Sun. May 12th, 2024

CCP

Dr. Fauci Faces Call To Resign, Answer For Shocking Report About U.S. Government Funded Wuhan Research

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, is facing calls to answer for a shocking report, published by the Intercept, about the so-called “gain of function” research that the National Institute of Health funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WIV is thought to be a possible origin point for COVID-19.

In May of 2021, Dr. Fauci, in his testimony to a Senate committee investigating whether the U.S. funded “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, claimed that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

The Intercept, however, found, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, evidence that the NIH issued a “bat coronavirus grant” to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance for “$3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.”

As The Daily Wire reported Tuesday, Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and an expert who spoke to The Intercept, elaborated on the findings on Twitter.

“The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present,” Ebert noted. “The materials confirm the grants supported the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.”

“The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (‘humanized mice’),” he added. “The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses — one not been previously disclosed publicly — was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.”

That puts Dr. Fauci in the spotlight. Dr. Ebright even suggested that Fauci was being “untruthful” in his remarks to the Senate.

Several Republicans have already suggested that Dr. Fauci must face a full investigation and be totally forthcoming about his agency’s — and the NIH’s — involvement in funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) suggested that Dr. Fauci is “hiding” something and should face an investigation.

Your tax dollars funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

What is Fauci hiding?https://t.co/TDcwOHZpNP

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) September 7, 2021

Former White House physician-turned-Congressman Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) also demanded answers — and for Dr. Fauci to be terminated from his role as a top health advisor to the president.

Fauci’s NIH funded DANGEROUS gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Laboratory. The same man that wants to mask your kids and keep us LOCKED DOWN forever helped cause this pandemic. How does he still have a job? Fauci needs to be FIRED and INVESTIGATED immediately! pic.twitter.com/BkCvMD1gDt

— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) September 3, 2021

Rep. Josh Hawley (R-MO) had the harshest criticism, demanding that Dr. Fauci resign immediately.

Anthony Fauci has repeatedly and deliberately mislead Congress and the American people. Resign. And face a congressional inquiry https://t.co/o8Bxfvb8jt

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 7, 2021

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has already referred Dr. Fauci for an investigation for possible perjury related to his testimony in front of Congress.

This article has been revised for clarity. 

Dr. Fauci Faces Call To Resign, Answer For Shocking Report About U.S. Government Funded Wuhan Research | The Daily Wire

Newly Disclosed Documents Show Fauci Lied: Sen. Paul

Newly disclosed documents detailing U.S. funding of Chinese research into coronaviruses show that Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top public health official, lied when claiming the United States did not fund “gain of function” research, critics say.

The documents made public this week shed new light on how much money the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and one of its subagencies, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci heads, granted to the EcoHealth Alliance.

The alliance, in turn, funneled the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top-level lab that sits a block away from the reported location of the first detected cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

At issue is whether the U.S. money went to fund so-called gain of function research, research that includes modifying biological agents so they become more transmissible or lethal.

Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, have insisted that the grants did not back such research. Fauci insisted so during multiple congressional hearings, resulting in tense exchanges with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is also a doctor.

According to Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and professor at Rutgers University, the new documents, which include grant proposals that had never been made public, show that the grants to EcoHealth meet the federal definition of gain of function research.

“The materials confirm the grants supported the construction—in Wuhan—of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells,” Ebright wrote on Twitter.

Both Ebright and Paul say the new documents confirm that Fauci was not truthful with the public regarding the grants, with Ebright also charging that Collins lied as well.

Collins and Fauci were “untruthful” when they claimed that the NIH did not support gain of function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at the Wuhan lab, Ebright wrote.

Paul also reacted on social media.

“Surprise surprise—Fauci lied again. And I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan. Read this thread and the papers released,” he said, pointing readers to a series of posts from Ebright.

Epoch Times Photo
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

“The U.S. did fund ‘gain of function’ research in Wuhan. Fauci lied,” added Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), another doctor, wondered how people could still trust Fauci.

“Either he’s completely misinformed or has intentionally lied to Congress & the American people multiple times,” he alleged.

Fauci and Republicans have clashed during congressional hearings on multiple occasions. In July, Paul said Fauci lied to Congress when he said two months prior that the NIH did not fund gain of function research. He asked Fauci to retract his previous comments.

Fauci, visibly shaking with anger, refused, charging that he did not lie and accusing him of not knowing what he was talking about.

Shortly after the hearing, Paul sent a criminal referral of Fauci to the Department of Justice.

The newly disclosed documents “make it abundantly clear that he needs to be held accountable,” the senator added on Tuesday.

People convicted of lying to Congress can be imprisoned for up to five years.

Fauci previously admitted he misinformed members of the public about the efficacy of masks out of concern that there wouldn’t be enough masks for healthcare workers.

Spokespersons for the NIH and Fauci’s agency did not respond to requests for comment. Fauci appeared on CNN on Tuesday morning but was not asked about the newly released documents.

Newly Disclosed Documents Show Fauci Lied: Sen. Paul (theepochtimes.com)

Intelligence Community Assessment on COVID-19 Origins Ignores Readily Available Information

In May 2021, President Joe Biden gave the intelligence community 90 days to write a report on the origins of COVID-19. The declassified version of that assessment has now been released.

The report is only 493 words long and curiously ignores readily available information, instead choosing to focus on and reinforce questions that are, for the most part, unknowable.

Specifically, the Intelligence Community (IC) claimed that in order to reach a conclusive assessment, it required “clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest cases.”

This China-reliant approach aligns with a recent response from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). When he finally conceded in June of this year that the virus might have originated in a Wuhan lab, Fauci also said that clinical samples of the earliest cases were needed.

At the same time, while the IC claims that China’s cooperation is needed to determine the origins of COVID-19, it acknowledges that China has refused to cooperate with any true investigation.

Fauci and the IC both understand that if there was information helpful to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that information would have been released immediately.

The report, unsigned but issued under a Director of National Intelligence letterhead, appears to be structured in a manner designed to avoid upsetting China. More importantly, the report effectively protects China, repeatedly giving weight to the lack of foreknowledge of the outbreak on the part of China officials. The report ignores that if the pandemic resulted from a lab accident, no official would have had foreknowledge.

The IC also appears to conflate cause and effect by claiming that China’s failure to cooperate with an investigation is motivated by “frustration” that the international community is “using the issue to exert political pressure on China.”

Notably, the IC has shown a marked lack of interest in the copious amount of data that is already available and does not require CCP assistance.

Perhaps the most obvious fact pointing at a lab leak is simply that Wuhan is at least 1,000 miles from natural bat habitats—a point not even mentioned in the IC’s report. 

Additionally, Wuhan was the only location in China where bat virus experiments were taking place. In fact, Wuhan had at least three labs conducting such work—the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Wuhan CDC Lab, and the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment. 

The director of the WIV, Shi Zhengli, herself admitted that she never expected this kind of virus to emerge in Wuhan. When viruses emerged naturally in the past, they emerged in Southern China.

Also ignored by the IC Report was the type of research being conducted at WIV since at least 2007, which has been well documented. Research papers provide direct evidence of increasingly sophisticated gain-of-function experiments—a process whereby viruses are deliberately made more virulent in order to predict emerging diseases—being carried out by the WIV lab in the years leading up the pandemic, including a number of experiments specifically designed to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans.

Some of these gain-of-function experiments were also detailed in a Nov. 9, 2015, article in the journal Nature about experiments that were being conducted at the Wuhan lab using “chimeric viruses” in mice.

Notably, In 2014, Fauci’s NIAID awarded a $3.7 million grant to the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak. According to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), some of the grant funds “went to Wuhan” as part of “a subcontract from EcoHealth.” In August 2020, after President Donald Trump canceled the first grant, Fauci awarded Daszak’s EcoHealth a new grant of $7.5 million. 

Only one section of the report refers to animal handling and sampling by the WIV. This section is in reference to one intelligence agency that concluded that it was moderately confident that the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan lab. Notably, all other agencies leaned toward natural origins for the virus’s outbreak. 

The report ignores that live bats were kept at the WIV, apparently the only location in Wuhan where bats could actually be found. The report also fails to note that thousands of bat samples were brought from Southern China to Wuhan by lab scientists.

The huge depository of bat samples in Wuhan was confirmed by Daszak in July 2020, when he discussed the early discovery of a close genetic match to COVID-19, noting that “It was just one of the 16,000 bats we sampled. It was a faecal sample, we put it in a tube, put it in liquid nitrogen, took it back to the lab. We sequenced a short fragment.”

Daszak, the person through whom Fauci was providing funding for the WIV, denied that live bats were kept at the Wuhan lab, claiming that that was not the way science worked. Daszak later deleted his tweet denial without explanation. Pictures from inside the WIV Lab have since emerged, confirming that live bats were indeed held by laboratory staff.

The report also fails to address the fact that the director of the WIV, Shi Zhengli, tried to cover up the fact that she had maintained possession of the closest known relative to COVID-19 for more than seven years. Shi suddenly renamed the virus in early 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, thereby obscuring that her lab had held a closely related virus.

Shi also obfuscated the virus’s origin. The location where Shi originally found the COVID-like virus was later discovered to be the Mojiang Mine where three miners had died with COVID-like symptoms in 2012. Shi would later admit that the Mojiang Mine was indeed the source of her virus.

Shi’s research on bat coronaviruses had previously drawn the attention of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in China. In 2018, after visiting the WIV, they sent a number of cables to the State Department warning of the inadequate safety conditions at the lab. 

Fauci’s own official representative in China, Chen Ping, had herself sent multiple messages to Fauci’s office—all of which should have raised red flags. Chen noted that research papers detailing gain-of-function experiments at the WIV were being published as NIH-funded work.

Her inquiries with Fauci’s office appear to have gone unanswered. Chen also complained that she was being denied access to the WIV. When, after two years, Chen was finally allowed to visit the facility, she was forbidden from taking any pictures inside the lab.

Since the start of the pandemic, unearthed video footage taken by Chinese TV crews inside the lab has been used to pinpoint a number of biosafety lapses, as well as the fact that the lab was keeping live bats.

In 2015, an article in Nature specifically warned about the pandemic potential from the WIV experiments. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefense expert at Rutgers University, presciently stated, “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”

There is no mention of any of these pre-pandemic warnings in the IC’s report. Nor is there any mention of the warnings from the French government, which had initially helped with the construction of the WIV’s BSL-4 (biosafety level 4) lab as part of a joint venture with the Chinese regime.

However, the French government later refused to certify the WIV’s lab based on bioweapon concerns from military officials. France also denied China access to safety equipment and viruses over similar concerns that these could be used for bioweapons research.

Additionally, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warned in a diplomatic cable of the construction of the WIV BSL-4 lab and the potential for biological weapons proliferation.

The IC report also failed to note that both the WIV and the Wuhan CDC were conducting bat coronavirus experiments in BSL-2 labs, a low biosafety environment that falls below the accepted threshold of safety for coronavirus research levels. A minimum of BSL-3 is required for working with coronaviruses, including isolation, culture, and amplification.

When Shi Zhengli finally admitted to conducting coronavirus experiments at BSL-2, a prominent natural origins supporter, Ian Lipkin, changed his view on the pandemic’s origin. Lipkin now thinks the virus did come out of a Wuhan lab, saying that “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

A more recent development also ignored in the IC’s report is that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) lead origins investigator, Peter Ben Embarek, has now claimed in a Danish documentary that a lab leak is likely and “may well have been started by an employee at one of the city’s laboratories.”

Embarek, who headed the WHO’s team that visited Wuhan in February of this year, had earlier claimed that a lab leak was extremely unlikely. But he now admits that that claim was the result of pressure from the Chinese regime. Embarek told the Danish documentary team that after two days of negotiations, a deal was struck between the Embarek’s team and their Chinese counterparts. 

Under the deal struck with the CCP, Embarek would be allowed to mention the lab leak theory—but only on condition that it was determined to be “extremely unlikely” and that there would be no further studies into the issue.

The IC report also fails to address a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that was hastily organized by Fauci and Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the British Wellcome Trust. The teleconference took place after the previous night’s public reporting of a potential connection between COVID-19 and the WIV.

Fauci and Farrar were concerned about previous U.S. involvement with the lab, and that they had knowledge of public statements made by the Wuhan lab’s director about U.S. funding being used for controversial gain-of-function research conducted there.

Following the teleconference, public discussion of the source possibly being a lab leak was actively suppressed by social media platforms, health officials, and the WHO.

Teleconference participants were also instrumental in publishing two influential articles that were used extensively by media organizations to push the natural origins theory. Simultaneously, alternative theories—including that of a possible lab leak—were widely discredited as conspiracy theories.

Another related area of focus that the IC report failed to address was funding of the WIV from domestic sources in the U.S. government and how those funds were being utilized. The funding agencies, including Fauci’s NIAID and NIH, have responsive records and documentation in their possession, as does Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, through whom funding of the WIV was arranged.

Indeed, EcoHealth documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act have confirmed that Fauci’s NIAID funded gain-of-function experiments—including the construction of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses at the WIV. Those engineered viruses were tested on humanized mice showing that the viruses could infect humans and were more pathogenic than the original virus.

Publishers such as Springer-Nature and Lancet, both of whom aggressively advanced the natural origins narrative, have archives of early drafts, data, and review reports of the many papers submitted by WIV staff. The Wellcome Trust, with whose help Fauci orchestrated his secret teleconference, has records pertaining to both its role in the teleconference as well as in funding the WIV.

The lab that trained WIV staff, the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, has detailed information both on the training and the staff. The government of France has records on the construction of the lab and on the disputes that ultimately led France to withdraw from the WIV. The EU also funded the WIV and has pertinent records. 

There are also whistleblowers from Western countries. While it is not realistic to gain direct access to Chinese whistleblowers such as Xiao Botao, a scientist from Wuhan, who was the first to publicly blame a lab leak for the pandemic on Feb. 6, 2020, there are many others—including some scientists who may have been initially misled by their peers.

Andrew Huff used to work as associate vice president at Daszak’s EcoHealth. He has since posted a number of statements on LinkedIn blaming a lab leak for the pandemic and also blaming international scientists for collaborating in the lab leak cover-up.

In response to the claim that the virus’s origin could not be determined, Huff stated that “you can read the peer reviewed studies, patent filings, grant applications, and Fauci emails, and it is very clear what Fauci’s role was.”

There are also a number of scientists involved in initial efforts to push the natural origins theory who have since had a change of heart. Stanley Perlman now says that the lab leak theory is “back on the table.” And signatory Charles Calisher claims that it was “over the top” to call the lab leak a conspiracy theory.

Another signatory, Peter Palese, is now demanding a proper investigation. Most notably, University of Chicago professor Bernard Roizman has stated that the virus originated from the lab due to “sloppiness,“ claiming that Wuhan lab personnel “can’t admit they did something so stupid.”

The intelligence community’s report has stated that “China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19.”

But there is a wealth of information in the public realm that is readily available and does not require the vast resources of our nation’s intelligence communities or the CCP’s cooperation.

If the IC’s intention was to provide the public with an answer to the origin of the virus, that answer could easily be found.

Intelligence Community Assessment on COVID-19 Origins Ignores Readily Available Information (theepochtimes.com)

Newly-Released Documents Detail US-Funded Coronavirus Research at Wuhan Institute of Virology: Report

New documents have been released detailing U.S.-funded research on various types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the first outbreak of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus occurred.

More than 900 pages of materials were obtained by The Intercept in connection with a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the publication against the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The documents detail the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund research into bat coronaviruses at the Chinese lab.

They include two previously unpublished grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates related to EcoHealth Alliance’s research.

One of the grants awarded by the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance is titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” and amounts to $666,422.

It outlines an ambitious plan led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to “investigate the ecology, evolutionary biology and transmission dynamics of bat coronaviruses at the human-wildlife interface.”

“Specifically, we will conduct field studies in China to obtain high quality samples from bats, and identify, characterize and isolate known and novel coronavirus. We will analyze the patterns of coronavirus transmission among bats and other wildlife, and the risk of spillover to humans,” the proposal reads. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals.

The documents also note that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed, The Intercept reported.

Epoch Times Photo
A laboratory technician working on samples from people to be tested for the new coronavirus at “Fire Eye” laboratory in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province, on Feb. 6, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The grant proposal also acknowledges the potential dangers of the study, including during fieldwork, stating that it “involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

“There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens or physical injury while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples of their excreta,” the document states. “Virus isolation may be a challenge,” researchers note.

The bat coronavirus grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans, according to The Intercept.

The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.

The second grant awarded by the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance is titled “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emergent Infectious Disease Hotpots of Southeast Asia,” and was awarded in August 2020 and extends through 2025.

The proposal states it “will bring leaders in emerging disease research from the U.S., Thailand, Singapore and the three major Malaysian administrative regions together to build an early warning system to safeguard against pandemic disease threats.”

The team would “identify novel viruses from Southeast Asian wildlife, characterize their capacity to infect and cause illness in people, and use serological assays of samples from people in rural communities with high wildlife contact to identify the background rate of exposure, and risk factors that drive this.”

In-depth surveillance at hospitals serving these communities would be used to examine if cryptic outbreaks are caused by these novel agents, which researchers hoped would help them develop a rapid response to outbreaks in such regions.

Epoch Times Photo
Researchers with Franceville interdisciplinary Medical Research Center collect samples from a bat inside a cave in the Zadie region in Gabon on Nov. 25, 2020. (Steeve Jordan/AFP via Getty Images)

Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments, and the newly-released documents will no doubt raise further questions regarding the theory that the CCP virus pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan.

Following the release of the documents, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University wrote on Twitter, “The materials confirm the grants supported the construction—in Wuhan—of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”

Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged China to share raw data from the earliest COVID-19 cases, saying it is “vitally important to know how the COVID-19 pandemic began” and to set an example for establishing the origins of all future animal–human spillover events.

A WHO-led team spent four weeks in and around the central city of Wuhan with Chinese researchers in January 2021 to investigate the origins of the pandemic.

In March, researchers said that the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal and that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”

However, the Chinese communist regime has faced fierce criticism from the international community, who have accused them of engaging in a cover-up.

In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China were being hampered by the lack of raw data on the first days of spread there and urged the regime to be more transparent.

Newly-Released Documents Detail US-Funded Coronavirus Research at Wuhan Institute of Virology: Report (theepochtimes.com)

Top Wuhan Lab Theory Denier Reverses Stance, Reveals He Knew Of Virus Weeks In Advance

Dr. Ian Lipkin – an American virologist who once claimed there was “no evidence” COVID-19 could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – appeared to reverse his premature stance on the origins of COVID-19 in a new interview. 

“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn’t in this lab?” Lipkin asked in reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in June before answering, “they wouldn’t.”

The unearthed comments come amidst Lipkin revealing he was informed of a “new outbreak” in Wuhan on December 15th, 2019 in Spike Lee’s documentary miniseries “NYC Epicenters.” The mid-December date, which Lipkin defends when pressed by the interviewer, is at odds with the Chinese Communist Party’s public COVID-19 timeline, first informing the World Health Organization of an outbreak on December 31st, 2019.

The National Pulse has previously exposed Lipkin’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party, including the Columbia Professor receiving awards and consultancy positions from the regime.

Lipkin was heavily quoted by mainstream media outlets including CBS and USA Today in an effort to “debunk” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Chief Dr. Robert Redfield’s explosive claim linking the virus to a Chinese lab.

“We should be moving away from finger-pointing,” Lipkin told CBS after adding there is “no evidence to suggest that it was created in a lab.”

Top Wuhan Lab Theory Denier Reverses Stance, Reveals He Knew Of Virus Weeks In Advance. – The National Pulse

Lead Scientist For COVID Vaccine Vial Maker Indicted For Stealing Technology For China

A former lead scientist for Corning Inc. – a technology company manufacturing glass vials for COVID-19 vaccines – was indicted for stealing company technology for use in China, including Chinese Communist Party-sanctioned business ventures. 

Corning’s Wang Ji was indicted on charges of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and unlawful exports. Wang, who worked for the company from 1998 to 2019, was a lead scientist on a Corning project developing optical laser fibers to attack hostile drones, which counted $16 million in funding from the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

He allegedly stole files relevant to the project to set up a business using the same technology in China and was in negotiations with several Chinese Communist Party authorities in the city of Tianjian to set up the company.

The indictment follows Corning, which supplies pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government to manufacture glass vials for COVID-19 vaccines. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) granted Corning $204 million and the company received another $57 million infusion from the federal government in March of 2021.

If convicted, Wang will face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million.

Lead Scientist For COVID Vaccine Vial Maker Indicted For Stealing Technology For China. – The National Pulse

China Tilts From Spavor Toward Kovrig in a Desperate Bid for Leverage Against Canada

Last week, China’s state-run tabloid Global Times ran an article, based on information from an inside source, which laid out the evidence that stood as the basis for sentencing Canadian national Michael Spavor to 11 years on spying charges in a case linked to Huawei. Spavor’s trial was held in secret. The article caused quite a stir as this is the first time that information on Spavor’s case was “leaked.”

Spavor is one in a growing line of Canadians targeted by Beijing, to be used as political pawns, to get the Canadian government to change policy, or more often, interfere in its judicial system for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) benefit. Other Canadians include Robert Schellenberg, whose initial prison sentence was recently revised to the death penalty; and Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat whose sentence has not yet been announced.

What has not been much discussed is why this information was leaked now and what it actually means. To start with, the argument presented in the Global Times article is rather embarrassing. The Ministry of State Security has had their hands on Spavor since late 2018, and apparently, the best case they’ve been able to build against him is that he took photos of military installations or equipment, and shared those photos with friends in the mainland and outside of China. The military secrets that Spavor allegedly divulged are deemed second-tier state secrets. But Spavor could have just taken any random photos of an airport near the China-North Korea border where he happened to both live and work before he was taken into custody by Chinese authorities.

If the leaked information sought to build legitimacy for Spavor’s conviction and imprisonment, it failed.

So what can be deduced from this information leak?

To start with, the CCP has walked a very thin line about making it clear that its actions are closely tied to the outcome of an extradition process in Canada regarding Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou (who is wanted by the United States). Hence, having this information “leaked” through the Global Times makes perfect sense. It should also be noted that only the English language edition ran the story, not the Chinese language one.

In reality, the Global Times article is actually not about Spavor at all, but rather about Kovrig. After sentencing Schellenberg and Spavor, Kovrig is now China’s last card to play—his trial has concluded but his sentence has not yet been announced. So far, all of Beijing’s actions have failed to sway Canada to intervene in the ongoing judicial process regarding Meng, nor has it managed to cause any serious divisions among the political parties in Canada. The outcome of Meng’s extradition trial is set to be announced in October.

In December 2018, Meng was arrested at Vancouver International Airport on a U.S. extradition warrant. She is accused of being involved in a scheme to use the global banking system to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran. The two Michael’s detentions were widely seen as a tit-for-tat response by the CCP over her arrest.

The leaked information, purportedly about Spavor, only briefly mentions Kovrig and that he allegedly worked with Spavor to carry out espionage activities. Kovrig is also accused of unlawful entry.

Kovrig could receive a far heavier sentence than Spavor, and this “information leak” is a warning shot against Canada of what is to come, unless the CCP sees meaningful support from the Canadian government to send Meng back to China. From the CCP’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. If 11 years for Spavor, a businessman connecting China with North Korea, was not enough to sway Canada, maybe life imprisonment of Kovrig will be.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou Appears In Court Before Start Of Extradition Hearing
Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on her way to a court appearance in Vancouver, Canada on Jan. 17, 2020. (Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

The problem for the CCP is that it is very unlikely that increasing the punishment for Kovrig will, or even can, change the behavior of the Canadian government. In fact, the CCP’s thuggish behavior is only leading to ever stronger negative views among Canadians about the CCP, rallying their support behind their government and Canada’s independent judicial system, which would make it politically difficult for the Canadian government to intervene, even if it wanted.

The leaked information is nothing but a desperate attempt by the CCP to use their last pawn. China has failed in its hostage diplomacy before, when they detained and disappeared Canadian couple Kevin Garratt and Julia Garratt in order to get Canada to stop the extradition of a Chinese spy to the United States. In this case, if Meng is indeed extradited back to the United States or locked into a prolonged appeals battle, we can expect the CCP to, despite the limited results that hostage diplomacy has brought them, continue to do more of the same. After all, the CCP has no other way to move forward, and by intentionally making Meng’s trial such a high-profile case in China, the CCP has tied itself to its outcome.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Peter Dahlin 

Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016). He is the author of Trial By Media, and contributor to The People’s Republic of the Disappeared. He lived in Beijing from 2007, until detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported and banned. Prior to living in China, he worked for the Swedish government with gender equality issues, and now lives in Madrid, Spain.

China Tilts From Spavor Toward Kovrig in a Desperate Bid for Leverage Against Canada (theepochtimes.com)3

Federal Judge Dismisses Jurors Who Haven’t Gotten COVID-19 Vaccines

A federal judge this week sent home jurors who weren’t vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19 during jury selection for the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, an Obama nominee, dismissed on Thursday in California nine jurors who had not received a COVID-19 vaccine.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Davila said his aim was to keep jurors and their families healthy.

Both the prosecution and defense in the Holmes’ trial backed the decision.

Experts said the decision may fall within the court’s ability but could reduce the fairness of trials.

“If you excuse those people, you no longer have a representative jury,” said Christina Marinakis, a jury consultant with litigation consulting company IMS.

“Any unusual restrictions on who is eligible to serve on the jury in a particular case could raise issues on appeal,” added Kaspar Stoffelmayr, of the law firm Bartlit Beck.

Stoffelmayr confronted the question earlier this year, as the lawyer for Walgreens Boots Alliance in litigation over the pharmacy operator’s alleged role in fueling the opioid epidemic.

The Ohio federal judge overseeing that case initially ordered that all jurors be vaccinated, but reversed course after Walgreens and other defendants argued that requirement would skew the jury.

Defendants said a vaccination requirement did not appear to be required by any statute, rule, or policy, and noted the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts recently told the media that “[w]hile courts may ask jurors COVID-19-related questions as part of their safety protocols, providing litigants with a jury selected at random from a fair cross section of the community remains of greatest importance.”

Less than 43 percent of Ohio’s population was fully vaccinated against the CCP virus as of June 16, meaning a substantial portion of the potential jury pool would not be vaccinated when the trial starts in September. That would “skew the pool,” defendants wrote, citing state data that show white and Asian residents were more likely to be vaccinated than black citizens, and other evidence that indicates conservatives were less likely to be vaccinated than liberals.

U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, a Clinton nominee, said the defendants made good points and reversed his order.

Jurors in the Holmes case were asked in the jury questionnaire whether they had received a COVID-19 vaccine or were scheduled to be vaccinated.

Holmes, the founder of a medical sciences company called Theranos, is facing wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud counts.

Holmes and her co-defendant, former romantic partner Ramesh Balwani, are accused of perpetrating a scheme that defrauded investors of millions of dollars as they claimed Theranos’s blood testing laboratory services were revolutionary and readily available despite knowing Theranos could not consistently produce accurate and reliable results for some blood tests.

The next court date is slated for Sept. 8. in San Jose.

Approximately 81.9 percent of residents 12 or older in Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose, have been fully vaccinated against the CCP virus, the county said on Sept. 3. Statewide, 67 percent of all residents were fully vaccinated, with another 10 percent partially vaccinated according to the California Department of Public Health.

Federal Judge Dismisses Jurors Who Haven’t Gotten COVID-19 Vaccines (theepochtimes.com)

Pfizer Doses Its First Patient in Phase 2/3 Trial for Daily COVID-19 Pill

Pfizer revealed on Wednesday that it gave its first dose to a patient participating in its phase 2/3 clinical trial examining the efficacy of an orally administered drug that is designed to combat COVID-19.

CEO Albert Bourla on Wednesday night wrote on Twitter that “success against COVID19 will likely require both vaccines [and] treatments” and said the pharmaceutical giant started a “Phase 2/3 study of our oral antiviral candidate—specifically designed to combat SARS-CoV-2—in non-hospitalized, low-risk adults.”

The drug, which has been dubbed PF-07321332, is designed for COVID-19 patients who haven’t been hospitalized but who have symptoms of the virus and are at low risk of seeing it progress to become a severe disease.

The randomized, double-blind trial will enroll about 1,140 participants, who will get either PF-07321332 or a placebo orally every 12 hours for five days, according to a press release from Pfizer (pdf).

“Protease inhibitors, like PF-07321332, are designed to block the activity of the main protease enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate,” the release said. “Co-administration with a low dose of ritonavir is expected to help slow the metabolism, or breakdown, of PF-07321332 in order for it to remain in the body for longer periods of time at higher concentrations, thereby working continuously to help combat the virus.”

Currently, the only three COVID-19 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are the vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the vaccines’ efficacy for keeping people out of the hospital has dropped. In an update, the agency said that against the Delta variant, the vaccines’ effectiveness at keeping people out of the hospital was between 75 percent and 95 percent in July—a drop from 97 percent in June.

It comes as the American Medical Association (AMA) called for “immediate end” to the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, and for doctors to stop prescribing it after podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan confirmed he took the drug in combination with other medications to treat COVID-19.

“We are alarmed by reports that outpatient prescribing for and dispensing of ivermectin have increased 24-fold since before the pandemic and increased exponentially over the past few months,” the AMA said on Thursday.

Ivermectin has been labeled as a “horse dewormer” by some mainstream media outlets, but the drug has been used for decades to treat river blindness and intestinal roundworm infection in humans. Over the course of the pandemic, some doctors have prescribed it for COVID-19, and several Indian states authorized the drug’s usage to treat the virus earlier this year.

Variations of the drug are given to pets and livestock, and federal officials have warned people against taking animal ivermectin for COVID-19, saying it could lead to hospitalization or even death. In veterinary medicine, the drug is designed to prevent and treat heartworm.

COVID-19 is the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Epoch TV Review: Something is Rotten in Wuhan

With the recent release of Congress’ official inquiry into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the half-expected declaration that the virus was equally as likely to have natural origins as man-made origins, it seems increasingly certain that we’ll never know where COVID-19 actually came from. Not only have scientists still not found the “missing link” animal that allowed the virus to jump from bats to humans, presuming it has a natural origin, but there are two separate labs in Wuhan, China, that deal with bat coronaviruses, and neither of them are talking. It sadly isn’t surprising that Congress couldn’t get any straight answers on this issue after waiting over a year to start asking questions, and were thus left to put out another report whose findings amounted to, “Oh well.”

While the Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been the chief suspect in the lab leak theory, there is a second lab located in Wuhan that has a lower biosafety level and seems to have been quietly swept off the list of suspects between the time Trump first mentioned the potential lab leak and a few months ago, when our media overlords finally decided we’re allowed to talk about it. Thankfully, “Truth Over News” hosts Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke not only remember this second lab, they have devoted an entire episode to it so you’ll remember it, too. “There’s Another Lab in Wuhan That’s Received Far Less Attention: The CCP’s Lab” deals primarily with the main players at this second lab, but also shows its ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The main takeaway from the episode is that anyone who believes China will ever tell us anything about the origins of COVID-19 is, at best, a fool.

Carlson starts off introducing the viewer to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Lab and its own bat enthusiast, Tian Junhua, who was in charge of studying coronaviruses. After giving a teaser about the lab’s proximity to the Huanan Seafood Market that took initial blame for the COVID-19 outbreak, Carlson drops an early bombshell about the date the lab opened, which is enough in itself to hook the audience into instantly wanting to know more. Mahncke picks it up from there and doesn’t disappoint, diving into Junhua’s background with the Chinese CDC and studying bats in particular with a starting timeline of 2012 and stomach turning details. The year 2012 may seem innocent at first, but it comes back into play later in the episode so keep it in mind as you watch.

Despite knowing very little about bats, Junhua trapped them for research with seemingly great enthusiasm. In addition to providing the viewer with his analysis, Mahncke also shows the referenced media story on Junhua so any interested audience member can pause and read for themselves exactly how reckless he was when collecting his specimens.

After revealing the stunning carelessness Junhua employed in capturing bats, Mahncke begins to connect him to other dots in the coronavirus pandemic. Junhua is not just an arbitrary scientist with no regard for safety protocols plucked from a list to support the idea that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Chinese CDC lab. He’s an accredited scientist and an internationally published author, who has written at minimum three papers in conjunction with, among other people, virologist Edward C. Holmes. Holmes was on the teleconference with Anthony Fauci in February 2020 that no one was ever supposed to find out about, where the initial plan to bury the idea that the virus originated in a lab was hatched.

As if this wasn’t enough to raise alarm bells about Junhua and the Chinese CDC lab, Carlson presents an article from a whistleblower in 2018 that outlined not only the deplorable conditions in the level-2 biohazard lab, but how many bats were still in captivity for research purposes. It will come as a surprise to no one that the article quickly vanished from the internet and the whistleblower vanished as well. Carlson then moves on to the date the lab was moved into close proximity to both the wet market and Union Hospital, which both saw COVID-19 outbreaks in the earliest days of the pandemic. Little is known about when or why the lab was moved, but Peter Ben Embarek, lead investigator for the WHO into the origins of COVID-19, was concerned enough about the lab’s recent move to speak with Danish documentary filmmakers about it.

Mahncke picks up Embarek’s trail from there, noting that he joined the “it wasn’t a lab leak” chorus in February 2020, and that his Chinese equivalents were just lovely, helpful people who never stonewalled him or tried to twist his arm into keeping his mouth shut. Again, what he said behind closed doors told the opposite story, even as he continued with the accepted natural origins narrative. Embarek even appears to have fudged the timeline with the WHO of the first coronavirus case happening in mid December 2020.

Holmes and Junhua come back into play as Carlson returns to fill in more of the timeline of the effort to squelch the lab leak theory. They published a joint paper in February 2020 to establish Dec. 26, 2019 as the official date of the first coronavirus case. In what feels a little too much like a planned coincidence, the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, published a paper on the exact same day claiming she just happened to stumble across a bat virus that was similar in genetic structure to SARS-CoV-2. Zhengli tried to hide the fact that the virus came from samples taken in 2012 (the same year Junhua started working for the Chinese CDC lab) and had managed to kill three miners working where the bats lived.

It’s at least worth asking more pointed questions, which is exactly what Carlson and Mahncke do at the end of the episode. They don’t accuse anyone of a specific cover-up, but rightly point out that there are enough red flags not to just leave this at, “We can’t be sure what happened.” Given the evidence laid out in “There’s Another Lab in Wuhan That’s Received Far Less Attention: The CCP’s Lab,” not wanting to ask questions feels more like a conspiracy theory at this point than speculating about a lab leak. The straightforward, no-nonsense reporting in this episode of “Truth Over News” is more than worthy of watching and sharing, and may finally help put to rest the ridiculous idea that anyone worried about the two labs in Wuhan is just xenophobic.

“Truth Over News” premiers every Tues & Thur at 5 p.m.—exclusive on EpochTV.

Follow EpochTV on social media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTVus

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVus

Epoch TV Review: Something is Rotten in Wuhan (theepochtimes.com)

Sen. Rick Scott Calls Out Kodak CEO for Apologizing to CCP Over Xinjiang Instagram Post

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is calling out East Kodak CEO James Continenza for apologizing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over an Instagram post featuring images of Xinjiang—where the regime is accused of committing genocide—after some complaints on heavily censored Chinese social media platforms.

The Republican lawmaker sent Continenza a letter on Wednesday in response to the company’s decision last month to pull 10 images by French photographer Patrick Wack taken of life in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, where at least one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities are being held in a sprawling network of detention and reeducation camps.

Wack described his photographs as a visual narrative of Xinjiang’s “abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia” over the past five years, which sparked backlash from Chinese Instagram accounts. Kodak subsequently apologized for “any misunderstanding or offense” that the post may have caused.

“For a long time, Kodak has maintained a good relationship with the Chinese government and has been in close cooperation with various government departments,” Kodak also said in a separate statement posted to China’s social media platform WeChat. “We will continue to respect the Chinese government and the Chinese law. We will keep ourselves in check and correct ourselves, taking this as an example of the need for caution.”

Scott in a Twitter post said it is “shameful” that New York-based Kodak “covered-up abuse to appease Communist China.”

“After sharing photos shedding light on Communist China’s brutal human rights abuses against Uhygur [sic] Muslims, @Kodak cowered, deleted them & apologized,” Scott said.

In his letter, Scott questioned Kodak’s “close cooperation” with the CCP as described in the apology.

“The ongoing abuses in Communist China are despicable,” Scott wrote. “Kodak’s decision to delete these photos, essentially censoring its own content, only empowers Communist China to continue these abuses against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.”

Scott gave the company 30 days to answer his questions, including whether all of Kodak’s supply chains are free from Uyghur forced labor, why Kodak apologized to the CCP, and whether Wack’s images will be reposted.

“As an American company headquartered in New York and incorporated in New Jersey, Kodak should be standing for American values and against our foreign adversaries,” wrote Scott. “I am deeply concerned by Kodak’s decision to not only delete Mr. Wack’s photos from Instagram, but also to issue gross apologies to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Addressing the issue in an interview with Hong Kong Free Press, photographer Wack said Kodak’s conduct is “disappointing,” particularly as a company that has been for a century “one of the main traders in the photography industry” that “prides itself on helping people record important events.”

“I think that’s what upsetting most people,” Wack said.

“Once they made the post, even if they were harassed by Chinese trolls … they should have stayed with it,” he added. “It was starting to get ugly for them and that’s why they panicked. They didn’t see that they were actually going to unleash something even worse by doing this.”

The Chinese regime’s army of Internet trolls, dubbed the “50 cent army” as they are paid by the CCP (pdf) to make posts, works to dominate online thought and discussion by echoing the party line.

Kodak didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.

Sen. Rick Scott Calls Out Kodak CEO for Apologizing to CCP Over Xinjiang Instagram Post (theepochtimes.com)

Investment Firm Backed By Top American Universities Partners With ‘Socialist’ China-Backed Fund

Hillhouse Capital – a private equity firm funded by America’s top universities and is invested in companies including Zoom and Apple – struck a $1.5 billion deal with a Chinese Communist Party-owned investment fund.

Hillhouse Capital partnered with the “wholly state-owned” Hangzhou Capitol on a billion-dollar fund “to invest in sectors including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and new energy vehicles,” according to Chinese state-run media outlet China Global Television Network (CGTN).

Hillhouse Capital, which was funded with $20 million in seed capital from the Yale University Endowment, is reported to be backed by America’s most prestigious universities. Following a Stanford University investment of $200 million in 2015, the fund was “investing money for at least six of the 10 wealthiest universities in the U.S.,” including Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) has also invested nearly $1 billion with the Beijing-based fund.

These investments are now being used, however, to contribute to the growth of the Chinese Communist Party.

A press release from Hangzhou Capital – which pledges to be “guided by Xi Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era” – reveals that its partnership with Hillhouse Capital is part of a broader Chinese regime-backed effort to turn the city into a “leading and exemplary benchmark for national advancement.”

“The implementation of the “National Digital Economy First City” strategy focuses on value investment to empower outstanding enterprise development, optimizes industrial layout and accelerates the cultivation of new kinetic energy, and creates new impetus for Hangzhou to become a model city ​​for high-quality development and construction of a common prosperity demonstration zone in Zhejiang Province,” the group adds. 

Hillhouse Capital’s partnership with a Chinese state-owned enterprise also calls into question its sizable investments in companies such as Zoom, Uber, Apple, TikTok parent company ByteDance.

MUST READ:  Biden White House Approves Licensing Deal For Chinese Communist Party-Linked Huawei, Reversing Trump-Era Hardline.

Article Seven of China’s National Intelligence law stipulates that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.”

Investment Firm Backed By Top American Universities Partners With ‘Socialist’ China-Backed Fund. – The National Pulse

NY Times Pulled Ad Calling CCP to Account for Pandemic

A full-page advertisement that called for the world to hold the Chinese communist regime to account for the COVID-19 pandemic was pulled at the last moment by The New York Times in March 2020. The paper said the ad didn’t meet its standards, but the ad was pulled after it had already passed the paper’s vetting process. The businessman who paid for the ad suspects the paper’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played a role. He only revealed the details of the incident to The Epoch Times earlier this year.

The ad was scheduled to run on March 22, 2020. It was already approved, paid for, and even printed and distributed in some locations when the paper pulled the plug in the middle of the night, preventing the ad from being published in some of the paper’s main markets, including New York and Florida.

The decision was so abrupt that the sales representative responsible for the ad wasn’t informed, and the client only found out the next morning when he couldn’t find the ad in the paper.

The client, Brett Kingstone, is a real estate agent in Florida. He backed up his story with email threads documenting his correspondence with the newspaper as well as images of the contract he signed, details about the payment and subsequent refund of the $55,000 ad fee, and photos of the ad as it ran in some locales.

New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said the ad ran in “an early edition of Sunday’s paper and was removed from all later editions, which account for the vast majority of copies.”

“The ad in question did not meet our standards and should not have appeared in The New York Times,” she told The Epoch Times via email.

She didn’t respond to a question about whether the paper faced any CCP pressure regarding the ad.

“It was removed after being flagged internally by [New York] Times staff,” she said.

Kingstone, a prolific donor to charitable and conservative causes, had contacted The New York Times via email on March 18, 2020, with an advertorial placement request.

He said he placed an advertorial in the paper’s Sunday edition back in 2018 and the staff “did an excellent job in delivering what was promised both in performance and placement.”

“I am interested in doing the same again,” he said, submitting a draft of the ad.

The text urged the U.S. government to organize and initiate investigations and lawsuits regarding the origins and repercussions of the CCP virus pandemic.

“This virus was the direct result of the incompetence and irresponsibility of the Chinese Government. They showed as much disregard for their own population as they have for ours,” the ad stated.

It called for “massive liability lawsuits” against the CCP as well as investigations into two Chinese labs close to the epicenter of the pandemic, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Scrutiny of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was treated as a taboo subject by social media and the corporate press at the time. Only earlier this year have establishment actors acknowledged that the inquiries were legitimate and that the virus could have escaped from the lab.

On March 19, 2020, the ad placement representative informed Kingstone that it had been accepted.

“My Ad Acceptability team has approved the message as long as we include the footnotes, your email address, a border around the ad, and advertisement slugs,” the representative said.

The two then exchanged several emails regarding technical edits to the ad as well as proof of payment of the ad fee required before publication.

Everything seemed to go smoothly.

Then, on the morning of March 22, 2020, Kingstone was surprised to learn the ad was nowhere to be found in the Florida edition of the paper.

In his inbox, he found an email from the sales representative:

“I wanted to let you know that I was informed late last night that our production team had pulled the ad from the production run, without my knowledge. I’m investigating this now and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can with any updates,” it read.

“I just wanted to assure you that I’m working on this and I will hopefully be able to share additional context on Monday after I speak to the necessary people. I will be in touch on Monday!”

The representative has since left the paper. The Epoch Times is omitting her name for the sake of her privacy.

Kingstone didn’t hide his disappointment.

“I would like to know the reason why they did this,” he said in an email response to the representative, requesting a refund.

He asked whether the paper’s executives concluded that his particular message needed to be silenced.

“I was very pleased with how the NYT treated me on my first advocacy advertisement. They were more than fair. Now my fears about bias are being realized,” he wrote.

The cancellation was all the more a slap in the face given that The New York Times used to regularly publish propaganda advertorials paid for by a company directly controlled by the CCP.

After receiving his refund, Kingstone didn’t leave it at that.

As it happened, his website, which was listed on the ad, came under a cyberattack around the same time the copies of the paper that did include the ad landed on people’s doormats, he said.

This was too much of a coincidence for Kingstone, who has had his share of run-ins with the CCP. It was his company that years earlier won a precedent-setting lawsuit against Chinese counterfeiters. In 2005, he published a book detailing his story, called “The Real War Against America.”

Kingstone started to inquire with his contacts and eventually reached the conclusion that the CCP must have been involved in the ad’s cancellation.

One New York Times executive told him a CCP official called the paper’s leadership, demanding the ad be pulled, he said. The Epoch Times wasn’t able to independently confirm that the phone call took place. Attempts to reach the executive for comment were unsuccessful. The paper’s spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied that such a phone call took place.

In any case, the situation carries “an earmark of how China would operate,” according to Pat Laflin, a former FBI agent who upon retirement led a series of lectures for the bureau to American businesses and research entities on economic espionage by adversarial nations, including China.

It’s “impossible” that the CCP let the ad slide, he told The Epoch Times.

“If there’s anything negative about China, China’s going to scream,” he said in a phone call.

It would just be the question of what form the pressure took, he said.

“Exactly what they said and how subtle it was or how not-so-subtle, that’s all speculation. I don’t know. But did the call come in? Yes.”

The New York Times has over the years repeatedly faced criticism over its relations with the CCP. The controversy reaches back to at least 2001, when the paper’s publisher at the time, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., met with then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin, whose power faction within the communist regime exerts influence even to this day, long after his retirement.

The paper actively discouraged reporting on one of the most gruesome atrocities committed by the CCP—the harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience, mainly practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual practice—as indicated by former New York Times Beijing correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow in her testimony to the independent China Tribunal in the United Kingdom.

Last year, the paper finally cut ties with the CCP-controlled China Daily and quietly deleted hundreds of paid propaganda pieces from its website, The Washington Free Beacon reported. China Daily disclosed to federal authorities one $50,000 payment to The New York Times in 2018. It’s not clear how much total revenue The New York Times drew from CCP advertorials.

NY Times Pulled Ad Calling CCP to Account for Pandemic (theepochtimes.com)

The Chinese Coronavirus Origin Charade

The intelligence community’s (IC) recently declassified non-assessment of the origins of the Chinese coronavirus should be seen as part of a continued charade by the Biden administration that—in effect—protects Communist China.

It enables Team Biden to present the appearance of concern over China’s malign behavior, while absolving itself of any responsibility to forthrightly confront it.

More than a year-and-a-half after the coronavirus began spreading, the IC declared that it “remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”

This conclusion seemed almost preordained. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a highly reminiscent statement on May 27, just after President Joe Biden called for the 90-day review into the origins of the coronavirus, asserting that: “The U.S. Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.”

As then, in the final assessment, different agencies gave different weights to these hypotheses.

The IC claimed it could not provide a more definitive conclusion without better clinical samples and the like, and that “China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment.”

Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the IC was only unequivocal on the most provocative thesis regarding the origin of the coronavirus: “We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.” Chinese officials, per the IC, had no “foreknowledge of the virus” before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 emerged.

The report, in short, generated precisely the answer one would have expected from increasingly hyper-politicized bureaucracies keen to hedge on vital questions—and likely even more so given the geopolitical implications at play—when seeking out sensitive information from a closed country in which they lack visibility, where they have frequently found themselves blindsided, and on which they have allegedly gone soft in the recent past.

Occam’s Razor suggests President Biden got exactly the review one would have expected, and therefore that he would have wanted.

We may never fully know why the lab leak thesis became politically correct months after officials across the federal government, in the medical field, and media had gone to such great lengths to pooh-pooh it. But we know that this created a political issue for the Biden administration after it had punted the origin question originally to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-dominated World Health Organization (WHO) for a futile Potemkin inquiry, and reports surfaced that it had quashed a Secretary of State Mike Pompeo-directed investigation into the matter.

The IC review was a necessary sideshow.

Why?

Because in the final analysis, how the coronavirus came about is of secondary importance to what China did once it was literally or figuratively out of the bottle.

Yes, the lab leak thesis is more than plausible based on a mass of circumstantial evidence, including that catalogued by the Secretary Pompeo-led State Department, the writings of prominent scientists and science journalists, and a House Republican-led report on the origins of the coronavirus. The president’s statement subsequent to the release of the IC review that “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak…so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again” though banal and toothless, is fine insofar as prudence demands learning from catastrophes.

But set aside how the coronavirus came about.

We know it came from China.

We know the CCP silenced whistleblowers who might have had valuable knowledge and insight into the coronavirus that could have saved lives (and certainly, including those associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where we know China engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research—one of the only places in the world where such work is conducted—that could very well have resulted in COVID-19).

We know it lied about human-to-human transmission.

We know it shut down internal travel but permitted Chinese citizens to fly all over the world and encouraged other nations not to halt such travel.

We know it hoarded personal protective equipment and then sold shoddy versions of it to peoples worldwide.

We know it pressed the WHO to push its favored narratives—including casting anyone who dared finger China for the coronavirus’s spread as racist and bigoted.

We know its mouthpiece threatened to “plunge” America “into the mighty sea of coronavirus” by withholding vital drugs as the crisis metastasized.

We know it sought to stymie investigations into the coronavirus’s origins at every turn.

We know it aimed to take advantage of the pandemic in service of its hegemonic ambitions in myriad ways, from the very start of the pandemic.

One could rattle off infinitely more such points.

But the bottom line is this: The CCP lied, deceived, and in effect weaponized the coronavirus that began on its soil. It did everything possible to conceal what was transpiring subsequent to the outbreak, stop other nations from taking necessary precautions—but advocating they shut down human life for months on end—and encourage its spread globally, which it has tried to exploit and leverage at every point to increase its power and influence.

The Biden administration has never made this point clear—that a hostile China weaponized the virus, and used it to pursue its ambitions. Consequently, it has never vowed to make China pay for it. And this in turn substantiates the point that the Biden administration’s punting of the question of the origin of the coronavirus to the intelligence community was part of a charade.

The review was the best the Biden administration could do if it wanted to create the impression of holding China to account out of political necessity, without doing anything about it.

And remember who the Biden administration’s core constituency is: The elite. Elites in government who have egg on their face over the gain-of-function research they funded by proxy at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and who again refused to investigate the lab leak thesis when smoking guns may still have been hot; elites in the medical field who appear to have been influenced by China into ignoring or dismissing the lab leak thesis—that Big Tech even banned talk of; elites in the business community, who are wedded to trading with China forever no matter the CCP’s evils; and elites in the media who themselves are complicit in refusing to investigate the coronavirus’s origins, and often running CCP-favorable coronavirus propaganda.

This is to say nothing of President Biden’s well-documented kowtowing to Communist China for nearly 50 years, made all the more disturbing and dangerous given the business activities of son Hunter and other family members.

The losers of this charade are the American people, who are seeing China once again appeased by their leaders, which will only invite further aggression.

The Chinese Coronavirus Origin Charade (theepochtimes.com)

For Sanctity of Life, ‘Move the 2022 Games,’ Olympian Once Arrested in Beijing Says

‘The IOC hasn’t learned anything. They trust the CCP too much.’

When an Australian Olympian ran into Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2002 waving a 1964 Tokyo Olympic banner with the words “truthfulness, compassion, tolerance” written on it as a stand against human rights abuses in China, she already knew that the communist country had been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Five years later, in 2007, she traveled the world in the lead-up to the Games as an ambassador for the Global Human Rights Torch Relay (GHRTR)—with the slogan, “Olympics and crimes against humanity cannot coexist in China.” She never expected that eight years later, in 2015, China would be awarded that privilege yet again; this time, to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Former Olympic swimmer Jan Becker, from Melbourne, Australia, now aged 76, swam the 100-meter freestyle relay in Tokyo at the ’64 Olympics and won the silver medal.

Her protest in Tiananmen Square—where she was arrested, interrogated, and deported along with several other Australians—was a major event at the beginning of her decades-long journey in speaking out about the persecution of faith by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She returned home to see the media headlines: “Olympian Arrested in China.”

Just move the Olympics. With human rights, what they’ve done is just absolutely atrocious. The CCP is so anti-Divine … The International Olympic Committee hasn’t learned anything.— FORMER OLYMPIC SWIMMER JAN BECKER

“When I saw what they were doing, when they were killing people and taking their organs, I just had to stand up,” Becker told The Epoch Times. “That’s why I went to Tiananmen Square, because I wanted to get the news out to the world and to let the Chinese people know that the Western world was aware of what they were going through and that we were supporting them.

“I wanted the CCP to know there was an Olympian there, that that was connected⁠—the Olympics.”

Believing in “a connection” between the Olympics and “faith in the Divine,” yet seeing no ceasing of the CCP’s ongoing persecution of faith, including of Christians, Tibetans, Buddhists, Falun Gong, and more recently of Uyghurs, Becker is urging for a complete move of the 2022 Games away from China.

“I would prefer to see a complete move of the Games, not boycott China, just move the Olympics,” Becker said. “With human rights, what they’ve done is just absolutely atrocious, what they’ve done to Falun Gong practitioners, selling their organs around the world. They don’t believe in any faith. The CCP is so anti-Divine, against people who practice looking up to their God or their divinity.

“So many athletes actually look to the heavens. They do believe in God, they do believe in the Divine, and it must have a connection.” But as for the CCP, “they certainly wouldn’t dedicate anything to faith or religion,” Becker said.

A 22-Year Human Rights Advocacy Journey

Besides being an Olympian, Becker has taught and coached swimming for 20 years, worked as a consultant for 8 years, and was a human resource manager for 22 years before finally retiring in 2014.

But rather than slowing down, Becker, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-eight, shifted much of her freed-up time into what she’d been doing in her spare time outside of her full-time job since 1999—raising awareness of the grave human rights violations in China, predominantly, of the persecution, torture, and organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

“I’ve always given 100 percent of myself to any job, my family, and do everything to the best of my ability. And that’s what I’m doing now,” she said.

Talking about what led her to defend human rights in China, Becker said it’s the CCP’s ongoing persecution of her faith: Falun Gong.

Searching for a cure for an illness at 54, Becker was introduced to the spiritual practice in February 1999. A self-cultivation practice of mind and body incorporating meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance,” Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) was practiced by 70 million to 100 million people in China before the CCP launched a persecution campaign in July 1999 in an attempt to eradicate the practice.

“I had been suffering probably for five or six years with a terminal illness, and I tried a whole lot of different things and nothing seemed to work,” she said. “And then someone told me about Falun Gong. I could see after reading the book that this would be really good for me to do. It was a spiritual journey.”

Besides the health benefits, Becker said that after 22 years of having taken up the practice, it has made her a better person. “I learned I had to be compassionate. That was the main thing I had to learn. And I have become a better person for it. It’s quite amazing,” she said.

After only five months of Becker having taken up the practice, however, the CCP’s persecution in China was launched.

By 2002, the reports of arrests, torture, and deaths of her fellow Chinese practitioners prompted her and some other Australian practitioners to go to China to stage a peaceful protest in Tiananmen Square to request the communist regime to end the persecution.

“I went to Tiananmen Square with a group of other Australians,” she said. “I took a 1964 Olympic banner, and I had a Falun Gong emblem painted on it—on ⁠the Japanese red circle⁠—and the words ‘truthfulness, compassion, tolerance,’ and I ran into Tiananmen Square.”

Becker said she was determined to make an impact and wasn’t scared of going, despite knowing that thousands of Chinese practitioners who had already protested in the Square before her were arrested, often tortured, and some even lost their lives.

“I never had any fear about going. I knew I was going, I was doing it, and I was coming home,” said Becker, whose story of going to Tiananmen was documented in the 2020 film “Protest at Heaven’s Gate.”

“Being an Olympian gave me a platform to be able to go out. That’s why I went to Tiananmen Square, because I wanted to get the news out to the world. The main thing was to let the CCP know that there was an Olympian in that. And also, make people around the world take a bit more notice of what was happening.”

Becker was arrested on that day, March 7, 2002, along with eight other Australians, not more than 30 seconds after running into the Square with her Olympic banner. She was questioned for 5 1/2 hours before being detained overnight and deported the next day, blacklisted from ever returning.

“They wanted to know where my Falun Gong books were, where my tapes were.” Becker said. “I said ‘they’re in my head and in my heart, I don’t need to bring them here.’ And they came in waving a glove, wanting to do a body search. They asked me to get undressed. I got down to my bra and knickers, and I said, you want me to get them off too?

“I remember telling the policeman that was interviewing me that they need to get out to see the world more, that ‘it’s not like this’ outside China. The world is not like what China was like. Everywhere I went in China, I was watched. They followed us down the street with phones. That’s why the Chinese people are so scared, they’re scared to do anything.”

The harassment didn’t stop there, either, Becker said. It extended beyond China’s walls to include threats to get her to stop speaking out to media only days after she’d returned home to Australia and had already told her story to various news outlets. About two or three days after being back home, she had left her house for the day, and when she returned, she found that the front door had been knocked down, “totally kicked off its hinges.”

“They’d placed a pitchfork on my bed, as if to scare me,” she said, referring to who she describes as “CCP agents” living outside China. Becker reported the incident to the police.

By the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics approaching, to raise awareness and call for a boycott of the Games, a coalition of China human rights advocates launched their human rights torch relay and asked Becker to serve as the GHRTR Australian ambassador. The relay kicked off in Athens, Greece, on Aug. 9, 2007, and made its way through over 100 cities in more than 30 countries throughout Europe, America, Asia, and Australia.

While the CCP was touring its Olympic torch around the world, Becker was carrying its counterpart, the “human rights torch,” in its own separate international tour, including relaying it through 67 towns and suburbs in her home state, Victoria, in Australia.

“I had to stand up,” she said. “Lots of people were involved. In many towns, there were mayors, MPs, media, faith leaders, school groups, and human rights advocates; there were lots of reports and lots of things that happened with that torch relay.”

‘2022 Olympics Should Be Moved’

In referring to the March 2020 final judgment of the China Tribunal, a London-based people’s tribunal, Becker said that after thorough investigations, chair of the tribunal Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and a seven-member panel summarized that “any government, organization, or individual who interacts with China should recognize they are ‘interacting with a criminal state.’”

The tribunal stated in its judgment that “Commission of Crimes Against Humanity against the Falun Gong and Uyghurs has been proved beyond reasonable doubt,” and that the investigations led to the tribunal’s “unavoidable final conclusion that forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”

“Therefore, I’m calling that the 2022 Olympics should be moved,” Becker said. “And I believe that the sanctity of life and respect for human beings takes precedence over any sporting event—even the Olympics.”

Although lawmakers in the United States, Canada, Europe, and recently Australia, have called for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Becker says she doesn’t believe it will solve the issue, because the CCP no longer cares about pleasing diplomats, so “that’s not going to make them lose anything,” nor stop their human rights abuses.

“I don’t think China will care at all if the diplomats don’t go,” she said. “You’ve just got to look at how they’re treating Australia at the moment, look how many things they’ve taken off Australia; they don’t really care about the politicians or the diplomats that much anymore. I think they’ve got to move the 2022 Games, they’ve got to push to move them.”

Becker, who currently has commemorative items on display at the “Memories of Tokyo 1964” exhibition at the Consulate-General of Japan in Melbourne, said that, even if the Games have to be delayed, which “can be done as we saw for Tokyo 2020,” a complete move away from China is achievable.

“There’s plenty of countries that could do it,” she said. “Plenty of European countries that have got the infrastructure set up. If they need to get things together, we could put it off a year, but I’m sure there will be European countries that would take it on.”

Becker said that expecting any kind of boycott by athletes is not a realistic solution either. Shifting the burden to athletes who’ve “put in 110 percent” would not be a fair or reasonable expectation; she said the burden lies with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

“This may be their only opportunity, one opportunity to go to an Olympics,” Becker said of the athletes. “It’s very hard to ask them to walk away from that. Administrators and the IOC should have made the right choices, it shouldn’t involve the athletes having to make this decision at all.”

The IOC ‘Stands Alone’

In 2001, when the IOC awarded the 2008 Games to China, as a former Olympian still in good relations with the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC), Becker raised with them directly the seriousness of the communist regime’s “horrible” human rights record.

Later in 2007, while touring the world as Australian ambassador for the GHRTR, she implored them to ask the IOC to move the Olympics to Athens.

Becker said that, at the time, they had taken up a collection of petitions to move the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And John Coates, the now-vice president of the IOC, who was then a member of the IOC and the AOC, had forwarded those to the then-president of the IOC. “He guaranteed me that they got those petitions. So he reported how I felt. He’s supportive,” she said.

Even when China was still being considered as a contender for hosting the 2008 Olympics, Becker managed to raise her concerns with then-vice president of the IOC Kevan Gosper in-person at an Olympic function they both attended in November 2000. His response was that he believed the CCP would surely change.

“He told me the CCP would improve. I assured him at the time, they wouldn’t,” Becker said. “It’s interesting that they don’t learn, the IOC hasn’t really learned what the CCP’s about. In 2001, they were awarded those Games; It’s 20 years down the track, and they’re still doing the same thing today.”

Referring to the recent Hong Kong issuesuppression of Uyghurs, and the CCP’s recent intrusion activities in Taiwan, Becker called these all “new human rights abuses.” “These are new things after they were awarded the Olympics. The IOC hasn’t learned anything. They trust the CCP too much,” she said. “The CCP have just done exactly what they want to do afterward.”

Becker applauds the members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) who have coordinated legislative actions on the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, saying they’re “politicians who have a good heart and understand the human rights issues.” She said, however, that presidents and prime ministers are not likely to get involved.

“The IOC is a very strong organization. It stands alone, away from politics,” she said. “That’s why those politicians don’t want to get involved. They know that it stands alone. So it’s up to the people to try to talk to the International Olympic Committee, the Australian Olympic Committee, people involved at that level are the people we have to get to.

‘It’s Up to the People’

Becker said citizens around the world who are concerned about Beijing hosting the Olympics can find and sign an existing petition to the IOC, or start a new one. “I think they can all sign a petition,” she said. “Stand up where they can, show China⁠. We’ve seen that China can’t be trusted, even with the COVID situation. I think people are really waking up to how it is.”

In getting the Games moved, Becker said the world shouldn’t rely solely on “people at a high level of government.” “I think individual people can make it happen more, and as the groundswell happens, they then might come onboard,” she said.

Speaking about corporate sponsors dumping money into the Beijing Games—dubbed the “Genocide Olympics” by critics—Becker said corporations “will do anything for money.” “Corporations need to be talked to because they’ve supported the Olympics forever and ever, it’s going to be a difficult one to move them on that, but we have to try,” she said.

Various human rights abuses were reported to have happened during the 2008 Beijing Olympics: Elderly people being thrown out of their homes and made homeless to make way for the Olympic village, and dissidents being rounded up en masse by the CCP and imprisoned out of fear they might expose the CCP’s crimes to overseas visitors.

“We spoke about all these things in 2008,” she said. “I don’t know that many people listened as much as they should have, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. I guess we have to go through it all over again.”

In predicting that “they’ll do it again,” Becker said those previous abuses by the CCP need to be brought back to the world’s attention because, “once again, they’ll make sure that anyone who doesn’t suit the commitment of the Party, the CCP, will be pushed out of town so no one can see them.”

Future of China, CCP, and Communism

When asked her thoughts about a communist country hosting the Olympics, and what she holds out for the future of China, Becker said: “I don’t believe in communism or socialism. I think it’s really bad for the world, you can see what’s happening⁠—people don’t have any thoughts, they can’t think for themselves, it’s just a terrible way of living.”

Becker said she’d like “to see the CCP collapse” and for freedom to be returned to the Chinese people. “It will be a better world for the Chinese people eventually. And I hope it’s sooner than later,” she said.

Seeing communism as a threat to the world, Becker said from her own experience that “we would not want to be ruled by the CCP.” But despite what may appear to be grim prospects with how far the CCP have already infiltrated the West, she maintains hope that the citizens of Western countries will fight to gain their dwindling sovereignty back.

“Even just in Australia⁠—and it’s happening in America and other countries as well⁠—the people are waking up; they’re realizing what the CCP is really all about, and how much they want to control everything,” she said. “People can now see through it.”

As for whether China will remain the host nation of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Becker believes that it “wouldn’t be good for the Olympic movement.”

“They’re putting themselves in a really difficult situation if they let China host the 2022 Olympics. They should have learned from the last one, and from the empty stalls in Tokyo. They may never go on. It may not keep going if we can’t take that away from the CCP,” she said.

“It’s wrong, it’s just wrong for them to have it.”

For Sanctity of Life, ‘Move the 2022 Games,’ Olympian Once Arrested in Beijing Says (theepochtimes.com)

Biden White House Approves Licensing Deal For Chinese Communist Party-Linked Huawei, Reversing Trump-Era Hardline

The Biden White House granted the Chinese Communist Party-linked firm Huawei – which was crippled by Trump-era sanctions – licenses to purchase American auto chips, according to reports. 

The decision follows the Beijing-backed tech firm hiring several lobbyists, including the brother of Joe Biden’s White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti and CNN guests who have pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

“U.S. officials have approved license applications worth hundreds of millions of dollars for China’s blacklisted telecom company Huawei to buy chips for its growing auto component business, two people familiar with the matter said,” Reuters reported.

The reported approval follows a Trump-era crackdown on the telecommunications firm, which has extensive links to both the Chinese Communist Party. Labeled a “national security threat” by the Trump administration and a decades-long Chinese military collaborator by the U.S. Department of Defense, Huawei routinely provides the regime backdoor access to its products, networks, and devices.

Former President Donald Trump’s State Department also emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party uses Huawei as an “instrument not only for making money but also for pursuing the Party-State’s agenda and fulfilling its strategic objectives […] deeply enmeshed in Beijing’s system of oppression at home and its increasingly assertive strategic ambitions globally.”

The Biden White House, however, has taken a considerably softer approach to the company, as Reuters notes:

Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, has been hobbled by trade restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on the sale of chips and other components used in its network gear and smartphones businesses. The Biden administration has been reinforcing the hard line on exports to Huawei, denying licenses to sell chips to Huawei for use in or with 5g devices. But in recent weeks and months, people familiar with the application process told Reuters the U.S. has granted licenses authorizing suppliers to sell chips to Huawei for such vehicle components as video screens and sensors. 

Biden White House Approves Licensing Deal For Chinese Communist Party-Linked Huawei, Reversing Trump-Era Hardline. – The National Pulse

REVEALED: Oregon Democrat Governor Kate Brown Has Long-Standing Ties To Chinese Communist Influence Groups

Oregon Governor Kate Brown has participated in events sponsored by Chinese Communist Party propaganda groups flagged by the U.S. State Department for “directly and malignly influenc[ing]” American officials, The National Pulse can reveal.

The unearthed Chinese Communist Party links follow Oregon Democrats calling for the cancellation of an upcoming event featuring The National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam and Natalie Winters due to the site’s promotion of “China-centric conspiracy theories” and “toxic beliefs.”

The Oregon Democratic Party is attempting to ban China-focused news reporters while one of the party’s most high-profile members – Governor Kate Brown – recently established links with one of the regime’s chief influence groups abroad.

Brown, in fact, has a long history of collaboration with groups tied to Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

Propaganda 101.

China’s billion-dollar “United Front” effort aims to “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission. United Front groups such as the China United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) have used tactics including free trips to China to garner “favorable coverage” from mainstream media outlets according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings.

Scarcely a “China-centric conspiracy theory” as the Oregon Democratic Party insist.

Brown also has deep ties to the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), dubbed the “public face” of the United Front and “avowedly an arm of the party-state.” The U.S. State Department has even described the CPAFFC as seeking to “directly and malignly influence” U.S. state and local leaders.

MUST READ:  Chinese Regime Takes Financial Stake In TikTok, Now Directly Linked to Facebook Fact-Checker ‘Lead Stories’.

Brown attended the group’s 2015 China-U.S.Governors Forum, an event the State Department has singled out for its subversive influence on U.S. politics:

“CPAFFC’s actions have undermined the Governors Forum’s original well-intentioned purpose.”

As the CPAFFC recounts, Brown emphasized that “Oregon hopes to enhance cooperation with China” at the event, which counted Chinese Communist Pary leader Xi Jinping as its top speaker. Following the forum, Brown was one of six governors to ink a deal with Beijing to collaborate on “clean technology and economic development.”

US-China Governors Forum.
2015 FORUM.
BROWN SIGNING CCP AGREEMENT.

While taking a private meeting with CPAFFC Vice President Lin Yi the month following the forum, Brown reportedly described Xi’s remarks as “encouraging” while pushing to “strengthen pragmatic cooperation with China in education, science and technology, health, tourism and sports”:

Governor Brown said it was her great honor to attend the Governors’ Forum held in Seattle last month. President Xi’s remarks were encouraging and the Forum helped provide great opportunities for U.S.-China cooperation. The State of Oregon regards China as the most important international partner and has  willingness to strengthen pragmatic cooperation with China in education, science and technology, health, tourism and sports, etc. 

REVEALED: Oregon Democrat Governor Kate Brown Has Long-Standing Ties to Chinese Communist Influence Groups. (thenationalpulse.com)