Lawrence Selin and Anna Chen Guest Post
COVID-19 was a planned bioweapon of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Already in 2005, Colonel Ji-Wei Guo of the People’s Liberation Army’s Southwest Hospital, Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China described a new type of bioweapon.
Colonel Guo rejected traditional biological weapons which produced mass destruction and were clumsy.
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Rely on microbiology and bacteriology. These weapons are subject to nature, difficult to control, and have irreversible effects.” These weapons are subject to nature, are difficult to control, and have irreversible effects.”
China would use biotechnology to create new forms of designed “biotechnological weapons” that would be “controllable” and “recoverable” for which China had sole possession of the vaccine or antidote.
Such weapons would be highly contagious, but of low lethality and capable of being deployed under “pre-war” conditions. Although artificially created, the new bioweapons would retain “plausible deniability,” that is, could be attributed to a disease of natural origin.
Thus, spawned the PLA’s massive joint bioweapon development-vaccine production program, which incorporated China’s universities and their access to international knowledge and skills, particularly those from the United States.
In his 2006 article follow up, Colonel Guo elaborates on his thesis. He advocates for the weaponization and use of military medicine in order to achieve this:
a fighting power in addition to a tool of maintaining and strengthening the fighting power of the army–that is, forming an aggression system of biotechnology.”
Colonel Guo suggested that, instead of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), military medical specialists use biotechnology in order to create weapons with specific physiological effects for the human body.
The goal of precision injury is not necessarily to terminate a life, but to choose a degree of injury depending on the purposes of operations and the types of enemies.”
In 2006, Colonel Guo concluded:
Since war is an act of violence aiming at annihilating enemies or depriving them of resistant abilities, the modern biological techniques used for attack purposes have a more direct and precise target at humans than other methods, which will play a more important role in future military operations.”
After 2011, Colonel Guo received English training and was sent to another country, most likely for spying purposes. However, it’s not clear where he ended up.
Colonel Guo and his PLA colleagues continued to promote biotechnological weapons and “bio-based war” in Chinese language military journals in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2018.
Specifically, Colonel Guo’s student, Kun Huo, in his 2013 Chinese language Master’s thesis, described the military doctrine underlying the use of “non-lethal” biowarfare agents like COVID-19:
This paper is the first to systematically put forward the thought of “non-lethal” biological warfare in which future war will focus on ultrastructural biological field and demonstrate scientifically the necessity and feasibility of the construction of “non-lethal” biological warfare.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that Colonel Guo’s home institution, the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing played an outsized role in the PLA’s coronavirus research during and immediately after the 2002-2004 SARS pandemic.
Chinese whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan claims that the COVID-19 virus originated in laboratories overseen by China’s PLA, using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 collected from Zhoushan, China, and used as the viral “backbone” for genetic engineering.
These bat coronaviruses have been first isolated and characterised under the guidance of the Third Military Medical University (now PLA Nanjing Military Command) and the Research Institute for Medicine.
There should now be no doubt that China has had an active and extensive biological warfare program of which COVID-19 was one of its “biotechnological weapons”.
Lawrence Sellin (Ph.D.) is a U.S. Army Reserve colonel who served as a war veteran in Afghanistan and Iraq. His civilian career was in medical research and international business. His email address: [email protected]. You can follow Anna Chen on Twitter @2020Gladiator