By LARRY ROMANOFF – November 16, 2020
In November of 2002, Hong Kong experienced the onset of an outbreak of what is now called SARS (1) (2), an event that appears to have some serious gaps in the logic of the official narrative as reported in the Western media, some elements of which seem either implausible or impossible, and with many unanswered questions as to the phylogenesis and distribution of this virus. It appears that the first identified case was of a farmer in Guangdong Province in Mainland China, who died from what appeared to be an unremarkable flu-type illness, "one of the unfortunate victims who succumb every flu season". The farmer died soon after admittance to hospital and, so far as I am aware, no definite diagnosis was made as to the cause of his death. However, he has been catalogued as "patient zero", marking the beginnings of an epidemic of a new and contagious disease that eventually infected over 8,000 people and killed more than 700. Of these deaths, 300 were in Hong Kong (of a population of 7 million) and about the same number in Mainland China (of a population of 1.4 billion). As a percentage of infections, the death rate in Hong Kong was more than three times that of the Mainland, and statistically SARS was a Hong Kong epidemic rather than a Chinese one.
The Chinese government was criticised at the time for failing to quickly enough publicise the outbreak and spread of the illness, but this is irrelevant in a search for answers. It is true that cases were initially under-reported and that perhaps Guangdong officials wanted to contain publicity to avoid a panic but, contrary to persistent reports in the US, the media in other nations were soon reporting that China appeared to have over-reacted to the problem. Their claim was that Mainland China had incurred less than 300 casualties in a population of 1.4 billion, but was acting as if the losses were in the millions, and even the WHO stated that the information provided by Mainland Chinese authorities had been "very detailed". There had to be more to SARS than combating a contagious virus because, while the Chinese authorities quickly engaged in what, even in retrospect, appears to have been anexceptionally powerful response, going so far as to state that deliberate spreading of this infectious agent would be considered a capital offense. (3) We don't do that for influenza or measles.
By contrast, the Western media profusely praised Hong Kong, the BBC telling us of Hong Kong's marvelous "transparency in reporting the spread of the disease, in sharp contrast to the cover-up in China", and the South China Morning Post was almost effervescent in telling readers that "swift moves to quarantine at-risk residents brought the outbreak under control". But that story was unforgivable nonsense propagated to trash China by comparison in the eyes of the world. In fact, the Hong Kong government, and Margaret Chan, the HK Chief Medical Officer at the time, were heavily criticised, and even condemned, locally for their handling of the outbreak until the matter became very serious. Even when the Amoy Gardens residential complex became infected and its 20,000 residents had to be evacuated and quarantined, the HK government still refused to inform the public of the severity of the situation. No one in Hong Kong knew how or where the disease was spreading.
Local citizens became so distressed about inadequate information and legitimate fears of an almost certain government cover-up, they created a citizens' website named "www.sosick.org" (4) in which they independently detailed their own information on the progress of SARS, especially on quarantines and new infections. This was more than nothing. The website was quickly attracting more than 500,000 visitors per day - from a population of about 7 million. It was the acute embarrassment from this public action that eventually forced the Hong Kong government (and Margaret Chan) to provide up-to-date information. (5) But the Western media, and especially that in the US, avoided any mention of this, deceiving their readers and slandering Mainland China without justification.
The Western media were unanimous in claiming SARS was carried from Mainland China to Hong Kong by one Liu Jianlun, a 64-year-old Chinese doctor who had treated similar cases in Guangdong and who traveled to Hong Kong to attend a wedding. He apparently stayed at the four-star Metropole Hotel in a room on the 9th floor (Room 911, to be precise), where he infected all the guests and visitors on his floor, who then boarded aircraft and spread the disease to nearly 40 other countries. (1) (6) Wikipedia was so exact as to inform us Liu infected precisely 16 hotel visitors. This claim comprises the first of our gaps in logic, rendering much of the remaining official (Western) story implausible at best, the tale appearing reasonable only until we stop to think about the practical logistics.
For one thing, Hong Kong had three of what virologists call "super-spreading events" whose explanations draw nothing rational from that standard narrative. One of these events (or sites) was the Metropole Hotel itself. (7) (8) The SARS virus was not spread like cold germs, where sneezing in a room might infect a dozen people. The contagion required some extended exposure and perhaps physical contact. None of that occurs in a hotel, where residents of a floor seldom even see each other, much less spend time in each other's company. If infection transmissions were to occur in a hotel, this would almost certainly take place in the elevators or the lobby where people might be in close proximity for at least a period of minutes, thereby spreading the infection to guests from every floor. To suggest this pathogen could have emanated from one infected individual in a corridor and passed through 16 or more closed doors to infect the guests in every room on the entire floor, and ONLY guests with rooms on that floor, is absurd. Prominent virologists claim the infections that occurred at the Metropole "cannot be explained" by their understanding of the behavior of the SARS Coronavirus, where the guests on one floor became infected, but nobody else except due to subsequent contact with those floors.
While SARS was widely described as "extremely contagious" the facts of transmission invariably paint a strangely different story. It is true that the virus was transmitted from person to person, but the new infections were primarily either medical personnel or family or friends visiting patients in hospitals, and those others who were in close contact with the victims for an extended time, like sitting next to an infected person on a long flight. While scientists confirmed that the virus could spread via droplets, they discounted the possibility of it spreading through the air. For the great majority of cases, which were again either medical workers or household and other close contacts, the contagion appeared to spread through droplets and physical contact with either the patient or with clothing or medical equipment, perhaps drinking glasses, that had been in contact with the patient. According to all records I have seen, apart from a few initial infections and the large events in Hong Kong, most of the infections occurred in this direct person-to-person manner. This pattern was true with MERS as well, where more than 25% of all infections were among the medical community. Moreover, virologists and the CDC confirmed that Coronaviruses are able to survive on environmental surfaces for a maximum of perhaps three hours. The short life-span and need for direct contact would seem to discount entirely the possibility of the virus spreading widely of its own accord and surviving long enough to infect all hotel guests on one floor.
Another of these unexplained "super-spreading events" occurred at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, (9) (10) where a young man had apparently visited a friend on the 9th floor of the Metropole Hotel and was shortly thereafter admitted to hospital where he immediately infected more than 100 medical staff. There was no sensible explanation for the logistics of this occurrence. If the SARS virus were really as aggressively contagious as this event would suggest, everyone in the Metropole Hotel would have been infected within days, given that this location was the apparent origin of all infections in and from Hong Kong, and it would certainly have followed the same aggressive infection campaign in Mainland China and the other 40 countries. But it didn't.
Also, the disease appeared to quickly spread on an international scale, appearing at surprising speed in many parts of the world, yet Mainland China's cases were limited to a few provinces, with the deaths occurring in primarily only two locations - Guangdong and Beijing. This is not the behavior of an "extremely contagious" virus that otherwise spreads throughout a hospital or, indeed, the world, like wildfire. The disease initially spread by travelers almost exclusively to Beijing, Taipei, Singapore and Toronto in Canada, later emerging to infect small numbers in other nations. About half of Mainland China's infections and deaths were in Beijing. Toronto, Taiwan and Singapore experienced about 40 deaths each, with only a handful of deaths in the rest of the world.
While SARS did spread around the world, the infections in most countries were few and deaths almost zero. Notable also is that while the SARS virus did spread to about 40 countries, it was almost exclusively Chinese who were infected, those in Hong Kong most seriously, with some parts of Mainland China being next. Taiwan is entirely Chinese, with Singapore composed of Chinese in very large part. And according to my information, the infections and deaths in Toronto affected mostly or entirely the large resident Chinese population. The CDC noted that SARS transmission in Canada appeared to be limited to "a well-defined population of health care workers and close contacts", i.e. returning Chinese travelers. The SARS virus apparently much preferred Chinese to Caucasians, though it did attack Vietnamese health care workers (who may be similar to Chinese in their genetic susceptibility) in both Vietnam and Canada.
The third "super-spreading event" was the Amoy Gardens residential complex, (11) home to almost 20,000 people that experienced a massive outbreak of more than 300 cases, and from which all residents had to be removed from the city and placed in quarantine camps, leaving the entire complex a ghost town. Virologists are unanimous in categorising this as "the most spectacular event" of the entire SARS crisis. The official (Western media) narrative tells us the virus was spread through defects in the building complex's drainage or sewage system, where the S-shaped traps under each of the thousands of sinks or toilets were inexplicably drained of water, the virus then blown into all the apartments through the now-vacant sewage pipes. Wikipedia told us so poetically that the virus "was blown by a gentle maritime breeze" from the toilet sewage pipes into the stairwells and thence to all the homes, but scientists had already discounted the possibility of the virus being airborne. In any case, such an event would be impossible for a multitude of reasons, one being that drainage traps are refilled with water on each use and cannot evaporate unless a home remains vacant and unused, perhaps for years.
The Amoy Gardens was not a place with empty apartments and drained plumbing, but the narrative begs many other important questions, the first being how the SARS virus entered the complex and got itself immersed in the plumbing system in the first instance. The Amoy Gardens is a large complex of 30- and 40-story apartment buildings, with one building suffering about half the infections and the other half spread among four others. How did the SARS virus enter all those buildings? What was the source? There was no immense open sewer full of viruses into which a wind could blow, and how does a wind blowing up through a toilet continue its travel into the corridors and stairwells? A contaminated individual might infect his family, but not 300 families in five different buildings, and to that point Hong Kong didn't have enough infected individuals to contaminate the entirety of five high-rise buildings. One version was that an infected patient discharged from the Prince of Wales Hospital visited a relative in one of the buildings, bringing the contamination there, but those claims were undocumented and unsubstantiated, becoming increasingly implausible as one examined the precise facts.
Another is the means of locomotion. If a virus is indeed resting in an outdoor sewer somewhere, what is the source of the powerful air currents that would be required to blow it upward throughout the plumbing system of a 40-story apartment complex and enter most or all apartments? There are no air currents blowing upwards through our toilets and sinks, and gravity serves to wash the pipes' contents down and out of the building, not inward and upward. For another matter, an enormous amount of SARS virus would be necessary, as well as a very powerful magical fan, to blow a sufficient amount of contagion upward through all the drainage pipes and stairwells to reach and contaminate most apartments in a 40-story building. And what would be the source of the required enormous volume of contagion? We would need hundreds of liters of the SARS virus gathering at the (non-existent) sewer entrances of each building, waiting for Wikipedia's gentle "maritime breeze" to blow them upwards into all the apartments. The virus resides in people and dies quickly without a host.
I am not a plumber, but a "defective sewage system" in a high-end high-rise apartment building does not seem to possess the claimed qualifications to distribute lethal pathogens to all apartments. In any case, aside from the initial - and unsubstantiated - claim, there were no reports either before or after the outbreak to suggest any plumbing defects ever existed, and I was personally told no changes or maintenance of any kind were performed later. Once again, to a casual reader the story sounds plausible until we stop to think about the practical logistics. After all, sewage and drainage pipes are no doubt dirty places which make a happy home for germs of all kinds, but those germs are there because we put them there each time we dispose of waste. They don't enter a building and seek out the drainage pipes of their own accord, then run around independently like mice looking for a place to hide, and lurking until victims approach. Nor do they spread throughout a building and intentionally enter each home. By whatever method the virus entered the Amoy Gardens and spread throughout the buildings to infect hundreds of individuals, the official story is unlikely to be correct.
In short, the narrative of the progress of the SARS virus from Guangdong to Hong Kong and from there by travelers to other nations appears credible, but support appears to be lacking for other critical portions of the official story, most especially the origin of the virus itself, and its transmission in the hotels, hospitals and building complexes in Hong Kong. Another area with more questions than answers is the contagious aspect of the virus, in part its apparent race selectivity, but also its inexplicably aggressive progress in some circumstances like the Prince of Wales Hospital where it almost immediately infected more than 100 people, or its progress in the Amoy apartment buildings where it quickly infected hundreds, and yet its comparatively selective and almost benign behavior in the Metropole Hotel teeming with travelers where it apparently chose to confine itself to one floor and infect only a handful of people in their rooms instead of lurking in the elevators and lobby that contained hundreds of easily available victims.
SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold. Various research studies discovered a similar strain residing in bats, which have been categorised as a kind of warehouse for the virus, with the Western media flogging the undocumented theory that the virus spread from the bats to civets which were then handled and eaten and thus communicated the disease to humans. However, neither the bats nor the civets displayed any sign or symptoms of infection. The Chinese CDC led an investigation that apparently discovered genetic links between the virus strains found in the animals and in humans. This would almost force a conclusion that the virus jumped not only one but two species barriers, but virologists tell us that Coronaviruses do not naturally jump species barriers, and that jumping two barriers would be a rare occurrence indeed. Another immediate problem with the theory is that civets had been handled and eaten in Guangdong for decades prior to the SARS outbreak, and have been handled and eaten subsequent to the outbreak, all with no effect. This doesn't mean the epidemic couldn't have occurred this way, but it does mean the simple explanation is not sufficient.
A more serious problem is that the SARS virus exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified. Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell (12) (13) (14) wrote that "the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists. The ... contagious disease spread by droplets from coughing, is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment."
Dr. Cantwell also noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. He wrote that when he searched in PubMed for the phrase "coronavirus genetic engineering", he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell:
“I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade. No wonder WHO scientists identified the SARS/coronavirus so quickly. Never emphasised by medical news writers is the fact that for over forty years scientists have been “jumping species” with all sorts of animal and human viruses and creating chimera viruses (viruses composed from viruses of two different species). This unsupervised research produces dangerous man-made viruses, many of which have potential as bioweapons. Certainly SARS has the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can or a specially designed suitcase, or a "gloved" box (the type used by anthrax spreaders) to infect an apartment building like the Amoy Gardens or a floor of a hotel likethe Metropole in Hong Kong, which also had a large number of SARS cases." The easiest way to surreptitiously spread a pathogen in a hotel or apartment building is to don a maintenance uniform and spray each doorknob with an aerosol can.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the Institute for Science in Society cites a Journal of Virology report (Feb 2000) (15) that described a method for inducing desired mutations into coronavirus to create new viruses. "A key feature of the procedure is to make interspecific chimera recombinant viruses. It involves replacing part of the spike protein gene in the feline (cat) infectious peritonitis (corona) virus (FIPV) – which causes invariably fatal infections in cats – with that of the mouse hepatitis (corona) virus. The recombinant mFIPV will no longer infect cat cells, but will infect mouse cellsinstead, and multiply rapidly in them."
Ho continues: "Manipulating viral genomes is now routine, and it is easy to create new viruses that jump host species in the laboratory in the course of apparently legitimate experiments in genetic engineering. It is not even necessary to intentionally create lethal viruses, if one so wishes. It is actually much faster and much more effective to let random recombination and mutation take place in the test tube. Using a technique called 'molecular breeding', millions of recombinants can be generated in a matter of minutes. These can be screened for improved function in the case of enzymes, or increased virulence, in the case of viruses and bacteria. In other words, geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution in the laboratory to create viruses and bacteria that never existed in all the billions of years of evolution on earth." (16) It wasn't widely publicised, but Dr. Ho called for a full investigation into the possible genetic engineering and dissemination of the SARS virus. (17)
And, in a disputation of claims that the SARS virus strain in bats and civets is 'the same' as that which infected humanDr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the US CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, according to Cantwell, claimed that "the genetic analysis and sequencing of SARS were not helpful in determining the origins of the virus". Dr. Gerberding wrote further that "Unfortunately the clues from comparing it to the animal viruses have not given us any real leads … We can’t say it’s a mouse virus or a pig virus, or any other animal virus, necessarily, because it just isn’t similar enough to the known species to be able to draw those conclusions." Dr. Cantwell noted further that "experiments inoculating SARS virus into chickens and pigs were unsuccessful, indicating SARS did not originate in Chinese pigs and chickens, as theorised."
To quote Dr. Cantwell again: In 1995, an abstract of an experiment details the species-mixing of mouse coronavirus with cow "mutant" (coronavirus) using these words:
"Targeted RNA recombination was used to construct mouse hepatitis [corona] virus (MHV) mutants containing chimeric nucleocapsid (N) protein genes in which segments of the bovine [cow] coronavirus N gene were substituted in place of their corresponding MHV sequences. Our results demonstrate that targeted recombination can be used to make extensive substitutions in the coronavirus genome and can generate recombinants that could not otherwise be made between two viruses separated by a species barrier."
In another 1997 gene therapy experiment, scientists mixed cat, human, and pig coronaviruses, and adapted them to human kidney cells. These are just two examples of thousands of gene experiments found on PubMed. One can enter "rat sialoacryoadenitis virus and genetic engineering" and be referred to 1424 experiments. The media constantly associate the SARS virus with a human coronavirus that causes the common cold, apparently in an effort to soothe the public. But they downplay the various coronaviruses which affect different animal and bird species and produce a variety of serious infections and fatal illness in various species of animals and birds. It is mostly these animal coronaviruses that have been genetically engineered." (18)
Almost immediately upon receiving the genome sequence, severalRussian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare.According to Cantwell and the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, the Russian Interfax-AVN news service on April 3 quoted Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, as saying the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses, the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” (19) And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.” (20) (21) In response, Dr. Cantwell noted that "This accusation was never reported by the mainstream media, but brings to mind similar accusations Russian scientists made in December 1985 when they concluded the AIDS epidemic was caused by experiments carried out in the USA as part of the development of new biological weapons."
It wasn’t widely reported, but it seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the SARS virus was man-made. This conclusion wasn’t a secret, but neither was it promoted to the international media since they would simply have used the claim to heap scorn on China, dismissing this as a paranoid conspiracy theory. The Western media totally ignored this aspect, except for ABC news who reported that the SARS “Mystery Virus” was possibly “a Chinese bio-weapon that accidentally escaped the laboratory”. Nice of ABC to notice, but their story, if true, would be the first example of a nation creating and releasing a race-specific biological weapon designed to attack exclusively itself.
In fact, scientists around the world, from Russia to South Africa to Israel, were almost immediately speculating that SARS was a deliberately-seeded bio-weapon. One Israeli doctor, in response to a question, stated (22), "In my heart of hearts I believe that SARS is genetically engineered to target Chinese (Oriental) genetic materials. You may already know that Israel has been working on such a thing, specific to Arab genetic material. Knowing the military-industrial-medical cartel like I do, I would not be surprised if this isn't a 'test market' for something more sinister regarding other populations."
In a thesis on Biological Weapons, Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek stated that one clear sign of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent was a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation. I.e. no clear idea of source. They also mentioned an “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, of which race-specificity would be one. (23)
Recent disease outbreaks that would seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA. And in fact thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only questions.
At the same time, the Hong Kong newspaper Wenweipo published an article titled, "Earliest SARS outbreak suspected in U.S." (24), in which the authors wrote of AP and Reuters reports about a 45-year-old woman who became gravely ill on Feb. 9, 2002 (nine months prior to the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong), while taking part in her mortgage company's annual sales convention near Philadelphia. She had the typical SARS symptoms of headache, fever, chills, vomiting and shortness of breath. After being hospitalized, she died early the next morning. The entire hospital and more than 80 individuals suspected of close contact, were all quarantined. Wenweipo believed the event had been covered up by authorities and suggested this was actually the original occurrence of SARS, speculating the virus had originated in a US research lab. There were also published reports that Chinese researchers and military experts reached the same conclusions as the Russian virologists, namely that the virus was necessarily man-made and almost certainly originated in a US military lab and subsequently released into China.
It is true that SARS appeared to be tightly-focused to Chinese. We might in other circumstances pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial events that serve to alter our focus. One of these is the history of American universities and NGOs having come into China in years prior to SARS to conduct biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities enraged. This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country. (25) (26) (27) (28) (29)
The Chinese were furious to learn that Americans were collecting Chinese DNA. The government intervened and prohibited the further export of any of the data. The conclusion at the time was that the ‘research’ had been commissioned by the US military with the DNA samples destined for race-specific bio-weapons research.
Also, a Chinese lawyer named Tong Zeng who had participated in various US genetic research programs in China, published a book in which he noted that US researchers in the 1990s had collected hundreds of thousands of samples of blood and DNA from mainland Chinese which were all sent to the US (30) (31), and which could have been used in the development of biological weapons. This would be one explanation for the SARS virus being Chinese-specific.
It seems that Chinese virologists did ascertain that the SARS virus did exist, or could exist, in civets, and indeed they were given a prize in recognition of their work. (32) But if we are examining all possibilities, this isn't the real issue. There are probably thousands of viruses and other pathogens that might be usefully employed as low-level biological weapons, and none of these are created from whole cloth, that is to say they aren't created from nothing. Each is separated from a natural host and methods used to encourage it to adapt to humans. We therefore need to 'work backward', to ignore initially the 'animal reservoir' and focus on locating our true patient zero and determining the method by which he was infected.That, and only that, is the crux of the matter. The specific source animal is of little consequence to us at the initial stage. We must determine precisely how the virus managed to infect our patient zero, and whether it had outside assistance. This is intelligence work; the remainder is basic science.
Nevertheless, the Western media immediately and unanimously staked out the claim about the SARS virus having been traced to bats in China's Yunnan province, then worked its way to civets as the "natural reservoir", then infected people in a wet market, although no documentation was ever presented in evidence of the precise transmission method of a virus jumping two species barriers. Nevertheless no other claims or theories were permissible, and the media strenuously avoided discussing the apparent outbreak in the US and the wide speculation that SARS was extracted by the US military in a lab and engineered to prefer Chinese DNA.
Dr. Cantwell stated that we are repeatedly reminded about bioterrorists and bioweapons in the most innocuous situations, yet with SARS there was not a word about terrorists or biowarfare, that entire subject being 100% censored by the Western media. Cantwell concluded this was "Certainly proof the media are controlled by powerful forces that refuse to recognise what many citizens are thinking privately, and posting on the Internet."
My conclusion at the time was that SARS was intended for China, and it was only an accident of fate that sent patient zero to Hong Kong to do most of his damage there, leaving Mainland China with relatively small remnants to deal with. A serious disruption of China's economy would be one certain motive.
I have no firm conclusions as to where this confusion of information leaves us. As I wrote at the beginning, portions of the official story seem either implausible or impossible, but without a clear trail in any particular direction. It is distressing that the entire Western media ignored in total the testimony of highly-credible Russian and Chinese scientists that the SARS virus could not have occurred in nature but created only in a lab. This one case would not prove a point, but there have been many of these in the past, where the US government and military have made claims that were overwhelmingly proven false by the Russians, yet flatly ignored by the Western media.
One such case was in Libya where the US repeatedly flooded the media with claims that Khadaffi was waging war against his own civilians, destroying large sections of cities with bombs and artillery and leaving huge numbers of dead bodies everywhere. In that event, Russia produced volumes of high-resolution satellite photos of the affected areas that clearly displayed no damage of any kind whatever and no evidence of either battles or bodies. Following TV reports of the American claims, the Russians produced all their irrefutable evidence to the BBC and other Western media newswires, only to have their evidence ignored.
This is a consistent and provable pattern which has persisted for decades: any evidence contradicting the official (Western) narrative on any topic is thoroughly censored. If the evidence is debatable, it is presented and ridiculed in the media as Communist propaganda or a conspiracy theory. If irrefutable, it is totally censored and appears no place. What then do we do with testimony from world-class virologists who tell us SARS was a man-made chimera, a mixture of pathogens impossible in nature and most likely of military origin? How then do we interpret the events at the Metropole Hotel and the Amoy Gardens in Hong Kong?
My view of this matter is that, even despite the passage of time, the entire SARS event deserves an international forensic investigation.
*
Larry Romanoffis a retired managementconsultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. His writing has been translated into more than 20 languages and is available on more than 100 foreign-language websites around the world. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
Notes
Larry Romanoffis one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new COVID-19 anthology ”When China Sneezes”.
Copyright © Larry Romanoff,Moon of Shanghai, 2020
