The True Origin of SARS‑CoV‑2 (Covid-19)

nivek

As Above So Below
China's state media INVENTED 'Swiss biologist' who 'claimed America had pressured WHO into investigating Wuhan COVID lab leak theory'

China's state media allegedly invented a Swiss biologist and quoted him claiming the US had pressured the World Health Organisation into investigating the theory Covid-19 was leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

The People's Daily, China Daily, and CGTN television channel all quoted so-called biologist Wilson Edwards but removed the content yesterday after the Swiss Embassy said it had no record of him as a citizen.

Beijing has repeatedly pushed claims the US pressured the WHO to investigate the possibility Covid-19 was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, where the virus was first found in December 2019.

China has insisted a leak would have been 'extremely unlikely' citing the conclusion reached by a joint WHO-Chinese mission to Wuhan in January.

Edwards was quoted by state media terming the WHO investigation a 'political tool' and saying the 'international scientific community' was 'disappointed' in the US.

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The People's Daily reported Edwards told them: 'Unfortunately, Washington's re-entry has brought geopolitical competition to the science-spearheaded world body'

China Daily reported Edwards' Facebook post, quoting him as saying 'as a biologist, I've witnessed in consternation over the past months how the origin-tracing of Covid-19 was politicized'.

The article added Edwards branded the WHO's probe was 'largely politically motivated', without elaborating.

While state-run television channel CGTN reported Edwards said he was worried about the 'WHO's independence' and claimed the group of investigators probing the origin of Covid-19 would become a 'political tool'.

CGTN said Edwards claimed he and fellow researchers were under 'enormous pressure' and 'intimidation' from the US and some media outlets after voicing support for the joint WHO-Chinese investigation which in January concluded a lab leak was extremely unlikely.

The state-run television outlet also reported Edwards quoted an unnamed WHO sources as saying 'the US is so obsessed with attacking China on the origin-tracing issue that it is reluctant to open its eyes to the data and findings'.

Edwards had Facebook and Twitter accounts - both of which have since been deleted - which peddled claims the US pressured the WHO.

His Facebook page was created on July 24, boasted three friends, and had only one post which said President Joe Biden would 'spare no efforts' to rebuild US influence over the WHO.

The page indicated Edwards was from the Swiss capital Bern and included a picture of Oxford University's Radcliffe Camera, but provided no further details about the so-called biologist.

Both pages were deleted after the Swiss Embassy's statement yesterday which said they were 'looking for Wilson Edwards'. If you exist, we would like to meet you!', the embassy wrote on Twitter.

The Embassy said it could not find any academic articles authored by Edwards, pointed out his Facebook page was created only days before he was quoted in Chinese state media, and said there was no registry of a citizen with the name.

'It is more likely that this is fake news, and we call on the Chinese press and netizens to take down the posts,' it added.

(More on the link)

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Non smoking gun

Honorable
'Compelling evidence' Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, explosive documentary concludes
Wuhan ‘lab leak’: Explosive Channel 4 documentary provides compelling evidence supporting Covid origin theory
The documentary, which featured several eminent scientists, pretty much stated it came out of the Wuhan lab.
The gist was when a organism jumps species, in the first month it mutates to become more infectious in that species.
Not the case with Covid.
It was also stated the lab was doing controversial 'gain of function' work on it'. GOF is where, to anticipate future threats, an organism is enhanced. The lab had funding from the US, Europe and China for this and was only using level 2 security protocols.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
US cash funded controversial Wuhan virus lab where research to make diseases more deadly was backed by Dr. Fauci, claims new book

The US was funding China's controversial Wuhan laboratory as it embarked on a secretive project to identify deadly viruses with pandemic potential, a new book has claimed. According to What Really Happened in Wuhan: the Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research, by Sharri Markson, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was creating a database of potentially lethal viruses with the help of Shi Zhengli - aka 'batwoman'.

Ms Zhengli, who earned her nickname sampling thousands of bats in remote caves, collected 19,000 samples while at Wuhan, with 2,481 of those containing coronaviruses. Her work was all part of China's own version of the Global Virome Project (GVP). The GVP was supposed to be an international collaborative effort to identify within 10 years all of the planet's viruses which have pandemic or epidemic potential in humans.

But during a visit to the Wuhan institute in March 2018, US career diplomat Rick Switzer - alongside US consul-general Jamie Fouss - found that China had launched its own version - in a lab with poor safety practices and no US oversight. And in a cable sent to the State Department in April, Mr Switzer made clear how the National Institutes of Health (NIH), headed by Dr Anthony Fauci, was funding the research at the lab - which included experimenting with coronaviruses.

The cable read: 'NIH was a major funder, along with the National Science Foundation of China, of Sars research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.' It added: 'In the last year, the institute has also hosted visits from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation and experts from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.'

The Galveston branch also trained Wuhan lab technicians while the US National Science Foundation had just finished a workshop with the Wuhan Institute in Shenzhen involving 40 scientists from the US and China. But despite the US's help in funding and training the lab and its technicians, few international researchers were welcome to work inside the facility.

'Institute officials said there would be "limited availability" for international and domestic scientists who had gone through the necessary approval process to do research at the lab,' Switzer's cable stated.

In his book, Markson commented: 'So a laboratory working with the most lethal pathogens known to humankind had effectively cut off collaboration with the international community.' When the coronavirus pandemic emerged in late 2019, the work of the lab and Zhengli in particular came under intense scrutiny - with many, including US President Donald Trump, suggesting the institute was the source of the Covid-19 outbreak. Zhengli would address the claims in February 2020, saying: 'Those who believe and spread rumours, shut your dirty mouth.'

In a post on WeChat, China's version of Twitter, she added that Covid-19 was 'nature’s punishment for uncivilised living habits of human beings.' She added: 'I, Shi Zhengli, use my life to guarantee that it has nothing to do with our lab.' Zhengli had been conducting controversial 'gain-of-function' research, which attempts to make viruses more infectious and deadly, often to humans.

It has been carried out by researchers across the world, who say it helps predict pandemics by identifying viruses which can become infectious to human beings - allowing them to pre-emptively start work on vaccines and medicines. But the Cambridge Working Group, made up of 200 scientists, released a letter in 2014 warning of the risks involved in the work. They wrote: 'Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks.

'An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. 'Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.'

The US even halted such research in 22 fields in 2014, with the White House saying in a statement on October 17 of that year: 'During this pause, the US government will not fund any new projects involving these experiments and encourages those currently conducting this type of work — whether federally funded or not — to voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed.'

Dr Fauci supported the move at the time, but argued: 'The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. 'It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature [than as a result of a laboratory accident or leak], and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.'

The pause on the research in the US was lifted in 2017. A year later, the Wuhan lab started working with live viruses. Prior to the pandemic, only two labs in the world were carrying out gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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nivek

As Above So Below
I think no matter the discussion outside of China concerning the true origins of this virus, China isn't going to allow a proper investigation inside their country...I also think China's refusal to cooperate only gives more credibility to the unnatural engineered origin theory...

In regards to this Lancet turn around, its too little too late unless this can uncover new information...

Now the Lancet U-turns over Covid lab leak theory and publishes 'alternative view' calling for a 'transparent debate' on the origins of the virus

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wwkirk

Divine
I think no matter the discussion outside of China concerning the true origins of this virus, China isn't going to allow a proper investigation inside their country...I also think China's refusal to cooperate only gives more credibility to the unnatural engineered origin theory...

In regards to this Lancet turn around, its too little too late unless this can uncover new information...

Now the Lancet U-turns over Covid lab leak theory and publishes 'alternative view' calling for a 'transparent debate' on the origins of the virus

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First climate change (or global warming), now all the Covid -related topics. A tragedy unfolding over the last decade or so is the politicization of science.* This is very dangerous as it will become very difficult to know what to believe. Untold disasters could result because of this.


*Indeed, in the modern era, relatively little science has been altogether neutral in that it is dependent on grants either from governments or corporations. But the tendency towards lock-step narratives seems to have intensified recently.
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
My 14 year old thinks it was a Chinese bioweapon that got released.
God only knows when this will end.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
This is what I'm leaning towards as well, that it was an intentional release, China has many reasons for doing so...

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Chinese whistleblower claims first COVID outbreak was INTENTIONAL and happened in October 2019 at Military World Games in Wuhan - two months before China notified the world about virus



Ex-Chinese Communist Party insider Wei Jingsheng (left) told a shocking new documentary The World Military Games (top-right) in October 2019 could have acted as the virus' first superspreader event. The international tournament for military athletes was held in Wuhan - the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic - two months before China notified the World Health Organisation about its first cases. (pictured bottom-right are healthcare workers testing for the virus in China). Jingsheng claimed he had heard of the Chinese government carrying out an 'unusual exercise' during the games. '[I knew] of the possibility of the Chinese government using some strange weapons, including biological weapons, because I knew they were doing experiments of that sort,' he said. His claims were supported by the former Principal China Adviser to the US State Department Miles Yu. He said French, German and American athletes were among those to fall ill at the tournament with Covid-like symptoms, but were never tested for the virus.

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nivek

As Above So Below

nivek

As Above So Below
US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a brand new coronavirus at the Wuhan lab that became Covid Ground Zero before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show



US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus at a Wuhan lab before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.

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nivek

As Above So Below
This is a little lengthy but very informative...

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Is this finally proof China created Covid? Group of online sleuths fought to discover if the virus was engineered by scientists in Wuhan lab at the heart of probe into the pandemic's origins

In the city of Bhubaneswar, India, a man known as 'The Seeker' was rifling through a Chinese website.

It was May 18, 2020, and he was responding to a tweet by an American scientist speculating about the origin of the virus ripping its way across the planet.

And, using login details he'd found online, he was searching through a digital anthology of academic work called

Then, suddenly, he stumbled on a medical thesis which reported how, in 2012, six men fell ill after clearing out piles of bat guano from an old copper mine in Yunnan, in south-western China. Three of the men had died.

The doctors suspected the men had caught a virus that originated in bats, and the case had been investigated by virologists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), more than 1,000 miles away.

The Seeker, a slim 30-year-old with shoulder-length hair, has been accused variously of working for the CIA or Indian intelligence services. But the truth is rather less dramatic.

'I learned how to make search engines work for me,' he told us. 'It was more madness than method.'

Motivated by an interest in finding out how the pandemic began and skilled at trawling the internet for clues, he began communicating on Twitter with a group of other internet 'sleuths' from around the world — all pursuing the same question: where did the virus that causes Covid-19 originate?

Soon, some of the sleuths had coalesced into a loose confederation known as DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19). And more key findings were quick to follow.

On July 8, 2020, in response to another query on Twitter — this time from a technology consultant in Madrid, called Francisco de Ribera — The Seeker drew his attention to another database: the Chinese National Genomics Data Centre, known as BigD.


This intervention would prove essential to Ribera's search for details of the work of Chinese scientists. He knew that an old trick used by company auditors is to pay particular attention to serial numbers on invoices: a missing number likely indicates a missing document.

And so he started to assemble a huge spreadsheet of every virus sample ever referred to by WIV scientists in papers, seminars or their genetic databases. No small feat.

But by August 2020, with information from the BigD database, Ribera had discovered there were eight other viruses closely related to the one that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, that, he ascertained, must have been collected by Wuhan scientists in 2015 from that copper mine in Yunnan where those three men had died in 2012.

A rather important fact. And yet the corresponding documentation was missing. It was not until November 2020 that WIV scientists confirmed that Ribera was right.

Could it be that, from their separate isolation, the Seeker, Ribera and their fellow sleuths had just done more than the Chinese government, the Western scientific establishment and the World Health Organisation (WHO) combined to shed light on the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic?

In researching our new book, my co-author — Alina Chan, the U.S. scientist whose tweet attracted the crucial attention of The Seeker — and I think that how the pandemic started may well be the keenest mystery of our lifetime.

The saga will forever punctuate the history of humanity. It has led to the deaths of millions of people, sickened hundreds of millions and dramatically changed the lives of almost every person on the planet.

But perhaps most concerning: if we do not find out how it began, we are ill-equipped to prevent it happening again.

Until May 2021 — with rare exceptions such as the Mail's Ian Birrell — scientists, government officials, broadcasters and journalists all largely assumed as fact that a natural 'spillover' event from a wild animal was by far the most likely way the virus first infected a human.

In fact, members of the scientific establishment repeatedly insisted to journalists that any alternative theory of a laboratory leak was 'conspiracy theory', even while — we now know — in private they shared strong doubts.


The WHO took a year even to begin to investigate other theories — and when it did, their conclusions echoed a narrative favoured by Chinese authorities, that the virus may even have reached Wuhan on frozen food from a source outside China, and that a lab leak was 'extremely unlikely'.

A conclusion they reached without investigating that possibility.

Yet now, partly as a result of the ingenious work by the sleuths and after months of research, we have come to the conclusion that a laboratory leak may well have been the source of the pandemic.

We acknowledge that a natural origin theory still remains plausible and deserving of proper investigation.

We cannot know until China's government allows a full and credible investigation. However, thankfully, many routes of inquiry exist outside China's protectionist borders.

There is scientific consensus on one fact: that, in the beginning, an ancestor of Covid-19 must have existed in bats.

Close relatives of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been located in the wild and they are almost all found in horseshoe bats.

The SARS virus — which caused the 2003 epidemic — is a close cousin and also originated in horseshoe bats. With SARS, it quickly became clear that food handlers were among the first to be infected.

Palm civets, small cat-like animals that are farmed for the table in southern China, were found to be infecting people — though how they acquired a bat virus still remains unclear.

At first, it was assumed the same thing had happened this time, at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan where a majority of the early cases were reported among people who had been shopping or working there.

Yet, despite testing markets, farms and no fewer than 80,000 animal samples spanning dozens of species across China, no evidence has emerged for a similar chain of early 'zoonotic' infections — transmitted from animals to humans — in SARS-CoV-2. Hundreds of samples taken from animal carcasses at the market have all tested negative for any trace of the virus.

And while the Chinese authorities have not revealed the professions of those who were earliest infected, we know that several of them, including the first known cases, had no exposure to the market whatsoever.

It was in May 2020 when Alina discovered that, compared with the 2003 SARS virus which evolved rapidly in the early months as it adapted to human beings, the virus causing Covid-19 seemed — rather unusually — to be already well adapted to infecting human bodies from first detection in Wuhan.

So where did the virus first hone its acute ability to infect and transmit among people? Could it have been in a laboratory?

According to U.S. intelligence sources, three of the early Covid-19 cases were workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

We must ask, is it a coincidence that a bat-derived, SARS-like coronavirus showed up in the very city with the largest laboratory collection of bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses in the world and the most active research programme studying such viruses? And a city that is well over a thousand miles from the region in China where viruses like this are naturally found.

Indeed, Wuhan, in Hubei province, was not chosen as the site for this research because such viruses are found there naturally.

Thousands of bats sampled there have never turned up a related virus and, fortuitously, a survey before the pandemic had shown zero antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the general public of Wuhan.

In reality, WIV scientists led by Dr Shi Zhengli (now known in the media as 'Bat Woman'), regularly made the long trip to Yunnan and collected thousands of samples from both wild animals and humans for study back in Wuhan.

They did not always wear full protective gear as they handled thousands of bats, swabbing the animals' anuses and noses, and generally getting far closer to them than humans ever normally would.

Thanks to the sleuths, we now know (as we did not in February 2020), that Dr Shi's lab at the WIV was in possession of a batch of viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2 collected from that abandoned copper mine in Mojiang county, Yunnan, where those three workers had died with a SARS-like illness in 2012 after shovelling bat guano.

This mine is 1,171 miles (1,885 kilometres) from Wuhan by road, or as far as London is from Rome. The Wuhan scientists went there at least seven times between 2012 and 2015 to collect samples from bats.

And while we do not know if the visits continued beyond 2015, most of the viruses recorded by Dr Shi's lab pre-date 2016. We do not know what viruses they might have found between 2016 and 2019.

A cordon of secrecy also surrounds the mine itself. To this day Dr Shi and her colleagues have refused to confirm its exact location, though — again thanks to DRASTIC — it is no longer a secret.

It remains strictly off limits to foreigners and is heavily guarded. Journalists who have since tried to visit have been tailed, obstructed by supposedly broken-down vehicles, and even detained by Chinese police.

Hardly an approach that instils confidence in the innocence and irrelevance of the site.

WIV have also not been forthcoming with vital information about the viruses they collected while there, including what had been done with them back at the laboratory.

They actually changed the name of one virus, failed to disclose the existence of eight others for 11 months post-pandemic and implied that they had only worked on sequencing their genomes from 2020, when databases reveal they had been doing so since at least 2017.

By 2019 the WIV had a database with more than 22,000 wild animal samples collected in the search for never-seen-before pathogens mainly from southern China.

Strangely, that data became inaccessible to users outside the WIV on September 12, 2019, shortly before the pandemic, a fact discovered by another key sleuth, Britain's Charles Small.

To dispel rumours that SARS-CoV-2 was derived from one of their specimens, the WIV could have easily shared their data with other scientists. And their excuse that there had been 'hacking attempts' does not make much sense either.

Besides, what's the point of collecting viruses with pandemic potential if you hide the data when a pandemic actually occurs?

There is, however, a detailed record of the research conducted in Wuhan that hasn't been obscured. In paper after paper, the scientists laid bare a record of experiments on coronaviruses that were ingenious, comprehensive and largely successful.

They did not just bring viruses to the laboratory for storage; they sequenced their genomes, made 'infectious clones' of them, grew live viruses in cells and 'passaged' them through a range of laboratory-made 'cell lines' of different animal species and cell types.

They also synthesised and altered their DNA to insert specific sequences, then 'hybridised' (combined) some of them and used these hybrid 'chimera' viruses to infect human respiratory tract cells and mice genetically engineered to have human versions of genes.

The aim of these experiments was to understand the risk that each newly discovered virus posed and perhaps one day to devise a vaccine against all SARS-like viruses. But the work carried a risk of unintentionally generating a more virulent or infectious version of a virus.

Scientists have found bats carrying viruses related to SARS-CoV-2 in Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, Laos and eastern China but in all except one case these were more distantly related to the pandemic virus than the ones from the Mojiang mine.

Then, last month, and possibly bolstering the theory of natural origin, one virus from Laos called 'BANAL-52' was identified which has been shown to have the most similar 'spike' protein (the key that unlocks the door into cells) yet to that in SARS-CoV-2.

But — and this is key — even this virus cannot be the direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2: it lacks a crucial genetic sequence and one that some people think might even be a smoking gun.

We're talking about a genetic feature called the 'furin cleavage site'. It is this feature which enables the virus to make a crucial change in shape and so slip into different kinds of cells more easily: it is the very thing that makes Covid-19 so highly infectious.

Crucially, a furin cleavage site has never been seen in a SARS-like virus before.

So it is, at the very least, intriguing to discover that the practice of deliberately inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses has become a bit of a hobby in recent years among virologists — including those in Wuhan.

The purpose of such manipulation was to make it easier to grow the viruses in different animal cells in the lab.

And, in a collaboration between Dr Shi's WIV group and scientists in America, a furin cleavage site was engineered into a MERS-like coronavirus from a bat in 2015.

Yet, most oddly, when Dr Shi first described SARS-CoV-2's genome in January 2020, she diligently noted other minor features of the gene sequence but failed to mention this show-stopping, unique furin cleavage site.

A rather shocking omission by someone who had identified the importance of such a feature, and used it in her own genetic manipulation research.

It was left to other scientists in China, Canada and France to point out that this was the first SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site, which makes it so highly infectious.

Then, in September this year, DRASTIC made perhaps their biggest scoop yet — and it concerned this very feature of the virus.

They uncovered a grant proposal by Dr Shi's close friend and collaborator, Dr Peter Daszak, a British-born scientist who runs the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which funnels government funds into research on viruses in bats and other animals in Wuhan and elsewhere.

The proposal requested $14.2 million (£10.4 million) in March 2018 from the U.S. Department of Defense. The subcontractors included Dr Shi Zhengli.

The application was turned down, but it contained the first written statements by the EcoHealth Alliance that it and its collaborators had plans to genetically engineer novel cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses.

And yet Dr Daszak did not reveal this essential piece of information while orchestrating a letter to The Lancet in February 2020 insisting (without declaring his competing research interests) that scientists could already 'overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife'.

Dr Daszak was later named as part of the WHO's joint study panel in Wuhan.

Working with viruses in laboratories requires scientists to take precautions. At biosecurity 'level 4', researchers wear

pressurised suits; at 'level 3' they work through fixed gloves to reach inside sealed cabinets; at 'level 2' they sometimes only wear latex gloves.

Worryingly, Dr Shi has said that her experiments growing bat-borne viruses in human cells were carried out at biosecurity level 2, which is entirely inappropriate for protecting laboratory workers against an airborne virus as virulent as SARS-CoV-2.

And that is because research accidents do happen. In fact, they happen often, in some of the many laboratories worldwide.

Multiple accidental releases of influenza, SARS, anthrax, smallpox, foot-and-mouth, Marburg virus and other pathogens have occurred and continue to occur in even the most secure and well-run laboratories. It is an occupational hazard of such research.

There were at least four known laboratory leaks of SARS in 2003 and 2004, in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing. In one of the Beijing cases, the laboratory-acquired infection was only discovered a month after the fact.

Close to 1,000 people had to be quarantined, 11 fell ill and one, the researcher's mother, died.

SARS-CoV-2 is far more infectious than SARS and can spread among pre- or mildly symptomatic individuals, so it is a prime candidate for lab escape.

It is not surprising that the scientific establishment is uneasy with the fact that the world now faces the strong possibility that scientific research intended to avert a pandemic instead started one; that all WIV's collecting of viruses from bats, experimenting on them, altering them and then hiding the results, put humanity in harm's way.

And yet it seems the Chinese government, the western scientific establishment and the WHO show little urgency in seeking to find the truth that may help to avert future crises.

Still, with political will — and as the independent sleuths have shown — routes of investigation exist that would find out conclusively how this pandemic started.

We can but hope the truth will — one day — come out.

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VIRAL: The Search For The Origin Of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley is published by Fourth Estate on November 16 at £20. © Alina Chan and Matt Ridley 2021. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 13/11/21; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

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nivek

As Above So Below
Ground Zero?...

Canadian military officer calls for a probe into a ground zero 'Covid' outbreak at Wuhan games two months before world was alerted

A Canadian military officer who fears he was at the 'Ground Zero' of Covid two months before China officially acknowledged the virus has demanded an investigation into the suspicious outbreak of illness there.

The long-serving officer, who cannot be named as he is still in the forces, was among the scores of athletes who fell sick with a debilitating illness after attending the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

He said foreign competitors found the city of 11 million people 'like a ghost town', and so many cases of a mysterious virus afflicted the Canadian team that a quarantine section was set up on their military flight back home.

The officer, who is still suffering from the effects of his illness despite previous high levels of fitness, said a military-appointed doctor later said he almost certainly caught Covid.

His revelations fuel concerns the Chinese government covered up the outbreak – with devastating consequences. The Beijing regime says the first confirmed case was December 8, three weeks before the World Health Organisation was tipped off by sources in Taiwan.

Several European athletes attending the Games, which attracted more than 9,000 competitors from 100 countries, have said they developed Covid-like symptoms in Wuhan. Reports also suggested Iranian participants died soon after returning home.


(More on the link)

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nivek

As Above So Below
Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.


The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.

Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.

Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.

“I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release.

The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally.

“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature,” he said.

Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”.

He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”

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wwkirk

Divine
Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.


The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.

Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.

Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.

“I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release.

The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally.

“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature,” he said.

Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”.

He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”

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So maybe, trust "The Science," but not "Scientists" or the "Scientific Establishment"?

Their suppress the debate and investigation stance is reminiscent of that of the pre-modern Catholic Church. The latter also thought they were acting for the higher good. The difference is that the Church's alleged higher good was men's souls, while the science establishment's alleged higher good is science itself. But note the tragic irony of the science establishment's approach: by suppressing science for science's sake, they are undermining science by that very act!
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Project Veritas releases military documents that contradict Fauci’s sworn testimony on gain-of-function research

Project Veritas released documents Monday night which appear to contradict NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sworn testimony regarding gain of function research. The documents come from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which were allegedly hidden in a top secret shared drive.



DARPA facilitates research in technology with potential military applications under the US Department of Defense. Project Veritas has obtained a report which stated that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, looking to obtain funding for Project Defuse to conduct gain of function research of coronaviruses from bats.

According to Project Veritas, the proposal was rejected by DARPA because it violated a gain of function research moratorium. Additionally, there were safety concerns. According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, proceeded with the research at the Wuhan Virology Lab in China and at several sites other across the US.

Fauci has repeated under oath during multiple Congressional hearings that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. According to Project Veritas, “The report goes on to detail concern regarding the COVID-19 gain of function program, the concealment of documents, the suppression of potential curatives, like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines.”

DARPA’s Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, told Project Veritas when asked about the secrecy surrounding the documents, “It doesn’t sound normal to me. If something resides in a classified setting, then it should be appropriately marked. I’m not at all familiar with unmarked documents that reside in a classified space.”

According to Project Veritas, “The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now.” This could be the death knell for puppy-torture expert Anthony Fauci. We live in hope.


Project Veritas Website with video and full documents for download: Military Documents About Gain of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony Under Oath

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wwkirk

Divine
Scientists speak out on being silenced when raising concerns about COVID lab leak theory

Some scientists have begun speaking out about efforts to silence researchers who raised concerns about the possibility that COVID-19 could have originated in a Chinese lab.


"It shot from every direction from people who we now know were actually thinking exactly the same thing but have chosen to say the opposite, which is extraordinary," Australian Dr. Nikolai Petrovsky, a Flinders University Medicine professor, told Fox News of the backlash he received for voicing concerns that the pandemic may have originated in a lab.


Petrovsky was not alone, according to reporting from Fox News' Benjamin Hall, who spoke with scientists from Israel, the U.S., Australia, Germany, the U.K., Australia and Germany. The scientists told Fox News that they received backlash and resistance to getting their work published, even from those who quietly believed in the possibility of the "lab-leak theory."


"It's taken two years for that to finally come out and be exposed," Petrovsky said.


The scientists say that there was a top-down effort aimed at protecting the scientific community from negative public attention, with fears spreading among scientists that a public realization that the pandemic may have spread due to gain-of-function research in a lab could hamper future experiments.


Many in the scientific community who attempted to speak out about COVID-19's origins were labeled conspiracy theorists in the media and by fellow scientists early on in the pandemic, even though the possibility of human error has now gained renewed attention from experts.


The scientists expressed fear to Fox News that the silencing of such voices has led to little change, with gain-of-function research continuing both in the U.S. and abroad despite growing calls for international regulation.


But the scientists expressed outrage that there was more of an effort by China, some scientists and media to cover up how the pandemic may have started, leaving little hope for a push for stricter regulation.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
The scientists say that there was a top-down effort aimed at protecting the scientific community from negative public attention, with fears spreading among scientists that a public realization that the pandemic may have spread due to gain-of-function research in a lab could hamper future experiments.

Perhaps they should realize those types of experiment should not be taking place, its far too dangerous...What if an even deadlier concoction escaped a lab killing billions, would they be in such a rush to keep it quiet or would there be any people left to try to cover it up?...There must be accountability and consequences...

...
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Top British scientist Sir Jeremy Farrar faces US Congress probe over concerns he was at the centre of a Covid cover-up after his U-turn on Wuhan lab leak theory

One of Britain’s top scientists is to be interviewed under oath by the US Congress over concerns that he was at the centre of a cover-up about the origins of Covid, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Sir Jeremy Farrar was among a group of scientists who initially claimed the coronavirus could have been man-made in a lab in the Chinese city Wuhan, where the pandemic began.

But after discussions with US officials and other leading scientists in February 2020, he changed his position, dismissing suggestions that the virus was made in a lab as a conspiracy theory.

He will now be questioned over his role in ‘apparent conflicts of interest’ and ‘suppression of scientific discourse’.

Amid an investigation into the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic carried out for the Committee on Oversight and Reform, Sir Jeremy will be subject to an on-the-record interview about his knowledge about the origins of the disease.

The committee has also demanded he provide all documents related to his discussions with senior figures on the subject.

An order sent to Sir Jeremy reads: ‘Documents in the custody of the National Institutes of Health reveal how a group of scientists, including you, initially believed Covid-19 to be man-made before reversing course and claiming otherwise following discussions with senior government health officials.’

It adds: ‘This sequence of events suggests a possible co-ordinated effort to conceal evidence pointing to a lab leak in Wuhan.’

Sir Jeremy is an expert in tropical diseases, as well as head of the Wellcome Trust, a charity that puts millions of pounds into medical research every year. He is also a former member of Britain’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

The US committee’s concerns about him revolve around a teleconference he led on February 1, 2020, as the emerging pandemic spread.

The call involved the two most influential scientists in America – presidential adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, as well as 11 experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser. It is alleged that it was after this call that the scientists began dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as ‘implausible’.

Sir Jeremy then signed an article in respected medical journal The Lancet that condemned ‘conspiracy theories’ alleging Covid was not natural while praising Beijing’s ‘open and transparent’ sharing of data.

A new letter seen by this newspaper shows he must now share all drafts of his papers claiming the Covid leak theory was implausible with the US Congress, and all communications regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have pointed to as the source of a Covid leak, and those between him and Dr Collins and Dr Fauci.

Sir Jeremy told the MoS: ‘The scientific evidence continues to point to SARS-CoV-2 [the Covid-19 virus] crossing from animals to humans as the most likely scenario.’


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wwkirk

Divine
Meet the scientist at the center of the covid lab leak controversy

Notable Excerpt from a Long Article

All eyes were on the WHO, the leading international public health agency, to probe covid-19’s origins. The team’s mission was to examine when and where the outbreak had started and how the new virus crossed over to humans. The report, which was released last March, concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that covid-19 could have been caused by a lab accident. The situation the team ranked most likely was that it had jumped from bats to humans via some intermediary animal. Their results, supported by research published in peer-reviewed journals and by ongoing studies, suggest that the pandemic probably started at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in central Wuhan, where live mammals were sold and where most of the early covid-19 cases emerged.

Not everybody agrees, but the majority of virologists and infectious-disease experts, especially those working directly on the origins question, lean toward that theory, barring the emergence of new evidence that persuades them otherwise.

Spillover from animals to humans “was how almost every major epidemic got started in the past decades,” says Shi’s longtime collaborator Linfa Wang, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School and a member of the WHO team that in 2003 investigated the origins of SARS, a deadly infectious disease caused by a coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-1. That illness sickened 8,000 people worldwide and killed nearly 800 between 2002 and 2004. “It’s a common and well-documented pathway,” he says.

But one year after the WHO’s visit to Wuhan, the disease detectives have yet to find the guilty animal or other indisputable evidence of natural origins. Critics also question the conclusion of the agency’s mission team partly because one of its members, Daszak, who is a prominent advocate of the natural origins theory, has potential conflicts of interest. Speculation over the possibility of a lab accident has surged. Inflaming the suspicions are concerns over biosafety procedures at the Wuhan lab, political tensions between China and the US, and a general sense that the Chinese government is not to be trusted.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
The 'early Covid mutations' from a Chinese lab that are fueling leak theory: How a 'barcode error' at Shanghai lab during tests on Antarctica soil accidentally exposed variant in monkey DNA from start of pandemic

The theory that Covid leaked from a laboratory was given fresh momentum last night after scientists studying soil samples in Antarctica stumbled upon traces of the virus that may have been manipulated in a Chinese research facility.

Rare coronavirus mutations from a sample processed in Shanghai at the beginning of the pandemic were found along with genetic material from hamsters and monkeys, which suggest the virus was being experimented on using either the animals themselves or their cells.

There is some debate among scientists about whether the changes predate the original Wuhan Covid but most virologists believe the mutations came after the coronavirus first jumped to humans.

Scientists made the discovery by accident while examining DNA from soil samples collected from Antarctica in late 2018 and early 2019 in a completely unrelated research project. The samples had been sent to the company Sangon Biotech in Shanghai to be analysed in December 2019, where a 'barcode error' saw them become contaminated with previously unseen coronavirus mutations.

The machine being used to analyse the samples has been known to suffer barcode reading errors - meaning samples from two different projects can be mixed together. In this case, the Antarctic soil is believed to have been mixed with the DNA from lab monkeys or hamsters carrying coronavirus.

The Sangon facility is thought to be used by Chinese researchers, including those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — the lab at the centre of the accidental leak hypothesis.

Some experts said the new mutations bridge the gap between the original bat coronavirus and the one that jumped to humans — the missing piece of the puzzle that has escaped scientists for the past two years. But others believe the contamination came from samples of China's early Covid patients, who were announced in December 2019.

A third theory is that the genetic material is from other animal-borne coronaviruses that were circulating at the time or being experimented on by the Chinese. The timing of the contamination is one of the key unknowns, but the Hungarian team who found the sample error say the virus could be the ancestor of the original Wuhan strain, if the mistake happened in December 2019.

If the samples were analysed in early 2020, however, Chinese labs would have already built up a library of Covid test samples and the contamination may have occurred during experiments to learn more about the novel virus.

When the Hungarian researchers first reported the mistake, they said the samples were wiped from the genetic database by Chinese researchers - although they have since been reuploaded.

China previously deleted crucial data from the earliest confirmed Covid patients in Wuhan and silenced Chinese scientists who questioned the official narrative as part of its state-sponsored cover-up that has fuelled suspicion about the true origins of the pandemic.

The latest findings, from Eotvos Lorand University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, both in Budapest, have been published online but not yet formally reviewed by other scientists.

(More on the link)

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