By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, an action based on our confidence in British and American intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” Those reports were totally wrong. The U.S. military suffered 4,431 deaths in Iraq while estimates of violent civilian deaths range from a 185,000–208,000 headcount up to 1,033,00 excess civilian deaths.
When the U.S. National Security Agency historical study of the Golf of Tonkin incident was declassified, it confirmed that the alleged attack by the North Vietnamese Navy on August 4, 1964 did not occur and was based on bad naval intelligence. Since it was considered at the time to be proof of a North Vietnamese attack, the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which President Johnson then used as the legal basis to deploy U.S. armed forces to South Vietnam and conduct war against North Vietnam. Other events could have been used, but this case based on totally wrong intelligence nearly 50 years ago was used to escalate that war. 58,220 U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam War but “...one million (plus or minus 175,000) Vietnamese died either as military or civilian casualties, on both sides, from 1965 to 1975” according to an academic study. But deaths continue to occur in both Vietnam civilians and U.S. military today due to our heavy use of the Agent Orange containing dioxin.
These actions that resulted from wrong “intelligence” had deadly and devastating effects.
When eight various U.S. intelligence agencies were asked about what they suspected about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, four leaned toward the natural origin in the Huanan market, two were undecided, and two favored the lab-leak theory, although with “low confidence.” It is important to note that the two reports pointing to the lab leak indicated it would have been an accidental leak and not biowarfare. Nevertheless, polls show a U.S. public where many consider it emerged as a result of Chinese warfare research. And none of these “intelligence” reports supports that at all.
The origin of a disease is a question for scientists, not spies. And the wholesale meat market origin already strongly supported by most scientists just got a big boost from findings presented on Tuesday, March 14, to the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). Florence Débarre, a specialist at the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) spotted the coronavirus-positive genetic sequence DATA that had been sampled at the Huanan market in the very first months of the pandemic and determined they contained RNA or DNA from raccoon dogs, civets and other mammals now known to be highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and which were at this market.
Back on October 14, 2022, the journal Science cited a report that had just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 10 that found “...the peer-reviewed literature overwhelmingly supports the zoonotic hypothesis,” the conclusion that the virus “spread naturally in a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans—without help from a lab.”
In the August 26, 2022 issue of Science, 18 Western scientists found that in late 2019, live SARS-CoV-2-susceptible mammals were sold and SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were associated with venders selling live animals. They also found that by mapping the early human cases, “...the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Another study in the same Science issue written by 29 researchers focused on the unique genomes of early strains and discovered that the early SARS-CoV-2 virus had already existed in two distinct viral lineages they label as “A” and “B” before February of 2020, indicating that there were “...at least two separate cross-species transmission events” where the virus was transmitted into humans.
These results have come together as a series of ever more conclusive solid reports linking the Huanan market in Wuhan with the original human outbreak cases. Meanwhile, when the U.S. intelligence agencies’ declassified reports are released, we can expect to see a new pandemic of scientific ignorance in Congress. That “origin” story still lacks any evidence and remains political fantasy.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.