Guest editorial: Not where the virus escaped from, but where it was developed

by: Clare Lopez

A 20 July 2021 Press Release from Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL) deserves both attention and credit. At his website, the Congressman from Alabama reported on a meeting he’d attended with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a medical doctor, Ph.D. virologist, and whistleblower. At the meeting, Dr. Yan provided insider information about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 (aka the ‘coronavirus’). Dr. Yan fled Hong Kong in 2020, defecting from China to warn America and the world about the Chinese Communist Party’s offensive, unrestricted biowarfare program.

As Representative Brooks noted, “The evidence is overwhelming that the Communist Party NEGLIGENTLY, RECKLESSLY OR INTENTIONALLY RELEASED COVID-19 on the world. Moreover, China engaged in a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign to cover up their misdeeds. Dr. Li-Meng Yan bravely defected from China to America after DISCOVERING the COMMUNIST CHINESE PARTY’S destructive and evil Wuhan bio-weapons program. I urge America and the world to wake up to the threat posed by an unchecked Chinese Communist Party. It’s time to get tough and hold China accountable for its deadly actions.”

Rep. Brooks is among the few on Capitol Hill who has had the courage and the insight to speak openly about the CCP’s illegal Biological Weapons program, which violates the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) – to which China remains a signatory – as well as the 1925 Geneva Protocol (later updated and accepted as ‘customary international law’). The weaponization of viruses is included under the designation of ‘bioweapon.’

At his website, Rep. Brooks includes a link to a 6-page report from Dr. Yan that details specifics of the CCP’s “comprehensive unrestricted bioweapons program of the Chinese military” (the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA). She points to open declarations by Chinese PLA scientists and other officials that suggest World War III would be fought with biological weapons. Specifically, in May 2021, the Weekend Australian reported on a 2015 document written by Chinese scientists and public health officials that openly discussed the weaponization of the SARS coronavirus. Titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, the document described the SARS coronavirus as among “a new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human ­disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.”

Then there is the September 11, 2019 blog entry from author, columnist, and geo-political analyst Jeff Nyquist, in which he posts the full text of the 2003 “Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian”. Gen. Haotian was the CCP Minister of National Defense from 1993-2003 and served simultaneously as the vice chairman of the central military commission of the CCP. In this chilling speech, Gen. Haotian spoke in blatantly racist terms of Han Chinese “national superiority”, atheism, and covetous “overseas” geographical expansionism in the name of “living space”. He stated that “[o]nly countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization” – adding that “We the descendants of the Chinese nation are entitled to the possession of the land!” He went on to describe biological warfare, “new bio-weapons”, and a “surprise attack” as the “special means” by which to “clean up America”, so that the killing of “one or two hundred million Americans” would make room for Chinese people to move in without despoiling the land (as nuclear weapons would).

Haotian left no room for misunderstanding: he declared that “[i]n the long run, the relationship of China and the United States is one of a life-and-death struggle”. Remember, he is speaking here as the CCP’s Minister of National Defense, asserting that “we will not hesitate to fight a Third World War” to “secure a Chinese century in which the CCP leads the world.”

In fact, Gen. Haotian’s speech merely echoes and amplifies the 1999 publication of “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America” by two Chinese Colonels in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese military. In those pages, the PLA lists multiple arenas of warfare the CCP regime considers legitimate. Among them is “Bio-chemical Warfare.”

Understood in this context, Dr. Yan’s warning is beyond chilling. As the world continues to grapple with a rapidly mutating SARS-CoV-2, questions are finally being asked about where that virus came from and how it got out to devastate the entire world. But the real questions that must be asked get to the heart of Dr. Yan’s reporting: and those, as Rep. Brooks also tells us, involve the CCP-PLA’s extensive offensive biological weapons program. We know now that Beijing has both the intention and capability to weaponize viruses, using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) gene-editing technology.

As Dr. Yan has explained in a series of public reports, there is credible evidence that the COVID-19 virus displays features characteristic of “gain-of-function” work commonly utilized throughout China. Among such features is the furin polybasic cleavage site on the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence that strongly suggests genetic manipulation because the amino acid sequence found there is not found in any other bat-related coronavirus and there is no known natural pathway by which such a segment could have emerged. In the simplest terms, this coronavirus’ extraordinary ability to bind to that place (the ACE-2 – angiotensin converting enzyme-2 – receptor) in human lungs most suited and most vulnerable to the SARS-CoV-2 seems to point directly at laboratory genetic manipulation designed intentionally to enhance this coronavirus’ infectiousness for human beings.

Dr. Yan’s medical credentials are notable: she holds medical degrees and a Ph.D. from multiple top medical universities in mainland China, including the Xiangya Medical College of Central South University in Changsha and the Southern Medical University in Guangzhou. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals. After an early focus on ophthalmology, stem cell therapy, and inflammation and artificial tissue evaluation in animal models, Dr. Yang continued her work at the University of Hong Kong. In 2014, she joined the WHO H-5 reference lab at the U. of Hong Kong, then led by Dr. Malik Peiris. Peiris is a Sri Lankan national with close ties to the entire CCP-PLA apparatus as well as the international research community, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). There at the WHO H-5 lab, Dr. Yang began working under Dr. Peiris in virology, focusing on viral infectious diseases, influenza vaccine development, and immunology. It was through this work at the U. of Hong Kong and the extensive linkage of its WHO reference lab with the network of CCP-PLA military labs in mainland China that Dr. Yang became aware of the CCP regime’s offensive BW program. By 2019, Dr. Yan was asked to investigate the origins of the new virus then beginning to spread across Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in central mainland China. Once she realized the menace of that BW program and the likely origins within it of what became known as SARS-CoV-2 and its ramifications for the rest of the world, Dr. Yan began to raise the alarm to her supervisor. This inevitably flagged her to the CCP authorities and resulted in warnings that she could be “disappeared” if she did not stop speaking of such things. By April 2020, Dr. Yan knew she had to flee Hong Kong and came to the U.S., where she now resides, pending an asylum claim.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Li-Meng Yan, as well as to Congressman Mo Brooks, for their courage in alerting the U.S. and indeed, the rest of the world, to the growing threat of China’s dangerous and unrestricted BW program.

Clare M. Lopez is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC