One of the most successful Chinese Communist disinformation successes of the last year has been to convince many people that the China virus is either a hoax or just another flu-like illness. Actually, the Chinese have never made that claim. They know the virus is real and that it kills in new and unique ways. They know because the evidence is that their scientists either produced or released it from a laboratory.

The communist lie is that it accidentally came out of a wet market.

Instead of holding the Red Chinese responsible, the “hoax” and other claims have been picked up by people upset with liberal governors using the pandemic to crush individual freedoms. Some of these people are Trump supporters, which is ironic since Trump got the disease and he has been consistently correct that the virus is a killer. More than anybody, Trump knows the virus is not a hoax. Aware that it is real and a biological weapon, he has used the term “China virus,” so the blame can be placed where it belongs. Out of office, he still brags about Operation Warp Speed producing vaccines in record time. He and his wife have been vaccinated.

Those claiming the virus is a hoax are naturally skeptical of what the U.S. medical and scientific establishments say about a range of medical issues and problems. Many are justifiably angry over restrictions on their freedoms and the destruction of their businesses through lockdowns. They argue that the virus has been “weaponized,” in the sense that case numbers have been inflated, in order to control people with ineffective masks and social distancing.

These patriotic Americans are losing sight of what is truly our main enemy – the murderous Chinese communist regime in Beijing that unleashed this disease on the U.S. and the world. What’s worse, it could happen again.

Some question death certificates, as to whether or not Covid killed someone directly or just contributed to the death. Let’s assume that the number of Covid-related deaths has been inflated by two, because of confusion over direct and indirect causes. That still leaves 250,000 dead Americans from the China virus. This is a war.

The same logic applies to masks. There are questions about their effectiveness. But as a non-scientist, I always take precautions and try to avoid the risk. I wear a mask as a result of common sense and common courtesy. The key point, documented by victims and front-line health care workers, is that the virus has unique characteristics, unlike the traditional flu, that enables it to attack weak and vulnerable people. These are real people getting very sick and dying.

As Trump repeatedly said, it is the China virus. It seems to be more infectious than the ordinary flu and leaves some victims unable to breathe, smell, or taste.

One man who knew a lot about communist disinformation techniques was Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West. The former head of Romanian intelligence, he wrote a book about communist disinformation with Ronald J. Rychlak, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Their book was titled Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.

Pacepa recently died of Covid-19 and blamed China for spreading the disease, with Rychlak telling me, “Pacepa took the threat of the virus seriously. He and his 92-year-old wife tried to avoid the risk as best they could. The virus prevented at least one, probably two meetings, he and I would have had over the past year. It also stopped my research in Rome for the second edition of Disinformation that we were working on.”

The further irony with some conservatives casting doubt on the nature of the virus is that many of them hold liberal governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York responsible for spreading the disease into nursing homes, killing thousands. They can’t have it both ways – either it’s a hoax and the presence of the virus in the nursing homes was of no consequence, or it’s a deadly killer that put thousands of old people into their graves prematurely. I believe the latter is the case and that Cuomo and other governors have to be held accountable.

I have done shows on the unreliability of the Covid-19 tests and the effectiveness of the masks or vaccines. I have done many America’s Survival TV shows on these topics. But I have never doubted that the virus is a real one that came from China.

The kind of work Pacepa and Rychlak conducted on disinformation carried out by the Soviet Union helps us understand how claims about the coronavirus can mislead and confuse people.

Under Trump, the Pentagon and the State Department began focusing on the ongoing COVID-19 disinformation campaigns of China, Russia, and Iran. One report, “Axis of Disinformation: Propaganda from Iran, Russia, and China on COVID-19,” was written by researchers associated with U.S. Central Command’s Information Operations Division and documents how the claims advanced by these three countries are all designed to take attention away from the Chinese origin of the virus. Generally speaking, these regimes insist that the U.S., rather than China, made the virus as a biological weapon.

Rychlak said, “Pacepa often said that people often think of spies as stealing ideas, but the worst harm they inflict is by planting false stories – especially those false stories that cause people to question their institutions, history, and heroes. (By ‘institutions’ we mean governments and churches.) Sometimes all it takes is a counter-narrative. Thus, after the JFK assassination, Soviet disinformation experts worked to convince Americans that the CIA was to blame. Convicting the CIA was not the aim; making people look away from Soviet involvement was. I see a lot of similarities between that effort (Operation Dragon) and disinformation surrounding the China virus.”

I have written on the topic of disinformation for decades. My sources have included people like Pacepa, with whom I corresponded via email, and Herb Romerstein, who worked for the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency under President Reagan.

To cite another example of the problem, as documented in the Pacepa-Rychlak book, former Senator John Kerry, now Joe Biden’s “Climate Czar,” was a dupe who parroted communist disinformation about the U.S. military effort to keep South Vietnam free from communism.

For his part, Herb Romerstein helped unmask a liberal icon, I.F. Stone, as a Soviet agent, and exposed Senator Ted Kennedy’s collaboration with the Soviet KGB.

It’s true that U.S. intelligence agencies and political leaders have become corrupted to the point where they accept and promote communist disinformation, such as in the case of the Russian dossier that was used against Trump. But that doesn’t mean that actual disinformation campaigns emanating from our enemies do not exist. They do, and the China virus campaign is one of them.

Early into this crisis, I authored a column “Coronavirus, China’s Lies, and Bioweapons Research,” noting “In making the charge that the Chinese coronavirus originated in the United States, the Chinese have taken a page out of the old Soviet playbook. As concern about AIDS was growing in the 1980s, the Soviet Union launched a disinformation campaign charging that an American military laboratory had developed the virus that caused HIV/AIDS.”

Since the Soviets were lying in order to cover up their own biological weapons program, I wondered if this was the Chinese motivation, too. It’s a logical assumption.

That is not to say that questions about a U.S. connection to the virus are illegitimate. There is evidence that U.S. agencies are linked to American and Chinese scientists working on dangerous biological experiments in China, described as “gain-of-function” research designed to make viruses more transmissible and fatal.

What is lacking is a thorough investigation, with results disseminated to the American people and the world, about all those whose fingerprints can be found in connection with this disease.

We know we are not going to get the truth from the UN’s World Health Organization and the China Joe administration.

If Trump wants to do something with major and lasting importance in his post-presidency, let him campaign for the truth about – and urge consequences for – China’s biological research.

Equally important, as we debate masks and lockdowns, what are we going to do to prevent another killer virus from being unleashed by China on the world?