The Chinese sturgeon Bingbing is seen during the 7th CISM Military World Games at the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport, on March 29, 2019. Al.geba/Shutterstock
It’s going to take far more than a few investigators to piece together the timeline of the great disaster of our times, much less figure out all the parties responsible. As an example, I’ve followed this as closely as anyone but one key date somehow eluded my radar until now.
It is the Military World Games held in Wuhan, China, 2019, drawing athletes from all over the world. In this high profile event, 9,308 athletes from 109 countries competed in 329 events in 27 sports. It is highly likely that COVID was already known to be there, a fact which destroys the timelines of many people on all sides of the issue.
So far there have been no deep investigations into the question. U.S. personnel were never tested. But the fact of widespread sickness after the games was well known by everyone who was there, and this was true in most countries. Doctors examining patients at the time described it as a “bad cold” but the symptoms they reported are unmistakably COVID, of the most severe variety (“wild type”), lasting many weeks with long recovery periods.
This was months before COVID made the headlines, and long before Jeremy Farar and Anthony Fauci claimed to have been made aware of the virus (Dec. 31, 2019). Until now, I’ve believed them. I’m beginning to doubt that.
If these games resulted in vast sickness on the part of so many, with unusual but similar symptoms, surely the possibility of a problem perhaps located in Wuhan would have been widely known in those circles.
Another telling sign that everyone noticed upon arrival in Wuhan in October: the city was empty. The highways had no cars. The retail shops were closed. No one was on the streets. For a city of 11 million, this was spooky. The CCP bragged that they had cleared out the city to make life special for the athletes but it was clearly a first sign of lockdown.
Why?
In a brief moment of journalism, the Washington Post actually ran a competent story by Josh Rogin on the topic in June of 2021, one that elicited no serious follow up. Here it is quoted at length.
The games in Wuhan were the largest in the event’s history, and the Chinese government went all out. The U.S. delegation came with 280 athletes and staff representing 17 sports, ranging from wrestling to golf. (Team USA brought home the bronze in the latter competition.)
During the two-week event, however, many of the international athletes noticed that something was amiss in the city of Wuhan. Some later described it as a “ghost town.”
As the covid-19 pandemic took hold worldwide in early 2020, athletes from several countries — including France, Germany,Italy and Luxembourg — claimed publicly they had contracted what they believed to be covid-19 at the games in Wuhan, based on their symptoms and how their illnesses spread to their loved ones. In Washington, military leaders either dismissed the idea out of hand or weren’t aware of it. Meanwhile, no one performed any antibody testing or disease tracing on these thousands of athletes. No one even attempted to find out whether the games in Wuhan was, in fact, the first international pandemic superspreader event.
If more evidence were discovered, it would add to the growing body of evidence that the virus was circulating in Wuhan as early as October 2019, months before the Chinese government acknowledged it to the rest of the world. U.S. intelligence reports have said that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in November 2019. But U.S. officials have said they have other information suggesting that the outbreak began even earlier.
Nailing down the timeline of the pandemic’s origin is a crucial task ....
These are some of the questions Gallagher is putting to the Pentagon. He noted that Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said he believes that the virus began spreading in Wuhan during September or October of 2019 and that more evidence has emerged that the virus was already present inside the United States by December 2019…
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) wrote a separate letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on this issue Tuesday, asking whether his department was aware of any U.S. athletes who fell ill after returning from Wuhan. He also wanted to know whether HHS was either looking into the issue or discussing it with the Defense Department.
Of course, there’s no way the U.S. government could have such evidence if they never tested the athletes in the first place. Five senior national security officials from the Trump administration told me that no one even thought to test the U.S. military athletes who returned from Wuhan. At that time, they noted, the conventional wisdom was that covid-19 had broken out in December 2019, not two months earlier.
The State Department’s only consideration of the Wuhan Military World Games came when the Chinese foreign ministry began citing the event in its own propaganda in March 2020. The Chinese asserted that U.S. Army personnel might have brought the virus to Wuhan from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., where the U.S. Army bioresearch program is based. That didn’t make sense because the first outbreak was in Wuhan, not Maryland. But the Trump team never took it any further than that.
“We were aware in the administration of the Chinese government’s misinformation campaign accusing the U.S. military of bringing covid to Wuhan at those games, which obviously we didn’t take seriously and didn’t consider to be a good-faith effort to get to the bottom of it,” David Feith, a former State Department official, told me. “To the extent there are now or there were all along credible reports of sick athletes from those games, we should certainly chase them down and learn more.”
Determining the timeline of the outbreak is crucial to understanding the origins of the pandemic — and to getting a clearer focus on the scope of the Chinese government’s coverup. The politics don’t matter. It’s a matter of national security and public health.
This same scenario was reported in a lengthy investigation into the virus’s origins conducted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, resulting in a report issued August 2021.
The earliest report in English that I can find dates from May 17, 2020. “Inside the Games” reported that “More athletes have revealed that they fell ill during the Military World Games in October when the Chinese city of Wuhan hosted the event months before the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Now comes discussion and speculation. No question that many men and women at this October 2019 event became very sick. There was no serious follow up into why. All the symptoms point to COVID of the earliest and most severe sort. I spoke at length to one athlete who was there and his description fit perfectly. If this is true, the entire story of a Dec. 27, 2019, wet-market transmission from animals to humans falls apart, and it raises serious questions about what China knew and when.
The other telling issue: if they knew much earlier, why did Fauci and Farrar not respond with openness and transparency?
If it was a lab leak dating from September 2019—and we know for sure that they considered the possibility—why were there no efforts at all to get to work right away on therapeutics?
Why were the means by which people are actually made better from this sickness left to be discovered gradually and six months later by independent doctors on the front lines rather than being sponsored by the NIH?
Why were the vaccines with a protein-spike focus considered to be the only solution, with a clear bias in the direction of mRNA technology?
And perhaps the most important question of all: if this virus were known to exist this early, along with the suspicion that it traces to a Wuhan lab, one indirectly funded by the NIH via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, why were the American people not told about it?
To point a fine point on it, it feels like a coverup.
Of course all this raises serious questions about the Wuhan lockdown of January 2020. So let us speculate. Let’s say that the CCP knew from September 2019 about the lab leak but had every intention of suppressing the information, a decision about which Fauci/Farrar/Daszik would have approved. In late December and early January, some Chinese scientists began to spill the beans. They were arrested and possibly shot. But still, the word was out.
What to do if you are the CCP? Perhaps you would stage a discovery of the virus, film a series of fake films of people falling dead on the street, distribute those to social media, and film other videos of officials locking people into their apartments and otherwise stopping all activity and generally brutalizing people.
Then you declare victory over the virus thanks to totalitarian tactics.
We know that the CCP worked with the WHO to organize a Western junket to China to show how brilliantly they suppressed the virus. Fauci sent his deputy assistant. The World Health Organization produced a ridiculous report released on Feb. 26, 2020, that claimed that the China way of virus suppression worked beautifully. The very next day, the New York Times flew into action with propaganda urging the United States to lockdown.
Perhaps no government in the world is capable of a tactic this clever. And yet, what if the CCP had been cooperating with Fauci the entire time, all motivated by the desire to minimize the damage of the lab leak from a U.S.-funded experiment, and thereby spent the better part of February lining up media to go along with the exportation of the China strategy to the West?
Yes, it all sounds too smart. And yet, on Feb. 27, 2020, the New York Times did two things. First, they dedicated their daily podcast with a reach of millions to whipping up disease panic, thanks to a wild interview with the lead virus reporter Donald J. McNeil, who wrote the next day an op-ed urging a medieval-style policy response.
And that same day, Feb. 27, 2020, the Times ran on its op-ed page an article announcing that a long-anticipated pathogen had arrived and that while we should take extreme action, the whole thing was inevitable. The author of the article: Peter Daszak of the NIH-funded EcoHealth Alliance that gave a grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research.
Of all the people on the planet earth who could have taken up op-ed real estate on that day, why Daszak?
Don’t bother looking for this article on the Time’s own rendering of the page that day. It does not appear there.
The case for deep investigations is obvious. That so many U.S. military personnel became sick at a locked-down Wuhan event in October 2019 raises profound questions about the timeline, the source of the virus, and who knew what and when, and how a possible attempt to suppress the truth might have contributed to the spreading of a brutal policy the world over.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
