This is the product of a full year of research between Attorney Brian Michaels and a small working group of professionals committed to truth. The article is part fact and part theory with a bit of opinion. We will be writing and adding chapters every few days. Feel free to follow along. Or not.

Batman ; )

Entry 1- Europe 2019

October in 2019 was glorious in Southern Europe. It was the busiest travel year of my life up until that point and was destined for my 67th passport stamp after 20 years of non stop travel. The trip began in the North of Europe. I landed in St. Petersburg, Russia in the dead of night on my birthday October 15th. I met my travel companion who was then living in Croatia and began a two week trek through Europe that took us to Northern Italy by the end of October. This is where the trail of Covid 19 began for me;  Northern Italy. October of 2019. Venice, to be be precise.

I try to travel Europe on the cusp seasons; late spring or early fall, to avoid the throngs of tourists. That was not to be. October was sunny and warm in Northern Italy that year. The narrow cobbled streets of Venice were congested with the usual suspects; large groups of selfie taking Chinese tourists and their equally annoying travel compatriots; the Americans. The old alleys and bridges were at times shoulder to shoulder with this array of Eastern and Western tourists cramped in with their ever bewildered Italian hosts from street to street. Little did I know at that time that Northern Italy would, within several months be the site of some of the worst carnage brought on by the yet to be discovered killer virus; Covid 19. Within 5 months first Europe and then the Northeastern United States would be under siege from the most horrific pandemic since the Spanish Flu.

ENTRY 2: THE EARLY DAYS 

While this is not meant to be a comprehensive history of the entire pandemic for purposes of this analysis its critical to look at the timeline of when Covid 19 was discovered and the actions of the Chinese government in response. These are the critical dates that were reported at the time of the outbreak.

"DECEMBER 1, 2019 A man in his 70s starts experiencing symptoms. He is later admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China.

MID-DECEMBER, 2019 People begin turning up at hospitals in Wuhan with strange white spots on their lung scans. Many of the cases are allegedly traced back to the city's Huanan Seafood Market, where a variety of live animals are sold.

DECEMBER 24, 2019 A sample is taken from a Wuhan Central Hospital patient's lungs and sent to Vision Medicals, a private company 500 miles from Wuhan that produces a partial genetic sequence of the virus within 48 hours.

DECEMBER 26, 2019 The sequence from the patient in Wuhan is strikingly similar to the virus that caused SARS, which sickenedover 8,000 people and killed more than 700 in 2003.The lab goes on to inform the Wuhan Central Hospital doctors and the city's CDC.

DECEMBER 30, 2019 Around this time, hospitals in Wuhan start seeing dozens of patients with severe pneumonia. More virus samples are sent to other labs for sequencing. One lab tells Wuhan Central Hospital, mistakenly, that the virus is SARS itself. The lab's results circulate quickly among the doctors and reach Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist. Li forwards a message to a group of doctors with a warning: “Don't circulate this information outside the group, tell your family and loved ones to take precautions.”

His message goes viral.

The local health commission orders Wuhan hospitals to report new cases directly to them and bars the release of information to the public. The orders leak and spread online.Word of the virus also reaches Marjorie Pollack, an epidemiologist, in New York. “My reaction was ‘we're in trouble.' It was very much a deja vu of what happened with SARS-1.” Her organization, Promed, sends a notification out to around 80,000 subscribers around the world.

DECEMBER 31, 2019 China's National Health Commission instructs Wuhan health officials to announce the outbreak. Officials describe the disease to the public as a “viral pneumonia” that's under control, with no evidence of human-to-human transmission: “We've investigated and it has no relationship to SARS.”

The World Health Organization learns about the outbreak from social media and from Promed, not from the Chinese government.[1]

JANUARY 1, 2020 - Chinese authorities identify the Huanan Seafood Market in the City of Wuhan as the source of the outbreak and immediately shutter it. The “Wet Market” theory emerges.

JANUARY 11, 2020 – China reports its first known death from Covid 19

JANUARY 11, 2020- The U.S. CDC issues the following report “On Jan. 11, 2020, CDC updated a Level 1 Travel Health Notice (“practice usual precautions”) for travelers to Wuhan City and an updated Health Alert to health care professionals and public health partners with new and updated guidance is forthcoming.

China health officials report that most of the patients infected with 2019-nCoV have had exposure to a large market where live animals were present, suggesting this is a novel virus that has jumped the species barrier to infect people. Chinese authorities additionally report that several hundred health care workers caring for outbreak patients are being monitored and no spread of this virus from patients to health care workers has been seen. They report no sustained spread of this virus in the community, however there are indications that some limited person-to-person spread may have occurred. CDC is responding to this outbreak out of an abundance of caution, ready to detect people infected with 2019-CoV.”

JANUARY 16, 2020

The United States identifies its first active case of Covid 19. A Washington State man who travelled from the City of Wuhan back to Washington.

JANUARY 30, 2020 – The WHO declares a global emergency.

FEBRUARY 11, 2020 - The Chinese whistleblower doctor, Li Wenliang, who sounded the alarm about a new Sars Virus dies of the virus.

FEBRUARY 29, 2020- The United States Announces its first Covid 19 death."

At no time during the outbreak does the Chinese Government make any mention of the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the country's  only P4 bio laboratory, located one kilometer from the Huanan Seafood Market, dedicated to the collection and study of Bat Bourne Beta Corona Viruses.

Within 24 hours of China's compelled admission of the outbreak of Covid 19 they immediately identify the source of the pandemic to be a Wet Market where wild animals and humans come into direct contact. Chinese authorities declare this the source of the outbreak and immediately wipe it clean of any of the animals found within.

No one is ever able to cooberate that animals within the market had any traces of Covid 19, yet the US and global media and virtually the entire scientific community hang onto the “wet market” theory as being the source of Covid 19 without any shred of cooberation that animals within the market infected humans for months on end.[2]

Entry 3- The Breakout-

The first recollection I had of the Pandemic's presence and its potential threat to the United States came in the early Spring when a US based passenger ship had become infected with Covid 19.

The story was not even significant enough to grab a top headline since the United States was in the midst of Presidential primary season and the press here was devoting most of its time to the primary. The last event with actual people that I attended was a Los Angeles event for Senator Bernie Sanders in March of 2020. After that, the world would never look the same.

Like many people I discounted the real threat of Covid 19 but I began to study the epidemiology of the pandemic as it was spreading and it was here that I first observed that there was something significantly wrong with the way in which the outbreak of Covid 19 was being reported.While I don't have a degree in Epidemiology, I'd spent a good deal of time back in the 90's studying the HIV epidemic and that is where I first encountered the work of a guy named Anthony Fauci. As it was with HIV I began to study COVID 19, I believe, as a means of survival. I wanted to know everything about it, and what I could do personally to make sure I didn't get it and drop dead from it before it even became a major problem in the United States.

I began to daily follow the New York Times Covid 19 study as well as multiple other sources and began to dig into the science of Virology. This stuff is a bit past my pay grade but I was able to get the basics on the prevalent theory regarding the Covid 19 outbreak in Wuhan, China and it just flat out made no logical sense.

In a nutshell, the scientific community, who were practically in complete unison with the Chinese Government and the WHO on this, opined that a Chinese Horseshoe Bat, which only live and breed in the far Southern districts of the Country, somehow made the species jump there and Covid 19 found its way into a third party mammal, which was identified to be a Panglion, a mammal commonly found in wet markets similar to the one found in Wuhan, and from there made its way into the local population and then out into the world. The genetic code was explained and no one questioned it.

For much of 2020 this was the singular theory for the Covid 19 outbreak. What caught my attention wasn't the genetics, since I don't do genetics, but it was the pattern and location of the spread of the epidemic that simply made no sense. As I understood it, the bat necessary to make Covid 19 does not live or breed anywhere in the wild in Northern China, where Wuhan is located, and it is entirely a warm weather tropical bat found in Yunnan province which borders several other warm tropical countries that should also have populations of these same kinds of bats. Something, or someone would have had to transport Covid 19 or its animal host from South to North for this to have occurred.

The “wet market” theory presumed, without any physical evidence whatsoever that one or more of the animals in the Wuhan wet market was exposed somewhere in proximity to these Covid carrying bats 1000 kilometers away and spontaneously exploded in a City where these bats do not exist. Everyone bought it. Ok, not everyone. Donald Trump and his minstrels didn't buy t either. Herein lies the divide that continues to this day.

As the epidemic spread around the world it in no way broke out in a manner that looked like a virus that jumped the species barrier in Southern China, which is necessarily where it would have to occur, but rather looked like a disease that broke out someplace else and possibly found its way to Wuhan. At this point in the analysis only the deranged voices of the right wing US President were pointing fingers at the Wuhan Virology Lab. It became a fringe right wing conspiracy that only Qanon supporters would consider to be valid. I have already been accused of this myself.

Had the epidemic been sourced to a bat cave in Southern China one would have expected to see thousands if not tens of thousands of cases in Southern China and the countries that border that region. and at least for the first year of the outbreak there was virtually no sign of Covid 19 in places like India, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Cambodia, etc, etc, etc.

Similarly there appeared no reports that Covid 19 was infecting other major metropolitan Chinese cities like Beijing or Shanghai in significant number. Now, one could postulate that there were mass casualty events in these major metropolitan cities and that the Chinese government simply locked the door on these places and there was no free flow on information coming from there. That seemed unlikely. These are major hubs of commerce and business and manufacturing. The numbers being reported there were small and I found that credible.

By contrast the explosion of Covid 19 in the winter months of 2020 were felt first by Western European Countries. Hit hardest and first were Italy, then Spain, and later France, Germany and the UK before it made it way to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. To my eyes, this did not look like a Chinese epidemic at all. This was a European epidemic with a factual nexus to one Chinese City; Wuhan. So unlikely was it to me, that Covid 19 flew out of a wet market in Wuhan China and left most of Asia unscathed it seemed more likely to me the epidemic might have sprung out of Europe, and there was circumstantial evidence to support it.

I began to pour through medical journal articles[1] particularly those that pertained to Sars 1 and lo and behold I found a field study from 2013 in which Italian Virologists located and catalogued caves full of Corona Virus carrying European Horseshoe Bats almost exactly at the locus of the European epidemic in a region of Northern Italy that bordered both Southern France and Eastern Spain. [2]. This looked a more plausible jumping off location then what I was seeing in China and how the epidemic was reported.

I followed this lead never one time considering the alternate theory, that the conveniently located WIV lab was involved despite protestations from others in our group. Media reports and other scholarly articles published in late November of 2019 identified cases of strange and new forms of Pneumonia being seen by Doctors in Northern Italy near Milan.[3] These reports were completely consistent with the outbreak of Covid 19, which was only confirmed by China nearly a full month later. These reports put Covid 19 in Europe a full month ahead of the Chinese outbreak.

The Wet Market seemed evidence of a rush to judgment and the origin of the outbreak story needed to be re-evaluated. There was circumstantial evidence of an Italian outbreak before the Chinese ever noticed it, reported it, or tried to contain it. I thought it more likely from the evidence I was seeing that the epidemic may have had origins in Europe and by some fluke ended up in Wuhan.

There was a well-publicized nexus between Chinese workers living in Milan [4]whose home city was largely Wuhan, China. It made as much sense that the virus hopped on a plane in Milan and made its way to China as it did the inverse. In short, none of it made any sense at all. What I was certain of was that the wet market story was a red herring as we call it in the law.

My initial foray into the outbreak of Covid 19 was wrong. This was not an outbreak of European origin. What I didn't consider then, which I am fully informed of now was the rampant and orchestrated lying by the Chinese Government. The WHO, large segments of the Western Media and major institutions in the United States; in particular the NIH, and its spokesman Doctor Anthony Fauci and others which coalesced into a massive deception that is only now coming to the surface.

Entry 4: The Wet Market Theory Collapse and The War of Words

In late January of 2020 the respected British Scientific Journal The Lancet published conclusive evidence that nearly half of the patients in Wuhan alleged to have become infected with Covid 19 at the wet market in fact had no epidemiological connection to the it[1]. Almost no major US media source ran this story and for almost the entirety of 2020 continued to stick to the narrative; ratified by the majority of the scientific community that Covid 19 spread out from animal to man in this market. In fact, by the end of January 2020 the evidence from this study proved not that animals brought Covid 19 to man, but that man brought Covid 19 to the market. Assuming this to be the case Covid 19 had to, by that time, have been spreading throughout the City and already made its way out of China.

Circumstantial evidence was available as early as November 2019 that Covid 19 was already in Europe by then. Italy had reported droves of unexplained unusual pneumonia's near Milan.[2]In the United States there were reports from the West Coast and East Coast of Emergency Rooms overrun with flu cases in early December particularly in the 64 and older age range.

Later evidence arose from France that proved that its first Covid 19 was discovered as early as December 27, 2019 and that it was a case of community transmission. Community transmission means that the disease spread not from a Chinese contact but from someone else in France already infected. This puts Covid 19 in Europe by at least the middle of December if not earlier and weeks before China disclosed it to the world.

In California, the San Jose Mercury News ran a number of stories in 2020 that proved that the earliest death from Covid 19 in California occurred in Santa Clara County on February 6th.[3]This case too, was one of community transmission. This was a full three weeks before the first reported Covid 19 case in the United States. The Santa Clara case alone proved that Covid 19 was on the West Coast as early as mid-January of 2019. California Governor Gavin Newsom, in one of his rare acts of foresight ordered State Coroners to open up their files from December of 2019 to try to find earlier evidence of Covid in California. The reports were never published and this story, as well, was never widely disseminated further propagating the misinformation that Covid 19 sprang from a Wuhan wet market in late December of 2019.

It certainly made sense why the Chinese Government would not have wanted to pursue any of this data. If in fact the wet market in Wuhan was not responsible for the Covid 19 outbreak, then something else in Wuhan had to be the source. When you remove the wet market theory from the Wuhan origin story, the only thing in that City that remains as the potential source of the outbreak would be the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The wet market was a clear diversion and western media outlets, particularly left learning media outlets in the United States clung to the wet market hypothesis well into the fall of 2020.[4]

It remains shocking and alarming that US media outlets could not quickly identify the diversion and begin to investigate the lab origin story. By now it should be abundantly clear that left leaning media outlets; particularly CNN and MSNBC were willfully refusing to shine any light on this clear evidence of an earlier outbreak because of their disdain for then US President Donald Trump who was one of the first voices to publicly accuse the lab of being responsible for the Pandemic.

Nothing has polarized and obfuscated the truth about the origins and causes of Covid 19 more than the 2019-2020 US Presidential Election cycle and catastrophically poor job the U.S. media has done in covering, or more correctly failing to cover this story. The US Presidential election of 2020 was one of the most polarizing in American history. The United States electorate has found itself in what appears to be an almost complete 50-50 divide politically since at least 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost that election to Political neophyte Donald Trump.

Since I have been accused repeatedly here of taking Republican talking points I will be clear. I have only one time in my life voted for a Republican. I am a life long California Democrat who worked on Presidential campaigns and have supported U.S Senate Bernie Sanders for the last two elections.I don't think it an accident that there are more of us in the so-called “progressive” wing of the party these days, that find it easier to accept theories, other than those shoved down our throats by the Democratic establishment, that are alternate to the mainstream view. Progressives tend to be younger and more able to view the world with an open mind. I am certainly not younger, but my eyes are wide open.

At the outset of the Pandemic and for at least the first three months of 2020, the current administration in the United States and Chinese leadership appeared to be working cooperatively and in unison. President Trump made two decisions early on that proved to be correct; he shut down travel with Europe and with China. It was clear that Covid 19 was coming at the United Stated from both directions, but more so from Europe in the early days than from China. Those travel bans still stand today.

Something radically changed towards the end of March 2020 and a war of words broke out between the United States administration and the Chinese Government. Donald Trump began to use phrases like the “China Virus” and the “Wuhan Virus” while then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began to accuse China directly of a cover up and asserting that China was indeed covering up the origins of Covid 19.

In April of 2020 Mike Pompeo said “ “The Chinese Communist Party now has a responsibility to tell the world how this pandemic got out of China and all across the world, causing such global economic devastation,” Pompeo told Fox News on Wednesday morning, during an interview where he repeatedly criticized China's government. “America needs to hold them accountable.”[1]

The President's tone then began to change more radically and at times would repeat racially insensitive remarks such as “Kung Flu” which did not help his administration's or the world's cause in getting at the heart of this developing crisis. The liberal US media ignored hard evidence and instead ran stories night after night accusing Trump and his administration of being racist towards Asians in an effort to discredit him in the election cycle and by and large it worked. Donald Trump was always his own worst enemy. To the extent that his own buffoonery was exploited, he contributed to the cover up by allowing it to happen.

Political media on the right, namely Fox News took an equally uninformed view of the pandemic often mocking social distancing, mask wearing and other preventative measures meant to curb the pandemic. But, to their credit, their reporting on the origins of Covid 19, albeit politically motivated, was far closer to the truth than what was being presented or more accurately not presented by the established US Media. Left wing US media outlets today are still engaged in a blackout of this story for reasons that will be discussed.

For its part China, along with its allies Russia and Iran began to run what seemed like absurd counter stories that the United States had developed Covid 19 in a lab in North Carolina, or that the US Military had planted it in China[2]. Russia, China and Iran were all engaged in a very deliberate counter misinformation campaign against the United Stated, but why? Most everyone in the scientific community accepted that Covid 19 jumped from bats to mammals and then humans, in a wet market, in Wuhan. What was this about?

Within lies there are often kernels of truth. While this is somewhat speculative it seemed clear that Donald Trump probably received intelligence about the origin of Covid in a Chinese lab and would have been advised to keep it quiet, as the United States had a hand in financing the lab and possibly in teaching Chinese researchers techniques that may have lead to the origin of Covid 19. Donald Trump was never very good at keeping quiet. By the end of March he decided to point the finger.

China knew it was responsible, but also knew that if Donald Trump continued shining light on it that China had clear evidence of US complicity. It benefited neither country for the world to know of the years of cooperation between US Scientists and Institutions and the Wuhan Virology Lab leading right up to the Covid 19 outbreak in Wuhan. Both Governments knew, but neither wanted to take responsibility.

Each side began to fire shots across each other's bow. Why were these two superpower behemoth governments blaming one another for a virus that crept into the world from a Bat? This is a rhetorical question. The war of words in and of itself was evidence these two Governments played a role in Covid 19. To what extent remained to be seen.

 

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[2] Citation pending

 

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[1]. PBS FRONTLINE, A timeline of China's Response in the First Days of Covid 19, 2/2/21

[2].