There’s a scene in the HBO mini-series, Chernobyl that bears an uncanny similarity to the current communist cover-up involving COVID-19. Indeed, with a change of country, wardrobe and accent, it could almost be cut-and-pasted to the catastrophe currently unfolding – to understand the true gravity of which, see the following interview between Dr Qanta Ahmed in New York and SpecOz editor on Sky News Australia.

The context is just after the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl on Saturday 26, April 1986 and the local apparatchiks who are trying to mitigate the panic that is about to occur when the true gravity of the disaster is revealed.

Note in particular what is said by the oldest member of the communist nomenclature bringing his other comrades to a standing ovation:

Now the State tell us the situation here is not dangerous. Have faith, comrades. The State tell us it wants to prevent a panic. Listen well! It’s true, when the people see the police, they will be afraid. But is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labour and leave matters of the State to the State. We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour. Yes, comrades…we will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight. This is our moment to shine.”

John Zmirak asks the question in The Stream whether COVID-19 was “Red China’s Pearl Harbour Attack”? This is because, according to Fox News, “China moved quickly to shut down travel domestically from Wuhan to the rest of China, but did not stop international flights from Wuhan.” Hence, Zmirak states:

Not only did the Chinese Communist regime know that the virus spread by contact, and lie about it. It shut down the infected province to travel inside China, but continued to send people from there all around the world. Does that remind you of anything? Maybe old stories of U.S. soldiers giving smallpox-infected blankets to Indian tribes they hoped to wipe out? Or the German general staff shipping Lenin to Russia, to bring down its tottering regime in 1917, and knock it out of the war?

Zmirak continues:

I’ll go further. If we can verify that China protected its own citizens from this virus, while sending those likely infected all around the world like human bioweapons … that’s an act of war. And a much more infamous one than Pearl Harbour, in fact. At least that sneak attack targeted soldiers, not old people in nursing homes.

While many are distancing themselves from the suggestion that COVID-19 might be a weapon—which it still could be—it now seems increasingly likely that it is a virus which has escaped from the virology lab in Wuhan. Fox News is reporting:

There is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States… This may be the “costliest government cover-up of all time,” one of the sources said. The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus – a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there – was bat-to-human and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

As Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department wrote on the weekend the coronavirus is China’s opportunity to present itself as a “saviour to the world”:

Forget the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus came from a People’s Liberation Army biological warfare laboratory. That’s fantasy. What is fact, is that Beijing is using the virus to position itself as the saviour of much of the world, sending medical equipment and doctors, building political indebtedness and loudly claiming that authoritarianism is doing a better job of beating the virus than the US and many democracies. This is why there is such an intense Communist Party push to win the narrative battle and why there is such hostility to self-evident judgments that the virus originated in China and that the party hid the seriousness of the crisis in January while Chinese companies stripped Western countries of protective medical equipment.

By the way, just in case you’re thinking that this is a right-wing conspiracy theory, Josh Rogin likewise argues in The Washington Post that there was a clear laboratory connection to COVID-19, rather than the seafood market in Wuhan.

As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.





You might want to also take a look at this following promotional video purportedly produced by the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year regarding its research into bats and coronaviruses. In fact, The Daily Mail has recently reported that:

[The] U.S. government gave $3.7million grant to Wuhan lab at centre of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated.

It’s just like Chernobyl all over again. Except the fall-out to this communist fall-out has spread to every corner of the world. In short, as The Victims of Communism Foundation concludes:

The simplest explanation for these actions is that the PRC was covering up a major outbreak which was an embarrassment to the communist leadership. The CCP has a long record of misleading the international community on health matters, most notably with previous outbreaks of SARS and AIDS. (See, Joan, Kaufman. “Policy Case Study: Public Health.” Politics in China: An Introduction, by William A. Joseph, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 399-417.)

Following on from this, though, The Foundation has also compiled an comprehensive timeline of the People’s Republic of China’s and the World Health Organisation’s actions involving the outbreak:

Timeline of Coronavirus CCP Cover-Up and WHO Complicity

And, unlike the Soviet Union in 1986, China has no Gorbachev-style figures talking glasnost and perestroika.

Mark Powell is Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.

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