The Pandemic of Coincidences and The Gas Leak

This article is a rather shoddy translation of the original article published here on Poder360, by Paula Schmitt

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about Event 201, a simulation in October 2019 about a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The conference took place a few months before the official start of the covid-19 pandemic (declared by the World Health Organization as a “public health emergency of international concern” in January 2020, and as a pandemic proper in March 2020).

My narration of that sequence of events prompted an outraged message from an individual disturbed by such chronology: how do I dare make conspiratorial insinuations about an event planned by cautious professionals with such an acute prognosis? Before I continue, let me clarify something very slowly for the slowest: honest journalism has the professional obligation to disclose coincidences, even if it throws the journalist into the shallow, common and imbecilised ditch of “conspiracy theory”. In fact, even more so if that is the case, because it probably indicates that such coincidences are peculiar and harmonious enough to further a cohesive chronology.

We know that Event 201 was harmonious, because the pandemic started right after the conference. The official date given by the Chinese government as the first contamination by covid-19 is December 2019, but some Chinese doctors believe that the first case of the disease in China happened in November, as told in this article here. But things get even more interesting: according to the Wall Street Journal, the first case of covid-19 contamination may have happened even earlier, in October — just around the time of Event 201. Last week, the WSJ published an article under the title “Possible Early Covid-19 Cases in China Emerge During WHO Mission,” saying that there is “the possibility that Covid-19 was already spreading in China as far back as October 2019. ” If true, the harmony between Event 201 and the actual pandemic is even more explicit, because the two of them would have happened almost simultaneously. It would have been a case of literal co-incidence.

But was that pandemic simulation really peculiar? If such thing happens every year, for example, the conference is not so interesting, and a coincidence would be expected. Turning a regular event into a strepitous headline would be tantamount to publicizing with a lot of ballyhoo the fact that a clairvoyant predicted the pope’s death a month in advance, while at the same time ignoring all the other times the same clairvoyant made the same prediction and the Pope did not die. Here in this article I specifically mention this problem with some conspiracy theories: the way in which the absence of seemingly irrelevant information can give rise to faulty chronologies. The case I mention there is that of Tower 7, one of the 3 buildings that collapsed in the attacks of 9/11 but which, unlike the other two towers, was never hit by an airplane. The fire alarm did not work that day either, and that may seem peculiar, but if we know that the alarm had always failed, or had never worked, the fact is no longer significant. (I don’t know if that was the case, and there is no indication it was). That illustrates quite well what I’m talking about: the seemingly irrelevant context of non-events that gives the correct measure of relevance of the positive (existing) event that attracted our attention.

Just to make a better use of this digression: With the fall of Tower 7, the world lost one of the most forceful critics of the CIA, John O’Neill. He had been an FBI chief investigator and was dismissed when his criticism of the agency increased, particularly his denunciations of the way the CIA was being lenient with some terrorists under its watch — exactly the terrorists who would later be accused of committing the attacks of September 11. John O’Neill, already removed from the FBI, was in that tower that fell, despite never having been touched by a plane, under a fire that did not set off any alarm, in a job he had started just 3 weeks earlier at the invitation of the man who acquired the World Trade Center a few months prior to the attacks. This story became a book, The Looming Tower, which later became an HBO mini-series directed, among others, by documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. I recommend it effusively.

Back to Event 201 and to wondering whether it was not only harmonious but also peculiar: according to the USA Today, Event 201 was the third pandemic simulation organized by the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins University since 2001, all of which were closed to the public. The latest exercise, the one in 2019, was the first one to invite members of the private sector (from airline executives to executives of pharmaceutical companies). In the same year, another simulation exercise took place from January to August. Organized by the American government, the Crimson Contagion had the participation of several government agencies and American states. In this exercise, the USA was victimised by a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus brought by tourists returning from China.

Boring conferences must be like a dime a dozen — they happen a lot. And a conference on a problem that has been feared for years, such as a viral pandemic, should happen even more frequently. But here’s another piece of news, less easy to dismiss as a coincidence, which you probably never saw in Brazilian newspapers but which should attract the attention of any journalist in the midst of such a devastating pandemic. In the words of this ABC News report, “As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.” This warning would have come from the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), the United States military and defense intelligence agency subordinated to the DIA (Defense and Intelligence Agency). “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” said one of the sources in the NCMI report. This report would have been passed on several times to the DIA, the Pentagon and the White House. The Pentagon, however, “issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.” But the Times of Israel newspaper published an article in April 2020 saying that the Israeli TV Channel 12 broadcast the news that “the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document.” According to the Times of Israel, “Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government.” American intelligence would have decided “to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF.”

Finally, I will finish today’s column with another beautiful set of coincidences. In 2014, then President Barack Obama’s government decided to cut the money allocated for gain-of-function experiments. As I’ve explained before, gain-of-function is a type of experiment in which viruses are modified, grafted with genes from other animals and/or human genes, or genes from “humanised animals” in order to make the virus more deadly, more malignant, more virulent, and thus allegedly anticipate the harm those viruses may cause to humans. The justification used for such experiments is that, by manipulating a virus and making it skip stages and evolutionary phases created in a laboratory, scientists could predict what would happen to that virus if it were left in nature under the authority of Time. For molecular biologist Richard Ebright, this type of forced intervention in nature under the excuse of understanding the enemy is like “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”

The gain-of-function experiments in 2014 were under the command of Anthony Fauci. Fauci is the immunologist who has led the powerful National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the USA since 1984, an unusual longevity, possibly never seen in such an important position in any democratic country where governments can be alternated every 4 years. Fauci is treated by lesser journalists like God, and perhaps that is why he was able to carry out the experiments without any scrutiny by executing an administrative maneuver. He did that by outsourcing gain-of-function studies, hiring the NGO EcoHealth Alliance. This NGO is run by Peter Daszak, who in turn transferred the money and delegated the experiments to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city where covid-19 was first identified, and to where the same Daszak returned later, this time as a member of the WHO commission that went to investigate the origins of the pandemic in January 2021. Now that’s some coincidence.