Jeff Stein
Denis Kaufman, a former top infectious diseases analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s obscure National Center for Medical Intelligence, says that the conspiracy theory circling the Internet that China invented the Covid-19 virus as a biological warfare weapon is, well, stupid.
“There's a spectrum of hypotheses about where it came from and why it got released,” Kaufman said in a SpyTalk podcast interview this week with co-host Jeanne Meserve.
“I think you can take almost all of this idea that this was some kind of nefarious action off the table,” Kaufman said.
“It would probably rank, in terms of monumental stupidity, as high as you could get—to release an organism that you have no countermeasures against, that was highly infectious, highly dangerous and highly lethal.”
The wave of misinformation and spread of deliberate disinformation about Covid-19 is worrying, Kaufman added, not just because of the staying power of the current pandemic but because it will undermine defenses against the next virus.
“Unless we get our act together and figure out how to stop the disinformation, how to silence people who are spreading lies,” the next virus will flourish, Kaufman said.
The podcast also featured an interview with former FBI Special Agent Mike German, deployed undercover with American Nazis in the 1990s, who cited several shortcomings in the Bureau’s current approach to dealing with violent domestic extremists.
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