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By Debbie Lerman
“The Wuhan Cover-Up: And The Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” is a crucial book for understanding how the COVID-19 catastrophe happened.
I would even go so far as to argue that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book is the most important COVID-19 chronicle to date, although it ends at the beginning of 2020 before most of us were even aware that a “novel coronavirus” was circulating among us.
The book explains the CAUSES of the global disaster, which all happened before March 2020. Everything after that are the downstream EFFECTS of what “The Wuhan Cover-Up” exposes.
Here’s how RFK Jr. summarizes those effects:
“Everyone has now seen that pandemics are another way for the military, intelligence, and public health services to expand their budgets and their power. In 2020, public health, defense, and intelligence agencies weaponized a [Covid-19] pandemic, resulting in unprecedented profits to Big Pharma and the dramatic expansion of the security/surveillance state, including a systemic abandonment of constitutional rights — effectively a coup d’état against liberal democracy globally.”
Putting Covid in the biowarfare context
Interestingly, in the publicity blurb on the book and interviews about it, RFK Jr. focuses on “the etiology of the gain-of-function research” and everything that led up to a virus being engineered in a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan by a group of Chinese and Western scientists.
At the core of this story is RFK Jr.’s desire to warn readers about the dangers of gain-of-function research, which he shows in the book to be irrefutably a biowarfare — not a public health — endeavor.
But in the process of constructing the argument and supplying the proof for his dire warning, and for his assertion that this type of research should be stopped immediately and forever, RFK Jr. provides what I find to be an even more compelling story.
The story in “The Wuhan Cover-Up” that interests me is the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex — the global behemoth comprising military/intelligence alliances, Big Pharma, Big Tech, academic and medical institutions and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs — that both created the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 and ran the global response to it.
In this article, I will highlight key parts of “The Wuhan Cover-Up” that pertain to this storyline — which I believe are downplayed in its publicity materials and are one of the main reasons it has been practically banned from polite society: The book has been so heavily censored that I cannot find a single actual review on Google.
Newsweek reported that independent bookstores do not want to carry it.
A lot of the censorship has to do with mainstream animosity toward RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign. However the explosive content of the book, as reviewed in this article, is also likely a factor.
Top-level summary of the rise of the biowarfare industrial complex, as told by RFK Jr.
- The biowarfare industry started to grow after WWII when Western intelligence agencies imported Japanese and German scientists to help develop weapons against Communist enemies. This was, in fact, the first task of the newly formed CIA [Central Intelligence Agency].
- After 9/11, funding for bioweapons research exploded, and so did the power and reach of the military and intelligence agencies in charge of such research. The research, presented to the public as “pandemic preparedness and response (PPR),” encompassed mostly attempts to engineer deadly pathogens and simultaneously to create countermeasures to them, predominantly vaccines.
- So much money was pouring into PPR/bioweapons research that the public health agencies and academic institutions involved in government research all became dependent on it — or, perhaps more accurately, addicted to the money and power this type of research bestowed.
Multinational public-private partnerships and “non-governmental organizations” (e.g., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust) were created to fund and promote the need for such research.
- In the fall of 2019, an engineered pathogen from one of the bioweapons labs in China found its way into the population. All the military, intelligence and public health officials from China, the U.S., the U.K. and other countries, with their pharma and academic partners, conspired to cover up the lab leak, while simultaneously preparing to unleash their countermeasures on the world.
How the nature of biowarfare research has not changed
As RFK Jr. tells it, the history of today’s biowarfare industry starts after WWII, when German and Japanese scientists were secretly repatriated to assist the intelligence community and military in developing chemical and biological weapons programs.
It is no coincidence, he argues, that many sinister features of those earlier programs carried forward to the present.
These features include:
- Tight alliances with the pharmaceutical industry and the media.
- The complicity of academia and medical schools.
- The co-opting of journals.
- Intense secrecy.
- Pervasive experimentation on human subjects.
- Liberal use of the word “volunteers.”
- Open-air testing on large unwilling populations.
- Ethical elasticity.
- The normalization of lies.
- The use of microbiology to alter and weaponize bugs.
- The use of vaccine development as a mask for bioweapons research.
- The corruption of the entire medical establishment.
Even just this list is enough to explain what happened with COVID-19: Take all these ingredients, add billions of dollars and multinational public-private partnerships involving top research institutions and thousands of scientists, and how could you not get a global disaster?
Deep CIA-biowarfare ties
“The Wuhan Cover-Up” spends a lot of time documenting the correspondence between the rise of the CIA and the emergence of the modern biowarfare program. RFK Jr. writes:
“It’s worth reviewing the agency’s seventy-five-year preoccupation with bioweapons, pandemics, and vaccines. Bioweapons development was the CIA’s first love, and has remained its relentless passion. The CIA’s natal obsession with bioweapons pitted the agency against all the idealistic underpinnings of both American democracy and the healing arts of medicine.”
An important related point emphasized in the book is that bioweapons research is not an obscure, niche industry.
Rather, according to “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” it is a top national defense concern, driving the national security agenda:
“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military and intelligence apparatus erected the biosecurity agenda as the new spear tip of American foreign policy. These agencies deftly replaced the fear of the Soviet monolith and creeping communism with a fear of infectious disease, which they have successfully stoked to justify vast expansions in power.”
Shockingly broad participation by academics and scientists
Because the biosecurity agenda — which focuses on biochemical and medical research — is so central to foreign policy and national security, it controls large swaths of research funding.
Thus, as RFK Jr. documents, it has come to encompass many top academic institutions and thousands of doctors and scientists:
“Among the most alarming side effects of the federal preoccupation with bioweapons has been the systematic diversion of vast resources and armies of academic and government scientists away from public health and healing.
“Today, some thirteen thousand death scientists labor on bioweapons technology on behalf of U.S. military, intelligence, and public health agencies in some four hundred government and university bioweapons labs.”
Moral bankruptcy
When faced with COVID-19 “conspiracy theories” — such as those put forth in “The Wuhan Cover-Up” — people often argue that so many doctors and scientists could not possibly have knowingly agreed to civilization-killing ideas like lockdowns and injections of unsafe medical products into billions of people.
They must have believed they were actually saving humanity, right?
Wrong, according to RFK Jr.:
“History has shown again and again the bioweapons agenda’s awesome power to transform compassionate, brilliant, idealistic doctors into monsters.
“They have, as a class, demonstrated thoroughly warped judgment and a reliable penchant for dishonesty and terrible ideas.”
Bioweapons research = vaccine research
Another crucial idea bearing on our understanding of the COVID-19 response is that vaccine research is a primary concern for the biowarfare-industrial complex, although it is publicly presented as a public health endeavor.
The book quotes Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, with this explanation:
“You can’t use a bioweapon against your enemy without having in your possession an antidote with which to shield your own team from blowback. For this reason, bioweapons and vaccines are always developed in tandem with each other.”
Moreover, because vaccine research funding goes to both biodefense and public health agencies, they have become inextricably linked:
“The military and public health agencies work in close coordination to develop vaccines for military applications, sharing information and working side by side in labs. Vaccine research often serves as a cover or rationale for illegal bioweapons development.”
From an obsession of U.S. national security to a tool of globalism
As RFK Jr. writes, after 9/11, Islamic terrorism became the focus of U.S. national defense. After the anthrax attacks, the focus of antiterrorist activities coalesced around the need to predict, prevent and create countermeasures to biological terrorism:
“This more reliable and terrifying enemy would soon replace the war against Islamic terror — justifying a ‘forever war’ against germs. ‘Biosecurity,’ a.k.a. Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR), provided a rationale for US presence in every developing nation.”
And, as further explained by RFK Jr., the focus on bioterrorism, which first served the American imperialist impulse, then became incorporated into the program of globalism:
“The emerging medical/military-industrial complex would soon be citing biosecurity as a pretext for centralized control, coordinated response among nations, a sprawling construction project for new U.S. bioweapons laboratories, the archiving of every germ with weapons potential under the pretext of pandemic protection, the control of the media, the imposition of censorship, the erection of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure ostensibly needed to ‘track and trace’ infections, universal digital IDs, digital currencies to reduce disease spread, and the ceding of power by national governments to the WHO [World Health Organization] — in short, globalism.”
China becomes a dominant biowarfare research player
Concurrently, China’s leaders were working on a mission to make China a world leader in science, research and innovation.
According to “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” the Chinese have been using the West’s march toward globalism to infiltrate “Western academia, businesses, media, cultural groups, and government agencies that speak the language of cooperation, globalism, and public health.”
As part of their infiltration process, the Chinese lavished funding on Western research institutions and scientific publishing houses. And because biomedical/biowarfare research was so central to Western governments and research institutions, the Chinese were able to eventually dominate that space as well.
Thus, the book explains, China was able to “co-opt U.S. academic institutions and U.S. public health agencies into performing backdoor bioweapons research for the Chinese military.”
Why would the U.S. do bioweapons research in/for China?
This is, perhaps, the most oft-raised question in response to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered bioweapon from a lab funded by the Chinese military, the U.S. and other Western governments.
As RFK Jr. explains, with the Chinese as major funders of Western institutions, journals and projects related to biomedical research, this strange collaboration was not just unsurprising, but in fact, inevitable:
“The Chinese campaign to co-opt leading scientists and the river of Chinese funding to researchers at US and British medical research universities and to the leading scientific journals had, by then, bought China powerful friends across the Western scientific establishment.”
Furthermore, the interests of China intersect with the interests of major global corporations and NGOs that comprise the biowarfare-industrial complex — many of which enriched themselves considerably through the COVID-19 response. As RFK Jr. writes:
“There is a natural intersection of interests between Western business titans and a former communist government [the Chinese Communist Party] that has made itself the global model for seamlessly merging corporate with government power, and promoting business growth by suppressing democracy, labor, and human rights.”
For its part, the U.S. intelligence community has all kinds of reasons — all ultimately geared toward increasing its own power and influence — to engage in sensitive scientific research projects with the Chinese:
“The deliberate transfer of our superior bioweapons knowledge to the Chinese — a potential enemy — makes little sense to citizens who think in terms of conventional rivalries between nations.
“Espionage was clearly among the complex motivations for the US intelligence community supporting Chinese bioweapons research in China.
“Knowing what the Chinese are up to is the mission of the US intelligence community. But quietly sharing cutting-edge technologies may also serve institutional self-interest.
“After all, the intelligence community expands its power by reporting the enemy’s expanding capabilities; more frightening capabilities abroad justify increased budgets and increased power at home.”
Bioweapons expert Boyle is quoted stating that:
“Opportunities to expand institutional power and corporate profits always seem to trump patriotism and duty within the CIA’s bioweapons teams. Patriotism is a polite fiction among the bioweapons set.”
RFK Jr. adds that the public health agencies, which are heavily involved in and funded by biowarfare research, share the CIA’s self-interested non-patriotism:
“NIH [National Institutes of Health] and NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] operate under the same perverse incentives that drive destructive conduct across the whole bioweapons field.”
A convergence of personal, political, financial and global interests
In the final chapters of “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” RFK Jr. focuses on several key figures in the biowarfare-industrial-complex, including Dr. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (now at the WHO), Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH and Bill Gates.
RFK Jr. uses these figures to show how the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from the toxic stew of ethically compromised biowarfare research standards; military, intelligence, public health and academic institutions/organizations dependent on biowarfare funding; the involvement of China and global interests in the booming business of “pandemic preparedness and response;” and, of course, the endless pursuit of political power and personal enrichment.
Here’s a great summary of how they all came together, through personal and institutional greed and power-mongering, to unleash the COVID-19 catastrophe on the world:
“The evidence suggests that instead of relentlessly protecting public health, Farrar exploited the pandemic to promote the venal financial agendas of his WEF [World Economic Forum] patrons, to transform Western democracies into surveillance states, to expand his personal power and paycheck, and to pander to high-level Chinese officials.
“Achieving these objectives required Farrar to hide [Covid’s] laboratory origins, a project in which he enlisted a cadre of his medical cartel cronies — those who, thanks to years of funding by Fauci, Farrar, and Gates, now occupy the highest echelons of virology in academia, the regulatory agencies, and pharmaceutical companies.”
If for nothing else, I would recommend adding “The Wuhan Cover-Up” to your library as an invaluable resource on leading figures, organizations and power brokers involved in the biowarfare-industrial complex.
Conclusions and comments
It was especially gratifying to me to read “The Wuhan Cover-Up” (all 600 pages of it), because it validated my own research, showing that the pandemic response was led by the national security/intelligence arms of the government, not public health agencies.
In fact, after reading the first few chapters — the ones that go into the history of chemical and biological warfare and the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex — I paradoxically felt an enormous sense of relief.
Finally, we have a detailed account that shows — beyond what I would consider a reasonable doubt — that the entire COVID-19 catastrophe was caused, and led, by a multinational military-intelligence-academic-pharma-tech-NGO cabal.
RFK Jr. concludes that we should look to a future “in which the bio-elites are held responsible for their actions, people regain their rights, and the Constitution is restored to its intended preeminence.”
But how do we do that?
I am afraid, based on the information in his own book, and the fact that RFK Jr. himself is being censored and banned so extensively from the public square, that the solution to the problems he exposes is much more difficult and complex than just “holding the bio-elites responsible” which will somehow lead to people regaining their rights.
What we need to do is to shut down, or extract ourselves from, the global biowarfare-industrial-complex that can convince (or coerce?) our governments into declaring states of emergency over supposed pandemic threats and then curtail civil rights and impose massive surveillance, censorship and propaganda that would not be permitted in non-emergency situations.
Not to mention garnering enormous wealth while forcing the world’s population to accept novel, untested and potentially lethal medical “countermeasures.”
“The Wuhan Cover-Up” does a better job than any other book or article I have read at exposing the trends, forces and institutions that brought us the COVID-19 catastrophe — with hundreds of pages of notes and references.
What’s frightening is that the enormity of the problem is beyond the scope of the book, not just to solve, but even to fully acknowledge.
Originally published by Brownstone Institute.
Debbie Lerman, a 2023 Brownstone fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S.
