by MICHAEL P SENGER
From an early date, commentators have noted that the response to COVID had all the look and feel of a coup attempt. The masks, the slogans, the symbols, the lies, the sudden inversion of long-cherished norms and values, the mindless acceptance of information from nefarious sources like the World Health Organization and China. Something was seriously off, and it all seemed so obvious.
Thus, one overarching question always lingered over the response to COVID. How were officials able to implement such destructive, totalitarian policies across the western world without intelligence authorities stepping in to stop them?
A detached review of the evidence leads to a chilling answer—though in hindsight, perhaps the only one that was ever really possible. Quite simply, the reason the western intelligence community never stepped in to stop this illiberalism is that virtually all the most illiberal aspects of the response to COVID lead directly back to the western intelligence community itself.
The western intelligence community was behind the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy via Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher—operatives with deep ties to the highest levels of the intelligence and biosecurity communities—through their work on biodefense policy during the Bush administration. In what may be the mother of all COVID coverups, Hatchett and Mecher’s story that “social distancing” was based on a 14-year-old’s science project, as told through the New York Times and celebrity author Michael Lewis, appears to be nothing but an elaborate cover story for the fact that the concept was lifted directly from China’s longstanding policy of “lockdown” during SARS in 2003.
The intelligence community either planned or was in attendance at nearly all the pandemic simulations that began being held on a semi-annual basis beginning with Dark Winter in 2001. Current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was personally present and sat directly beside China’s CDC Director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic which took place just weeks before COVID was revealed.
Michael Callahan, the federal government’s chief virus intelligence expert, told National Geographic that he began tracking the novel coronavirus in November 2019, and he was the US government’s only confirmed contact in Wuhan during the initial lockdown in January 2020. Upon returning from Wuhan, Callahan’s testimony was key to throwing the federal government into a state of emergency and the widespread adoption of mechanical ventilators which proved to be deadly. The federal government’s first impressions of COVID thus came from the western intelligence community via Callahan.
Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, one of America’s highest-ranking intelligence officials in 2020, arguably played the most important role of any individual in the initial months of the response to COVID, unilaterally ratcheting up alarm about COVID in the White House beginning in January 2020 and advocating mask mandates, quarantines, and shutdowns all based on his own sources in China, while breaching protocol on several occasions. Pottinger was also behind the appointment of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, and he selected Birx for this role as a “public health security advisor” as early as November 2019, the same time that Callahan began tracking the new coronavirus. Having been installed in the White House, Birx then went on to be the chief force orchestrating lockdowns across the United States.
The origin of the online videos of Wuhan residents falling to their deaths which went viral all over the world in early 2020 is disputed. The videos were carefully edited, suggesting a sophisticated state-sponsored disinformation campaign, and they directly contradicted the reality of what we now know was taking place in China at the time, suggesting the Chinese Communist Party either created or at least approved of them. However, the videos were generally released through Chinese dissident groups that claimed to be hawkish toward the CCP and thus also had the approval of the western intelligence community. While some of these were most likely CCP controlled opposition groups, regardless, the western intelligence community green-lit the dissemination of these videos.
The propaganda story about Li Wenliang, the eye doctor who was supposedly punished for warning his friends about an incidence of pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019, appears to have in fact been invented by the venerated CCP propaganda outlet Beijing Youth Daily weeks after the events supposedly occurred. However, just days after being invented by the CCP’s propaganda machine, this absurd tale about Li Wenliang was featured in many of the western world’s most elite media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and countless others, and it continues to be touted as true in elite policy circles to this day. This story, too, thus had the approval of the western intelligence community.
Prior to the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, in February 2020, virtually no one in the world was publicly advocating or hoping that China’s lockdowns would come to be adopted as global policy. Yet in his book, Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza recalls that he was well aware the concept of lockdown came from China and that the decision to adopt this policy in Lombardy was made based on information from Stefano Merler. A look at Merler’s work reveals that he spent 2020 stamping information from China as “science,” effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the CCP. Yet Merler had also been praised by Bill Gates and was part of the western biodefense network. In 2013, Merler had authored Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses; it appears the western biosecurity community deputized Merler for just this purpose in 2020. This decision for Italy to copy China’s lockdown policy thus appears to have been condoned by the western intelligence community as well.
Days after the lockdown of Lombardy, the WHO released a report gushing about China’s lockdown measures, telling the world, “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of nonpharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.” As Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward reported, “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this.” Apparently the western intelligence community either failed to notice or tacitly approved of this bizarre act of sycophancy to the CCP as well, rubber stamping China’s lockdowns into global policy.
In March 2020, hundreds of thousands of social media bots began touting China’s lockdown policy on Twitter using nearly identical language. Given these bots heaped praise on China while denigrating every other country in the world, including the United States, it’s long been quite clear that this was a CCP disinformation campaign. That said, these bots were permitted to perform their function and, incredibly, their pro-lockdown posts were not deleted from Twitter until well into 2021. Even as far back as 2014, millions of bot posts touted “lockdown”—specifically using the Chinese term instead of the western term of “social distancing”—in response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, and those bot posts remain intact to this day. These massive disinformation campaigns were allowed to take place and the posts were able to stay up for years despite social media being tightly monitored by the western intelligence community throughout this period.
As soon as lockdowns began, dissenting opinions were censored, with one prominent example being the censorship of Aaron Ginn for his original anti-lockdown article in March 2020. Worse yet, Twitter under its prior management gave prestigious “blue checks” to ridiculous users like nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding, who sowed COVID hysteria on an almost daily basis from the earliest possible date. Even top scientists on the political left who generally supported lockdowns were so troubled by Ding as to jointly call him out as a charlatan. Yet astonishingly, Twitter ignored these bipartisan calls to rein Ding in and instead featured him prominently in its exclusive “COVID-19 experts” section. In light of revelations in the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden, we now know that the western intelligence community was steering these decisions on COVID by major social media platforms.
When the response to COVID began, the public health establishment, in accordance with its longstanding guidance, did not initially recommend masks. Weeks later, this guidance abruptly changed, and masks were mandated across the western world. Both Pottinger and Birx pushed for masks inside the White House based on their own information and experience from China. Simultaneously, Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard launched a bewilderingly-successful campaign to reverse the CDC’s longstanding mask guidance and push for mask mandates all across America—also based on information from China. The western intelligence community, through Pottinger and Birx, and perhaps through Tufekci and Howard, thus instigated this shift in masking guidance.
The intelligence community was also heavily involved in the development and push for COVID vaccines, with Michael Callahan and others playing leading roles in “Operation Warp Speed.”