America's rebel: rebels against Chapter 1!
But Ron Unz (commenters) set the record straight
Ron Unz posts long pieces on controversial subjects. After being “purged” from The American Conservative magazine for being too conservative, he started a popular alt-media website called The Unz Review. The Harvard-educated physicist calls himself a sincere conspiracy researcher, so interesting people read his research, which attracts candid comments. One commenter called it the “commentariat.”
During my MSM days, I often sent NYT and WSJ articles to a friend, who would reply with a quote from a commenter. When I claimed he missed the point of the article, he’d fire back, “You missed the point of the people.”
Some of my readers engage there because it allows them to remain anonymous (Ron doesn’t moderate content). Contact me at jim.haslam@protonmail.com with questions. But let’s not fear the nerds who created Covid. Remember, there was no CCP or PLA in Wuhan before 2020—just Dani Anderson and her live Chinese horseshoe bats.
If Covid were a military creation, I would share that fear. However, it was a Western academic science fair experiment conducted in the Eastern World. Ron wrongly claimed I blamed Dani for the pandemic, yet Chapter 1 identifies who inserted the furin cleavage site that triggered the pandemic. Ron and I debated this topic on Kevin’s radio show (you can skip the first 1/2 of technical issues for the 2nd half fireworks).
One Unz commenter asked if Ralph Baric had any relation to Colonel Sanders?
Another commenter suggested that only Shi Zhengli had access to RaTG13 in her BSL2 lab. However, Baric experimented with RaTG13 in 2018, following her “data dump” of sequences in November of that year. Ironically, Baric later told Fauci that Shi should be arrested for publishing RaTG13 on Jan 24, 2020. This revelation set the stage for the Feb 1 teleconference, where Fauci secretly invited Baric.
I see, thanks. So Ralph Baric would have been one of the very few who had foreknowledge of RaTG13. That is damning. It’s plausible that Baric had eyed Shi Zhengli as a patsy even before Covid was released. That would serve as a sort of safety offramp in case people did not believe Covid had a natural origin.
Ron focused on the outbreak from its earliest days. His website became the leading platform for the theory that the Wuhan military games served as the launching point for an American bioweapon attack on China (and Iran). On Jan 27, 2020, Unz Review asked, “Was the 2020 Wuhan Coronavirus an Engineered Biological Attack on China by America for Geopolitical Advantage?”
In April 2020, Ron countered the Trump “Cheeiyna” neocon bioweapon narrative by asking if “Our Coronavirus Catastrophe was Biowarfare Blowback?” Ironically, fact-checker Dani Anderson banned Ron and others from Facebook over that article. “I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past two years,” she told Health Feedback. “I can personally attest to the strict control and containment measures implemented while working there. The staff at WIV are incredibly competent, hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”
Dani didn’t disclose that she was working on Fauci’s CREID (DARPA Defuse TA2), acknowledging June 2019, “I know we took a lot of text from our other [DARPA] grant proposal.” Peter Daszak declared this 2019 CREID bid was based on their losing 2018 DARPA Defuse proposal.
It wasn’t public record that Dani had been in the Wuhan BSL4 until she revealed it in that February 2020 Facebook fact-check. A year later, she claimed to be working on Ebola. Four years later, I wrote my book declaring her Patient 0.
Ron recently published a lengthy article about a dead Russian bio-general but ventured close to the origins of Covid by citing Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs:
Last week, Sachs once again appeared on Carlson’s show, declaring that the evidence “is now overwhelming” that Covid was “made in a U.S. lab,” with their discussion accumulating more than 35 million impressions on Twitter and almost another million views on YouTube.
One of the crucial pieces of evidence cited by Sachs was a December 2018 scientific paper authored by a team of American scientists led by Dr. Ralph Baric that analyzed the characteristics of something very similar to the Covid virus. The research had been conducted at an American lab and none of the co-authors was Chinese or directly associated with any lab in that country, but their naming convention indicated that the precursor virus had been obtained from the Wuhan lab. A few months after the global epidemic began, other scientists determined that although the Covid virus could infect and be transmitted in various types of bats and other mammals, these did not include Chinese bats.
Ron linked to the 2018 joint Baric/Munster SARS1 (WIV1) experiment infecting Egyptian fruit bats and noted SARS2’s ability to transmit in this species. Yet, the Harvard-educated physicist, with an IQ of 214, failed to connect the dots. The German lab labeled Egyptian fruit bats a “reservoir host” for SARS2, “although this species is certainly not the original reservoir of SARS2 because these bats are not present in China, the epicenter of the pandemic.”
Hey Ron, Egyptian fruit bats are exclusive to Western labs—so who was the lone Westerner in that Eastern lab?
A commenter, Dany the Blond, then provided a concise summary of my book:
Regarding COVID-19 origin, the House sub-committee only scratched the surface, as it appears in its 500+ pages report.
It is only said that Fauci, Farrar, and a small number of scientists (all funded by Fauci’s NIAID) decided to promote the unwarranted Natural Origin assumption, including through a Nature Medicine paper, hence covering up the research done by US and Chinese scientists. The focus is on the Chinese responsibility in gain-of-function research in Wuhan by Shi Zhengli and their recklessness in using BSL2 labs rather than level 3 or 4. EcoHealth Alliance is crucified, in particular its chairman, UK citizen Daszak. Fauci’s NIAID is sharply criticized for a lack of control over the work done in China.
There is no thorough analysis of the US role & responsibility, nor the actual role of the Chinese party in the US-China ventures on Sars-like viruses and horseshoe bats role.
A recent book: “Covid 19 – Mystery Solved” by Jim Haslam, proposes a new scenario: Covid-19 would be a vaccine platform project targeting horseshoe bats in order to indirectly protect US troops (100,000+) in Asia from potential future Sars-like viruses. The entire project would be US designed (NIAID, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, NIAID Rocky Mountain lab), the only tasks fulfilled in China being a) gathering horseshoe bats (Shi’s team) and b) testing the vaccine on horseshoes (a Duke Australian scientist in Wuhan’s BSL4 lab, without any Shi role).
This project was refused by US military DARPA but funded by NIAID through 3 parallel CREID projects.
Chapel Hill (Ralph Baric) would have used as a platform a virus from Laos (Banal 52), some features from Chinese RaTG13 (identified by Shi), adding a furin cleavage site as well as other features to facilitate virus transmission between bats, Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana (Dutch scientist Munster) would have worked on the virus to increase its capability of air transmission, successfully tested the product on US deer, mice, minks, etc. Only the test on horseshoe bats, a crucial one in Asia of course, was to be done in China because nowhere else were such bats available in labs.
In the scenario, the Australian Duke scientist in charge of the test (Dani Anderson, under the monitoring of Linfa Wang, her Duke boss in Singapore, often called “Batman”) would have blessed herself with the US product by early October 2019, and transmitted it, without being sick, to her scientist colleagues sharing the same dormitory in Wuhan. The vaccine for bats was surprisingly highly effective on human beings, but this was not investigated by NIAID, its RML Lab, Chapel Hill, Duke universities, etc., as tests on animals were still being done.
Linfa Wang resigned from Duke on Jan 10, 2020.
So, this would be an accident, not a bio-weapon, but with 99.9% responsibility to the US. NIAID’s 3 CREID grants remain to be investigated, as well as NIAID RML in Montana, Duke, etc. Not sure it will ever be.
Ron listened to the commentariat and read the book:
Upon reading the first few paragraphs of Haslam’s book and the pages that followed, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. For several years, I’d been regularly citing Dr. Danielle Anderson as “the single best eyewitness” to the internal workings of the Wuhan lab. But according to Haslam, she had actually been Patient Zero, the asymptomatic “Typhoid Mary” who had personally started the gigantic global epidemic that had devastated the entire world. I was utterly flabbergasted at that revelation. Anderson’s carelessness with a needle-stick had cost us 30 million lives, probably making her responsible for more deaths and human suffering than any other single individual in all of world history.
In a recent interview with a German podcaster, Haslam minced no words, declaring that he was 99.999% certain that Anderson had been Patient Zero, the individual who had infected the entire world.
https://www.unz.com/runz/five-years-and-thirty-million-deaths/
Ron spent more time on our Substack than the rest of the book. Why doesn’t he like Dani’s story? She was his Wuhan witness to an American (economic) bioweapon attack on Iran. She was in the Wuhan BSL4 and conducted several media interviews (truthfully), claiming that the Chinese were doing nothing wrong. Ron’s final verdict?
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.
I addressed Ron’s theory in Chapter 4, titled East vs West Biowarfare:
Others argue SARS2 was deliberately released at the front door of an international civilian lab, implicating both Washington, D.C. and Beijing. Was Covid an economic or ethnically targeted bioweapon? Its high infectiousness harmed economies worldwide without discrimination. It affected everyone, yet humanity survived to debate its origins.
The rest of the chapter discussed the 100% infection rate but 99% survival rate since this was a clue to the origins of Covid. In February 2020, Dani took an antibody test but never disclosed the results. Linfa claimed the test produced false positives. A year later, Dani told Bloomberg she was tested again: “If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick—and I wasn’t,” she said. “I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated (presumably in 2021), and had never had it.”
Ron claimed the NBC News cell phone report, tracking Dani and Linfa’s phone, was B.S.
The entire analysis was only based upon five(!) devices, probably a tiny fraction of the total number present at the BSL4 facility, and the device count for October 2019 isn’t all much different than many other months. Indeed, anyone looking at the actual data would assume that the shutdown had actually occurred in March and April 2020.
What probably happened was that some Neocon PR operative pitched the story at NBC reporters, and since TV people tend to be gullible idiots, they aired it without carefully looking at the underlying data.
I told Ron via several emails (I knew his review was coming) that 2 of the few devices belonged to DARPA Defuse team members, but he never mentioned the document in his 12,000-word article. I doubt he’s even heard of the document because it’s not in his archive. Props to Mr. Anonymous:
The truth is that Jim has totally debunked Ron’s conspiracy theory. More than that, Jim calls Ron an “unwitting accomplice” of the real conspiracy and cover-up. Obviously, Ron doesn’t understand Jim’s analysis at all and is distorting it like everything else. He doesn’t even mention that Anderson was part of the DEFUSE team that planned to develop viruses just like Covid and that she lied about her work in Wuhan.
To Ron’s credit, he published Whitney Webb’s prophetic Jan 2020 piece about DARPA and bats in Wuhan.
Dany the Blond continued her summary. She is the only person who read all of the book, twice:
Ron, if my comments to your “assassinating a top Russian general” post contributed to triggering your interest in Jim Haslam’s book, that’s fine for me.
I tend to agree with you that the book reading is not that easy; personally, I’m still reading it a second time.
A huge point is the role of the NIAID Rocky Mountain Lab, with input from Dutch citizen Munster, apparently the world class leader in virus aerosol transmission, as much as Baric is the world class leader in virus chimera construction. This means that Fauci has an immense and direct responsibility. Presumably this will be a key point when the US Senate will resume its Covid investigations.
One point you do not mention is that the backbone of Baric’s COVID-19 chimera would not be the Chinese RaTG13 virus, but a Banal virus from Laos, identified by the Singapore-based Duke team (Linfa Wang, often named ‘Batman’ – Dani Anderson), both being 96% identical to Covid virus.
Regarding Dani Anderson’s role and Haslam’s patient 0 story, it seems to me you’re missing one key point: In the EcoHealth Alliance DARPA Defuse grant request, it was expressly mentioned that testing on Chinese horseshoe bat would be done by Anderson in Wuhan BSL4 lab. It now appears that everything mentioned in the Defuse proposal was actually done and financed by NIAID through later grants under the CREID program.
Dany the Blond understands because, by the end of the book, I identify the culprits behind Covid. Dani Anderson, barely discussed in the back of the book, is part of a narrative arc that quickly shifts focus to Munster’s lab in RML—Fauci’s biodefense lab. Fauci didn’t simply send your tax dollars to China for others to mishandle. He sent SARS2 to Wuhan for testing.
The “needle from Montana has punctured her spacesuit in Wuhan” absolves Dani of all responsibility. My abbreviation of her name irked Ron, but it was meant to humanize her. From the abbreviation page, “First vs last name – Repeated first name use implies innocence.” Since there’s a Dr. Andersen in the story, who is more important than Dr. Anderson, it keeps readers from mixing the two up. And neither of them are medical doctors, so don’t deserver the title Dr. They are professors involved in a Western academic coverup.
While the pandemic’s origin was accidental, its creation and subsequent cover-up were anything but. While I don’t explicitly state it in Chapter 26, the American public—scared of 9/11 and Amerithrax—was ultimately to “blame.” This fear drove irrational biodefense funding, as evident in a long line of bipartisan callers in Fauci’s 2002 C-SPAN clip. VP Dick Cheney turned Fauci into America’s biodefense czar. Chapter 26 explains what happened 17 years later:
The rest of Fauci’s 2019 calendar reflects his $6 billion budget, which spans scientific research and biodefense. In November, Fauci emphasized, “The worst bioterrorist has been nature itself,” highlighting the unpredictable nature of infectious diseases. He also compared the perceived risks, stating, “Your risk of dying on the (Washington D.C. highway) on the way to work at the NIH is thousands and thousands of times higher than the risk of getting Ebola from a health worker who treated a patient with Ebola.”
Fauci acknowledged public apprehension towards new risks, noting, “The American public, understandably, has an issue with the concept of a new risk.” He elaborated, “You live with risks every day. But when a new risk is far less risky than the risks you live with, you get panicked about the new risk.”
Over the past two decades, congressional representatives had shoveled taxpayers’ money at America’s Doctor Fauci. From SARS to H1N1 to Ebola, they expected Fauci to “do something” about these scary pathogens. Well, he did something!
Fauci visited the RML lab in October 2019, an event more suspicious than the Wuhan military games happening around the same time. By November, Fauci’s CREID contractor, Dani, was leaving Wuhan. As Dr. Deepak put it, “She was a victim of the system.” The “smoke stick” email in Chapter 2 further corroborates this.
In Chapter 2, I highlighted the metro ride that Dani would have taken to the Wuhan International Airport, with hundreds of Chinese laborers working in Qom, Iran, to tickle Ron’s conspiratorial bone.
During their subway commute in November 2019, Linfa and Dani passed the notorious Wuhan wet market and the nearby US Embassy, which housed 14 diplomats who had visited the WIV in 2018. Emerging after an hour underground, they reached Wuhan International Airport. The airport had daily flights to Italy, Iran, New York City, Seattle, and Singapore.
In the next paragraph, I introduced the most important character in the book: America’s Patient 0. He was the anonymous traveler from Seattle to Wuhan who didn’t visit the wet market but collected the WA1 ancestral (i.e. oldest) strain of SARS2. He became the ‘return-to-sender’ address for that FedEx package.
One commenter referenced Steven Quay’s D614 research to challenge my RML theory. However, WA1 (which predates the D614 variant) transmits efficiently in the five listed American lab animals. This explains why Quay avoids mentioning these animals or the WA1 isolate, and we debated the topic on Twitter.
I declared the book was fact-checked online, so you can confidently read it offline. Meanwhile, “Wild Man” tuned into the Science podcast discussing deer as a contagious vaccine model—and understood the implications:
The link you provided is interesting and I urge everyone here among the commentariat (and Unz) to read and listen. This clears up a lot of confusion about the state of technologies for self-spreading vaccines, which in the main, seem to be modified viruses.
Wild Man continued:
I am halfway through your October 16, 2022, substack article (what a doozy). I am right now, mighty pissed at Unz. I pointed to many of these possibilities as to potential activities at the Wuhan overall WIV campus, you have outlined in the first portion of your substack article, way way back, to Unz, as per just straightforward logic, about LAI (lab-acquired-infection) in particular, among arguments also around early infection precise locations featuring two clades, in various neighborhoods (different locales though) but all quite adjacent to the outdoor market across the river from WIV, reinterpretation of the Pekar studies, that Unz was relying on (Unz was absolutely clearly misinterpreting the fucking Pekar studies).
I like Paul’s comment the best:
Ironically, the political rationale given by some scientists who proposed a natural origin to COVID was to thwart anti-Chinese hysteria and military escalation against the country. (Jim’s) analysis would’ve buttressed their argument but at the unacceptable loss of their innocence.
Here was the toughest question:
If SARS2 is a self-spreading bat vaccine, why was it designed or developed to be highly infectious to humans? I can’t see why the virus would be shipped from Baric to RML in the first place. What is to be gained from this if the Chinese horseshoe bat is the target? What could done at RML anyway? Aerosolization? What is that? Making it more infectious? But to what?
Humans aren’t the only mammals. A virus circulating in humans doesn’t mean it was designed for them. Covid doesn’t infect humanized mice, which are irrelevant to humans.
DARPA’s Defuse proposal prioritized “inoculating bats” and wildlife vaccine delivery, aiming to prevent zoonotic spillovers from infecting 100,000 US warfighters in Asia. Chinese horseshoe bats harbor SARS-like viruses, and SARS1 shut down US military bases in Singapore in 2003.
Baric proposed developing a bat vaccine in US labs, including Wisconsin’s USGS bat lab, but Munster’s cheaper transmissible vaccine at RML won the DARPA funding. Munster’s $8M Australian bat vaccine outcompeted Baric and Daszak’s $14M Chinese bat vaccine, which used safer, non-contagious methods. Munster’s approach involved spreading the vaccine between animals, working on species like deer, mice, and mink, unlike Baric, who avoided transmission research.
Fauci used RML as his biodefense hub, similar to Fort Detrick, for dual-use research of concern. In 2018, Baric and Munster infected live bats at RML, declaring that SARS1 (i.e., WIV1) didn’t infect Egyptian fruit bats. They sought a furin cleavage site for Chinese horseshoe bat research. SARS2 has such a site and infects Egyptian fruit bats, which aren’t native to Wuhan but are found in Fauci’s lab.
This reveals an uncomfortable reality revealed in a lab leak: bats and humans share mammalian traits like ACE2 receptors and furin. Covid wasn’t a bioweapon but a Western animal vaccine experiment gone wrong in Wuhan, where Dani tested a transmissible vaccine in her BSL4 lab.
Ron ripped me for “claiming without evidence” that Dani was on the receiving end of the cold chain. The book aims to answer a question: Why does this Old World virus (SARS2) thrive in New World lab animals such as American deer, deer mice, mink?
Another Unz commenter agreed; here via Priss Factor:
If bio-warfare theory is out, Anderson theory might just make sense as she seems to have been one of the handful of Westerners working at the Wuhan lab. If it wasn’t bio-warfare and if the virus was made in the US and had to have ended up in Wuhan somehow, the likely ‘culprit’ would be a Westerner, someone like Anderson. Btw, does FedEx have a service of delivering top secret material? If not, it’s rather weird that something so dangerous would be sent via FedEx for pickup.
It is weird, but a frozen package of pathogens is in the cargo hold of every intercontinental jet. The interconnected BSL4 labs operate via an “anarchical society.”
Pete commented via his own Substack:
I am a fan of Jim Haslam and appreciate his work [and Ron Unz also found much (90%) of it credible]. I differ with Jim mainly as to his conclusion that it was an accidental release. [Ron Unz had reservations about the WIV release (10%), but you can read it yourself.]
Some might think it impossible that our own people could be so Evil, which is why nobody wants to entertain the possibility. Of course, those who do Evil usually figure a way to justify it as necessary for the Greater Good.
There is another thing both Ron and I agree on: the future US health regime won’t touch the lab origin story. An Unz commenter asked Ron how this could be investigated? RFK Jr? Jay Bhattacharya? Ron replied:
These days RFK Jr. won’t even touch the assassination of his own father and his uncle, so I very much doubt he’d go out on a limb for this. And I’ve actually met and spoken at length with Bhattacharya, and I’d say there’s about zero chance he would either.
We agree! I contacted RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense to publish my book but received no response. This is understandable—if he had published it, RFK Jr. probably wouldn’t have been nominated as HHS director.
Future NIH director Jay Bhattacharya also ignored my WA1 survey question, which proves an NIH lab in Montana holds the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. Ron, for his part, has avoided naming Covid’s creator, though a prior Twitter commenter compared Fauci’s aerosol specialist, Vincent Munster, to Frankenstein.
I told commenter Dany the Blond she sparked a fun conversation, and I’m glad someone truly understood the point. Ron judged the book by its cover without glancing at the back cover. By the end of the book, I don’t care when or where Covid started—we should only focus on where it ended up (Fauci’s lab in Montana).
Question: if SARS2 doesn't infect Chinese bats, why was it sent to WIV BSL4?
Jim, in the Defuse proposal there is a lot of talk about testing these viruses in humanized mice models and HAE cell cultures, to be done at WIV. Why do exclude this as a possible lab leak scenario? Wouldn't this explain human infectivity, too?
Also, the proposal repeatedly mentions "three test bat caves" in Yunnan province. Does this refer to the famous Mojiang mine where human infections occurred in 2012?