Don Rechtman “IT would be crazy to think that right now the Chinese were not behind some of the cyber activity that we’re seeing targeting U.S. pharmaceutical companies and targeting research institutes around the country that are doing coronavirus research, treatments and vaccines,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said. “This is the holy grail of biomedical research right now, [and has] tremendous value both commercially and geopolitically.” So says the U.S. Government, but let’s think this through a bit. First, we will look at the statement in detail, then, we will look at the U.S. Government’s record for telling the truth in general. There is cyber activity all over the world. The U.S. Senate just this month voted down a bill that would have kept the FBI and CIA from continuing their monitoring of Internet activity without having to have a warrant. There is hard evidence of Russia’s involvement in recent U.S. elections. So why has there not been any hard evidence provided of China’s hacking into research institutes? What makes a COVID-19 vaccine the “holy grail” of biomedical research? One word: money. Big Pharma in the U.S. has everything to gain if it can get a hold of and control the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine. Were China to get a hold of the vaccine first, it would be a financial disaster for Big Pharma, but for the right and not for the wrong reason: China would release it to the world. Evidence? How about this: as soon as China identified the genome structure of the virus, it was released to the world. They could have hoarded the information and used it to get a head start in creating a vaccine, but that is not their intent. Their intent is to save lives. Because the U.S. Government as the representative of big business is first and foremost profit-motivated, it is quite difficult for their citizens to comprehend that another nation might actually place people above profit, and to cover its own greed, the U.S. plays into that disbelief by striking out at other countries with the exact accusations that mirror its own policies. The U.S. and its officials have a remarkably poor record for telling the truth. Let’s start with the more than 100 treaties, all of which were broken by the U.S., that were made with Native American nations. Then let’s skip all of the 1800s stuff, and move into more modern times. There is the Gulf of Tonkin, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Bay of Pigs, WMDs, no “Quid Pro Quo,” “the heat of April will kill the virus,” “the virus was created in a Wuhan lab,” “China is hacking the pharmaceutical industry.” Oops. How did that last one get in there? The truth here is about being false. The U.S. Government has cried “wolf” so many times that it has lost credibility with the rest of the world. Without proper publicly disclosed evidence, no one is going to believe this latest falsehood either. To understand the underlying motivation, all one needs to recognize is that the only thing the U.S. cries louder than “wolf” is “money.” (The author is a U.S. citizen from Chico, California, who has been residing in China for more than 12 years. His personal website is www.OrfeoMusic.org.) | 