Transcript of “COVID USA with Larry Romanoff – April 1, 2020”

 

Transcript of “COVID USA  with Larry Romanoff – April 1, 2020”  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKVnIxQzfvs

Published April 7, 2020

CHINESE   ENGLISH    SPANISH

Larry Romanoff discusses many of his articles including:

“China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update, Did the Virus Originate in the US? Japan, China and Taiwan

Reports on the Origin of the Virus”;

“Humanity at the Crossroads – Connecting the Dots to Our Brave New World”;

“Why Is the US Apparently Not Testing for the COVID-19 Coronavirus?”;

Six unexplained viral outbreaks in China during the trade war necessitating US imports;

Research into the origins of the coronavirus;

Gene sequencing of all of the different strains;

All strains exist only in the US;

Wuhan Seafood Market not the origin of the virus;

Wuhan BSL4 lab not a bioweapons lab; over 1,000 leaks from US BSL 3 and 4 labs in five years;

Enormous Ft. Detrick bioweapons lab shutdown for 6 months;

China virus 100% Chinese specific, same with SARS;

Harvard kicked out of China for illegally collecting Chinese DNA;

CDC ordered American physicians not to test for coronavirus;

Italy and Iran geopolitical targets;

CDC produced flawed tests and then none at all;

CDC part of the US military;

Economic devastation.”

* * * * * * * *

Viruses. It's like children of a parent. You cannot have a child appearing by itself. It has to come from some place.

And in this case, there are five sort of so-called parents. And only the US has all five.

Korea, Taiwan had one variety. Same as England, actually. China had an entirely different one from the others. It was much more lethal than the one in Korea.

And different countries had different types.

Iran and Italy sequenced theirs and discovered that it was different from the one that was in China, so their infections did not come from China. They came from someplace else.

But the someplace else could only have been the US because that was the only place that those varieties existed.

Bonnie Faulkner: I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Larry Romanoff. Today's show: COVID USA.

Larry Romanoff is a researcher, journalist and author. He is a retired management consultant 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 executive MBA classes.

Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of 10 books generally related to China and the West.

Today we discuss several of his most recent articles in his series on the novel coronavirus, including “China's coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did the virus originate in the US?”, “Japan, China and Taiwan: Report on the origin of the virus”, and  “Why is the US apparently NOT testing for the COVID 19 coronavirus?”

Larry Romanoff, welcome.

Larry Romanoff: Thank you.

Bonnie: I've read with interest many of the articles you've written in your series “Tracing the Outbreak and Spread of the Coronavirus”.

When did you first start studying the coronavirus outbreak? And what got you started on this line of inquiry?

Larry: Actually, I started at the very beginning because there were curiosities just about the fact of the outbreak, and partly because China inexplicably had six of these – various kinds of pig viruses, bird viruses, all sorts of things, breaking out one after the other just in the past two years, all while the trade war was going on.

In the whole world there had been a few outbreaks of various things in the US, but the only other place where there had been any virus outbreaks or disease outbreaks of any kind had been in other countries where the locations had been exactly at the place where the US military has bio-lab bases.

For instance, when the ebola [virus] broke out in Africa, it broke out in three different places simultaneously, thousands of kilometers apart from each other. And in each case, at exactly the place the US had a military bio-weapons lab. That's not proof of anything, but it was just very curious.

And with China having had this long succession of viruses that had no explanation, this last one seemed really curious.

So I began studying it from the very beginning, and the more I studied it, the more curious it became.

Bonnie: Well, you write that in the past two years during the trade war, which you've just mentioned, China has suffered several pandemics and you list six of them in one of your articles.

Could you talk about these pandemics that attack wildlife, livestock, crops and even people in China, and what these pandemics lead to?

Larry: Well, there were no wildlife being attacked, but four of them were bird viruses. One was extraordinarily pathogenic that happened during the coronavirus crisis. It came out in January in a province in China next door to Wuhan, next door to Hubei province.

The four of those bird viruses, and the pig virus, were unusual pathogens. They hadn't been seen here before, and there was no explanation for them. There was no tracing the actual origin, but they were deadly.

And in the case of the pig virus, the swine flu, there were multiple reports from very different parts of China that somebody was flying small drones over the pig farms and either dropping or spraying something.

In one very large pig farm area, and China doesn't have very many large operators. These are mostly small farms. But in one very large operation in northern China, the drones were coming by so often that the owners got some jamming equipment to jam all the drones to stop them from coming.

They finally had to stop because the authorities said that they were on a flight path to an airport and they were affecting the aircraft. So they had to stop doing it.

But there were reports of drones from many, many parts of China flying over the pig farms. Nobody ever traced it.

The Western media had stories about Chinese gangs trying to kill all the pigs so they could somehow profit, but that story made no sense at all. There was no evidence of anything like that.

But everything was just very, very strange.

There was no way to connect it with anything external. There was no actual hard proof.

But just the fact that China would have had so many and nobody else in the world would have anything – just to make everything really, really curious.

And the only result of all of that was that it killed more than half of the pigs in China, which meant that China had to import billions of dollars worth of pork from the US.

It killed all the chickens, four times in a row or five times in a row. So China had to reverse its policy and start buying a lot more US agricultural products.

And it was just very damn curious, because it had not happened any place else, and China just kept having these things one after another in succession. And none of them were related to each other. They were not the same virus each time.

Bonnie: Has the fact that you live in China aided you in tracking the progression of the virus, the coronavirus, or could have you done the same analysis if you lived in, say, the United States?

Larry: I think probably being here is an advantage because I have contacts here, sources of information, I probably would not have if I were outside China. It's probably much more convenient to do it from here.

Bonnie: What methodology do you use to track the spread of the virus? That is to say, do you gather evidence from the mainstream media, from government statistics or other sources? How do you go about your research?

Larry: Well, it's actually very complicated. It includes everything you mentioned and much more.

This virus started off almost as a curiosity for me, but it ended up being three months of full-time research – very long days, literally for three months.

So I've sourced everything I could find – sourced from the media from every country, from local and international scientists.

I have friends in Italy, for example, contacts where I could collect information from Italian virologists on their opinions on the source of the virus and the cause of it and its expansion. Similar with Canada. Similar with South Korea.

So I had sources from many, many different places and it was just a matter of collecting all of that and putting it together and try to see what made sense.

Bonnie: In your article of March 4 [2020], “China's coronavirus: Shocking update: Did the virus originate in the US? Japan, China and Taiwan reports on the origin of the virus.”

What did Japan, China and Taiwan report about the origins of the coronavirus?

Larry: Well, this is the strange part, because whenever a virus breaks out, the first thing that every country does is to try to find the source – effectively the patient 0.

You want to find out . . . You want to discover who started this, who was the original infection source, so that you can stop the source.

Because if all you do is treat infections that arise, they will continue to arise forever because the source is still running around infecting everybody.

So you want to trace it back to the origin and put a stop to it there, and then you can treat the outbreak and eventually it will die.

Well, [there was] a massive effort to try to track down the source, the original patient 0, and then something really strange happened, because suddenly they stopped. And instead, the Chinese, not only the virologists, but the Chinese intelligence agencies, stopped looking at China and they started looking outside of China in the rest of the world.

They collected all together more than 100 samples of the virus from different countries on four continents and started doing the gene sequence for all of those.

And that was a very strange thing to have happened because they never said why they did it, but obviously they stopped looking for the source inside China because something happened. Something triggered it to make them believe that the virus came from outside the country.

So they stopped looking in China and started looking outside. That was the first thing.

The second thing that happened almost at the same time was that the Japanese news agencies published several stories and a TV program saying that the virus almost certainly had to originate in the US, that people had been coming back to Japan infected with the coronavirus as early as late September – tourists returning from the US to Japan – and other information.

And then a Taiwanese virologist spent a lot of time. He must have had access to the same information because he tracked down all the different types and strains of the virus. And he demonstrated conclusively in a very long TV program that the virus had to have originated inside the US because all the trains outside the US were essentially branches of one tree. And those branches could not have existed by themselves. They had to have come from the original trunk and that trunk existed only the US because only the US had all the different varieties of the virus.

So that is where it started.

Bonnie: At what time in the evolution of this virus did China start looking outside of China? Do you remember?

Larry: About the end of January, it seems to me.

Bonnie: That's right around the same time that the CDC made its explosive announcement actually.

So how were Chinese researchers able to conclude that the virus originated outside of China? And how could they collect all of these samples?

Larry: Well, because when China first sequenced the genome for the virus they sent it to the WHO and other people, including the US, did the same.

But the Chinese authorities also went to the US and I assume they collected them from the local health authorities but they also got them from the WHO and they got them from the health authorities in all the other countries as well.

So they collected everything and then compared all the varieties. It should be very simple to explain but for some reason it's not.

It's just that these viruses, how can I say it, it's like children of a parent. You cannot have a child appearing by itself. It has to come from some place.

And in this case, there are five sort of so-called parents, and only the US has all five.

Korea, Taiwan had one variety – same as England, actually.

China had an entirely different one from the others that was much more lethal than the one in Korea.

And different countries had different types.

Iran and Italy sequenced theirs and discovered that it was different from the one that was in China, so their infections did not come from China. They came from someplace else.

But the someplace else could only have been the US because that was the only place that those varieties existed.

Bonnie: I'm speaking with researcher, journalist and author, Larry Romanoff. Today's show: COVID USA. I'm Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter.

According to your article, it was from the seafood market in Wuhan, China, apparently that the novel coronavirus spread rapidly. What have you discovered about the viruses entry into the Wuhan market?

Larry: What the Chinese virologists discovered was that the market was not the origin of the virus at all. In fact, the virus had nothing to do with the market.

They tracked it to multiple points in Hubei province and in the City of Wuhan but unrelated to the market.

And it seems that what happened was that the originally infected individuals all traveled to the market, and because it's a very busy place with huge numbers of people very close together, everybody infected everybody very quickly and the virus really broke out rapidly from all the multiple contacts at the market.

But the virus went into the market before it came out of the market. That much was proven and even there are . . . Daniel Lucey, who is an American virologist, said exactly the same thing. He studied that too. And he's quoted as saying that the virus went into the market before it came out.

So the wet market was actually irrelevant.

And the market does not sell bats and wild animals and all sorts of other things. It's largely a seafood market.

So all of that was just smoke that was created by the media.

The market was actually irrelevant to the outbreak. It would have happened even if the market had not existed.

The virus was, I don't know, seeded, planted, broke out somehow in many locations at the same time in Wuhan, and from there it just carried through to the city. The market just happened to be a convenient place to spread it.

Bonnie: You mean, in the seafood market they're not selling bats and something called pangolins, or whatever it is . . .

Larry: No.

Bonnie:. . . all of these strange things?

Larry: No, no, no. No, no. That is smoke. No such thing.

People in China do not eat bats. And they do not eat pangolins either.

The photos that were in the videos that were circulated were taken in Palau in Micronesia in the South Pacific, because there people do eat bats as a delicacy. And the video was of a Chinese tour guide who was there with a tour group and the local people gave her a bowl of bat soup to try and they showed the video of it.

And then people took that video of it and promoted it as Chinese people eating bats. But that was never true. And there have never been bats for sale anywhere in China – ever.

Bonnie: Isn't that interesting, because I saw a picture of this woman trying to eat a bat out of a soup . . .

Larry: Yes.

Bonnie:. . . and then I think I saw her apologizing later online. That's really crazy.

Larry: Well, that video was taken four years ago.

Bonnie: Now, who put these videos out?

Larry: I have no idea. Some of them came from the VOA and Radio Free Asia, which are essentially CIA propaganda fronts.

But once they get out, everybody who thinks it's exciting will propagate it and pass it on to someone else so it spreads just like a virus. It just goes everywhere. And it's very difficult to track the original source.

But somebody picked that up and they were just using it as a smokescreen just to try to lay the blame on China – to sort of implicate China by inference.

The same was true of this Wuhan University so-called virology lab, which was totally irrelevant to everything too. But they said that China had this when it was very close to the seafood market so therefore that is the cause.

But, again, it was just creating a lot of smoke to confuse everybody by sort of circumstantial evidence, trying to put the blame on the local population for the outbreak.

But all of that was just fake news.

Bonnie: Isn't that interesting because I've read so much about this bio-level 4 lab in Wuhan that has had leaks before that people are claiming. That's not true?

Larry: No, no. China has had only one example of leaks and that was 10 years ago in Beijing where they had built their first lab and some viruses broke out two or three times, but that was minimal and it has never happened since.

And the Wuhan lab, it is a BS4 lab to deal with various kinds of pathogens, but there was never any leaks and it is not a bioweapons lab. It's just part of the virology of the university.

The fact that its location was in Wuhan sounded implicating, but as I mentioned in one of my articles, it's the US that has all the outbreaks.

I mentioned in one of my articles that from 2012 to 2017 the US had 1,059 pathogen outbreaks, leaks, from bio-3 and bio-4 labs. 1,059 in seven years. And many of them were serious.

The last one was at Ft. Detrick, US AMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease] where the CDC shut it down because of dangerous leaks, and they shut it down for six months. This was not nothing. It was not like they closed it down for the weekend. They shut down the entire lab. And this is a monstrous place – 80,000 sq. meters. So nearly a million sq. feet. It's a huge place.

And it's all bioweapons lab stuff – US military. And the CDC gave them a cease and desist order and they shut down the whole place for six months.

And even then, by December it opened up. They were only able to open partially to continue some work, but it took six months of testing and decontamination to clean that place up.

So the US media, and the Western media generally, ignored all of that and they blamed China on leaks in Wuhan that have never existed.

And the only leaks China has had was, as I said, in Beijing 10 years ago. But they ignored more than 1,000 serious leaks that happened in the U.S.

So it's not China that has the leaks.

Bonnie: Well, isn't that interesting, because the implication is always that the bio-level 4 lab in Wuhan, at the university as you explain, is always written about as if it's a bioweapons lab.

Larry: Yes, and it's not. It has never had any connection whatever to the military.

I know the place well. I don't live all that far from Wuhan. I've been to Wuhan many times. I know the university and I'm familiar with the lab. And it is just a part of the Biology Department. It has nothing to do with the military at all.

Bonnie: Wow!

Larry: So all of that was just smoke created in the Western media to try to by implication suggest that China was responsible for it themselves.

But the really foolish part is this virus, when it broke out, was 100% Chinese specific. It did not attack anybody else.

There are millions of foreigners in China. There are thousands and thousands and thousands in Wuhan. And there was not a single Caucasian infected.

The virus was 100% Chinese specific.

And even at the very end, after several months, there was only one Caucasian that I know of – I believe a German – who was infected by the Chinese version of the virus.

So no country is going to create a dangerous pathogen that attacks only its own people. I mean, why would China do such a thing?

Bonnie: So are you saying that this virus in Wuhan was genetically specific to Chinese?

Larry: Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. Nobody else got infected by it.

Bonnie: Well, that's quite explosive. I remember reading that Chinese had kicked a bunch of Americans out of China for collecting DNA over there.

Larry: Oh, they did. They did. Let's go back to that for a second because it's very important.

But so far as the part that Wuhan is concerned, I mean, there are really many, many, many thousands of foreigners, Americans, in Wuhan. And absolutely nobody got infected. So it was 100% Chinese specific, and yes, that is very explosive because there is no way that a natural virus will attack only one race of people.

Now, in Italy and Iran the virus strains are different. They are not the same as the one in China. They are attacking Italians and Iranians. And the same is true of South Korea.

South Korea has a totally different strain than China. It's much less lethal but more infective. And it's attacking only the South Koreans. It's not going anyplace else. Well, I'm sorry. Taiwan has it as well – the same type – but it's very mild. It's totally different strain.

So, this one was attacking only Chinese people.

And it was maddening because in the media they would say France had its first infections of this coronavirus, but when you tracked them back, it was not France. It was two Chinese people who traveled from China to France who were found to be infected.

And they would say, “Australia has its first case of the coronavirus”, but that again was a Chinese person. There were entirely, 100%, Chinese people who were infected.

And those infections were not related to the eventual outbreaks.

Like in Italy, there were two or three Italians who were found to be infected in Italy. They were quarantined. That passed, and then the outbreak in Italy happened in a totally different place from people who had no contact with those Chinese travelers. It was a domestic outbreak – totally unrelated.

But the media, while making it sound like China had been spreading this virus all over the world to French people, to Australian people, to Italian people, and that was never true. That was never true.

It was only Chinese people who were infected by this virus.

The same thing happened with SARS, by the way. It was 99.5% Chinese. Some Vietnamese were infected and nobody else.

And even they made a big splash about Canada having about 40 SARS cases, but those were all Chinese who had traveled to China, had become infected and they returned to Canada and who had infected Chinese medical staff.

There were no non-Chinese who were infected with SARS. And the same is true with this coronavirus now.

So the initial outbreak for the first couple of months was entirely Chinese specific. And that cannot happen by accident.

Bonnie: I'm speaking with researcher, journalist and author, Larry Romanoff. Today's show: COVID USA. I'm Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter.

And then you were going to talk a little bit about: who were these Americans that were collecting DNA in China, and then China got them out of the country?

Larry: Oh, that was bad. That was Harvard University. Harvard made an arrangement with the U.S. military, and I don't know who all else, to come to China. They had some research program. They wanted to do studies. Initially they said it was about asthma.

But what they wanted to do was collect DNA samples.

And the Chinese government refused to agree to the study.

So then, without telling anybody, they sent a team of people from Harvard to China, to Anhui province, proposing to do some local study on asthma and some other illnesses in Anhui, which is sort of a poor province in China.

But what they did was to take and collect hundreds of thousands of samples of Chinese DNA and then the snuck them out of the country – I think in diplomatic bags, actually.

And when the government found out about it, there was just hell to pay. There were lawsuits everywhere in China, in the U.S. Harvard was blasted for the lack of ethics, and the Chinese government was just damn furious that they would do that because that study had been specifically forbidden before.

But they came back in and they did it anyway and they snuck everything out of the country without anybody knowing it. And it wasn't discovered until they wrote a paper about it and published it.

And then some reporters from the China Daily started doing an investigation and they uncovered the whole big mess.

And Harvard University said that they had obtained permission from the Chinese government from various levels, and it was proved that all those letters of permission were forged. They were entirely fake.

They said that they had obtained letters of consent from every individual from whom they got DNA samples, but then when there was a legal investigation by the Department of Justice in the U.S., Harvard University suddenly shredded all of the documentation claiming privacy concerns for the patients.

And all of a sudden there was no evidence of any kind, and there was no proof of anything any more. So no investigation could be completed.

So they just obstructed everything by shredding all the documents. So there was no way to prove anything.

But the researchers here went through thousands of so-called “patients”, and nobody had been asked to sign any kind of release or letter of understanding or permission or anything at all.

There was absolutely no permission. There were no documents. There were no agreements, no nothing.

They just did it quietly, under the table, and then slipped everything back out to the U.S.

It was a huge mess.

Bonnie: And what timeframe did this take place in? And obviously they were collecting DNA from Chinese patients, right?

Larry: Yes. It was exclusively DNA that they were checking. This was around 1999 or 2000.

Bonnie: Okay, so that was a long time ago. All right.

Larry: Yes. And the suspicion at the time was very much that they were doing it for bioweapons research. That's one of the reasons the government was so angry that it happened.

And Harvard has not been permitted back in.

Bonnie: The Chinese virologist that you quote says that the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing, which you've pretty much been describing.

What country has the most different strains of the virus, and which countries only have one strain?

Larry: Most countries have only one strain. The U.S. has all of them.

China has one strain, which is more lethal than the normal flu. It had one tiny pocket in Guangzhou of a different strain – a very mild one – that was contained quickly and killed, and it amounted to nothing.

Australia has 90% one strain and a tiny bit of a second one. Australia's prime minister said that 80% of its infections have come from the U.S. So that one strain.

But the U.S. is the only country that has all of them. Most countries have only one.

Bonnie: Now, are all these different strains of coronavirus that exist in the U.S., are they all floating out there among the public? Where are these strains in the United States located?

Larry: Well, there was a big outbreak in Washington state, which seems to be where it started. Right now New York is the epicenter, and I don't know how New York got to be the epicenter.

But it's obviously . . . New York has 40~50% of all the U.S. deaths and about 40 or 50% of all the infections. So somehow it got carried to New York.

But actually, there is something else to that story that I don't think anybody knows.

There is a Chinese virologist, a doctor, (Helen Chu) in Washington state who had been doing studies on the flu – just normal flu – for several months starting in October-November-December of 2019.

And she'd been collecting throat swabs and nasal swabs from people all over the state of Washington. And they'd just been cataloging and saving them.

And then when the new coronavirus broke out, she became concerned that when she and her teams were taking these swabs from people in Washington state, that they were finding symptoms of an illness that was not the flu, that there was something new and very strange going on and she became more and more concerned that there was a new pathogen floating around.

And she asked the CDC for permission to start giving tests on these swabs that they'd collected for months for the coronavirus, and the CDC refused to give her permission.

And, in fact, when she became quite insistent that there was something very strange happening and they needed to track it down, the CDC had a . . . I think it was a video-conference. I can't remember. I think it was a video-conference with the CDC and Dr. Chu and her team and the state health authorities and some other people, and they gave her an official cease and desist order and they absolutely prohibited her from testing any of those swabs for the coronavirus.

And then finally toward the end of February, Dr. Chu became so concerned that there was something very seriously wrong and that people were going to start dying, that she disobeyed her orders and tested some of those prior swabs anyway, and, of course, she found the coronavirus, which is why the news broke out in the U.S. at all.

If it hadn't been for that, nobody would have ever known.

But by that time, thousands, or tens of thousands, of people in Washington state had been infected.

Dozens of people in the nursing homes had already died. And that was where the disease originally began in the U.S.

And even after that, Dr. Chu was slapped down again and forbidden to absolutely to do any more testing.

The CDC claimed that because the swabs had been collected from Americans for flu testing that it was unethical to test these swabs for another disease because you were violating their privacy and you would have to go back and get permission from every single one of those people before you could retest, which is completely crazy.

I mean, if you suspect that the swab you took from me might have a dangerous disease, to say that it's unethical to test it for the disease and sit back and let me die is just crazy.

They SHOULD have gone back, but the CDC absolutely refused and I think they're probably going to destroy all the samples.

But that would probably prove that the virus was floating around Washington state last October and November. But they were just blaming all the deaths on the flu and they weren't doing any testing.

And, in fact, the CDC ordered American physicians to not test, specifically not test, for the coronavirus but to test for the flu and to test for every other possible kind of illness first.

And if they found symptoms of every other illness, they would stop there. They were never to test for the coronavirus.

And in my experience, if you don't ask a question, it's because you already know the answer and you don't want anybody else to know.

But they were all forbidden, specifically forbidden, to test for the coronavirus.

Bonny: What I don't understand, if you look at this from a political point of view, what's with Italy? Why would such an outbreak happen in northern Italy? Do you have any ideas on that?

Bonnie: From a geopolitical standpoint, Italy is bitterly hated by the U.S. government, partly because it joined China's “Belt and Road”, partly because it has been participating with China in many of the worldwide initiatives, partly because it has refused to fully join the EU's 100% financial integration. Italy has essentially kept its banking and credit infrastructure separate from the rest of the EU and been hated for that for a long time.

There are quite a few very good explanations why various people would like to punish Italy very, very much, compared to Germany or anybody else.

Italy is definitely a target. It's bitterly hated.

Bonnie: Well, that's very interesting. I didn't understand that about Italy, mainly that the Italians had not completely integrated their financial and banking system into that of the EU. I didn't know that.

Larry: Yes, many people don't, especially the bank credit system, which the EU has been fighting Italy about for a long time. They very much wanted to swallow Italy up into that and Italy had been refusing, which was a big bone of contention for a long time.

So Italy, from a geopolitical standpoint, there are many very good reasons to want to cause Italy essentially an economic collapse, to force them financially to integrate fully into the EU.

And that's going to be the effect of it. Italy is going to be hit so hard, they are going to have so much debt, and their economy will be damaged sufficiently, that the banking system is going to be in serious trouble and they will probably have no choice but to do what the EU wants them to do.

That will be the major result of the virus in Italy.

Bonnie: Similar to Greece, right?

Larry: Yes. Yes. Yes, Greece happened without the virus but it was the same kind of thing that happened. Greece was just forced into that, and Italy is now going to suffer the same effect. There's probably nothing to prevent it.

And generally anything geopolitical, the first question to ask is: who benefits from this.?

Because it's always a mistake to assume that the results were not planned. They are almost all planned.

So when you look at the result, what is the benefit? Who benefits? And in this case the EU benefits because they get to swallow up Italy's financial system, and Italy gets punished for participating with China. That's essentially the result.

With Iran, it's especially bad. Mike Pompeo made a speech the other day. Actually, Mike Pompeo sent a circular to all the State Department staff, to everybody – all the Foreign Service staff – giving them talking points on [unintelligible] very specifically. I got a copy of those documents on how to blame China for the worldwide virus and infection, and, specifically told them that in every news interview to state that “the United States is the most humanitarian nation that has ever existed in the history of the world”. Okay? That's a quote from Pompeo.

But in the meantime, one of the first things that happened when the virus broke out was that the U.S. administration levied even more sanctions on Iran to ensure that Iran could not obtain medical supplies.

It was only China violating those sanctions that gave Iran any hope of being able to treat the people because Iran has been totally blocked from getting any medical supplies from any place in the world.

And this was instituted after the virus broke out by the Trump administration, which is not very nice.

Bonnie: I'm speaking with researcher, journalist and author, Larry Romanoff. Today's show: COVID USA. I'm Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter.

In your article of March 6 [2020], why is the U.S. apparently not testing for the 2019 coronavirus. You point out that the US Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, is not testing for the new coronavirus, COVID-19, and that reliable tests do not exist in the U.S.

What do you mean “reliable tests do not exist in the United States”?

Larry: Well, starting from the very beginning, going back to January now, the CDC produced some virus tests, which were badly flawed.

They sent them out. All the states immediately objected saying the results were totally inaccurate. They were wild.

They would take two tests from the same person. One would be strongly positive, another negative.

They were completely unreliable.

And the CDC eventually told everybody to just discard them because they were flawed.

At the same time, the WHO had a very good working test that they offered to the U.S., and the CDC refused to use it.

Trump said in one of his news interviews that the WHO tests were no good, but that's not true. They were perfect.

The CDC produced a flawed test and then they produced nothing at all. And they just dragged their feet. They did not produce any test of any kind.

So there were no tests available in the U.S.

California, at one point in February, middle of February, said that there were only two test kits remaining in the entire state. New York had even less. And most of the states had none.

There were no tests available in the entire Unites States of America, and the CDC refused to produce any.

Then the CDC started saying that people should contract with private manufacturers to see if they could get tests.

So people tried to do that, but then those private manufacturers had to go to the CDC to get approval for the tests, and the CDC dragged their feet and refused to approve them.

So this dragged on for . . . This process went on for about two months.

So, nobody could get any testing done.

Finally, there are some tests that are being done now, but, in fact, nobody really knows.

The CDC is using . . . I can't recall the word, but it's “presumed infections”.

So the figures that you see in your newspapers telling you that the U.S. is 100,000 in infections and 5,000 deaths or something, those figures are not accurate.

The CDC is not actually testing. They're really just guessing.

They did the same for the H1N1 flu back a couple of years ago. They just used “presumed infection rates”. So nobody really knows.

There is not very much testing being done in the U.S. even today.

But there is something else that you should know that nobody seems to be aware of.

The CDC is not what it appears to be. We would expect that the CDC should be the big sister to the NIH, the National Institute of Health, for instance, as a civilian organization dedicated to preserving the health of Americans.

But that's not the case.

The CDC is actually the mother of the bioweapons lab at Ft. Detrick. It's part of the U.S. military.

At the end of the Second World War, when the Japanese unit 731 in China were apprehended for conducting all of their biological pathogen experiments in China and doing all of their human experimentation, the reason that they avoided war crimes trials is because the U.S. military, with General Douglas MacArthur, made a deal with Shiro Ishii to get all his documents and all his people transferred to the United States.

And there were at least 4~5,000 of them, and I think maybe as many as 10,000. [There were] transferred to the U.S. with all their biological weapon experience and practice,  documents – everything.

And they were all put onto U.S. military bases, and they were all transferred to the U.S.

Some of those people at that time were transferred to the newly formed CDC, which is part of the U.S. military. It was never a civilian organization.

And a few years ago, there was a big splash in the media that the CDC had been exporting biological pathogens to countries all around the world.

And the example that was used was Iraq, that the CDC had sent a long list of everything from anthrax to the bubonic plague to coronaviruses to God knows what – a long list of things to Iraq and to other countries.

And the CDC hotly denied it and they said that they were as pure as the driven snow and they would never do such a thing and that they were purely a civilian organization and they had nothing to do with pathogens.

But then USA Today published a shipping list on CDC letterhead, which read like a terrorist's dream. It was a list of all of these biological pathogens that the CDC had been selling all over the world to various countries.

So then the CDC went quiet, and the matter was removed from the media. It just went off the radar.

But the CDC has been internationally marketing biological pathogens for decades.

The CDC is part of the U.S. military. It's not a civilian organization.

So it's messier than it appears to be.

Bonnie: Well, what I don't understand politically is this lockdown, okay? This thing has gone global. There are all these countries in lockdown.

Now, here in the United States, it's destroying all the small businesses, maybe even medium-sized businesses.

This does not seem like an appropriate response to a pandemic.

Larry: Well, the lockdown, I think, if I follow my earlier theory, the lockdowns were never supposed to happen. Nothing was supposed to happen. It was just supposed to be attributed to the flu and life would have gone on as normal, and there would have been no particular effects.

The hospitals would have seen increased deaths, but really nothing else.

But when the news of the coronavirus being loose in the U.S. escaped and became public knowledge, then the local health authorities, who are not part of any national plan for anything at all and they're not a part of the CDC, the local health authorities were trying to protect their own people.

And when they started doing some testing of their own and they realized that the virus was spreading, they were taking the initiative to do the lockdowns themselves.

I mean, it was New York that decided to lockdown New York. It was not the Trump administration or the CDC that decided to do it.

And the same is true in California and many other states and cities. They were taking their own initiative to try to protect themselves. It was not the national instruction.

In China it was the national level where the government decided: this is how we're going to handle it. We're going to quarantine all these areas and lock them down and prevent the virus from spreading. That came from the top.

In the U.S., nothing came from the top. It all came from the bottom.

Bonnie: In your devastating article, “Humanity at the Crossroads: Connecting the Dots to Our Brave New World”, you write that “the financial powers of Europe and America are planning a super-sovereign world government within their absolute control. One would have to be a fool to ignore the sheer volume of evidence.”

Do you consider the coronavirus global lockdown as a step in the direction of this super-sovereign world government?

Larry: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

If you think about the results, again, one of the things that's happened, you mentioned that it's killing small and medium-sized businesses. It's also killing the airlines.

All of them are going to be on the verge of bankruptcy very quickly. And somebody is going to buy up all the stock from all those airlines for pennies.

And when the virus disappears, somebody is going to own all the world's airlines.

That's not nothing.

Bonnie: That's what makes me feel that this pandemic is fake. But it's not fake because people are dying. So I don't get it.

Larry: Well, if you think about biological weapons, normally we think of: if I hate your country, I would want to release the bubonic plague and kill half of your people.

But normally, that's not what really happens. If I hate your country, there are better ways to deal with biological pathogens than just killing you.

Illnesses are far more expensive and difficult to deal with than deaths.

If I really want to do damage to a country, I don't want a virus that kills everybody. I want a virus that makes everybody sick, because that kills your hospitals. It collapses your healthcare system. It puts an enormous strain on your economy. It could collapse the entire economy.

It could bankrupt all the banks, the country's financial system, the country's credit system.

It could put 100s of millions of people out of work.

It could do so much financial damage that you might not recover, or might not recover for 10 or 20 years.

So this coronavirus fits perfectly into that mould, because what it does is create an enormous amount of financial damage, for instance, with Italy, without actually having to destroy the country.

So in a sense, you could say that the virus is fake in that it's not really trying to kill off the populations. But it is trying to something else, and it's going to be very effective.

The U.S. airlines now are saying that they need at least $50 billion immediately in cash just to survive for the short term.

And already most airlines, major international airlines, have cut their capacity by 80~90%.

So everybody is really, really hurting.

Some airlines are down to 5%, 10%, of their former capacity. They have almost no passengers.

So many of those businesses are being hurt very, very badly, and somebody is going to buy them out at the end.

You asked me somethings about living in China.

Bonnie Yes.

Larry: One thought that I would leave with you is that China is actually a very much more gentle kind of place to live than is painted in the Western media generally.

I'm from Canada, and Canada is practically just the same as the U.S. And they kind of paint China as some kind of dictatorial, authoritarian kind of place, and it's actually just the opposite.

And I'll give you a couple of just sort of unrelated examples to try to put some flavor on it.

One day a couple of years ago I came home after dinner in the evening and I discovered I had no electricity. It was just a circuit breaker that we reset, no big deal.

But I wondered out loud at the time to my friend if maybe my electricity got cut off because I forgot to pay my bill.

And she gave me the weirdest look, and she said, “I've never heard of such a thing.”

So in Canada and in the U.S. and in many other countries, if you don't pay your electricity bill by July 12, you discover that you have no electricity and you end up paying connection fees and a lot of other stuff.

In China that would never happen. They would never punish you.

Bonnie That's very interesting, because I'm always . . . We read about the social credit system in China and how they're trying to spy on everybody. And if you jaywalk, you get a demerit, and then you can't ride the bus or something.

Larry: No. Actually, it's very common to jaywalk or cross a red light even with a policeman standing there.

The social credit system actually exists because China does not have ways to punish people as we do in the West for so many of what we might call civil transgressions. There are no laws to deal with it.

So what they're trying to do is have this system to sort of replace, I guess, or substitute, for laws of various kinds.

In the West we might throw a person in prison for causing a disturbance. We could manufacture some kind of generic charge.

China has nothing like that. So if there are people who cause a lot of social trouble, or if they have debts that they refuse to pay, or they're able to pay, they will find themselves in this Social Credit System and not be able to buy first-class tickets or train tickets and make their lives inconvenient until they start to behave properly.

But that's not because of surveillance or because of an authoritarian state. It's because there are no laws to punish people for things that are very common in the U.S.

I mean, in the U.S. we commonly have punishments for all of these things.

In China those punishments don't exist. So that's really the purpose of it. It's very different.

Another kind of thing: in Canada or the U.S., nobody ever passed the policeman on the highway who was driving at the speed limit.

Bonnie: Ha, ha, ha. That's true.

Larry: In China, it happens all the time.

And I mentioned that to my friend once, a friend of mine, and he said, “Why should I be afraid of him? He's my servant not my master.”

Bonnie Oh!

Larry: The attitude here is totally different.

I was standing once on the platform of the Maglev train at Pudong Airport and I was watching a man and his wife having some kind of a heated discussion with a policeman.

I wasn't close enough to know what their debate was about, but the argument ended with the man's wife kicking the policeman in the shins.

I wrote at the time, “I can think of many Western cities were that would not have been a good idea.”

Bonnie Ha, ha, ha, no kidding.

Larry: So it's really, really very different here.

You can do so many more things in China really, especially small things, break rules, and there are no punishments, no sanctions.

Life here is actually much more free than it would be for me in Canada or in the U.S. I have more freedom here than I would anyplace else.

That may be hard to believe, but it's really true. It's 180º from the way it's portrayed in the Western media. It's a pleasant, happy place to live.

Bonnie Larry Romanoff. Thank you very much.

Larry: My pleasure.

Bonnie I've been speaking with Larry Romanoff. Today's show: COVID USA. Larry Romanoff is a researcher, journalist and author. He is a retired management consultant 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 executive MBA classes.

Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of 10 books generally related to China and the West.

His articles are posted at Moon of Shanghai + Blue Moon of Shanghai

Exclusive articles for PRAVDA and The Saker Blog.

About the Author:

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant 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. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/andhttp://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ 

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

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