements were automatically banned by Facebook.

But exactly these same prohibited ideas are now widely accepted and promoted by leading figures in the media and political establishments. The 45-year veteran of the New York Times who spearheaded its Covid coverage has now admitted that he was completely mistaken, and that the virus probably came from a lab. The three billion Facebook users can now openly discuss this possibility.

The total collapse of this “natural virus” propaganda-bubble was produced by a self-published 11,000 word article by longtime science journalist Nicholas Wade. Yet the astonishing thing is that almost none of the crucial facts he cited in his article were new. Nearly all of Wade’s important evidence had been publicly available for a full year, but was simply ignored by our entire political and media establishment, partly because Trump took that position and they all hated Trump.

So the virus probably came from a lab. But the question now becomes “which lab?” Just as the MSM had promoted the totally unsubstantiated belief that Covid was natural, the MSM has now begun promoting the equally unsubstantiated belief that Covid accidentally leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the evidence of any such Wuhan lab-leak is so thin as to be almost invisible.

It’s true that Chinese researchers at that lab were experimenting with related bat viruses, but many American researchers were doing very similar experiments, and for decades bat viruses have also been the central focus of America’s huge biowarfare program.

Wuhan is an enormously large metropolis of 11 million, much larger than New York City, and the Wuhan lab is located 20 miles(!) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was the earliest epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak. A distance of 20 miles seems pretty far for an accidental lab-leak.

Immediately after the initial Wuhan outbreak, the virus began infecting Iran’s top political elites, and killing a number of them. Isn’t it implausible that a random lab-leak in Wuhan would so quickly jump to the Holy City of Qom on the other side of the world?

There are many other aspects of the timing of the outbreak that seem very inconsistent with a random, accidental lab-leak.

Until a few weeks ago, the MSM and Facebook shut down anyone who disagreed with the “natural virus” theory, even though the evidence for an artificial virus had always been much stronger. They’ve now said “Oops! We were wrong. The virus probably came from a lab.” So I think they’ll now have a much harder time shutting down any debate about which lab.

Once people became aware of the basic facts of the virus, belief that it was artificial natural quickly collapsed. And once people become aware of the basic facts of the initial Covid outbreak, I think that belief in an accidental lab-leak will also begin to collapse.

Question 2–You seem to have anticipated my next question, but I’ll go ahead and ask it anyway. In another one of your articles, you say this:

“As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?”

My question is this: Is this the smoking gun? In other words, do these two “attacks” on enemies of the United States strongly suggest Washington’s involvement?

Ron Unz– Well, it’s certainly an *extremely* odd coincidence for those who claim the global Covid outbreak was caused by an accidental, random lab-leak of a virus in Wuhan, China.