Who’s Afraid of Fort Detrick Probe
By Finian Cunningham
August 06, 2021"Information
Clearing House" - "Sputnik"
An international online petition calling
for an investigation into a US military
laboratory and the possible origin of Covid-19
was hacked at the weekend. The hackers were
reportedly based in the US.
Fort Detrick in Maryland is the center
of American biowarfare research. It is just one
of the hundreds of such infectious disease
laboratories located across the United States.
During the Cold War, Fort Detrick was the main
site for experimenting with lethal pathogens,
including viruses causing deadly influenza.
In 2001, when a disgruntled researcher
is believed to have killed five people by
mailing deadly anthrax spores
it was Fort Detrick that was the origin of the
lethal material.
However, the network of secretive US biowarfare
laboratories is also infamous for
safety violations and accidents. In August 2019,
Fort Detrick was shut
down abruptly for several months when its
wastewater decontamination process failed.
It is not unreasonable to call for an
investigation into the practices and records at the
Maryland center to ascertain if it had any
connection to the Covid-19 pandemic which has so far
killed over four million people worldwide and more
than 600,000 in the United States alone.
Of course, American politicians and media dismiss
the appeal as “disinformation” put out by Russia and
China. Americans have accused China of being the
origin of the pandemic after the first cases of
Covid-19 were detected in the city of Wuhan at the
end of 2019. More sinisterly, the Wuhan virology
institute has been fingered as the source of the
virus even though an international survey by the
World Health Organization concluded such
a release was “extremely unlikely”.
Scientific consensus contends that the virus
evolved naturally and was most likely transmitted to
humans from animals.
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US President Joe Biden has given credibility to
the conspiracy theory unleashed by his predecessor
Donald Trump that the Wuhan laboratory was the
origin of the Covid-19 virus. Biden has tasked his
intelligence agencies to look into the claims. They
are due to report back on their findings next month.
Washington berates China for not being transparent
about its laboratory and is demanding that Beijing
open up its facility for inspection. The Americans
claim China was not fully open with WHO
investigators who cleared the lab as not being the
origin of the virus.
But two can play that game. If the Americans
accuse China and demand an investigation into
secret laboratories then why can’t China level
the same at the US?
It is still not known where the Covid-19 pandemic
originated. It may take years to determine that. But
what is certainly hindering an answer is the
politicization of the disease. Washington is using
it to smear China while hypocritically suppressing
any questions about its own conduct.
The early cases of Covid-19 were detected in
Wuhan. But who is to say that cases may have existed
elsewhere but were simply not detected and reported
in other countries? The US had an
unprecedented surge in
influenza deaths in 2019 before the Wuhan cases.
Were some of these misdiagnosed as flu instead of
Covid-19?
Fort Detrick has a notorious history of
safety failures. It works on a wide range of
biowarfare pathogens with little public oversight.
And it was shut down in mid-2019 for reasons that
are not clear to the public.
It is therefore reasonable for China to demand a
probe into the American facility. This is not just a
matter of “counter-propaganda” to turn the tables
over American speculation about the Wuhan institute.
There are empirical grounds for suspecting Fort
Detrick as possibly having a role in the origin of
the pandemic.
An online petition was
started in China earlier this month demanding the
WHO launch an investigation into Fort Detrick. It
had gathered over 10 million signatures when the
online site was hacked into at the weekend.
Apparently, the petition was defended by its
cybersecurity system and continues to operate.
According to Chinese reports the hackers were
identified as having computer server addresses
located in the US. If that is confirmed then the
suspicions around the murky practices of Fort
Detrick become more acute. It looks like the
Americans are afraid to
permit a probe into the site, even
though they make high-handed accusations and demands
on China over tenuous claims about Wuhan.
Finian Cunningham
has written extensively on international affairs,
with articles published in several languages. He is
a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and
worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society
of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a
musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news media
organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and
Independent.
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