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Novichok isn't a great example here because "looks like an accident" was not on the design objectives list for Novichok; they're standard nerve agents - AChE inhibitors - and those have distinctive symptoms. You examine a Novichok victim, you can immediately identify him as "killed by nerve agent"; you can't tell exactly which nerve agent from a cursory exam, but that's not happening naturally so it's obviously funny business.
There are ways to fake natural causes, though, at least to a cursory exam; Havana syndrome suggests microwave beams are hard to detect as foul play, for instance. So the point stands - Novichok's just not an example of it.
Fair enough, you’re right that it’s a bad example!
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Gosh, if Trump got killed by a nerve agent, we'd probably have a crazy scenario where the government and his family were fighting over the body.
While it's possible that a nerve agent (or something like it) could withstand careful scrutiny by an advanced team, it would be easy to just find some county coroner in Maryland to take a cursory look and pronounce it a heart attack or whatever.
Havana syndrome is fake, right?
People are starting to think it might be real again (at least partially; obviously there exist psychogenic cases).
The dubiousness is pretty much my point, though; you couldn't have this kind of wide-open question if microwave weapons left obvious fingerprints, because they'd be obviously there or obviously not.
As someone who was tracking the story from the start, long before the term "Havana syndrome" was coined to discredit it, it seems pretty obvious to me that it was a real advanced weapon, the feds didn't actually want the public to know about it for some reason (it was presumably one of their own secrets, not an enemy secret - maybe something that got stolen or misused), and they eventually decided to feign an episode of mass hysteria as a coverup.
I knew some people involved in the workup and analysis on the medical side. They could be wrong, but they were convinced it was real. I've been out of touch with the relevant people for awhile so I don't know if the recent developments convinced them otherwise, but I do know that the "government" involved major research institutions in looking into this in a way that was a. too expensive to be a psyop, b. semi public, and therefore c. legible to foreign actors that they were actually investigating.
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