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https://twitter.com/KittySn52889207/status/1226405463786278913?s=19
Bioweapons, secret labs, and the CIA: pro-Kremlin actors blame the U.S. for coronavirus outbreak
Multiple narratives begin to emerge on fringe Russian outlets and social media, following a familiar playbook
A previously unknown variant of coronavirus that appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 has already infected thousands of people, with cases confirmed in at least 20 countries. While epidemiologists work to identify the exact source of the outbreak, officially known as 2019-nCov, pro-Kremlin actors are already blaming the United States for supposedly using bioweapons to disseminate the virus. So far, their efforts have gained very little traction.
The practice of spreading disinformation about public health threats is nothing new. During the Cold War, a Soviet disinformation campaign blamed the United States for the AIDS virus. Known as Operation Infektion, the campaign began in 1983 when a little-known Indian newspaper — later exposed to be financed by the Soviet leadership — published an anonymous letter with the headline, “AIDS May Invade India: Mystery Disease Caused by U.S. Experiments.” The column pushed a conspiracy theory that the virus causing AIDS was developed in an underground U.S. biological weapons lab. Over several years, the false narrative was picked up by other media, before eventually making its way to the United States, including CBS Evening News. In 1992, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service admitted that Operation Infektion had been backed by the KGB.
A similar pattern of spreading disinformation appears to be evolving alongside the current outbreak. Narratives blaming the United States for the coronavirus outbreak first appeared on fringe pro-Kremlin outlets, and are spreading to well-established Kremlin media, Russian politicians, and social media platforms including YouTube and VKontakte (VK). While it is not as far along as Operation Infektion, the mechanisms available to spread narratives quickly are much larger and faster in today’s media environment than they were during the Cold War.
Multiple narratives get things rolling
Fringe pro-Kremlin outlets have accused the United States of using bioweapons against China, claiming the U.S. is using economic and military tools to pressure its competitor China. The economic version of the narrative, published by Topcor.ru, suggested that the ongoing trade war with China has cost the U.S. billions of dollars, and the latter would benefit from the virus undermining the former’s economy.
An alternate version of the narrative, disseminated by Katushya.org, states that the Chinese military is claiming the virus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of breaking China from within. The fringe outlet suggested that the outbreak is essentially a U.S. bioweaponry reconnaissance operation with the goal of testing the capabilities of Chinese biological weapons defenses.
Additional outlets referred to statements by pro-Kremlin military expert Igor Nikulin on TV Zvezda, who claimed that the appearance of the virus looked like sabotage. According to Nikulin, the United States actively researches lethal disease vectors to test them within a population while simultaneously developing cures for them. Similar narratives have begun to appear on more mainstream pro-Kremlin outlets, including Pravda TV and Izvestia.
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Zhirinovsky Weighs In
Russian nationalist Member of Parliament Vladimir Zhirinovsky has also picked up these narratives, amplifying stories originating from fringe outlets and amplifying them on other channels. In one case he claimed the virus appeared in China because U.S. pharmaceutical companies want to cash in on the vaccine, while in the other he said the U.S. has allegedly used biological weapons against China. In both instances, Zhirinovsky claimed that the main goal of the U.S. would be to undermine the Chinese economy.
Amplification on social platforms making little progress
In addition to news outlets, small Russian YouTube channels are beginning to share videos which narrators discuss the coronavirus outbreak and link its appearance in China to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as well as U.S. bioweapons research. So far the spread on YouTube appears to be limited to relatively unknown Russian channels with little to no audience.
The Russian social network VK has is also being employed to spread the same disinformation narratives blaming the United States for the outbreak. At the time of publishing, engagement also appears limited, with some stories attracting hundreds or thousands of views and others attracting close to zero.
Conclusion
It is unknown whether these narratives blaming the United States for the coronavirus outbreak will spread alongside the outbreak itself, but it serves as a reminder of Russia’s long history of employing anti-U.S. influence operations during public health crises. While Operation Infektion took years to spread, ultimately it sowed doubt regarding the origins of the AIDS virus. Their current efforts to create disinformation narratives for coronavirus have so far been more successful than their ability to amplify them. The DFRLab will continue to monitor the information environment around coronavirus.
Eto Buziashviliis a Research Associate, Caucasus, with the Digital Forensic Research Lab and is based in Georgia.
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Received via Whatsapp: Author unknown
*I consider the following FAKE NEWS.
American CIA injected and planted the so-called “Wuhan virus” into Wuhan, China in or around the dates of October 31st 2019 and December 31st 2019 with intent to harm China and with potential to destablize and perhaps even motive to collapse China from within.
US wants to re-route global supply chain around China, to bypass China and isolate China on the world stage vs China wanting to use Huawei-enabled digital-blockchain Yuan, cashless WeChat, etc to topple the US Petrodollar hegemony and the BRI relationships and bi-lateral trade/infrastructure agreements in order to propel the world to adopt the use of the digital Yuan, and in order to have the world bypass the SWIFT system (since US has abused its dollar status and weaponized it for unlawful sanctions) and the US dollar as the default global reserve currency etc. It was a race against time to see whom would pull the rug from underneath the other countries feet first. US, unable to compete fairly due to its structural disadvantages and many other shortcomings, decided to go the biological attack route, which allows it to hide under the cover of “plausible denialability” (since it is more difficult to conclusively prove the attribution or source of a new mysterious virus than it would be to track the trajectory of an incoming thermnonuclear missile etc) to inflict maximum damage to China while minimizing the potential blow back.
Right after the signing of the so-called “Trade Deal” in which the US didn’t get what it wanted (the US did not get the sort of Plaza Accord concessions that it was hoping XI/CCP would kowtow to etc) and immediately into the start of the new decade (marking the turn of the second decade in what the PNAC would called the “new american century”) the US resorted to biological attacks in order to contain, isolate and attempt to cripple China/CCP internally and on the world stage at large. After its NED/CIA sponsored Hong Kong destablization/radicialization didn’t spill over into the rest of mainland China, and right after its intense year long anti-China anti-Huawei campaigns have peaked in effectiveness, the US releases the evil demon virus into the heart of mainland China, at the absolutely worst possible location (Wuhan being one of the Chinese main Central hubs in terms of transportation and an important city for China’s Belt and Road initiatives and estimated to have as high as 8% growth in GDP in 2020) and in also the absolute worse possible timing (right before the Chinese Lunar New year, otherwise known as the greatest annual human migration event, during a time in which shopping, spending and consumerisms activity would have been at a peak etc) in order to cripple China economically, to cut China off from the rest of the world and even force China to isolate its own cities from within, and to have the effect of smearing China’s reputation on the world stage and invoking the escalation of fear, racisms and bigotry towards the Chinese people abroad.
All this comes right on top of the heels of the event last fall, African swine fever (ASF), which had never before seen in China but now mysteriously appeared with the onset of the US trade war, decimated half of China’s pigs, which doubled pork prices and contributed to inflation causing pricy US pork exports to double in China. The odds for two such consequent anomalies, timing and location are exceedingly low. Yet both did occur – in almost perfect sequence. Particularly devasting is the very real possibility that this virus was intentionally engineered to have as long an incubation period as possible, and with the ability to hide within plain site, by being asymptomatic during its initial stages hence making it orders of magnitude more difficult to eradicate. Just recently, as recent as Feb 1st 2020, there has been yet a third mysterious outbreak in China, this time of the bird flu kind that is far more deadly to humans and wiping out Chinese chicken and poultry at the most dire of times. Indeed the coronavirus victims so far, both inside and outside of China, are only people with Chinese type of blood, Haplogroup O-M175, designed to attack that type of blood and specifically Chinese people.
Dr. Steven Hatfill Biological Weapons Expert says the Wuhan virus it will have to play it out and “run its course” not only in Wuhan but the greater mainland China. The host Steve Bannon (Trump chief campaign advisor) predicted this will crush China economically, and that its the end of the Xi/BRI/OBOR and will give US the chance to re-route trade of all countries to go-around and bypass China bringing the global supply chain back to US and its allies whilst isolating China economically, politically, etc. They are selling this to the American people and pitching it to the world as this Chinese Belt and Road connectivity is what is allowing this virus to spread so fastly to the rest of the world and that it would behoove mankind and all nations to reconsider the security and stability of their own supply chains and basically urging everyone to pull their companies, people, trade, businesses etc out of China. This is not unlike what Wilber Ross US Commerce Secretary already stated a few days ago… that this virus is good for America and will help bring lots of jobs back to the USA… seems like the goal is to use this event to pull the rug underneath China’s development feets.
I suppose it could be a coincidence that China, the geopolitical adversary and economic enemy to the United States (according to the US itself), suddenly gets this mysterious virus seemingly more potent than SARS (which itself apparently only targeted Chinese ethnic DNA and left the white/Caucasin population untouched) at the worst possible timing and in the worst possible location. Wuhan being Chinese’s central hub and this being the Chinese Lunar New Year, it has the highest ability to spread and go “super viral” whilst impacting the max amount of damage to the stability of the China, both in terms of having the max potential to cause political turmoil in the homeland (ruining people’s new year, quarantinee and lockdowns of cities of unprecendeted porportion, causing many Chinese citizens to get angry etc) and doing the maximum amount of possible damaage to the Chinese economy, ruining the New Year in which consumerisms was supposed to be at its very highest points.
Even the SARS of 2003 had an negative impact on Chinese GDP by as much as 2%, and has already turned out to be far worse and at a much more accelerated speed of spread and deaths. Unsuprisingly without need for a single bullet fired or sanction imposed, it already managed to force China to self-impose the closure of its borders and cities, most nations have already stopped flights to China including the United States itself, on the world stage it is another “ding” for China’s image and gives the propaganda mouthpieces of the West something else to gripe about, whilsts at the same time an attempt to cap Chinese One Belt One Road ambitions and sabotage China’s growing economy and hegemonic rise. It comes right on the crisp of Trump signing the fake “Trade Deal” and the UK decided to go against the US and work with Huawei…. I say something else is going on behind the scenes, more than what we are being told. We could have transition from Trade War, to Tech War to now maybe bio-war, if that is the case, then very likely the US already fired the first, second, and third shots, so to speak.
China should at least stay vigilant and have a credible deterrence contingency plan in place… In the nuclear world in which China has DF-41, the “MAD” doctrine is still well in place. But a mystery virus affords far more “plausible deniability” for the US. Thus achieving the goal with less fear of attribution and thus retribution. Instead of directly confronting China in the SCS militaristically immediately, maybe they think a better way to take China down a notch or two would be the use of “other means” to an ends.. Science and technology in the world has come a long way since the days of Westerners giving Native Americans blankets laced with smallpox to “thanksgiving” them. It is the human condition to be risk/loss adverse. A nation that would stop at nothing to achieve Maniesft Destiny on the way up surely wouldn’t have any qualms of preserving its hegemony at all costs on the way down. After all, the American way of life is nonnegotiable and Graham T. Allison predicted the likelyhood that this confrontation of a rising power with a declining power will inevitably lead to war, and history has shown that to be indeed the case. The US is applying its doctrine of maximum pressure to destroy China on all fronts, with Trade War, Tech and supply chain War, cyberwar, information and pysops war, and now biological warfare and most likely to be followed up with conventional or even nuclear war once US believes China is sufficently weakened.
Steve Bannon was hoping to “break the back of the CCP” by cutting off China’s supply chain, and was hoping the HK roits was going to catch fire in the rest of the mainland and force the CCP to lose control making it easier to do an opportunistic regime change.
I’m sure both China and US have their own red lines. If the US had any involvement in this new virus, if China finds any credible evidence, then there are a number of things China can do besides retailiting with its own bioweapon… for example, we all know the Trade War is not about trade, but wanting China to slow down in terms of hegemonic rise… for example China could simply start building Huangyan Island in the SCS, making a move that would seal the US fate as the “falling empire”. If China militarizes the island it would give China total control of the SCS region, so China can declare ADIZ over SCS, America would be pushed back to Guam, and it woulld be the beginning of the end of the petrodollar hegemony (which never could have lasted forever anyway but it would push it up along the timeline to make it collapse that much faster)
Some have said that well the virus is RNA single stranded which makes it harder to target any race specific without mutations losing the specificity over many infections cycles. And that if it were double stranded it would make it that much easier to create vaccines for and kill/contain. But I believe in this case it is about maintaining “plausible deniability” whilst not crossing any hard red lines in case attribution is established in the future. A virus outbreak that dings China’s GDP by 2 to 5 % in 2020 is not comparable to an end of civilization event that wipes out 90% of the Chinese population, for example. Whatever blowback or collateral risk is considered acceptable levels since it was deployed to China’s central Wuhan, naturally China has a self interest in containment, and the vast majority of the damage will be internal to China. It may have been engineerred as race specific single stranded RNA and knowingly by hostile forces that predicted by the time it lost its race specificity that China would have already contained it. Hence “mission accomplished” with little attribution and minimal blowback. What better way to undermine China/CCP than to have its population grow resentful of or turn against its very Government!? Already Western media is talking about how Chinese are filthy and if it wasn’t for eating rats, bats, dogs, etc this wouldn’t ever have befallen. Perfect cover for re-enforceing racists stereotypes for the ulterior motives of containing and isolating China, and that of Chinese culture, and Chinese ideology on the world stage.
All of this should be seen within the larger context and backdrop of the so called Thucydides’s Trap. For various reason, biological warfare against mainland China gives America multiprong strategic and asymmetric advantages, hence why it has now become the method and weapon of choice for the US to use against China. At what point does China take action or else find itself too little and too late to be suffering same fate as Native Americans? History has shown that America is willing to wipe out entire Han civilization to maintain american hegemony and regain full spectrum dominance and supremacy.
Kissinger is credited for giving Nixon the idea to open up China. It appears as the 45 year rapprochement comes to a sudden close, the US has regretted the long term decision. When viewed threw the lens of optimization of entropy maximization and the 2nd law of thermodynamics it is all about the counterbalance needed to an unchallenged US uni-polar scheme that impedes the progress and destiny of a universe in evolution.
Steve Bannon was quoted to say that it is Ten times more important for the US to kill Huawei than it is for Trump to sign any trade deal. USA realizes that China will soon surpass them if status quo isn’t changed. The true motive of the trade war is to decouple the US from China quickly enough to asymmetrically target and destroy any tip of the spear Chinese companies/projects/tech such as the Huawei, 5G, DJI, EV, trains, Cancer research, TikTok, SenseTime, etc etc to cripple China’s plans to move up the value chain and hi-tech-ify its economy and to do so with enough force to set back China and permanently prevent it from successfully climbing the arch trajectory of replacing the US. For the US it’s not just about losing the top spot to China, if America were to ever lose its petrodollar hegemony it would collapse in much the same way as happened to the USSR. The whole US empire is built on house of cards, ever since Brentwood they got away with taxing/usurping the world using the dollar as economic weaponization through ‘quantitative easing’ and its military to control OPEC to sustain the petrodollar hegemony. In the 1980’s Japan became a threat to the US so they forced Tokyo to acquiesce to the Plaza Accord resulting in the “lost four decades” and Japan never recovering. Nowadays Trump, Steve Bannon, Pompeo and other Hawks are trying to impose the same sort of colonization on China, but much harder to do since China doesn’t entertain US troops/US bases unlike the Japanese vassal so the next best thing is to subvert Hong Kong by way of CIA/NED and other propaganda techniques. And which nation killed a million civilians in Iraq after a false flag event and a WMD pretext but now is banning Chinese AI startups ostensibly because they care about the human rights of Muslims in China’s internal Xinjiang region?
This is all part of the bigger picture to contain China’s continued rise, as we see that if the US ever lost its hegemony it would be game over… America views Chinese ambitions such as Made In China 2025, One Belt One Road, 5G, AI, etc as existential threats to its very lifestyle and way of life, hence the whole “Huawei is a national security issue” stance… Now even TikTok, a dancing video app, has become a “national security” threat and targeted and singled out by the US Congress. By “national security” they really mean China is offering the world a better deal and they are pissed that they are being undercut and view Chinese success as a direct threat to American hegemony. The West had its chance to help out Africa but did nothing, now China wants to help them develop and US is getting resentful, the supreme irony is accusing China of predatory lending. This will only get much worse, Xi predicted this will last a period of 30 years until which time China has become the undisputed Number One in the world economically, technologically, politically and militaristically. As the declining power the US isn’t going to just go down without fighting….. Just like the Roma Empire, as the US declines on the way down the lip service of freedom, democracy, etc stops and the true colors of the ugly side all comes out, they just did another coup in Bolivia after China signed a lithium deal to secure development of batteries for EVs, and now US is even sanctioning its own “allies” like Germany for daring to buy energy from Russia (NordStream 2, etc)…
Like others have already brought to light and mentioned, with the multiple initial sources surrounding this Wuhan virus, it makes “intentionally starting a pandemic with a bioweapon” scenario much more likely. The virus failed to spread with the first group of targets, so they tried again with the market.
For those who refuse to believe the US could ever be morally capable of doing such a coordinated strike and biological attack on mainland China, even if you do not at all believe US had anything to do with it, and even if US in reality had nothing to do with it, it still doesn’t change the fact that this virus has changed the power dynamic and upset the balance; and we already have evidence from US such as Wilber Ross etc willing to take full advantage of the situation. China must be prepared to adapt and adjust to this fluid situation as well, short term and as well as long term. This thing could very well politically isolate China (it is already having such an effect) and crater China’s GDP, and most importantly strategically pressure China to give up its long term development aspirations and also to sign away certain concessions (give up on MIC2025 etc) right at the most critical moment in history.
Sure we understand that the flu killed already 10000 US person this year alone, I also know the numbers in terms of how many up to 80,000 die of flu alone last year. And yes some of the hysteria and panic of this Wuhan thing may cause more damage than good at this point, sometimes the fear is more than just the virus damage itself.
Having said that, on the other hand, the facts are this banning of all flights from China to the US, the enactment of the quarantine is described by the US CDC itself as the heaviest action it has taken in 50 years. Indeed when was the last time Russia closed its borders to China? When was the last time Disney shutdown, and all these hundreds of other things shutting down in China and all the countries closing their door to China? Precisely my point regardless of whether or not the real or percieved threat of this virus is overblown or not, the fact is the reaction to it has already greatly harmed China substantitively at what could be argued as the worst possible timing… so yes, this virus has changed the power dynamic and upset the balance.
The fact of the matter is the rest of the world isn’t closing its flights and borders to the USA, despite the flu in the US killing way more people, but the world is closing its doors to China… This cannot be good no matter how it is spun. I’m concerned this will be the point of inflection in which the tide permanently turns and China regresses back to being closed, isolated country and America pulled the supply chain rung under China’s feet while China is down/ill and then convinences the rest of the world to a new Brentwoods to basically maintain US hegemony for the next 100 years. Perhaps this is what Trump was secretly hinting at when he gleefully announced at Davos that “now is the time for renewed and great optimism”… Maybe he was hinting at world events to come that will greatly benefit America at the direct expense of China, events that by the time he made the speech at Davos would have already been put in place by the CIA.
If America has declared war on China, –(first by economic decoupling via sanctions and tariffs then by trying to kill off Chinese technology ascension by attempting to cut off China’s tech supply chain, and finally by covert biowarfare to destroy China’s food supply and then poision the Chinese people with a sinister virus in hopes of destablizing the entire country,)– etc and by all appearances it has, with Pompeo openly stating that the Chinese CCP was the “central threat of our times”, and Bannon calling for Trump to “takedown Xi” and “break the spirit and crack the back of the Chinese people”, then it behooves China to defend itself and its citizens and interests appropriately.
This information better be spread across Chinese media so that the average Chinese develops a healthy and warranted suspicion of certain nations that have taken it upon themselves to stop at nothing to destroy the Chinese way of life and to destroy China’s development and progress. Making more mainland Chinese aware of the underlining truth that all of China is constantly being targeted with warfare of all categories and at all levels by everything American cannot possibly be a bad thing. America has been applying every kind of means of warfare that exists under the sun against China, against the Chinese government and against the Chinese people and their well-being; be it Trade War, Economic War, Proxy War (Taiwan, HK, etc), Tech War (Huawei/5G/AI/tiktok), Supply Chain War, CyberWar, Information propaganda Warfare (including the “reverse conspiracy theory” and other false flags), Biological Warfare and soon to be Conventional war and perhaps even someday Nuclear war.
The Chinese people for their own good should be more aware of the ideological war that America has inflicted upon the Chinese citizens both at home and abroad… The stark constrasting juxposition could not be more supremely ironic and hypocritical. Brain drain from the rest of the nations in the world to the US is called “free market” and labeled as “freedom loving scientists going to work in open democractic Universities with higher pay and better quality of life” and yet this same notion of “brain drain” from the US to the rest of the world is called “intellectual property theft”, “spying”, or “sending spies to steal ‘American technology'”. For when as China or Russia or India jailed their scientists for working with US universities and earning US research grants. If they did that, immediately the US media will instantly accuse them of being “totalitarian communist police state with no academic freedom” etc.
During China’s moment of greatest need and vulnerability we see Westerners racism and xenophobia come out in full blossom from Universities that say it is normal to be xenophobia to so-called “free speech” newspapers that take delight in China’s plight and openly incite hatred and racisms by publishing intentionally vile depictions of the Chinese people and the Chinese flag in order to kick China while it is down.
America knows that “time is on China’s side” be it with regards to GDP PPP, or the situation in the South China Sea, or that of Hong Kong, and later Taiwan, as China’s sphere of influence continues to grow in Eurasia; or even in the larger context of the digital blockchain Yuan and China’s BRI/OBOR to replace or supplant the US petrodollar hegemony and so many other aspects… America knows that if status quo doesn’t abruptly change that one day it will be too late to confront China. Trump, as their self-proclaimed “Chosen One” has openly stated from the beginning that he won’t allow China to surpass America “on his watch” and that if his administration doesn’t stop China right now that no future generation of administrations will ever be able to do so again. The US recognizes that the situation is quickly reaching an inflection point past which there is no point of return or going back. It is now or never. And since a direct nuclear confrontation is not going to help America achieve its goals or retaining its status, nor reversing its decline, and coming back on top in terms of once again being sole unipolar hyperpower with no contender or meaningful challenger, then only option left after a failed trade war and failed tech war was to attack China in the back by secretly using biological warfare against China, not once, not twice, but now for a third and potentially ever more devastating time as each attack is increased in boldness and exponential in unprovoked escalation.
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weehingthong 