Did Covid begin in America?
For “Citizen journalist” Laura Mueller (as well as myself), this “thermo-nuclear” theory’s just as plausible as the “settled science.” Laura’s story reveals the importance of independent journalists.
A Prologue that frames the article that follows …
Note: Emphasis added by Bill Rice, Jr.
NY Times, International - January 7, 2020
China, Eager to Calm a Nervous Public, Grapples with Mystery Illness
BEJING - For days, Li Bin had what felt like a cold, with a high fever between 102 and 105, and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting better. After four days, he went to a hospital, and a doctor told him he had a form of viral pneumonia, without offering specifics. Mr. Lin, 42, was hospitalized, then transferred to another center and quarantined with other patients
…The authorities urged the public to be on alert for pneumonia-like symptoms like fever, body aches and breathing difficulties …
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Note: The above excerpts, from one of the very first New York Times’ articles that reported the existence of a strange “form of viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, describe a cluster of symptoms that created mass global fear and led to unprecedented lockdowns of the entire world.
In the article that follows, readers will note that identical “outbreaks” of a pneumonia-like illness were being reported and observed weeks and many months earlier - especially in the eastern portion of the United States of America, in and around Frederick, Maryland, the home of Fort Detrick, which houses America’s most famous bio-labs.
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Two weeks ago I wrote a story about the “rise of the Citizen Journalist.” I also recently wrote an essay about people who don’t believe the pronouncements of experts are always infallible.
My friend Laura Mueller falls into both categories. An acupuncturist by training, Laura became a “contrarian citizen journalist” because she didn’t necessarily trust the experts, became convinced the official “origins” narrative did not fit the timing of what she’d observed, and wanted to find out what actually happened.
Today, I want to tell Laura’s story … because, IMO, the world needs more Laura Mueller’s.
This article also suggests why Laura’s research (as well as my own) is considered taboo, seismic or thermo-nuclear.
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The more one thinks about “early spread” evidence, the more one is open to the hypothesis a novel coronavirus perhaps did not originate in Wuhan, China. That is, it’s perhaps more likely the Pandemic of the Century started in America.
Fortunately, for some reason(s), certain researchers and writers exist who will pursue areas of investigation which are clearly off-limits to important truth-seeking organizations.
Laura reached out to me …
In spring of 2023, Laura contacted me after she’d discovered one of my “early spread” stories on Substack.
Laura, like myself, had become convinced many Americans had already been infected with this virus by the summer, fall and winter of 2019 (or even earlier) - months before the experts said was possible.
In a recent phone interview, I asked Laura why she became a “citizen journalist.” Laura replied, “Because I saw the official version's timeline does not fit what I saw happen in my community.”
Like my own work, Laura’s effort to connect dots arrives at conclusions she finds unsettling. Considered together, the details that follow very possibly explain the official disinterest in pursuing a more comprehensive or authentic investigation into “the origins of Covid.”
Based on a series of experiences in her own life, from reports provided by her network of neighbors and friends, and from her own later research, Laura began to suspect a novel virus might have escaped from an American government lab.
Laura cites more than a half dozen personal anecdotes and observations that, collectively, made her suspect the timeline of “Covid spread” - and the location of possible “Case Zero” - might be intentional government disinformation.
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In April 2018, Laura, then age 64, and her husband Tom moved from Maryland to Fayetteville, Pennsylvania's Penn National Active Lifestyle Community, which includes two popular “4-star” golf courses.
In early April 2019, Laura became sick with a strange flu-like illness. When abdominal pain developed, she called her doctor's office, which referred her directly to the emergency room.
After hours of waiting, doctors told her the hospital was extremely busy due to many patients suffering from symptoms of a respiratory illness - one that was infecting large numbers of people in late spring … after the typical “cold and flu” season. After 12 hours the hospital staff sent her home - with no water or fluids, no diagnosis and no treatment.
On July 26, 2019, Laura’s husband Tom needed an annual “wellness visit” for Medicare. Laura accompanied her husband to this appointment, where doctors and nurses tried to convince her husband to get an injection of Pfizer’s Prevnar 20 - to purportedly prevent pneumonia.
During this visit, the physician “warned” the couple a "strange pneumonia" was spreading through their community, which is popular with retirees and is located approximately 40 miles north of Fort Detrick. The physician said the source of the illness “came from the Men’s locker room at the Clubhouse" at Penn National's Golf Club.
According to Laura, by late October 2019 many of their 25 condo association neighbors experienced what she’s described in articles as “lower-lung illnesses with impeded circulation,” symptoms that “lasted weeks.”
From acquaintances, including prominent citizens who owned many local properties, Laura learned that a local YMCA, several large apartment complexes and two local hospitals were suddenly upgrading their ventilation (HVAC) systems. The hospitals were also adding "respiratory wings.”
One friend asked the couple if she should upgrade the HVAC ventilation units at the properties she owned before winter.
Per Laura’s later speculation, one reason so many property owners - all at once, in the summer and fall of 2019 - decided to upgrade their ventilation systems could have been an effort to mitigate an atypical, spreading virus.
After Laura rallied from her strange April respiratory illness, she and her husband also became sick in December 2019 (Laura around December 15th, her husband two weeks later after the couple visited the Amish View Inn for a weekend get-away to celebrate the New Year 2020.)
According to Laura, all 25 neighbors in the condo association became sick - and four subsequently died - after experiencing respiratory symptoms between October 2019 and February 2020.
All of these events occurred between April 2019 and January 2020 with a more conspicuous rash of strange illnesses occurring in October 2019, resulting in four deaths between December and January.
“So many deaths and such drawn-out illness in such a short time had me in shock,” Laura later wrote. “How could a respiratory illness turn so invasive so fast? I got no answers from our local medical practice, which would provide no blood antibody test even after a year of requesting one.”
(Note: Like myself, Laura believes public officials might have intentionally delayed PCR testing and, later Covid antibody testing, to conceal evidence of “early spread” - evidence that might point to early outbreaks occurring not in China, but in America.)
*** (Since legacy journalists have decided details in this article are insignificant, the Share Button might allow this article to reach more people who may think otherwise.) ***
News from China begins to dominate the media airways …
Like every other citizen in the world, it wasn’t until mid or late January 2020 that Laura heard about a strange new virus that was apparently spreading in the city of Wuhan, China.
Because she’d previously lived in Maryland not far from Ft. Detrick (and her son still lived near America’s most famous/infamous lab that experiments with deadly pathogens), Laura also learned of a major flash flood that happened in Frederick, Maryland on May 16, 2018.
As Laura recounted in an article later published at the website TrialSite News, in a three-hour period between 1 and 4 a.m., 11 inches of rain fell on the area around Ft. Detrick.
Her research showed Ft. Detrick’s “rusting steam decontamination plant” had been “overwhelmed” by the flash flooding, which breeched the rusted tops of containment tanks.
Contamination sprayed for weeks, accumulating on the ground and flowing into a pipe leading into downtown Frederick's canals and then into a local stream, which fed into nearby rivers.
While residents expressed alarm to the Town Council that deadly pathogens from Ft. Detrick might have escaped the facility’s myriad labs, officials at the base assured local residents there was nothing to worry about.
Virginia Nursing home outbreaks …
Approximately 14 months after the flash flood, two assisted living facilities in Fairfax County and Burke, Virginia reported outbreaks of respiratory illness that killed at least three residents and sickened or caused respiratory illness symptoms in at least 85 residents and at least 19 employees.
At the time, public health officials noted it was very unusual for large number of residents and staffers to become ill from flu-like outbreaks in the summer (between June 30 and July 17, 2019).
Approximately 12 days after these outbreaks were first reported in the local press - on July 12, 2019 - then CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield ordered Ft. Detrick shut down so an extensive safety review could be performed. (Note: both assisted living facilities are less than an hour from Ft. Detrick).
Even today, most Americans are unaware that at the time of the Wuhan “wet market” outbreak in mid-December 2019, America’s premiere biological agent research facility had been ordered to cease all operations five months earlier. (Many labs at the 13,000-employee facility remained closed for eight months, until April 2020.)
While thousands of articles have been written about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, few of these articles note this was China’s only research lab with the highest level of safety precautions (BSL-4).
In contrast, the American government operates or funds “hundreds” of BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in numerous U.S. states and, indeed, around the world (including countries like The Ukraine).
“Lab leak” theories published in the legacy press rarely if ever mention that one nation’s government funds or operates far more labs where pathogens might accidentally escape (or even be intentionally released).
Outbreaks of vaping illnesses …
In the same pre-Covid time period, another strange illness that produced Covid-like respiratory symptoms - reportedly and perhaps related to vaping - briefly received a fair amount of national coverage.
According to a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, “As of December 17, 2019, a total of 2,506 hospitalized cases have been reported across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and two U.S. territories, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is coordinating a nationwide public health response.”
(Note: According to Laura’s research, on February 28, 2020 - at the peak of Covid media saturation - “the CDC stopped tracking “EVALI, and archived all related data at its website.”)
According to a Reuters’ article published October 2, 2019 that cited a Mayo Clinic study, a “vaping-related outbreak … has sickened more than 800 and claimed the lives of 16 people in 13 U.S. states …the dates of symptom onset ranged from April 21, 2019, through August 30, 2019, which is outside the typical influenza season …”
“… A total of 97% of the patients had respiratory symptoms at hospital presentation … The most common respiratory symptoms were shortness of breath (85%), cough (85%), and chest pain (52%).”
Another observation struck at least some citizen journalists as “strange.”
Per anecdotes Laura found in her research, no similar outbreaks of vaping illness were reported in Europe or the UK, which several citizen journalists noted had higher percentages of residents who used vaping products than America.
The interviews that did take place … and didn’t take place
One study noted that “comprehensive interviews had been conducted for 83% of the 98 patients with a confirmed or probable case” of a syndrome later named “EVALI.”
I include this excerpt only to note that, to my knowledge, CDC officials have yet to interview a single American who experienced Covid symptoms before January 2020, people who also tested positive for Covid antibodies.
That is, with some high-priority epidemiological events, officials can and do interview people with potentially-significant medical cases.
Laura and I have both noted a long list of common-sense medical investigations and interviews that have not occurred in inquiries seeking to more-definitively date the “origins” of virus spread.
This “dog-that-didn’t-bark” evidence might suggest that officials have no true interest in “solving” the origins case/mystery.
It also might suggest that the investigators themselves could be criminal accomplices in either perpetrating a crime and/or engaging in a conspiracy to cover-up the existence of a crime(s).
The strange deer evidence …
Like a few other contrarian citizen journalists and researchers, Laura has also noted another strange Covid phenomena that doesn’t involve human beings. Apparently, for reasons difficult to explain, huge percentages of deer were infected by this virus.
For example, according to one published paper, “Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 33% of the 481 samples collected from January 2020 through 2021.”
“...three positive samples from 2020 were collected in January, early in the pandemic. …Antibodies were also detected in three frozen samples from 2020 (3%) and one sample from 2019 (2%).
Another study reported that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 40% of 2021 samples from Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. More significantly, these researchers state,“Our findings represent the first evidence of a highly divergent lineage of SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer and of deer-to-human transmission.”
If one extrapolates the sample results to the estimated deer population in these four states (5.6 million), this might mean that 2.5 million deer had been infected by this virus.
In one study, PCR tests found even greater percentages of positives.
"We found that 80% of the sampled deer in December (2020 in Iowa) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, which proportionally represents about a 50-fold greater burden of positivity than what was reported at the peak of infection in humans at the time.”
As of today’s date, researchers have not posited a compelling theory which would explain how and why so many American deer were infected - and how could American white-tail deer have, perhaps, been infected before the Wuhan outbreak?
Others have noted that outside of America and Canada, no deer studies produced the same findings, prompting some to ask why were only North American deer infected in such eye-opening percentages.
The ILI outbreaks …
Like myself, Laura’s “early spread” hypothesis posits that if a novel and contagious coronavirus was spreading across America, evidence would probably exist that showed an increase in outbreaks of citizens suffering from “flu-like” symptoms.
Above, I’ve shared anecdotes which led Laura to believe that many of her neighbors were suffering Influenza Like Illness (ILI) symptoms as early as April 2019, and definitely by October 2019.
Much of Laura’s evidence involves illnesses within an hour-radius of Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
Bolstering her theory that something different was occurring around Ft. Detrick, Laura presents this ILI “Flu Map,” which is from September 1st, 2019, according to Laura's source. The map shows widespread flu activity in only two states - Maryland and Louisiana.
Laura also noted that, as of October 3, 2019, “3,128” patients in Maryland were admitted into a hospital with flu-like symptoms, but only 106 (3.4 percent) of these patients had tested positive for Influenza A or B.
Per Laura’s research, the CDC issued statements that such early “flu activity” was very unusual.
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I previously published two very-long articles which document - via contemporaneous ILI surveillance reports published weekly by state health agencies and the CDC - that in the 2019-2020 flu season, spikes of ILI began earlier, lasted longer, produced weekly ILI percentages much greater than expected “baseline” percentages … and included more states where ILI was severe and widespread than any flu season in recent years.
Per my own citizen journalism, scores of contemporaneous media reports also confirm a flu season that was severe and abnormal.
In two other very long articles, based on scores of contemporaneous media reports, I showed that more schools and school systems closed “due to illness” than probably any other flu season of recent decades.
What I’ve yet to uncover in my research is similar ILI maps produced by China’s version of the CDC or any similar articles showing that schools throughout China shut down “due to illness” at abnormal rates.
That is, accounts depicting elevated ILI and numerous school-closings - before the “Wuhan Outbreak” - seem to be unique to America.
While this data doesn’t necessarily “prove” early spread occurred in America, it is consistent with what one might expect to find if a novel respiratory virus was infecting millions of citizens in the weeks and months before the first Covid cases had been “confirmed” in America.
Indeed, while collaborating on “early spread” research, it was Laura who provided me links revealing that Covid testing protocols established by the CDC make it virtually impossible to “confirm” an early case of Covid in America.
For example, through February 2020, CDC virus detectives only tested American citizens who had recently returned from China (and all tests had to be performed by CDC labs in Atlanta). Wide-spread testing by PCR didn’t begin until latter March and antibody testing wasn’t widely available until the first days of May 2020.
Conclusion …
To solve a mystery that would require connecting disparate events, Laura Mueller identified and sought to connect a series of odd “dots.”
Her activities were motivated by her growing conviction the official “virus origins” story was probably false. She also quickly became convinced public health officials and professional “mainstream” journalists were not going to engage in such work.
The above points largely explain how and why a retired acupuncturist became a full-time citizen journalist and researcher.
Her efforts also point to the unsettling conclusion that the Pandemic of the Century, very possibly, originated in America.
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The most important characteristic of citizen journalists might be the fact most of these researchers are independent. This research - which often leads them down paths they never expected to follow - was assigned by themselves.
Most, like Laura, are not working for money or trying to please superiors. Instead they are simply “seeking the truth” and probably wouldn’t have embarked on such a quest if other important organizations were committed to this same mission.
That is, one might argue the motives of the citizen journalist are, in fact, purer.
For these reasons, the theories, findings and conclusions of independent citizen journalists should, perhaps, carry more weight with the public.
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Possible Further Reading: For a summary of early-spread evidence, see this TrialSiteNews article, which includes my byline as “co-author” but was largely written by Laura Mueller.
In the Readers Comment section, I will also add “bonus content” that might be of interest to those interested in this topic and additional details of Laura’s back story.
More cutting-room-floor text ....
Like many “citizen journalists,” Laura’s preoccupation with uncovering more credible versions of the truth struck many friends and certain members of her family as obsessive behavior.
Common reactions included, “Stop imagining things” … “Let’s talk about something else … “Don’t worry; be happy.”
Bonus content. The story was already quite long so I cut a good bit of text ... For example:
“I began reading and researching extensively,” Laura said.
In the last five years, she’s “watched and reported on dozens of Congressional hearings and Covid Task Force briefings, read dozens of books about Covid, and made daily ritual visits to Brownstone.org, Children’s Health Defense, TrialSiteNews, Unz Review, and hundreds of Substacks.”
A key feature of Laura’s personality is she’s not afraid to reach out to others who might have much-higher public profiles than herself. The fact she lacked “media credentials” left her undaunted.
If she could find the email address of people she wanted to query or contact, Laura wasn’t shy about reaching out to these people, share information she thought was important or ask them a few pointed questions.
Laura learned that at least a few much-better known public figures or experienced writers would correspond with her.
For example, Laura has shared emails with Debbie Lerman, Jeffrey Tucker, David Bell, state legislators or staff members Congressional Committees that might entertain contrarian evidence regarding virus origins (plus other Covid contrarian public figures).
It occurs to me that all important or significant citizen journalists probably share this personality trait. In their minds, their expertise or conclusions might be just as credible or valid as the perceived experts and authorities.
They know the extensive research they’ve performed and how much time they’ve spent thinking about a subject, time investments surely much greater than journalists employed by major media corporations.
Today, most “science” or health journalists typically view their core job as reporting the pronouncements of authorized scientists; questioning how these experts arrived at these conclusions - and considering the possibility these statements could be false - is not part of their job descriptions.