Our friend and 2023 MRC Bulldog Award winner Andrew Kerr put a spotlight Tuesday on the revelation that a previously censored 2022 Biden administration report on the coronavirus pandemic that he said showed “[s]even Americans may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan in October 2019, several months before the reported start of the pandemic.”
Of course, ABC, CBS, and NBC wanted nothing to do with this and ignored it on their flagship broadcast morning and evening newscasts. The went for all shows on CNN and MSNBC.
Kerr explained the report was required in 2022 as part of the annual reauthorization of the National Defense Authorization Act into the COVID-like symptoms seven U.S. troops contracted afterwards (which they “all recovered...within six days”).
Specifically, the demand was the report be made “‘publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format’ by summer of 2022” and it was delivered “to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in December 2022,” but its whereabouts were unknown “until sometime in late March when the Trump administration quietly uploaded it to a Defense Department website.”
Crucially, Kerr said the bombshell finding ran counter to public declarations by the Biden administration, including their Swiss army knife of a spokesman, John Kirby:
The December 2022 report, which the Biden administration was required by law to release to the public over two years ago but didn’t, reveals for the first time that seven U.S. military service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms during or after their participation in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019—contradicting the Biden administration’s public claims in 2021 that there was no evidence that any American participants contracted the virus at those games. The revelation adds to a mounting body of evidence that the virus was circulating in Wuhan for months before China disclosed it to the world in December 2019 and further bolsters the growing consensus that it could have leaked into the human population from a Chinese lab.
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Former Biden Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told the Washington Post in June 2021 that the military had "no knowledge" of any COVID-19 infections among the troops that participated in those games.
The first Trump administration issued similar statements regarding the Wuhan games. In June 2020, the Pentagon told the Prospect that it did not test any of the American troops that participated in the games because they were held "prior to the reported outbreak."
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The Defense Department uploaded the report sometime in late March to a section of its website dedicated to "quality-of-life" issues for military service members and their families. The Wuhan World Military Games report is sandwiched between two separate reports on military spouses obtaining occupational licenses.
Unsurprisingly, Kerr said the World Military Games just so happened to have been “held within close proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the now-infamous site for taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research on viruses deriving from bats.
He added a June 2020 article in The American Prospect suggested this all along with another all-too-convenient fact about the virus’s initial known spread within the United States: “The American military athletes traveled to and from Wuhan via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, according to the Prospect, which noted that Washington was one of the earliest COVID-19 hotspots in the country.”
To further bolster his case, he noticed the Daily Mail found “[m]ilitary athletes from Germany, France, Italy, and Luxembourg who competed in the October 2019 games also reported coming down with COVID-19-like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan.”
The broadcast networks had other ideas about stories to cover. Alongside their gargantuan amount of tariffs coverage, all three networks marveled at the creepy, real-life act straight out of Jurassic Park with that formerly extinct dire wolf. Oh, and on both Tuesday and Wednesday’s CBS Mornings, they were multiple mentions of co-host Gayle King going to space next week on a Blue Origin civilian flight.
