The standard narrative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 and has led to the imposition of a worldwide lockdown, says that it made its first appearance in China in December of 2019. Chinese scientists publishing in the journal Nature date the start of the outbreak to December 12, 2019 in Wuhan, China.
This has led to all sorts of speculation about the origin of the virus. Did it spring into existence naturally, or was it helped along by human science? Given the suspicious proximity of a Chinese high-level virology lab to the outbreak in Wuhan, this has been a popular question. Also suspicious: Just how many people died in China from the virus? How many people were actually infected? Virus whistleblowers in China were detained and muzzled by authorities, and the reporting out of the communist nation has been suspect. We may never now the exact details about what happened in Wuhan.
Other questions, more disturbing, suggest that the truth about the virus may differ, perhaps substantially, from the accepted narrative. One such question: Were authorities already putting in plans, such as virus ID schemes, that would benefit from the outbreak of a pandemic and from the fear propaganda it would generate before SARS-CoV-2 emerged? And, another question: Is there evidence for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 elsewhere in the world before the Wuhan outbreak?
The answer to both questions, disturbingly, is yes.
Virus ID Schemes
The New American has already written extensively on the plans that have been made for the implementation of population tracking by virus ID schemes. In that article we reported that deep state public-health insider Dr. Anthony Fauci said that Americans might need to be saddled with immunity ID cards before they could be allowed to have some semblance of their freedoms returned to them.
So far, that hasn’t panned out, exactly, but consider that masks are, at present, performing the same symbolic function as an immunity ID. Already access to goods and services is being denied to those who choose not to wear a mask. Big-box home store Menards, for example, states with imperious grandiosity: “All shoppers and workers will follow the CDC guidelines of wearing a mask or face covering, which includes a full length face shield, when in our stores.” In Florida, Walmart workers physically blocked a man from entering a store because he wasn’t wearing a mask, the New York Post reported on June 22. In some places, people not wearing masks are now being verbally attacked as they attempt to go about their business, while in other places people not wearing masks are being violently detained and arrested by police.
The New American has already carried an important article from an industrial safety engineer working in the specialty chemicals industry — one where masks and other personal protective devices are used to work with chemicals and compounds far deadlier than coronaviruses — pointing out that masks will not be effective at stopping SARS-CoV-2. Others questioning the mask narrative have been censored. Physicist Denis Rancourt, PhD., published a detailed summary of the science of mask wearing to stop virus transmission. He concluded that “individuals should know that there is no known benefit arising from wearing a mask in a viral respiratory illness epidemic, and that scientific studies have shown that any benefit must be residually small, compared to other and determinative factors.”
Rancourt had made his work on masks available on ResearchGate.net, which bills itself as “the professional network for scientists and researchers” that aims to allow researchers to share publications and engage in scientific debate. The site, though, would not allow professor Rancourt to publish his work on masks, taking down the paper.
“My April 2020 article entitled ‘Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy” was banned from ResearchGate on 3 June 2020, after it had reached an unprecedented 400 K reads on the site,” Rancourt noted. In an e-mail sent to Rancourt, ResearchGate wrote of the removal that his paper violated the site’s terms of service because of “its questionable scientific basis and controversial subject matter.”
Note that science, at its most fundamental level, is an approach to clarifying and gaining understanding of “questionable” matters. As to whether a topic is controversial or not, that too is not something that should be avoided by science, as science is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as governing or mainstream opinion makers wish it to be. Indeed, as Rancourt noted in an e-mail response he sent back to ResearchGate, “It is inconceivable to me how the article could have been judged to be ‘non-scientific content’, and I find nothing in the TOS about ‘questionable scientific basis’ (I would hope that all submissions are ‘questionable’) or ‘controversial subject matter’ (I would hope that some science communications are about ‘controversial subject matter’).”
In a follow-up e-mail to Dr. Rancourt, the site told him that they removed his article because it “was advocating that face masks were not effective and, in effect, discouraging their use.” Moreover, the site’s response continued: “This goes against the public heath advice and/or requirements of credible agencies and governments.”
And there you have the real reason for the takedown: Dr. Rancourt had the temerity to challenge the official government and mainstream narrative. How dare a scientist look into the truth of things when those truths might undermine the government! Says Dr. Rancourt in response: “This is censorship of my scientific work like I have never experienced before…. The actions of ResearchGate are contrary to science, freedom, and democracy. In my opinion, ResearchGate is using the public internet infrastructure, while actuating an apparent bias aligned with its funding sources.”
In a footnote to this, Dr. Rancourt, citing techcrunch.com, notes that those funding sources include “the Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, and Four Rivers Group, Ashton Kutcher, LVMH, Xavier Niel, Bill Gates, Benchmark, and Founders Fund, some of whom (like Gates, Benchmark and Founders Fund) were investors in previous rounds.”
Among these, Gates has been of world-wide influence, through billions of dollars funneled through his organization, pushing for international vaccination schemes. His money and influence reach nearly all levels of government and involve multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of which, as The New American has reported, have been working to build a universal digital ID tied to health and vaccination for several years.
One manifestation of this, demonstrating that the universal vaccine ID push has been accelerating in lockstep with the pandemic and its wave of statist propaganda, is the plan for a vaccine ID in the European Union.
Like the worldwide vaccine ID push, the EU’s branch of the effort predates, by just a bit, the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
In its “Roadmap on Vaccination,” last updated in “Q3 2019,” the European Commission provided a timeline for developing and deploying a “common vaccination card/passport for EU citizens.” This “passport” will be “compatible with electronic immunisation information systems and recognized for use across borders.” In other words, travel through the EU by EU citizens seems likely to be regulated by whether or not someone has an updated and correct vaccination passport.
According to the timeline proposed by the European Commission, a “feasibility study for the development of a common EU vaccination card” would start in 2019 and conclude in 2021. In 2022, the Commission would put forth a “proposal for a common vaccination card/passport for EU citizens.”
Meanwhile, knowing that even EU citizens might be hesitant to give in to such totalitarianism, the Commission simultaneous to the vaccine passport feasibility study intends to provide “Guidance on countering vaccine hesitancy tailored to specific needs identified by Member States and/or vaccine specific issues.” These are just a few parts of a very thorough and broad-based emerging EU-wide vaccine policy that will subjugate all the citizens of the EU nations.
Americans, however, shouldn’t be complacent. It is easier to implement such schemes in a bureaucratic state — such as the European Union — lacking a government architecture with separation of powers, such as exists in the United States thanks to the foresight of America’s Founders. But it can happen here, too.
To the degree that the current radical leftist attacks on our nation threaten to undermine our system of checks and balances, the final emergence of a totalitarian bureaucratic state overriding and submerging the system of constitutional separation of powers in the United States is a growing danger, particularly with the November presidential election looming. Were it to take power post-election day — a distinct possibility given current instabilities — shackling America with an EU-style vaccine passport will be a trivial matter.
Early Signs of the Virus
Curiously, the SARS-CoV-2 virus just happened to emerge exactly when needed to support the internationalist socialist plans for world control. Now, correlation does not imply causation, and it remains unlikely that the COVID-19 situation was launched in order to bring about the new international socialist world order. But, as leftists such as Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff for the Obama administration, preach, “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” This same sentiment was repeated by no less than Hillary Clinton, who quipped of the pandemic: “This would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes.”
So the elitist socialists may not have engineered the pandemic, but they were eager to take advantage of it once it emerged.
And when it did emerge, it might not necessarily have been solely in China. Some evidence, still vague, suggests the virus was showing up in places far removed from China in late 2019.
In one case, researchers in Spain looked at archival wastewater from Barcelona dated to January-March 2018 and January, March, September-December 2019. They found: “SARS-CoV-2 was detected in sewage 41 days (January 15) before the declaration of the first COVID-19 case (February 25), clearly evidencing the validity of wastewater surveillance to anticipate cases in the population. This SARS-CoV-2 early detection in sewage supports the idea that COVID-19 cases may have been present in the population before the first imported case was reported.”
Moreover, they found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 as early as March 2019. “This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide,” they wrote. “Barcelona is a business and commerce hub, as well as a popular venue for massive events, gathering visitors from many parts of the world. It is nevertheless likely that similar situations may have occurred in several other parts of the world, with circulation of unnoticed COVID-19 cases in the community.”
These findings should not necessarily be taken as definitive — the article in question is still in preprint status and not yet published after full peer review. Nonetheless, this is indeed a sensational finding, if it holds up.
It’s also not alone. Researchers in Italy conducted a similar investigation. In their paper they note that their earliest detection of the virus “dates back to 18 December 2019 in Milan and Turin and 29 January 2020 in Bologna.” Officially the first case of the virus in Italy is dated to February 21, 2020.
It’s also not the only sign that SARS-CoV-2 might have been circulating in the West earlier than thought. In April, the Los Angeles Times speculated that the virus had been present considerably earlier than previously thought.
“‘The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,’ Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing,” the LA Times reported on April 11.
Citing Smith, the paper continued its report: “But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was ‘a lot longer than we first believed’ — most likely since ‘back in December.’”
Its probable existence, Smith noted, was masked by the flu.
“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said, according to the paper. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”
Biologically and sociologically speaking, the spread of the pandemic virus at an early date is quite intriguing, and is fully worth much more investigation. More intriguing, and more dangerous, is the early spread of the mental virus of socialist totalitarianism, which has been spreading remorselessly for several hundred years, and which now has latched onto biological viruses as a prime vector through which to spread.
As interesting and consequential as the biological virus may be, the mental virus of socialism has proven to be far more deadly, especially since the turn of the 20th century, the start of a period of bloody statist murder in pursuance of various socialist policies of many hundreds of millions of innocents.
To truly save lives, those eager to wear masks out of compassion should instead focus their caring energy on opposing the onrushing socialist totalitarianism that presently threatens to overwhelm the world.
Image: nito100/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Dennis Behreandt is a research professional and writer, frequently covering subjects in history, theology, and science and technology. He has worked as an editor and publisher and is a former managing editor of The New American.
