From 9/11 to COVID-19

What Zelikow’s Myths Tell Us about the Truth

Why would three philanthropists who’d funded virus hunts in China that some say may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic want Philip Zelikow, the former director of the 9/11 Commission who now leads the COVID Crisis Group, to tell their story?

That’s the question that’s been puzzling me since reading Lessons from the COVID War, the first draft of the official story of the origins of COVID-19.

I asked Philip Zelikow about it at a recent book talk in Washington, D.C. His denials and obfuscations only made me more curious. (That’s journalist Sam Husseini who backs me up at the end.)

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[You can see the entire Q&A featuring great questions from members of COVIDorigins.org on Twitter.]

COVID War, a brief book with few citations, tell this story:

In 2012, six miners in southern China’s Yunnan province, working not far from the borders with Laos and Vietnam, presented with an unusual illness. Three of them died. Some medical practitioners believed the miners had caught a SARS-like virus. Following up, Chinese scientists from Wuhan discovered many SARS-like viruses among horseshoe bats from the same mine in Yunnan province where these miners had spent time immediately before they got sick, as well as among bats across southern China. Although related, none of the viruses found so far in this region or elsewhere are the immediate ancestors of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that has caused COVID-19.

COVID War cites Reuter’s 2021 “Explainer: China’s Mojiang mine and its role in the origins of COVID-19” by David Stanway:

Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged China to release information about six labourers who fell ill after working in a mine in Yunnan province in 2012, and are now seen as a key part of efforts to find the origins of COVID-19.

The workers, ages 30 to 63, were scrubbing a copper seam clean of bat faeces in April 2012. Weeks later, they were admitted to a hospital in the provincial capital of Kunming with persistent coughs, fevers, head and chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three eventually died.

The mine is in Mojiang in southwest China, about 1,500 kilometres from Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first identified.

* * *

[A] 2013 thesis written by a Kunming Medical University postgraduate student named Li Xu…concludes they were victims of a "SARS-like" coronavirus contracted from horseshoe bats.

* * *

Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.

Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.

First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.

WHAT OTHER VIRUSES WERE FOUND IN THE MINE?

From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine.

The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.

In a preprint last month, Shi and other researchers said none of the eight was a closer match to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13. Crucially, none of them possessed the key receptor binding domain that allows SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans so efficiently.

It’s a fascinating story, but there are additional details that make it even juicer:

• Shi Zhengli and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hunting for viruses right where the Mojiang “miners” got sick—before they got sick. Were they actually miners? Or were they working in the mine shaft for the virus hunters?

• The Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t doing this alone. The virus hunts were conducted by a consortium of U.S. scientific institutes, including EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota.

• Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance has claimed that the viruses were kept in a freezer at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but we know that some went straight to infamous “gain-of-function” bioweapons researcher Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina and were used in his experiment, published in 2015, where he engineered a virus startling similar to SARS-CoV-2. In fact, we have to take his word for it that it wasn’t SARS-CoV-2 itself, because he didn’t publish the sequence until May 2020.

• The viruses were retained by Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance. Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know reveal that Peter Daszak made a decision in 2020 to keep the virus sequences hidden from the public because of what they might reveal about the origins of COVID-19.

• Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance have Pentagon contracts to conduct research in the military’s so-called Defense Threat Reduction Agency bioweapons labs across the globe. In 2014, Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca funded and secured government contracts for Metabiota’s work in Ukraine. This included $307,091 allocated for Metabiota’s “Ukrainian research projects.”

• Another person who had access to the virus that sickened the miners was George Gao, the head of China’s CDC. Gao was Li Xu’s thesis advisor and was involved in treating the “miners.” Gao later participated in the Bill Gates and World Economic Forum funded Event 201. If you’ve seen the documentary Plandemic, you’ll recognize Event 201 as the eerily predictive October 2019 tabletop exercise that war-gamed a coronavirus pandemic almost exactly like the one that would start two months later. Lesson from the COVID War ignores Event 201 altogether, which is odd, given that its organizers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security are official members of the COVID Crisis Group and should analyze how well Event 201 prepared leaders like Gao for the pandemic.

• The $200 million in funding for the virus hunts came from a U.S. Agency for International Development program called PREDICT. That program was launched first at Google.org as Predict and Prevent.

• Rajiv Shah was USAID director during the PREDICT virus hunts. Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google when it launched Predict and Prevent with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (now Metabiota) and financial assistance from Jeffrey Skoll of EBay.

• Now, Schmidt, Skoll and Shah (as president of the Rockefeller Foundation) are the backers of Philip Zelikow’s COVID Crisis Group (formerly the COVID Commission Planning Group).

So, why would Schmidt, Skoll and Shah want Philip Zelikow to tell the story of the “Mojiang miners,” given where it leads?

Did they want him to cover it up? Or did they hired him to cement a COVID origins myth that they had worked since 2008 to construct? A myth that would make the intentional release of a biological weapon look like lab leak?

Here’s what Schmidt, Skoll and Shah made sure COVID Wars didn’t include in the story of the “Mojiang miners”:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t hunting viruses alone. From 2009 to 2020, they were partners in USAID’s PREDICT and PREDICT-2 Consortiums which dispersed $211.8 million in grants between 2009 and 2020. The consortiums also included EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota.

USAID’s PREDICT started in 2008 as Google.org’s Predict and Prevent, which committed $30 million to virus hunting and research on potential pandemic pathogens conducted by Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-profit Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, soon to become the for-profit Metabiota. Predict and Prevent/GVFI funders at the time included Jeffrey Skoll’s foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck Research Laboratories and the US Department of Defense. Jeffrey Epstein Was thanked in Wolfe’s 2011 book The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age.

Google.org’s Predict and Prevent got a much bigger budget when it found a home at Rajiv Shah’s USAID. In its first USAID funding cycle, 2009-2014, $74.7 million was dispersed from USAID through Dr. Jonna Mazet’s One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. I have not been able to find a record of sub-awards on that grant. In its second funding cycle, 2014-2020, $137.1 million was dispersed, again through Mazet at UC-Davis. The record of sub awards show that EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota were the primary recipients of round-2 funding, together receiving more than $74 million, often dispersed in matching grants. For instance, they each got $9.1 million in 2016 and $12.7 million in 2015.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota received PREDICT funding for work they published together in May 2014, “Evidence for Retrovirus and Paramyxovirus Infection of Multiple Bat Species in China,” an analysis of bat viruses collected in Yunnan near Pu’er City, south of Kunming, between November 2011 and March 2012. 

It was in Kunming, just after Metabiota, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance had finished that virus hunt that six men exposed to bat guano were hospitalized with severe pneumonia of an unknown cause. They were admitted to the hospital in April. Three died. The longest hospitalization lasted into September.

So that places PREDICT (and by extension their funders Schmidt, Skoll and Shah) at the scene of the COVID-19 origins story Zelikow’s team tells in COVID War.

Shi Zhengli, working under a grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discovered the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 sometime during or after the Kunming hospitalizations. PREDICT virus hunts were logged in August and September 2012 and April and July 2013.

In February 2020, Shi published the same virus as RaTG13, calling attention to its similarities to SARS-CoV-2 without mentioning the virus’s relationship to the hospitalized men or the fact that it had been published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016’s “Coexistence of multiple coronaviruses in several bat colonies in an abandoned mineshaft.” 

RaTG13 is identified as “extracted from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid,” meaning that it was taken from a human, but its source is also contradictorily marked as from a bat “fecal swab.”

Strangely, none of the PREDICT scientists published anything related to the deadly outbreak, even though spillover events like this were their raison d’etre, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology participated in attempts to diagnose the illness.

The first news of the 2012 outbreak was in March 2014, when Science Magazine ran a story, “A New Killer Virus in China?” about the publication of “Novel Henipa-like Virus, Mojiang Paramyxovirus, in Rats, China, 2012.” According to the authors, an all-Chinese team led by Qi Jin:

We report on a novel henipa-like virus, Mojiang paramyxovirus (MojV), in rats (Rattus flavipectus) in China.

In June 2012, in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, Yunnan Province, China, severe pneumonia without a known cause was diagnosed in 3 persons who had been working in an abandoned mine; all 3 patients died. Half a year later, we investigated the presence of novel zoonotic pathogens in natural hosts in this cave.

Did the men get sick while “cleaning the bats’ feces inside the cave” for the PREDICT consortium? Did Qi Jin’s team go looking for paramyxoviruses because that was what the PREDICT team had been looking for when men working in an abandoned mine for them had gotten sick? The Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota’s 2014 “Evidence for Retrovirus and Paramyxovirus Infection of Multiple Bat Species in China,” was an analysis of bat viruses collected in Yunnan near Pu’er City, south of Kunming, between November 2011 and March 2012. 

Was RaTG13 taken from the hospitalized men rather than a bat colony, as Drs. Jonathan Latham and Alison Wilson have suggested?

Are the hospitalized men where Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli got the virus they gave to Ralph Baric for his infamous gain-of-function experiments published in “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”? It was around this time (between April 2011 and September 2012) that WIV’s Shi Zhengli and EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, working with the USAID PREDICT Consortium, discovered the first bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor “at a single location in Kunming.”

Because COVID War doesn’t acknowledge that the COVID Crisis Group’s funders were funding these virus hunts and that there were U.S. organizations involved, including Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance, Zelikow’s Group doesn’t admit that answers to these questions could be investigated without China’s help.

This is not speculation. Thanks to emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by U.S. Right to Know, we know that Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance do, in fact have PREDICT viruses relevant to the origins of COVID-19. The emails reveal that they didn’t make the viruses public because President Donald Trump had linked their work to the origins of COVID-19 and Peter Daszak feared that they would lose their USAID funding just as they had lost their funding from NIH.

Why did Schmidt, Skoll and Shah choose Philip Zelikow?

If the sight of Philip Zelikow’s name doesn’t make you raise your eyebrows and click your tongue, consider what Michael Saba reported in his 2004 piece, “9/11 Commission: A Giant ‘Snipe Hunt’?”:

Zelikow is apparently not an innocent bystander when it comes to 9/11 issues. Zelikow has historically worked very closely with Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice co-authoring a book with her. Zelikow also served on the Bush 2 transition team for national security again with Rice and was briefed by Richard Clarke on the growing Al-Qaeda threat prior to 9/11.

A pair of public interest groups, the 9/11 Family Steering Committee and the 9/11 Citizens Watch have repeatedly called for the resignation of Zelikow citing both conflict of interest and overt participation in American counterterrorism efforts prior to 9/11. In a letter the Family Steering Committee wrote, “It is clear that (Zelikow) should never have been permitted to be a member of the commission, since it is the mandate of the commission to identify the source of the failures. It is now apparent why there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We now can see that trail would lead directly to the staff director himself.”

In the November/December 1998 issue of the Foreign Affairs journal, Zelikow co-authored an article titled “Catastrophic Terrorism.” In this article, the authors said, after pointing out that the 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center could have been much more catastrophic, “.....the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949.”

“Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”

* * *

When we interviewed Bob McIlvaine, one of the members of Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and the father of the late Bobby McIlVaine who died at age 26 in the Sept. 11 tragedy, he stated that he felt nothing would come of the call for the resignation of Philip Zelikow. He said that he was “100 percent” sure that “they knew it was coming” and didn’t really want the true facts made public. … [McIlvaine] pointed out an interesting comparison when he was read the statement in the Zelikow authored Foreign Policy article from November/December 1998. He stated that in a letter sent in 2000 to President Bush by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” spearheaded by neocons and other conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, PNAC members were betting on “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.

Unsurprisingly, Zelikow’s 9/11 Commission Report was a snow job. The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry lists some of the ways Zelikow hid the truth, including what Philip Shenon, author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation reported in his 2016 article for the Guardian, “Saudi officials were 'supporting' 9/11 hijackers, commission member says”:

Zelikow fired a staffer, who had repeatedly protested over limitations on the Saudi investigation, after she obtained a copy of the 28 pages outside of official channels. Other staffers described an angry scene late one night, near the end of the investigation, when two investigators who focused on the Saudi allegations were forced to rush back to the commission’s offices after midnight after learning to their astonishment that some of the most compelling evidence about a Saudi tie to 9/11 was being edited out of the report or was being pushed to tiny, barely readable footnotes and endnotes. The staff protests were mostly overruled.

(This may have been something of a limited hangout, given more recent evidence that the CIA took 9/11 hijackers under its wings, as well.)

Schmidt, Skoll and Shah’s choice of Philip Zelikow for their COVID origins investigation speaks volumes to current goals, but it also ties them back to the crimes of the Bush-Cheney regime.

Richard Hugus summed of the meaning of Zelikow’s role in the COVID Crisis Group eloquently in “Philip Zelikow's Covid Coverup”:

Zelikow is the consummate insider. Had he not appeared with this coverup masquerading as an earnest critique, we might have missed seeing that the neocons had to be involved in the covid operation just as they were in 9-11.

Indeed, connections between 9/11 and COVID-19 were apparent from the get-go, as I discovered in 2020 when I looked into who was in charge of reviewing “gain-of-function” research funding and found Christian Hassell and his boss Robert Kadlec.

The most startling connection between 9/11 and COVID-19 is former Fort Detrick commander David Franz. Franz, now principal at SBD Global, is currently a science and policy advisor to EcoHealth Alliance.

I believe Franz worked on contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to produce microencapsulated anthrax with Ken Alibek and Charles Bailey, and that this was the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks.

[For background, and to understand how the 2001 anthrax attacks were evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, read The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy by Dr. Graeme MacQueen. McQueen passed away recently. You can learn more about his contributions to our understanding of 9/11 in this tribute by James Corbett.]

In “Evidence for the Source of the 2001 Attack Anthrax,” a 2012 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense, Martin E. Hugh-Jones, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and Stuart Jacobsen linked the forensic evidence from the 2001 attack anthrax to the silicon coated anthrax contracted for by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here's a summary they wrote for the Frederick News Post:

In the case of biological weapons like anthrax, microencapsulation could be used to prevent their detection as well as to protect them from inactivation. A plan to test the effects of microencapsulation on the detection of pathogens was spelled out in the Department of Defense’s unclassified annual budget justification documents issued in 1999, 2000 and 2001 for the Biological Warfare Defense program, under which DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was developing a biological weapons detection system. The budget document for 2002 stated that the plan had been accomplished in 2001. Evidently, the DARPA project had been supplied with microencapsulated pathogen(s) in the year of the letter attacks. Dry anthrax spores were one of the pathogens known to be under study by DARPA in 2001. Antibioterrorism training and vulnerability assessment were also underway in the U.S. at the time and may have utilized any anthrax spore preparations that were available.

Here are more details from their paper:

DOD-sponsored projects explicitly involving microencapsulation at DARPA, Dugway and perhaps elsewhere were spelled out publicly in budget documents in 1999 and thereafter, and executed at the very time of the anthrax attacks.

* * *

From 1999 to 2001, annual DOD budget item justifications for the DARPA project on detectors (called “sensors”) listed a plan to be carried out in FY 2001 to “evaluate methods for removing microencapsulation of disguised pathogens and/or sensing through the micro-encapsulation”. The budget item justification sheet dated February 2002 listed that plan under “FY2001 Accomplishments”, indicating that at least one microencapsulated pathogen was studied by DARPA in 2001.

Also accomplished by DARPA in 2001 was the evaluation of “methods of cell stabilization for possible application to cell based sensors”. One such stabilization method is microencapsulation.

Concomitantly, the Chemical/Biological Defense Program (CBDP), covering work at Dugway, undertook in 1999 to identify and evaluate emerging threat agents by various means, and continued work on this project through FY2001, during which year they assessed the gaps in the threat agent data and the needs for improved simulants. Also in 2001, plans were made to initiate a program of synthesis, toxicology screening and characterization of new threat materials, to include Fourth Generation Agents [which include those altered for better survival, e.g. by microencapsulation], and to initiate development of improved simulants for microencapsulated viruses and stabilized bacteria. Throughout this period the program provided controlled biosimulant aerosol challenges for Joint Service, DARPA, and DOE experimental equipment. Dugway tested DARPA’s detection equipment in 1999.

* * *

The small but real tin content found by the FBI laboratory in the Dugway samples appears to have been overlooked. Was it a remnant of tin used previously at Dugway in classified work? There is no evidence whatsoever to rule out the possibility that the attack samples had been legally made at Dugway or elsewhere. It must be recognized, of course, that making the spores is not synonymous with sending the letters. The “attack” anthrax could have been made for the use of US agencies or contractors conducting legitimate activities such as vulnerability and response assessment or testing detection devices such as DARPA’s. The letter sender(s) may have been one or more individuals who, whether legally or illegally, had access to the material at some point in the process.

* * *

The presence, shown by FBI analysis, of the two extraneous elements, tin and silicon, together in the attack spores favors the silicone microencapsulation hypothesis. Microencapsulation, a process that would require special expertise and sophisticated facilities, could explain the presence, location and amounts of both elements. At least two government programs, at DARPA and Dugway, had projects requiring microencapsulated pathogens or simulants. Both Dugway and Battelle, a sub-contractor there, had access to Bacillus anthracis from the presumptive parental flask RMR 1029. Both had the expertise to make anthrax spore powders, both – and perhaps other government- supported laboratories as well – could have made the attack spores legally for institutions conducting biodefense activities that required microencapsulated spores.

Bailey and Alibek’s 2001 patent for silicon microencapsulation technology reads: 

According to the invention, cells are cultivated in a plurality of individual microdroplets of liquid media. These microdroplets are created by aerosolizing liquid media that has been inoculated with the cells of interest and coating the aerosolized droplets with hydrophobic particles of solid material, such as silicon dioxide, for example. The individual microdroplets are stabilized within the hydrophobic solid particles, thereby providing a large number of small cell culture reactors. The coated microdroplets each provide a sterile environment for the individual microdroplets contained within the culture. Furthermore, the individual microdroplets each provide an optimum microenvironment with a reduced effect of potentially inhibitory metabolites and optimal accessability to aeration, resulting in substantial increases in the concentration of cells per liquid volume.

A news report about Bailey and Alibek’s Advanced Biosystems’ $10 million in DARPA contracts to work on anthrax from 1999 to 2002. noted that they were assisted by Southern Research Institute in Frederick. Franz was vice president for chemical and biological defense at the Southern Research Institute at the time, so that’s why I believe he worked on the silicon encapsulated anthrax with Bailey and Alibek.

It was mind-blowing to see David Franz, an anthrax-era military bioweapons scientist, as an advisor to EcoHealth Alliance, an organization with a central role in the COVID origins story that Zelikow is shaping on behalf of billionaires with a personal interest in how that story is told.

Writing this article, I learned that Philip Zelikow was also a consultant to the January 6 Committee vice-chaired by Liz Cheney. That gave even more significance to the appearance of Dick Cheney at the Capitol on the anniversary of the events of January 6, 2021.

The involvement of Philip Zelikow in the COVID coverup, and Liz Cheney in January 6, signals that these two events are connected, as Dr. Simone Gold of America’s Frontline Doctors can attest, but what’s going on?

I shudder to think, but it looks like we’re being primed for Trump v. Cheney 2024. Could Hunter Biden’s scandals bring down Joe Biden just in time for Cheney to throw her hat in the ring, win the Democratic primary and beat Trump? She and her father seem to think so. I leave you to ponder Liz Cheney’s most recent political ad (and her dad’s from last fall, in case you missed it):