Lab Leak?

Nathan Rich has some great videos explaining the Fort Detrick lab leak theory, see here, here, and here.  I want to capture some of the sources for my reference.

In June of 2019 the CDC audited Fort Detrick.  They subsequently issued a report detailing their findings.  The report indicates 2 breaches of toxins occurred.

The below excerpt indicates improper containment in ABSL rooms, the "A" designates it as room where animals are housed and studied.  There was risk that contaminated air from this room could expose people without respiratory protection outside of the room.

This section discusses improper waste disposal coming from the animal test room.  The room includes NHPs, which stands for Non Human Primates.

On June 30, 2019, a respiratory illness led to the death of 3 people and sickness of 63 people including staff at a senior living center located about 60 miles from Ft Detrick.  The cause could not be identified.  Story from ABC News here.

July 2019, a second assisted living facility is reporting 25 cases of a mystery respiratory illness.  This is about 54 miles from Fort Detrick.

On July 18, 2019 Fort Detrick is shut down.

August 1, 2019 marks the start of a surprise outbreak of vaping related illness with symptoms quite similar to covid.  It hits men harder, as does covid.

September 2019, blood samples from Italians are drawn and subsequently test positive for Covid antibodies.  These are the earliest human samples that have tested positive for Covid.

October 18-27, 2019, a multi-sport competitive event called the World Military Games is held in Wuhan, China.  Many US military personnel are reporting that they were sick with Covid like symptoms.  A French athlete has been told by doctors that she likely had Covid.  She reports that many others seemed sick.  They were not tested and many athletes have been directed not to speak to the media.

November 2019, US intelligence warns Trump, NATO, and Israel about the coronavirus outbreak occurring in China.  This is weeks before anyone had presented themselves at a hospital in China for Covid.

December 10, 2019, Wei Guixian, a shrimp vendor in Wuhan, developed what she thought was a cold and went to a clinic for treatment.  The treatment was not effective and she returned to a hospital.  She was informed that others had been to the hospital with similar symptoms.  She is the first identifiable person infected in China as far as I know.

December 13, 2019 through January 17, 2020 blood samples are collected in the US which would later be tested for Covid antibodies.  1.4% would test positive.  Extrapolating this % to the full US population suggests 4.7M people had Covid antibodies at this time.

January 13, 2020, 2 days before China had awareness that Covid was human to human transmissible, the Moderna vaccine is already developed.

Note: May update occasionally as new information comes to light.

At least victims of US violence aren't Americans

Capitalism in the US produces a lot of corpses, just as British capitalism did before it.  But I've literally encountered this argument myself and also seen it in debates.  Defenders of US capitalism, with it's 800 military bases, funding of death squads that do such things as smash children to death against rocks, torture programs around the world like the Phoenix Program where people are raped using eels, at least we're only killing Vietnamese or Colombians or Syrians.  It's not like Stalin and Mao who had it in for their own people for some reason.

It's a strange argument to my ears and I do wonder if some people just don't feel empathy in an ordinary way, but I want to address it in any case.  For the moment I want to set Stalin and Mao aside, except to say that for me while I accept that there were major problems and millions dead this doesn't mean we should accept the full western characterization of the situation blindly.  But why is it that US violence doesn't target Americans?  Is this due to some sort of benevolence?  Lenin has an excerpt from his work "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism" that sheds light.  In it he recounts a story from Cecil Rhodes, well known for the Rhodes Scholarship program.  He was a vicious imperialist and mass murderer.  He explained what prompted him to advance imperial adventures.

It's true that US imperialism does not target US citizens.  But this is not due to benevolence.  This is because it is necessary to have stability at home and stave off civil war by placating the population.  Imperialism allows the acquisition of new markets as well as cheap labor and resources.  These can be used to provide an OK life for the home population and therefore the home population will not disrupt the system.  The exploited countries will of course be chaos.  We'll have to have death squads killing children and raping women.  But chaos there is not really a threat to the system at home.

But this is only for capitalism in the imperial stage.  The earlier stages of capitalism could be very violent to natives.  The stage of primitive accumulation, which is the earliest stage, was characterized by extermination of Native Americans and slavery.  That's what was needed to advance the profits at that time.  Today the US is imperialist, but there are signs that this is waning.