'An outrage': Biden admin hid report of US service members getting sick at Wuhan military games in October 2019



Nearly 10,000 athletes from over 109 countries traveled to Wuhan, China, to compete in the 7th Military World Games from October 18 to October 28, 2019.

Participants from various nations, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg, reported taking ill with COVID-like symptoms at or after the games — a damning coincidence granted the games took place near the suspected origin of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous experiments were long performed with poor safety protocols on coronaviruses.

The Biden administration apparently sat on a December 2022 report indicating that some of the 263 members of the U.S. delegation who attended the games may have also caught COVID-19 or something just like it months before the supposed zoonotic leap at a wet market.

By concealing the document, the administration effectively left the public with then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby's 2021 assertion to the Washington Post that there was no knowledge of American infections at the games and no evidence to indicate U.S. military personnel were infected before travel restrictions were implemented in early 2020.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included a requirement that former President Joe Biden's then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin submit to congressional lawmakers a report on the military games detailing:

  • the number of American athletes and staff "who attended the 2019 World Military Games and became ill with COVID-19-like symptoms during or shortly after their return to the United States";
  • the results of any blood testing done on American participants;
  • the number of home station Pentagon facilities of participating members that experienced outbreaks in early 2020; and
  • whether the Pentagon discussed the illnesses surrounding the games with other militaries.

In addition to disclosing such information to the House and Senate armed services committees, the NDAA required that the Biden administration make the report publicly available.

'It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information.'

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration refrained from releasing the report to the public, and it wasn't until March 2025 when the Trump administration uploaded it to the Defense Department website that the document became widely accessible.

Contrary to Kirby's suggestion that there was no knowledge or evidence of infection, the Pentagon concluded that of the 263 total American participants in the game — of whom 2019 were military personnel — seven service members "exhibited COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms during the timeframe of October 18, 2019, through January 21, 2020."

Members of the U.S. delegation to the games were not tested for COVID-19 or antibodies "as testing was not available at this early stage of the pandemic," so there is apparently no definitive proof these were indeed COVID-19 infections.

The report indicated the symptoms could have been caused by other respiratory infections and that all seven infected service members' symptoms resolved within six days.

The report noted further that there was "no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them."

Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University told the Free Beacon, "It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information when it became available in 2022, but, instead, withheld this information for the duration of their terms."

"This new information strengthens U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan in October-November 2019, U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that researchers working with genetically enhanced SARS viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology contracted COVID-19 in October-November 2019, and phylogenomic data indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 entered humans in July-November 2019," added Ebright.

Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa) told the Free Beacon that the report helped put a nail in the coffin of the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

"Taxpayers deserve to know the truth about COVID-19 origins, but the Biden administration concealed this information from the American people for years," said Ernst. "This report should have been made public immediately and not restricted to Washington insiders. If Americans visiting Wuhan were potentially infected with the COVID-19 virus in October 2019, those claiming the pandemic began in a wet market just two months later would be completely off base."

Ahead of the games — as early as August 2019 — hospitals in the region were apparently overwhelmed with an unseasonably high number of patients, while regional queries for the terms "diarrhea" and "cough" spiked on China's equivalent of Google.

An American researcher and several European researchers noted their suspicions in a September 2022 study that the Wuhan games "may have contributed to the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2" but indicated that "no official information has been made available despite reports that some foreign participants experienced Covid-19-compatible symptoms that were attributed to influenza or gastroenteritis."

French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx, German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock, and Italian fencer Matteo Tagliariol also indicated they and/or members of their team got sick while in Wuhan.

Brock indicated in early 2020 that "after a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days."

"I have never felt so sick," continued Brock. "Either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19."

Tagliariol told Corriere della Sera, "When we arrived in Wuhan, almost all of us got sick. But the worst was returning home. After a week I had a very high fever, I felt like I couldn't breathe."

Canadian military sources told the Financial Post in 2021 that one service member reported feeling "very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia."

Scores of Canadian athletes were apparently placed in isolation on their 12-hour flight home at the end of October. The athletes' symptoms included coughing and diarrhea.

The Canadian Department of National Defense told Blaze News last year that "some athletes experienced gastrointestinal symptoms on the flight to Wuhan for the Military World Games and during the return flight home to Canada."

"Their symptoms and illness course of one to three days were consistent with gastrointestinal illness, or a 'stomach flu,' and were managed as such," said a spokeswoman for the National Defense Department.

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‘I, Pencil’ defined free trade — Trump’s tariffs are writing the sequel



On Sept. 17, 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in the hands and pockets of alleged Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and Syria. Intelligence sources believe the Israeli government carried out the operation in retaliation for the terrorist attacks committed on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli agents reportedly intercepted the devices — manufactured overseas — and modified their batteries to include small amounts of explosives. However one feels about this novel form of retaliation, it serves as an explosive reminder of how critical a country’s supply lines are to national security.

Trump understands that reindustrialization is more than an economic policy. It’s a national imperative.

For decades, the global liberal economic order has operated on the assumption that nations could stretch supply chains across the world to maximize efficiency and profit — with little risk. Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil” illustrated the idea, celebrating how no single person or country could manufacture a pencil alone. It highlighted how markets, when left to coordinate production across borders, could reach extraordinary levels of efficiency.

If global trade remained stable and secure, national self-sufficiency seemed unnecessary. Countries could rely on the global market to supply even critical goods — so long as the U.S. Navy kept shipping lanes open. Under Pax Americana, the thinking went, every nation could specialize in what it did best and enjoy the shared prosperity of free trade.

The global trade system rested on the assumption that American military dominance would continue indefinitely. That belief led to some baffling choices.

A shocking share of goods essential to U.S. national security are produced almost entirely in China — including antibiotics and components used in American military hardware. The idea that a country would rely on semiconductors from its primary geopolitical rival to launch a missile defies basic strategic logic. Yet that is exactly what the United States has done.

Defense contractors have prioritized profit, operating under the assumption that global trade is both reliable and free from political risk.

While this approach always carried serious risks, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed its full recklessness. Fears of contagion and widespread labor shortages disrupted global trade, causing economic shocks and widespread shortages of consumer goods.

More urgently, the pandemic revealed that critical medical supplies — such as ventilators — were largely manufactured in China, where the virus originated. Despite this wake-up call, the United States has yet to reshore production of many essential medicines. Yet we still rely heavily on China for antibiotics and other critical pharmaceuticals.

The pandemic and Israel’s pager attack made one thing clear: The era of supply chains divorced from security concerns is over — if it ever truly existed.

The global liberal economic order operated on the assumption that American dominance would go unchallenged. Under that model, it seemed economically irrational for any country to sabotage goods it sold to the United States. Nations believed they could depend entirely on foreign production because the reach of American power would keep economic exchanges politically neutral.

But Israel didn’t manufacture the pagers that wound up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives. It simply accessed the supply chain and modified those devices. These weren’t weapons or advanced military systems. By tapping into the logistics of basic consumer electronics, Israel was able to inflict serious damage on its enemy.

This illustrates the core vulnerability of today’s trade model.

Donald Trump has long argued that Americans are getting a raw deal in the current global economic system. While the United States has embraced free trade, many of our allies — including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel — have maintained protective tariffs.

Meanwhile, China has benefited from open access to U.S. markets despite its use of centralized planning, currency manipulation, and widespread intellectual property theft.

Trump has made clear that his goal is to reverse this imbalance. For both economic and national security reasons, he intends to use tariffs to secure better trade agreements and bring as much manufacturing as possible back to the United States.

Some disgruntled mainstream conservatives — particularly at publications like National Review — have joined leftist politicians and media voices in sounding the alarm over efforts to build an economic order that prioritizes U.S. interests. For many neoconservatives, free trade has become a kind of orthodoxy. They treat economic predictability — even within a broken system — as more important than restoring national sovereignty.

NeverTrump conservatives often dismiss the president’s trade agenda as outdated or uninformed. They mock his focus on reviving the American middle class. Among the D.C. elite, working- and middle-class Americans from “fly-over” states are often treated as relics of the past — easily replaced by foreign labor in a gig-based, service economy.

But Trump understands that reindustrialization is more than an economic policy. It’s a national imperative.

Tariffs once funded nearly the entire federal government. Now, Trump is attempting something unprecedented: using tariffs strategically within a modern, globalized economy. This may ultimately fail — but it’s clear to anyone paying attention that the current model is collapsing. Staying on the same path leads only to a slower, more orderly decline.

Political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli warned that the boldest reforms bring the fiercest opposition. A leader who proposes a new system will face resistance from all who benefited under the old one and enjoy only lukewarm support from those uncertain about the future.

If Trump succeeds, he will have demonstrated vision and resilience in the face of a system deeply hostile to him. If he fails, history may view him as the man who delivered an already-ailing economy to an early grave.

What remains clear is this: Every nation that hopes to endure must learn how to secure its supply chains. That process will demand serious reindustrialization. The era of security-neutral trade is ending fast — and those guided by short-term indicators instead of long-term national interest may not survive what comes next.

Trump Backs Sununu's Prospective Senate Bid and Top Dems Change Their Tune on Biden's Decline

All love on AF1: Former New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu recently teased a prospective run for the Granite State's open Senate seat, indicating he had "no doubt" Donald Trump would support him if he entered the race. The Free Beacon's Jon Levine was aboard Air Force One traveling back from Florida with Trump on Sunday, so he asked the president: Is that true?

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Biden Administration Concealed Congressionally Mandated Report on Earliest Suspected American COVID Cases

Seven Americans may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan in October 2019, several months before the reported start of the pandemic, according to a bombshell military report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden administration concealed from the public.

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New York Times charts prove COVID panic's permanent damage



Five years after the world stopped and lockdowns began, shocking New York Times data reveals that the COVID-19 panic left permanent scars on America’s economy.

“Remember, that 2020 to 2022 period was a dark economic time, right? It was really, really terrible, and it lasted a long, long time until it came ‘back to normal.’ But the chart can’t even detect those changes any more because COVID broke the chart,” Stu Burguiere of “Stu Does America” comments.

And while many things did go “back to normal,” some things have stayed at COVID levels for five years now.

“Some things changed around the country and never got back to normal. And this is the stuff we really lost because of not only COVID, but the government response to COVID,” Stu explains.


The New York Times charts reveal that used car prices are one of these things that never went back to baseline. The used car market had been reasonable before and at the beginning of COVID, before spiking like crazy up to February 2022. While it has dropped slightly, it’s still far above pre-COVID levels.

“And then this is probably one of the more sad examples of what we lost during COVID,” Stu says. “Third through eighth-graders and their test scores. This is just a way of measuring academic performance, it’s not necessarily just about whether they get lower scores or not, but you see a massive drop-off.”

On average, these students have fallen quite behind in reading and math — but depending on where they go to school, that changes slightly.

“Red states opened early, got their kids back to school. Their decreases are much less punishing to the kids when it comes to academic performance than it is in blue states,” Stu explains.

Even sadder is the chart revealing socialization.

“This was decreasing anyway, before we got to the COVID period, and then we saw a massive drop-off in 2020 by about 25% of the time you’re normally socializing with others. That drops by 25% in 2020 and has stayed low,” Stu says.

“We have now lost a massive percentage of the time that we actually spend with other human beings,” he continues. “That’s bad. Spending all your time online and not spending time with actual people is really, really, bad.”

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Trump And RFK Should Accelerate Inexpensive Treatments For Long Covid And Other Diseases

Generic drugs can combat an array of chronic diseases, but only if the Trump administration creates a structured, interdisciplinary study of these drugs.

Inside the Country’s Largest COVID Fraud. Plus, Inside Israel’s Revamped War Plan.

Feeding our fraud: It took jurors less than five hours to convict Aimee Bock and Salim Said on 28 counts of wire fraud, federal programs bribery, money laundering, and related conspiracy counts in the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, dubbed "the shame of Minnesota" by assistant U.S. attorney Joe Thompson. Altogether a cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants stole some $250 million from the state-administered federal child nutrition program—the largest pandemic fraud in the country. How'd they do it? Minneapolis's own Scott Johnson explains:

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COVID hit, the city froze, but I found God’s grace



Five years ago today, I became a Christian.

There wasn’t much ceremony — a lovely Episcopal parish church in Brooklyn, just me and the priest. Save God himself, nobody else was there. COVID-19 had come to town.

'Dovie,' a friend texted me, 'you might die. You need to get this done.' He was not wrong.

Have you ever seen time stand still? It looks like something out of “The Flash”: You’re moving, slowly, but everything around you comes to a halt. Or it looks like the end of a zombie flick, with the streets bare save a few straggling survivors. It’s eerie.

Eerie is how I’d describe hearing the voicemail of one of my closest friends from college, saying goodbye. Eerie is how I’d describe visiting that friend in the psych ward after the suicide attempt thankfully failed. Your blood runs cold, and the wall between life and death becomes very porous indeed.

You see Hades in those moments. But I saw something else: God, Jesus Christ, calling me to come to a new home. His home. The church.

I began to go to an Episcopal church in Brooklyn that a close friend of mine had recommended to me. I’d visited churches before, to enjoy the music and community. But before 2019, becoming a parishioner, becoming a Christian, that was never going to happen.

Former Orthodox Jews don't become Christians. That’s no knock on the People of the Book — Christ and the apostles were Jews, as were some great saints. But if a Jewish fellow today wants to be edgy, he becomes an atheist. If he wants to believe in something, he becomes a Buddhist. Christianity is, generally, off the cultural radar.

But who was I to say no? A vague belief in a higher power wasn’t the God I was beginning to know and love again in a new way. My time at the church, going to services every Sunday, started to burn faith into my soul like a cattle brand. After several months, I spoke with the rector, and we decided on an Easter baptism. Then, COVID-19 hit.

“Dovie,” a friend texted me, “you might die. You need to get this done.” Blunt as he was, that’s not wrong. My disability doesn’t just have me in a wheelchair — it significantly weakens my lungs. I’ve nearly died of pneumonia a few times.

I texted the pastor, and he agreed that on Sunday, March 22, 2020, I would be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so it was. At the appointed time, I wheeled into the small side chapel, and after an hour or so, came out a Christian.

That evening, the governor of New York put the city under a stay-at-home order. The next day, I woke up with a bad case of COVID-19. The world hurt; the city was still. But I was alive, and I was in his grace.

Two years later, I’d be confirmed as a Roman Catholic, and I’d truly be home. But that’s a story for another day.

Cori Bush's husband accused of stuffing his pockets with taxpayer cash intended for struggling businesses



Before Cori Bush's Democrat voters denied her a third term in Congress, the former Squad member and Black Lives Matter activist talked a big game about fighting corruption. It turns out her household may have been a good place to start.

The former Missouri congresswoman's husband, Cortney Merritts, was charged Thursday with two counts of wire fraud for allegedly filing bogus applications with the Small Business Administration in order to fill his pockets with cash intended for struggling businesses.

According to the federal indictment, from July 2020 to April 2021, Merritts allegedly "devised, intended to devise, and participated in a scheme and artifice to obtain money and property, in connection with [the Small Business Administration's Economic Injury Disaster Loans program] and [Paycheck Protection Program] funds, by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, with the intent to defraud and with the knowledge of the scheme's fraudulent nature."

Over this period, Merritts allegedly collected over tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds "for his own benefit and enjoyment."

The Department of Justice indicated that the alleged scheme started in earnest when Merritts received a $8,500 EIDL loan from the Small Business Administration on July 7, 2020, for a moving business he ran called Vetted Couriers. Bush's husband allegedly claimed in his application for the loan that he had six employees and made $32,000 in gross revenue between January 2019 and January 2020.

'We look forward to litigating this case in the courtroom.'

The next day, Merritts allegedly filed another application for an EIDL loan in the name of a sole proprietorship called "Cortney Merritts." This time, he claimed to have a business that employed 10 people and made $53,000 in gross revenue the previous year. Merritts apparently even asked for a $10,000 advance on the loan. This application was rejected because the SBA indicated it was virtually identical to Merritts' previous submission.

According to the indictment, Bush's husband — evidently undeterred by the SBA growing wise to his efforts — tried hitting the government up for more cash in April 2021, applying for a PPP loan in the name of his sole proprietorship.

The indictment alleged that in his application, Merritts falsely claimed that he created the business in 2020 and that it generated $128,000 in gross income that year. He ended up with with a $20,832 PPP loan, which was ultimately forgiven by the SBA because Bush's husband allegedly stated he spent the money on payroll costs for his supposed 10 employees.

An attorney for Bush's husband said he plans to plead not guilty, reported the Washington Post.

"We look forward to litigating this case in the courtroom," said attorney Justin Gelfand.

While Bush was not mentioned in the indictment, she has previously faced accusations of misusing federal and campaign funds — in some cases for Merritts' benefit.

The "defund the police" Democrat used her congressional campaign budget to blow $812,000 on suspicious private security services and paid over $150,000 to her husband, reported the Washington Free Beacon. Bush continued paying her husband $5,000 in campaign funds monthly for "security services" even after the DOJ launched an investigation into her expenditures.

A complaint filed against Bush alleged that despite receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from her for security services, Merritts had not bothered to acquire private security licenses in the St. Louis or Washington, D.C., regions. The complaint was ultimately dismissed by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

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Four more years (it's only fair)

Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist and federal inmate, made a startling prediction this week during an interview with Chris Cuomo, the former CNN host best known for giggling with his big brother, former New York governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, while COVID-19 was ravaging the state's nursing homes. "I'm a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028," Bannon said. "A man like this comes along once every century, if we're lucky."

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