The CCP is little more than an international crime syndicate with political affectations. Knowing what is going on in China is dependent on sifting through their official lies, deflections, and ‘dezinformatsiya.’ The fact is, we just don’t know what unleashed monster they’re running from in Xi’an. All we know is that the CCP is lying about it.
~ Ben Harnwell
Evidence indicates that China’s President Xi Jinping has been sitting on, and desperately trying to suppress, a new COVID variant since December 2021. Let’s consider this evidence.
The Xi’an lockdown
Xi’an City (population 13 million) was locked down on 23 December 2021, with authorities citing as justification two ostensibly unrelated outbreaks: one of COVID-19 originating with six persons infected with the Delta variant from a flight from Pakistan, and the second of an unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever.
Xi’an is a city three times larger than Los Angeles, responsible for 40% of Samsung’s global microchip output.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is all about frenetically maximising China’s economic output. It is simply not feasible that it would close such an important economic hub for six Delta cases, nor for any non-person-to-person contagious season haemorrhagic fever.
So the first question is: why lie? One obvious motivation for lying would be the Olympics. We all remember Mayor Larry Vaughn, who in the great 1975 film Jaws desperately sought to keep open Amity Island against the known threat of a great white shark prowling over the 4th of July holiday in the U.S. Think of President Xi as a seedier version of Mayor Vaughn, only in charge of a much bigger Amity Island.
A successful Beijing Winter Olympics is essential for Xi to reassert his credibility both on the national and international level.
I thank Jack Posobiec—former U.S. naval officer fluent in Mandarin—for popularising in Western consciousness the Chinese concept of ‘mandate from heaven.’ This concept entails the notion of whether a regime has legitimacy by the ‘signs’ that accompany it. One runaway global pandemic would certainly suggest that the gods aren’t too impressed. Two runaway global pandemics and the gods are angrily throwing rotten vegetables at the stage.
When you have no legitimacy, and you are staring into the stony eyes of your subjected people, and they know you have no legitimacy, such cultural concepts of ‘mandate from heaven’—when you don’t have any other mandate to claim—take on an oversized importance.
Why was Xi’an City really closed?
CCP officials explicitly stated that it was the Delta variant. They went out of their way to say that it was not the more contagious Omicron variant. Were they telling the truth? The presence of a new variant is unlikely to be openly confessed by the CCP. The problem is that this is the same CCP that has successfully obstructed every independent investigation into the origins of COVID itself, knowing that the facts lead inexorably back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so uncovering the truth of the situation in Xi’an will be a near-impossible task.
But what would you do, if you were a pitiless illegitimate dictator, sitting on an undeclared new variant, six weeks before you were to host the Winter Olympics? I know what I would do. I would hit Xi’an with the most furious lockdown it had ever seen and at the same time pretend that any differing symptoms presented by the new variant were due to a totally different virus that just happened to be coincidentally circulating at the same time.
So what did Xi do?
The brutality of the Xi’an lockdown is unlike anything we have seen since the CCP first tried desperately—and unsuccessfully—to suppress COVID-19 in Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak in late 2019.
No one is allowed out of their homes, not even for essential shopping supplies; residential tower blocks have been welded shut from the outside. Deserted streets are sprayed with disinfectant. The fact that Xi’an City is literally starving has provoked the even world’s normally lethargic mainstream media to report on the situation.
Despite the severity of these controls, however, the COVID outbreak is spreading from Xi’an in a broadly easterly direction, forcing full and partial lockdowns all the way to Ningbo, China’s largest port, on the east coast. All the while, the CCP is calculatingly vague about what is actually going on.
Here is the timeline of the Xi’an related epidemic:
Xi’an
- province: Shaanxi
- population: 13m
- date of lockdown: 23 December 2021
- distance from to Beijing: 1093 km
Yuzhou
- province: Henan
- population: 1.2 million
- date of lockdown: 2 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 775 km
Ningbo Port (the largest port in China)
- province: Zhejiang
- population: 8.2m
- date of lockdown: 3 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 1373 km
Zhengzhou
- province: Henan
- population: 10.4m
- date of lockdown: 5 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 693 km
Shenzhen Port
- province: Guandong
- population: 12.6m
- date of lockdown: 7 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 2176 km
Tianjin Port (the largest port in northern China)
- province: (n/a — run directly from Beijing)
- population: 14m
- date of lockdown: 10 January 2022
- Beijing: 143 km
Anyang
- province: Henan
- population: 5.2m
- date of lockdown: 11 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 508 km
Dalian
- province: Liaoning
- population: 5.8m
- date of lockdown: 13 January 2022
- distance from to Beijing: 840 km
As the Beijing Winter Olympics race into view, the Xi’an-originated virus races towards Beijing. Not unreasonably, the CCP’s absolute paranoia is that with the virus now on the doorstep of the Chinese capital—three weeks before the Winter Olympics—the virus will penetrate into the heart of Beijing.
What else has Xi done which would seem to be unduly excessive given the official narrative? On 23rd December 2021, China closed all domestic flights from Xi’an City. On 5th January 2022, China then extended that ban to all international flights out of Xi’an.
Symptoms in Xi’an
The official symptoms in Xi’an are both similar and different from all other recognised variants. In addition to all the expected respiratory tract symptoms, there is also recorded haemorrhaging including from the eyes, ears, and nose.
How did the CCP explain this? Officially, the CCP—the same authority that claims less than 5,000 people have died of COVID-19 in China since the beginning of the outbreak—closed down Xi’an City because of the above-cited six Delta cases. But the CCP—the same authority that reassured the WHO at the crucial early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak that the virus was not passed via person to person transmission—also highlighted as justification for the Xi’an lockdown an outbreak of an unspecified “seasonal haemorrhagic fever.”
The official Party press release, dutifully picked up by the Global Times, has the typical move-along-folks-there’s-nothing-to-see-here quality about it. So let’s do what the “gutless, lazy, and dumb Mainstream Media” has so far refused to do, and actually dig a little deeper. (That phrase, by the way, courtesy of the one and only Stephen K Bannon, who demonstrates yet again how well he has the MSM’s number).
According to the Global Times/CCP press release, this “seasonal haemorrhagic fever” is not person-to-person contagious. But if this really were the case, if the unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever were indeed not person to person contagious, why close Xi’an citing it?
Considering that the official CCP explanation is that the ‘seasonal haemorrhagic fever’ is spread by rodents infecting humans, I suppose we ought to be grateful at least that Xi didn’t blame the Chinese themselves, by accusing them of feasting on rats at a wet market.
It is of course possible that specific patients have been unfortunate enough to acquire both the COVID virus and the unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever at the same time. It is also possible that such apparent haemorrhagic symptoms are ‘merely’ side-effects from (or perhaps over-dosing on) one of the vaccines. A possibility that is either comforting or alarming depending on your point of view.
Two viruses in Xi’an—or one?
What if, rather, they are the same virus? What if two different viruses have somehow merged together? Is this even possible? In a word, yes. The technical term is ‘viral recombination’ and describes the process when two viruses independently infect the same cell, and then exchange genetic segments before reproducing.
Is there evidence that COVID can undergo viral recombination? There was early evidence that the Omicron variant itself is the product of viral recombination between two different coronaviruses—SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) and HCoV-229E (the common cold)—combining the upper tract breathing difficulties of COVID with the higher transmissibility of the common cold.
If we are indeed seeing in Xi’an some kind of viral recombination between two viruses, and not two unfortunately-timed simultaneous viruses outbreaks, of what might the viral recombination be comprised? Marburg Virus Disease (MVD) belongs to the filovirus family. There are seven known strains of filovirus: MVD itself and six others. The other six are all strains of what is commonly known as the Ebola virus.
MVD is person-to-person contagious but thankfully the virus is not airborne. It is transmitted through physical contact with infected blood and/or body fluids. MVD is named after the German city Marburg, after an outbreak there in the 1960s, when infected African green monkeys passed the filovirus to man. The mortality rate is around 90%, with victims bleeding from their eyes, ears, nose, etc.
Whilst MVD is harmful to primates, it is not in fact native to them. It is a virus which has crossed species from its original host reservoir, in which it is asymptomatic. That original species host is the African fruit bat.
Given that both COVID and MVD are both viruses that have their original genetic background in bats, it is theoretically easier that viral recombination has occurred between them. In a similar vein, twenty-five COVID cases were noted over the weekend in Cyprus, which appear to be a combination of the Delta and Omicron variants, provisionally nicknamed Deltracron.
If we are dealing with a new Xi’an variant—a viral recombination between COVID-19 and MVD—what might its characteristics be? Early symptoms of the unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever in Xi’an seem to match those of COVID, suggesting that it is indeed the same virus. As the infection develops, however, the symptoms then seem to progressively mirror those of MVD.
Even if this unlikely (but not impossible) scenario has unfolded, it would appear—thank God—that the resulting new COVID variant is not especially contagious. It may, nonetheless, have already escaped China.
Last week, news emerged that ticked all the boxes of a potential new variant that is a hybrid between COVID and MVD. Six people have been reported to have died since December in Brazil. An article in Outbreak News Today speaks of “a wave of death for patients who manifested respiratory syndromes and haemorrhages in recent weeks […] after experiencing shortness of breath, coughing, fever, chest pain and haematemesis (vomiting blood).” This could be the viral recombination which I’m calling the Xi’an Variant, though obviously much further testing would be needed to know for sure. Testing by internationally respected, independent experts not in the pay of the CCP.
Probability of a new Xi’an variant
TFI Post describes the situation thus “China is on the cusp of giving us a new pandemic—it could be a haemorrhagic fever or any new variant of COVID-19.” It would be easy for a sensationalist and irresponsible journalist to say, ‘there is a new variant in China, and it is a viral recombination between COVID and Ebola, merging the transmissibility of the first with the haemorrhaging symptoms of the latter.’ Such a scenario would be beyond horrific and would probably spark fear and panic across the globe. So, let me be clear: I do not know that this is the case, and I am not claiming to know the situation—I am just asking questions and speculating answers.
On the one hand, the small number of potential cases suggests that such a combination is unlikely. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the CCP is not lying about something massive—something too serious for them to share with the benighted Chinese people or the rest of the world.
If this viral recombination has taken place, weakening the body’s natural immunity response through massive over-vaccination could well be the worst public policy response. In a strange irony of fate, the original inventor of the mRNA technology underpinning the current mRNA COVID vaccines is actually one of the original virologists on the team that worked on an Ebola vaccine—Dr. Robert Malone. He would be a great person for governments to be talking to. Instead of receiving the Nobel prize for medicine and being the recipient of a grateful world’s plaudits, Dr. Malone has just found himself banned from Twitter for criticising various governments’ vaccine policies. This is—if we want to listen to the scientists—no doubt a colossal mistake.
Be that as it may, Dr. Malone has already signalled what appears to be “the development of a rapidly spreading Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever virus” in China, though Dr. Malone was careful not to explicitly link this outbreak to COVID-19.
In any case, bat-originating virus recombinations will become more likely in the future, as bats’ natural habitats and environments are being drastically changed. Presently, this is most notable in Indonesia, Africa and the more tropical parts of China.
A final word of caution
The CCP is little more than an international crime syndicate with political affectations. Knowing what is going on in China is dependent on sifting through their official lies, deflections, and dezinformatsiya. The fact is, we just don’t know what unleashed monster they’re running from in Xi’an. All we know is that the CCP is lying about it. So, all we can do is try to graph a line of best fit through the few known data points.
Unless independent scientists can get into China immediately and start testing, the wisdom of going ahead with the Beijing Winter Olympics looks evermore questionable. With something uncontrollable and terrible raging loose, we’re on the cusp of a situation in which cancelling the Olympics would be the least controversial option. Our globalist overlords will soon need to decide, balancing the potentially greatest super-spreading event the world has ever seen against propping up the prestige of China’s morally bankrupt, failing and almost universally hated regime.
By Ben Harnwell
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About Ben Harnwell
Benjamin Harnwell is international editor of “Steve Bannon’s WarRoom,” the Number 1 political podcast in the U.S. His articles, comments, and observations can be read by following him on GETTR @harnwell or onTwitter @ben_harnwell.
