The Talented Mr. Pottinger: The US Intelligence Agent Who Pushed Lockdowns

In 1948, the US House of Representatives received a tip from a man named Whittaker Chambers that several federal officials had been working for the communists. One of these officials was more than happy to appear before Congress to clear his name-a leading State Department and United Nations representative named Alger Hiss.

The next year, intelligence leaks from the federal service led to the Soviet Union's first successful nuclear test, ending the security afforded by America's nuclear monopoly 15 years earlier than experts expected.

• Shortly thereafter, Kim Il-Sung and Chairman Mao used the cover of Soviet nuclear weapons to invade South Korea.

Matt Pottinger pushed for alarm, shutdowns, mandates, and science from China in the early months of COVID-19

• Became a leading protagonist in three different pro-lockdown books on America’s response to COVID
• The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright
• Nightmare Scenario by Yasmeen Abutaleb
• Chaos Under Heaven by Josh Rogin
• Deputy National Security Advisor, second only to Robert O’Brien
• Called meetings and ratcheted up alarm about the new coronavirus in the White House

The next morning, January 28, 2020, Pottinger says he spoke to a doctor in China who told him the new coronavirus would be as bad as the 1918 Spanish flu, and that half the cases were asymptomatic

• Blocking travel from China would be an unprecedented intervention
• And over what? Five cases of sniffles in the United States?

As Deputy National Security Advisor, Pottinger was supposed to "avoid arguing forcefully for any particular outcome," so he brought Peter Navarro to make his arguments for him

• In an awkward position
• he needed someone else to make the more pointed parts of his argument for him. Someone who would stand up to everyone else in the room unflinchingly.

Pottinger had been waiting for an opening

• He told his colleagues that he had come across some alarming information: Chinese officials were no longer able to contact trace the virus
• It was so widespread that they couldn't determine where people had contracted it
• And he relayed the Chinese suspicions about asymptomatic spread: people who seemed perfectly healthy were transmitting the virus, not just in China but potentially everywhere, including the United States.
• Mulvaney couldn't believe what he was witnessing

Pottinger pushed for mask mandates in the White House and for staff to be quarantined if they traveled outside Washington

• He advocated for Americans to adopt universal masking in response to the coronavirus based on recommendations from his own sources in China
• A mask could significantly stem transmission
• If people’s noses and mouths were covered, they would emit far fewer respiratory droplets, lowering the risk of infecting others

Popularizing Shutdowns

• Pottinger popularized shutdowns within the White House using a dubious study on the 1918 flu pandemic comparing outcomes between Philadelphia and St. Louis during the 1918 Spanish flu
• He began circulating this study among his White House colleagues on January 31, 2020
• Appointing Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator
• Started a months-long campaign for lockdowns

When she became head of the CDC's Division of Global HIV/AIDS, one of her subordinates was a bright virologist named Yen Duong, who developed a widely used HIV test while working at the agency.

• Duong would eventually marry a Wall Street Journal reporter turned marine turned Trump advisor, Matt Pottinger, who pleaded with her over several weeks to head the Coronavirus Task Force, and she reluctantly agreed
• She then embarked on a months-long, largely clandestine, scorched-earth crusade to orchestrate lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible across the United States.

How to Fight the Spread

• Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start
• However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude
• He didn't have the numbers in front of him to make the case for extending it longer

Promoting mass testing

• Pottinger promoted within the White House the idea of mass testing for coronavirus.
• At a Coronavirus Task Force meeting, Redfield announced that the CDC would send a limited number of test kits to five "sentinel cities."
• Five cities? Why not send them everywhere?

Endorsing Remdesivir

• In March 2020, Pottinger appears to have endorsed use of the drug remdisivir as a possible Covid therapy based on information from a doctor in China.
• The health outcomes of remdesiviral remain unknown, but no benefit to the mortality of its recipients has been proven.

Pushing Intelligence to Believe Covid Came From a Lab

• Pottinger has continually promoted the idea that the coronavirus came from a lab, and specifically prodded the US intelligence community to do the same, regardless of evidence, while urging the global adoption of China's virus containment measures.
• Although the national security community has quietly admitted Covid is not genetically modified, it began spreading undetected globally many months before lockdowns, and it did not cause Wuhan residents spontaneously die, the question of whether Covid came from the lab would appear to be a moot point from a national security perspective.

 

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-talented-mr-pottinger-the-us-intelligence-agent-who-pushed-lockdowns/