Covid-19: alternate origin stories

Pre-Wuhan Covid-19 in Italy, bioweapons research in Russia and China, and curious coincidences.

There’s a lot of credible information that casts doubt on the official story of Covid-19’s origins.

Starting with a big one, Covid-19 antibodies were detected in Italy months before the Wuhan outbreak. The data isn’t entirely solid, but it comes from credible sources that admit their provisional status, and it’s huge if true.

On another front, there was an explosion and fire at a virology research institute in Novosibirsk in September 2019, such as a James Bond type figure may trigger to destroy evidence or cause a diversion. It wasn’t any old institute of virology either, but the infamous Vector institute, which was at the center of the Soviet bioweapons programme.

Recommended reading if you want to know how scary Soviet bioweapons were.

September 2019. The timing is, at the very least, extremely curious.

Wuhan itself is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which hosts the world’s most impressive collection of bat coronaviruses, and a prominent scientist specialising in them, known affectionately as batwoman. You can’t make this up. 

Batwoman disappeared for months following the outbreak, sparking rumours of her defection. More likely, it was the usual “rapid reeducation and loyalty assurance training in a PLA dungeon” thing that happens to prominent Chinese citizens in high stakes situations with alarming regularity. Jack Ma could talk. Nothing to see here.

It gets better. The Institute engaged in gain-of-function research, which means genetically enhancing wild viruses to increase their infectiousness and/or lethality – a fascinating, fascinating topic. The Institute held and worked with SARS-CoV2’s closest known natural relative, a virus known since 2013 that shares 96,2% of genetic information with SARS-CoV2. It’s not a huge stretch to suspect that SARS-CoV2 may be an artificially enhanced variant of the wild virus. 

There are rumors (or possible US propaganda, who knows with these things) that multiple employees of the institute fell ill with Covid-like symptoms ahead of the Wuhan outbreak. Or maybe they just had the flu and the Trump administration seized on the opportunity to make China look bad. Not that China needs any help with that.

At the very least, it would be a big coincidence if SARS-CoV2 just happened to appear in a wet market in the same city that has China’s biggest virology institute that specifically studies bat coronaviruses and does gain-of-function experiments on them. 

Very big coincidence.

There are more chin-scratching things. 

China waited a year to allow international inspectors into the Institute, who at that point would have been able to discover exactly jackshit even if the Institute had a full zombie apocalypse scenario in December 2019. The results are therefore so much toilet paper, and multiple first world governments voiced their diplomatically worded, but unequivocal view that the WHO inspection in Wuhan was a charade.

The Washington Post (whose “democracy dies in darkness” motto is to be understood as aspirational) described the visit as “experts debunk fringe theory”, which is such an over the top, lady-doth-protest-too-much string of manipulative weaselwords, such a low-skill, high-effort bruteforce clumsy attempt at epistemic violence, that the sensible conclusion is that the “expertly” “debunked” “fringe” theory is probably correct. 

The virus has unusual properties, and is better equipped to infect humans than any other species, which is kinda weird for a wild bat/pangolin/whatever virus. 

If similar functionality – binding to the ACE2 protein – can be bolted onto any virus, Covid-19 would have been a perfect low-danger rehearsal to study spread and institutional responses around the world. It would enable a hypothetical bioterrorist to model what would happen if they released one of the properly nasty natural or enhanced viruses they have on ice, such as airborne ebola, HIV-flu or other meme bioweapons that may actually exist. 

We’ll never know for sure, but the vanilla guy-ate-bat story of Covid-19 seems pretty unlikely. If you believe that, I have a WMD stash in Iraq to sell you.

The official version is batshit in all senses.

One has to be an NPC to believe it, and one has to be an NPC to believe the current Chinese infection numbers. Four cases a day in a country of a billion and a half that’s open to international travel, of a disease with frequent asymptomatic but infectious cases? Impossible unless China has an effective cure or vaccine they somehow stealthily administered to the whole population, which is of course implausible, and I present it only as a less absurd alternative to China having four cases a day. And it’s not like they could cover up an ongong epidemic of millions of people. There doesn’t seem to be any good explanation for the numbers, and I welcome your theories. 

There are many questions. Was Covid-19 linked to the explosion in the Russian institute of virology in September 2019? Was it just coincident timing? Is there clandestine joint Sino-Russian bioweapons research? Did the virus escape from the lab in Wuhan? Was there pre-Wuhan Covid-19 in Italy? 

I’m aware all of this information doesn’t easily fit into a singular coherent narrative.

If Covid-19 was rampaging around Italy as early as summer/autumn 2019, it can’t have come from a lab leak in Wuhan in December, nor the September blast in Russia.

If SARS-CoV2 came from Russia, it can’t have simultaneously have come from Wuhan, unless the two countries secretly work together on engineered pathogens hooooly shiite nonononono. 

There are several ways to assemble the pieces, we don’t even have all the pieces, and we don’t know what we don’t know. The pieces we do have, however, already throw serious doubt on the official narrative. 

For the sake of speculation, here are two scenarios:

Highly likely scenario that I think is what happened: there was an accident in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly involving an artificially enhanced virus. In the following critical weeks, when the pandemic could have been prevented, the Communist Party opted instead to attempt an idiotic cover-up. Once it was clear the virus was going to spread, a media psyop was launched involving horrific “““leaked””” imagery of Chinese soldiers welding people shut in apartment buildings and people collapsing in the streets, which was theatre for western audiences, intended to scare western governments into overreacting, destroying their economies and discrediting institutions. 

(If you’re not sure why something was done, look at the result and assume that was the intention.)

The likely axis of spread into Europe was via slave labo…. ahem, migrant workers in Chinese sweatsho… ahem, garment manufactures in northern Italy, possibly via the city of Wenzhou, whose extensive connections with Iran also possibly explain why Iran was another early Covid-19 flashpoint. 

Highly speculative scenario that would make for a good James Bond movie: A Sino-Russian joint bioweapons project, working with the wild virus discovered in 2013 in China, which killed several miners, and taking advantage of Russian bioweapons expertise, was getting close to creating a very dangerous pathogen, or maybe already had one. In response, western intelligence blew up the Novosibirsk lab, destroying half the project, and released SARS-CoV2 – a less dangerous variant of the speculative superpathogen – in Wuhan, pinning the blame on and compromising the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which housed the Chinese half of the project. The resulting pandemic causes the world population to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV2, providing cross-immunity against the closely related superpathogen that Russia and/or China have in a freezer somewhere. A benign deliberate release.

Or maybe western intelligence wasn’t involved, and in the spirit of comic book villains backstabbing each other, the Chinese blew up the Russian lab to have monopoly on the virus, and the Russians, having backed up the virus elsewhere, retaliated by releasing it in Wuhan. 

This speculative scenario would explain why Russian troll farms continue spewing unprecedented volumes of anti-vaccine disinformation. They’re super mad the world is going to be largely immune to their bioweapon.

Oh, and Russia was the first to have a vaccine. Because maybe they had it before the world even knew about the virus. 

What’s more, the Russian Sputnik vaccine was revealed to have different compositions in different markets, and they recently sold the Slovaks a shipment of hundreds of thousands of doses, whose composition didn’t match the specification. It can be literally anything. When the Slovaks asked for more information, the Russians withdrew the shipment.

“If you want to know what’s in it, we’re taking it back”. Does that inspire confidence in you?

So in this scenario, the Russians would vaccinate their own population (and perhaps friendly countries) with the real vaccine, sell everyone else duds or worse, and then release the virus – SARS-CoV2 or the big one – in the “near abroad”. Central-Eastern Europe becomes easy pickings. Nobody else is affected, because nobody else is insane enough to even ponder using Sputnik. 

Indeed, governments in the region have been suspiciously inept, even by their usual standards, at sourcing western vaccines, or perhaps they are deliberately stalling to make room for a Sputnik-based Russian PR offensive, against the overwhelming wishes of the populations. 

Maybe that’s not the only Russian offensive it’s meant to make room for.

It’s gossamer threads of speculation with few hard facts, but it fits the Russian modus operandi 110%. 

For the love of fuck, get vaccinated with something western. 

Ok, that spy novel stuff is speculative and presented more for entertainment purposes, but the lab leak is super likely. The reason why the lab leak theory fell out of favor was simply that Donald Trump supported it, which was enough to trigger a knee-jerk opposition to it. 

And of course, Chinese influence and money quickly worked to turn the narrative, including through the WHO, for whom (…ahem) the pandemic has been a reputational nightmare.

“Weird bat virus incidentally emerged in city with weird bat virus lab doing secret bioweapons research, and those two things aren’t related” was always the real conspiracy theory. It is an insult to people’s intelligence.

China didn’t release SARS-CoV2 on purpose, but they quickly and masterfully took advantage of the situation once it was out. They acted through political proxies to maximise the economic damage of Covid-19 in countries of interest, preparing to fill the vacuum with economic colonisa…ahem, Chinese investment, sold faulty medical equipment at exorbitant prices, sometimes to countries that weeks earlier gave China high quality medical equipment for free, probably directed the WHO to play down the pandemic, refuse to call it a pandemic for a ridiculously long time, and spread anti-mask disinformation when the virus was just beginning to spread globally and could still be stopped with trivial precautions (or maybe the WHO was being independently dumb), and all around mined maximum advantage out of the pandemic which their (at best) negligence caused – global bioterrorism by omission followed by bloodthirsty opportunism.