Origins of SARS cov2


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  • #73982 Reply
    SA
    Guest

    Clark

    Some of the memes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are somewhat reminiscent of those repeated by CTs, in that Daszak who has devoted a lot of energy to predicting pandemics and research on viruses, is somewhat carrying out a major coverup in plain sight. It goes without saying that top scientists in a field have a vested interest in getting resources for their research but I am not sure whether that means they lose all scruples. So we now have the hate figure of Daszak and also he manages to terrorize anyone who disagrees with him, and there is therefore a massive conspiracy of silence engendered by fear of retaliation. This is what the first part of this article you have linked to says.

    But particularly galling is this particular paragraph which I have to quote in full for context:

    “On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.

    “And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS,” Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger….”

    Daszak: Well I think … coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.”

    I have highlighted a passage which is a misquote because the article of the bulletin gives a link to the interview and at around 30 minutes Daszak says “… people aren’t going to use pandemic SARS”. So what he is saying is that you use a backbone of another virus which you can limit either with antibodies or in other ways rather than using the actual manipulated virus – a completely different meaning. This is manipulation and is found elsewhere and is similar to those smoking-gun sensational declarations by CTS.

    There are other assumptions in this article and you would really have to be an expert to detect this sort of manipulation.

    But let us look at what is being implied here: Scientists who have devoted a lot of energy to prevent epidemics, knowingly cause one through carelessness in a lab escape. They cover this up, thereby delaying some vital pieces of information that could save the world, and in so doing cause millions of people to die, in order to save their reputations. They are aided and abetted by governments of different colours and interests, but who cares, they are mad scientists who want this sense of power and control. Sounds familiar?

    #74004 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    SA, I agree that’s a very significant typo, and most unfortunate that it seems to have got into an echo chamber. If I had more time I’d write to the Bulletin etc; they’re reputable publications so I expect they’d publish corrections.

    However, if Daszak dislikes the accusations about him he has a very simple remedy which is to open his database of bat viruses; science is supposed to be about full disclosure of data, is it not? Instead he has made matters worse for himself by organising that letter making smears of conspiracy theory, and pretending to have no conflict of interest. Daszak could also mitigate the rampant politicisation and China-bashing – the US already has a copy of the genetic database that got taken off-line in China, but Daszak holds the publication rights over it.

    Why hasn’t he released it? Maybe he merely thinks it’s worth a lot of money, in which case it’s up to him whether he thinks it’s worth all the accusations. But with so many dead and so much economic hardship, he has no right telling anyone to shut up about it.

    #74903 Reply
    josh R
    Guest

    here’s a new one to chew over,
    I’ll leave it to people with more time on their hands to assure me it’s all bollox.

    Corona Ausschuss – Ausweichkanal: Sitzung 60: Die Zeit ist kein flacher Kreis (YouTube)

    Those crazy conspiracists are bleeting on about some patent professional ranting about Corona patents & Fauci, PCR as a publicity rather than clinical tool & the fraud of variants?!?

    We need to robustly challenge this murderous attack on our intellects. Together we can do it!!

    #74908 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    That video has been posted. It seems there have been many patents especially in Veterinary medicine. The origins of Sars-Cov-2 is still inconclusive.

    #74910 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    I’ve listened to the bloke in the bow tie for a few minutes. He makes no clear distinction between ‘coronavirus’ as a family of viruses, and ‘coronavirus’ used colloquially since 2020 to mean specifically SARS-CoV-2. Yes, there must be loads of patents associated with coronaviruses, going back decades. At Wikipedia, there are many references to scientific papers concerning attempts to make vaccines against various coronaviruses.

    I can’t be bothered to listen to such mush. If he has seen a patent with precisely the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, could a believer please just post a link to that specific patent so that I can check for myself? That would be significant, but I’ve followed one of these wild goose chases before and it was false.

    Let’s be clear; this is conspiracy theory. Why? Because as soon as the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was published early in 2020, the virology, immunology and genomics communities started searching for previous occurrences of the sequence, and finding its closest known relatives. If Google had immediately presented twenty examples from registered patents, it would have been all over the scientific literature unless the vast majority of those scientists were conspiring to conceal it.

    #75353 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    The rulers of China are on edge after the U.S.A. spy agencies somehow managed to secure a giant catalogue of genetic information from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    It is thought that access to a huge amount of genetic information could finally reveal the origin to COVID-19, according to CNN.

    I have always thought that the virus came from the Level Four Laboratory in Wuhan.
    “the simplest explanation is usually the best one.”

    #75371 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    As it’s a “spy agency” we’ll probably never know where they got the genetic database, if they’re not merely bluffing. All we’ll have is the story they wish to tell and whatever snippets they release – chosen to support whatever political objectives have been decided behind the scenes.

    Most likely they just secretly bought a copy from Peter Daszak of New York Ecohealth Alliance, who commissioned and funded the research at WIV and therefore hold the ownership rights to it.

    Secrecy kills. Transparency now!

    #75385 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Clark, I am not sure how many Level Four Laboratories there are in the World, I thought I heard China is opening a second?
    Is the main purpose in most of them, to mess about chopping up dangerous virus.
    Is there anything useful, other than war or threat of war, that these places do?

    #75387 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    This was a civilian programme. The claim was that by trying animal viruses in humanised mice they could predict which ones were likely to spill over to humans, and prepare, with treatments and vaccines. The motivations were the original SARS, MERS, Ebola etc.

    Backfired a bit, I’d say.

    There are quite a lot of these BSL4 labs all over the world. But part of the problem at WIV was that some of the work was being done at just BSL Level 2.

    You can order the humanised mice over the internet. You can have bits of DNA synthesized by providing the genetic sequence, and the company will post them to you; transfer them to your own cell cultures at home. There’s a whole hobbyist amateur genetics community working in their own kitchens. I kid you not.

    #75650 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    [ Transferred from the Westminster thread by the mods. ]


    I don’t think you could make this stuff up.

    Marburg Black Hemorrhagic Fever

    1967 Marburg virus outbreak in West Germany was an outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever initial among laboratory workers who were exposed to imported African green monkeys or their tissues while conducting research. A total of 32 people (laboratory workers and their contacts) became sick.

    Yet it is in Marburg that BIONTECH has its laboratory.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58186032

    #75677 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Just reading this gives me the shakes
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus_disease

    So it seems that monkeys or bats are routinely chopped up to get at viruses.

    It is becoming a little, little, more clear that very dangerous diseases strike in or near laboratories that are looking at these vectors. Is there world oversight?

    #75682 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the international mission to Wuhan, said a lab employee infected while taking samples in the field falls under one of the likely hypotheses as to how the virus passed from bats to humans.

    He told the Danish public channel TV2 that the suspect bats were not from the Wuhan region and the only people likely to have approached them were workers from the Wuhan labs.

    Ben Embarek previously acknowledged in an interview with Science magazine that “politics was always in the room with us” during the Wuhan trip, which was mired in delays after China initially stalled approval for the international researchers’ entry.
    https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210813-china-rejects-who-call-for-renewed-probe-into-origins-of-covid-19

    So, it does not have to have been a leak from the Level Four Lab in Wuhan.
    It could though, be persons contracted to collect bats in Bat Caves in a different part of China, who became the zero people?

    #75688 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    “Just reading this gives me the shakes”

    Just to give you some more shakes there a whole host of such Viral hemorrhagic fever diseases. God forbid one of these ever gets a chance to get going. It almost happened with Ebola. Gives perspective on the world’s tragically inadequate response to Sars-Cov-2. Compared to these diseases covid is relatively benign.

    #75698 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Most marburgvirus infections were repeatedly associated with people visiting natural caves or mines.
    Bats are good spreaders of diseases. I think they are one of the few mammals that inhabit all continents except Antarctica. I think bats co-evolved with the Angiosperm rain forests. They are riddled with viruses.
    Bats are almost certainly fine, if you leave them alone.
    Some years ago a registered bat handler, in Kent I think, caught rabies from a bat and he died.

    #75703 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    I worked in Queensland many moons ago for a while. Every evening in the summer time hundreds of thousands of fruit bats would emerge towards sunset and take to the skies. It was quite a spectacular sight. Still is from this video.
    Also the cane toads were just as numerous after heavy rains.

    #75791 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael Norton, August 13 at 09:17 (above):

    “It is becoming a little, little, more clear that very dangerous diseases strike in or near laboratories that are looking at these vectors. Is there world oversight?”

    No, not that I’ve heard of:

    https://thebulletin.org/2021/06/how-to-make-biomedical-research-and-biosafety-labs-less-dangerous-and-more-ethical-post-covid-19/

    There is a weakness in this biosafety regime, however. There are no surveillance systems of laboratory-acquired infections and, if they occur, there are no mandatory mechanisms in place to notify state and local health officials about those infections. …laboratory-acquired infections fall through the cracks in government surveillance systems. …without good surveillance systems at regional, national, and international levels, it’s difficult to know the extent or severity of the problem until a disaster strikes. […] Until COVID-19, society had largely abdicated research funding decision-making to the scientific community with little, if any, oversight or input by humanists, ethicists, or public health professionals who might not share the scientists’ views.

    At the international level, the World Health Organization should work with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Implementation Support Unit to create a laboratory-acquired infection surveillance system based on data collected and reported at the national levels. Biomedical research is inherently dual use; it can provide society great benefits, but it can also be used for ill. The collaboration between WHO and the BWC would send the message that the international community takes these issues seriously.

    #76161 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    A disinformation campaign claiming that the Covid-19 virus originated from an American military base in Maryland has gained popularity in China ahead of the release of a U.S.A. intelligence report on the virus origins.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58273322
    Uncle Joe ordered a 90-day probe into whether the Covid-19 virus came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.
    But now as the report is due to be released, China has gone on the offensive. In the past few weeks, Chinese sources have been amplifying a baseless claim that Covid-19 was made in the U.S.A.

    China have not covered themselves in glory. They are keeping secrets, secret.

    Even if the Chinese Regime have been so brilliant at ruthlessly suppressing the virus in China, they must of heard their is a pandemic going on in most of the World?
    You would have thought they would want to help the World find out the origin?

    #76379 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    In a new report published in the journal Nature, WHO scientists have warned their inquiries have “stalled” – and the damage caused by further delays could be irreparable.

    As so many, many people have been killed or badly damaged by the virus, it would seem important to do the utmost to discover where this all started?

    #76390 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    How COVID-19’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West.
    Worth a read, the article charts the timeline and individuals involved in the evolution from the lab leak theory being a nuts conspiracy theory to where we are now. In my opinion, we will never get the full facts about its origin. Whether it was a lab leak or natural evolution it is still with us either way and needs dealing with.

    #77202 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, thanks for that link. From a link within it to a Twitter thread by Alexandros Marinos, it seems that certain investors were tipped off early on:

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1404374212907700228.html

    One more piece: Farrar had a call with a group of money managers Jan 31: “In the 20 or 30 years I’ve been involved in emerging infections, I’ve never seen anything that has been as fast or as rapidly moving and dynamic as this”

    The speed of spread is really the defining feature of SARS-CoV-2, more so than its fatality rate.

    Globally, covid deaths have been and continue to be under-counted by around a factor of three:

    https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/15/there-have-been-7m-13m-excess-deaths-worldwide-during-the-pandemic

    #78788 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Very shocking, if true.

    “Orders for PCR test kits spiked in the Chinese province where Covid originated, seven months before the first case was reported, it has emerged, providing fresh evidence that the disease was circulating for months before Beijing reported it to the world.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology and the Hubei CDC were all among institutions placing unusually-large orders for PCR test kits starting in May 2019, according to new research.

    It is just the latest piece of evidence that suggests the Chinese Communist Party covered up the initial spread of Covid – helping the virus to spread across the world and become a debilitating pandemic.”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10060265/China-Covid-PCR-test-kit-orders-doubled-Hubei-case.html

    #78789 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    “The Donald Trump administration’s claims about a Wuhan lab leak were treated as a conspiracy theory by hostile US media, but their attitude changed after Uncle Joe Biden took office?”

    The Chinese Communist Party think Australia and America are trying to make trouble for China by suggesting covid started months before China told the World.
    https://www.rt.com/news/536612-china-pcr-testing-equipment/

    I think it is strange how China seemed to be so prepared for covid, when almost all other countries did not see it coming.

    #78793 Reply
    Pigeon English
    Guest

    MN

    I find it strange how UK was unprepared for Covid with 3 months notice.
    I would find it strange if China were unprepared for Sars or war in general.
    If you look at the graphs there were other years were China nearly doubled demand for tests.
    Both graphs are rising more or less since 2012. Did they know already in 2012?
    I find it strange that UK sold PPE reserves.

    #78805 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    There is also the people behind the organisation who published this data analysis with extensive links to army intel or arms companies.

    #78804 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    PCR testing has existed for years, but the specific PCR test kit for SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t (and couldn’t have been) developed until SARS-CoV-2’s genome was sequenced, early in the pandemic. This is why there was a global shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, which China suffered from too.

    China was caught unawares by covid; that’s why it ripped through Wuhan, which then had to be locked down. Local authorities had tried to suppress doctors’ reports of the new illness, until the national government became aware and ordered them to reverse that policy. Immediately following the Chinese New Year celebrations when many residents travel long distances to visit relatives all across China, the central Chinese government imposed lockdowns in multiple cities and travel restrictions across multiple entire provinces – 750 million people were under travel restrictions, fully 10% of everyone in the world!

    I give no credence to this idea that China let covid spread before the Wuhan outbreak and covered it up. There is some evidence that some Wuhan Institute of Virology lab staff may have been hospitalised and isolated two or three months earlier, but if it was SARS-CoV-2 it must have been contained or nearly so. When China did lock down and impose travel restrictions, it was impossible to hide; nitrous oxide pollution from traffic and soot emissions from coal power stations dropped so much that it was noted by satellites. And the current extremely low levels of covid-19 could not have been achieved, not unless there had been a far more widespread lockdown as stringent as Wuhan’s, and if that had happened we couldn’t have missed it because Chinese manufacturing would have suddenly ceased, like it did at the start of 2020.

    This looks like just the usual political China-bashing.

    #78806 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Then there’s my friend’s friend who lives and works in China. He started e-mailing my friend about covid in January 2020, including some pretty alarming police training videos of how they would deal with uncooperative people suspected of being infected. Not a peep about covid from him before then.

    #84894 Reply
    Death by 1000 cuts
    Guest

    [ Mod: As advised to you previously, the ‘Name’ field is for a name, not a slogan.

    You have also been advised to retain a singular identity and stop adopting new pseudonyms such as ‘No to Mass Murder’, ‘Carrots’, ‘Onions’ and ‘Habbak’. Kindly respect the advice and repost under a conventional name, preferably one you have used previously. ]


    [ — snip — ]

    #88064 Reply
    Kate
    Guest

    — SNIP —

    [ Mod: This comment did not concern the origins of SAR-CoV-2, but raised another substantial issue that warrants a topic of its own. It has been moved to “Concerns about the contents of the covid vaccines“. ]

    #88074 Reply
    mods-cm-org
    Guest

    Dear Kate,

    Thank you very much for reposting your comment about the covid vaccines in the discussion forum (and for correctly raising your enquiry about it in the Blog Support forum). However, your comment about the vaccines doesn’t directly concern the origins of SARS-CoV-2, so it shouldn’t really be posted on this thread. It warrants a separate topic in its own right, which would keep the discussion focused and easy to reference via its own URL.

    I have taken the liberty of reposting it for you, under the title “Concerns about the contents of the covid vaccines”. (This can be changed later, if you like.)

    It’s likely that other commenters will be keen to engage you in discussion about this issue, so keep monitoring the thread for replies.

    Thank you.

    #88540 Reply
    Oscar
    Guest

    A book: States of emergency: Keeping the global population in check, by Kees van der Pijl.


    [ Mod: As noted before, this is a discussion forum, not a posterboard for favourite links. Please make some kind of argument, with reference to relevant content in the linked resource.

    Thank you. ]

    #88551 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Oscar, I’ve encountered Kees van der Pijl before. I think he was once a serious political scientist, but got sucked into conspiracy theory (by which I mean the misleading mode of thought) regarding the 9/11 attacks, and started believing a load of confusing nonsense. It seems he has not recovered his senses; from the book review:

    “Van der Pijl cogently shows how the Covid crisis fear campaign’s official account is untrue; how it is a political and not a medical emergency…”

    …yet this notion is easily dispelled by the sudden surges in the overall death rate. To support his idea he will have to have accepted many other things that are clearly false, such as the supposedly high false positive rate of PCR testing, and that countless thousands of doctors and other medical staff suddenly invented, or mass hallucinated, or lied about a new set of clinical symptoms.

    Before vaccines were deployed, covid was definitely a public health emergency. I myself was told of over twenty covid deaths in a single month, by an ex girlfriend working in the kitchen of a care home; am I to start speculating that the staff killed them off somehow? Another friend of mine who was a nurse told me of the burnout among her colleagues.

    None of this is to say that covid wasn’t a political emergency too, nor that the powerful didn’t use it for their own objectives – indeed, we know that they did; for instance the Johnson government gave a £37 billion contract to a friend of Johnson’s with zero relevant experience, for a test-and-trace programme that never stood a chance of working. Liam Fox (who Craig exposed years ago) attempted to use test-and-trace as cover to install surveillance software on millions of smartphones. There’s a quote in my comment of September 12, 2021 at 11:43 above, as to how the financiers were able to capitalise upon the emergency.
    – – – – – – –

    I feel very sorry for David Icke, who promotes a lot of this stuff. He was a hippy, a nice bloke, and not in the least a tough political animal. He was joint leader of the Green Party when it became a threat to the established order, so the good old BBC propaganda machine humiliated him on prime time TV in front of millions of people, by having Terry Wogan ask him deeply personal questions about his faith, and then ridicule him for his openness. His reputation was destroyed and his son was severely bullied; very few people are strong enough to survive such powerful institutionalised abuse. He became rather bitter, as you can see in some of the videos of his talks. I’m really not surprised he turned a bit paranoid.

    #88561 Reply
    Oscar
    Guest

    This thread is about the origin of the pandemic.

    Debate about the origin of the virus or the policy measures taken is often labelled “denialist”.

    Just as the term “conspiracist” is often used pejoratively to discredit criticism of the Establishment, the term “COVID denier” has become widespread as a way of dismissing any debate or criticism of the before, during and aftermath of the health crisis.

    Neither I nor Van der Pijl have denied the existence of the bug. Nor have Wikispooks (or at least not in all their topics on the subject).

    Be that as it may, these forums have given the necessary clues to get at least part of the truth. But for that, we first have to clear our psychological and linguistic barriers…

    #88564 Reply
    Oscar
    Guest

    I must add another criticism, and that is how quickly we change people’s status when what they claim (and often prove) does not fit our mental schemas.

    We have Drs Mullis and Malone (whose work has been very prominent during the pandemic, paradoxically, but we could cite hundreds of scientific professionals around the world. Until they question things, they are cool; if they do, they have gone mad – progressively or suddenly.

    The same must be true of Van der Pijl, William I. Robinson and many other sociologists… they’re brilliant until they don’t go to the root, then, I suppose it’s an age thing, they start to crack up.

    Anyway…. human beings are wonderful, though.

    #88565 Reply
    Oscar
    Guest

    With all this I do not intend to defend anything with ad verecundiam arguments, just as I would not dispense with everything David Icke says with an ad hominem argument related to illuminati lizards.

    I am simply pointing out the double standards and the tremendous hypocrisy that reigns in society, and how easy it is to make something look like something it is (e.g. confusing questioning the origin, policy measures and consequences of the Covidian event with denialism of the virus, deaths and health care overcrowding.

    #88571 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Oscar, when arguments polarise, typically both poles are wrong. The poles require each other, wrongness supports wrongness. “Conspiracist” is indeed used pejoratively to discredit criticism of the Establishment, but the technique couldn’t work unless conspiracism really existed, and got stuff so badly wrong. Polarisation by its nature is divisive.

    Here’s some ridicule of the establishment that resonates with me – Karl_Was_Right on Twitter. Here’s some similar criticism, but rationally argued rather than done by overdubbing – the ‘Two Davids’ at Media Lens. These two links illustrate another type of division; nationalism. Power has to divide the people in order to rule.

    The conspiracists are dissenters, but their dissent becomes useful to power for herding the majority around power’s chosen perspective. British monarchy doesn’t make North Korea’s rulers good, nor vice versa. That pharmaceutical company Merck covered up the deaths caused by their drug Vioxx doesn’t mean that the MMR vaccination causes autism.

    To overcome power effectively, we have to see it clearly. This is one of the reasons I try to expose conspiracism; we need those dissenters’ dissent, but aimed at the real targets.

    #88572 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    It’s a bit like a lever, or a see-saw. Two kids half way out from the centre balance one kid right at the opposite end. The fulcrum is the truth. The establishment position is just wrong enough that the 80% of the population who cluster around it balance the 20% of conspiracists who are five times more wrong in the opposite direction.

    #88634 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    “We contend that although the animal reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has not been identified and the key species may not have been tested, in contrast to other scenarios there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin. Although the possibility of a laboratory accident cannot be entirely dismissed, and may be near impossible to falsify, this conduit for emergence is highly unlikely…………..”

    An extract from the conclusion in this paper: “The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review.

    In it they review the various threads of evidence for zoonotic and lab leak propositions. Worth a read.

    ps. This is a second try to post this, not sure what happened the first try. It just didn’t post.

    #88652 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, thanks for that link.

    To its credit the paper does actually address the issues of concern that I have heard of, notably the furin cleavage site and the laboratory use of transgenic mice.

    Clearly, nothing in the paper is conclusive of either hypothesis. It’d take me a long time to assess the evidence sections because they are based on so many citations, many of which would also need to be assessed for the soundness of their relevance to this paper. The Conclusions section however seems to over-interpret, suggesting a preference for zoonotic origin among the authors. The final sentence of the first paragraph seems particularly glaring:

    “Although strong safeguards should be consistently employed to minimize the likelihood of laboratory accidents in virological research, those laboratory escapes documented to date have almost exclusively involved viruses brought into laboratories specifically because of their known human infectivity.”

    But (1) as I understand it “strong safeguards” weren’t being employed, and that’s part of the criticism of the US-sponsored work being done at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV); viruses known or suspected of airborne transmission were being handled under mere biosecurity level 2 (BSL2) safeguards despite these being hopelessly inadequate and international recommendations being higher, and (2) the viruses collected in Yunan Province were “brought into” [WIV] “specifically because of their” suspected and/or potential human infectivity, and, according to publicly available contracts and grant applications, WIV was keen to modify such viruses to make them more infective to humans.

    Another possible bias is all the detailed epidemiological tracing of spread within Wuhan while completely neglecting the 1500 kilometres to the habitat of horseshoe bats – though I’m sure bats do get about. It’s also interesting that the paper resurrects the “wet market hypothesis” which I thought had been pretty widely abandoned early in the pandemic.
    – – – – – – – –

    A piece of research I have not yet heard of would be to look for transgenic genes in the wild mouse population of Wuhan. Maybe the virus escaped in a mouse; mice are exceedingly good at escaping.

    #88657 Reply
    Oscar
    Guest

    U.S. Right to Know recently published an interesting timeline with relevant snapshots of the available emails. Of course, the whole blog on the origins of Covid-19, gain-of-function research and biolabs is extremely interesting.

    Incidentally, some interesting research based on a social network analysis of individuals and groups related to the Covidian event was also published [ English version (Google Translate) ] and may prove useful. It is a German website, but the pdf is in English.

    #88680 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Last year while protesting with Extinction Rebellion I got chatting to a scientist [1]. We were on the train out of central London back to our semi-legal camp site [2], all wearing masks, of course.

    I then mentioned that I thought that SARS-CoV-2 had probably escaped from WIV. This scientist dismissed the idea as conspiracism and politically motivated China bashing [3]. I said to look at Nicolas Wade’s articles in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [4]; that it wasn’t China bashing because the research programme it had escaped from was US funded, so covid was probably a result of outsourcing. “Outsourcing? Now I believe you” said the scientist without a moment’s hesitation, and we all cracked up laughing.

    [1] – These days there are lotsofscientists in XR, engaging in civil disobedience and encouraging the public to join them; you can find over 1600 signatories including over 260 professors or assistant professors here.

    [2] – A fairly rebellious Greater London council had said they wouldn’t move us on – but the police had cleared such camps before.

    [3] – If you want something to be dismissed as nonsense, just get Donald Trump to say it 😉

    [4] – Nicolas Wade is a prominent science journalist and has been a staff writer for both Nature and Science, no less. The Bulletin maintain the famous Doomsday Clock, now at 100 seconds to midnight.

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