“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” CIA Director William Casey
Please don't think that there will ever be a serious attempt to find the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The simple fact is that the result of such a search would be both hugely embarrassing and deeply compromising to both the US and China. The World Health Organisation (WHO) sent a delegation to China to investigate, allegedly. They didn't get anywhere, but it didn't stop them pretending that they did. Since them we've had the usual media merry-go-round with certain individuals allowed to express doubt, but that's as far as it will go. A touch of smoke and mirrors and no quantifiable outcome.
Remember what the Chinese said? It started in a live food market in Wuhan, via infected bats. No bats were sold in the food market(1) and there has never been a shred of physical evidence to authenticate that statement. So, why would the Chinese say it? And, if it wasn't from the food market, it must have been from something/somewhere else, mustn't it?
Co-incidentally, there is a Level 4 laboratory (an international classification indicating a lab used for diagnostic work and research on easily transmitted pathogens which can cause fatal disease) in the same city, and a further biological facility less than a kilometre from the live market, both of which conduct research on bat coronaviruses. How peculiar.
But the story of the virus doesn't start in a Wuhan live market. It starts in the US, many years before. Research on coronaviruses has been going on for decades, since the 1960s at least. Not just coronaviruses, either; in 2012, whilst there were thirty laboratories around the world who were working the SARS virus, there were another ten working with the Spanish Flu virus.(2)
This work was claimed to be vital important, in order to potentially predict pandemic events, to study the ways in which a virus could mutate and recombine and to develop treatments of vaccines to ameliorate any such virus. This is known as 'gain of function' research, literally enabling viruses to become more impactive upon humans, whilst seeking to develop countermeasures. It was being advanced by passing live viruses through live animals until they mutated into a form that could pose a pandemic threat to humans. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for one, it is not difficult to see that scientific curiosity might get the better of good judgement. Viral combinations that would be vanishingly rare in the wild, between diseases that would never normally have a chance to encounter each other, could be accomplished in a lab. There were discoveries to be made, papers to be written. There were also recombinant viruses that could escape into the public; after all, humans are fallible creatures and prone to error.
“In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014.”(3)
Interestingly, the original SARS, another wild virus, has a genome that is similar to both a bat virus and a mouse virus. This is a more plausible possibility than the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which emerged in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and is a mix of a bat virus and a camel virus. At least bats and mice can coexist in the same environment. But bats and camels are unlikely ever to meet, let alone infect each other.(4) And I wonder how often bats could infect any human other than a bat scientist.
The obvious potential for an eventual disaster bothered a good proportion of the scientific community, as well it might. America's future doctor, Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute for Health, defended gain of function research but, nonetheless, a moratorium was introduced in 2014 and over 20 studies were mothballed. Or, to be hair splittingly precise, the studies were no longer to be conducted on US soil.
Fauci's NIH granted $3.7 million to the newly finished level 4 lab at Wuhan, to cover research up to April 2019. The subject of the research? Bat coronaviruses. In 2019, a further $3.7 million grant was approved, this time to fund gain of function research with the same viruses to see if there was any 'spillover potential; in other words, testing the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans. Who'd have thought it?
Contrary to popular belief, the process by which an animal virus becomes a transmissable human virus is two stage, not one. An animal virus needs to mutate enough that it now infects a human being, singular. The second process, which is that same virus mutating further and becoming infectious between humans, will happen afterwards, if at all. These processes didn't change just because of the arrival of Covid
And concerns about the Level 4 lab in Wuhan go back to the beginning of 2018. Memos from US officials in Wuhan detail a dearth of appropriate experience among technicians at the facilities and sloppy bio-security. Incidentally, bat coronaviruses are studied at both of the facilities, one of which is within half a kilometre of the actual, recorded outbreak, the Union Hospital.
There have been reports, compiled from publicly available data, that there was some kind of hazardous event at the level 4 facility in October 2020. Mobile ‘phone activity was absent from part of the complex between 7th-20th October, indicating a probable lockdown. There was no vehicular traffic, either.(4) Predictably, US intelligence officials did not pursue an inquiry.
Further information is almost impossible to glean or treat with any degree of confidence because if the Chinese had truly been interested in establishing the origins of the outbreak, in checking whether the Wuhan labs had anything to do with it, they'd have questioned scientists, gone over decontamination protocols, sieved through records, searched for physical evidence. None of that happened, which is telling, in and of itself.
The nature of Covid is also not as it seems. Generally, viral mutations are silent, or synonymous – tiny changes that make next to no difference to the functionality of the virus. Nearly all coronaviruses have genomes that share similar sequences indicating a common ancestor at some point in the past. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, only one other virus is even close, RaTG13 which has a 96% likeness. This is significant because, if RaTG13 is derived from nature, SARS-CoV-2 is very likely to be, too.(5)
However, the first time anyone knew of the existence of this virus was 23rd January 2020. The paper which announced its discovery was by Shi Zhengli, a renowned scientist at...you've guessed it, Wuhan.(6) The same scientist who was in receipt of NIH funding for the past six years. But there are some major doubts as to the very existence of RaTG13. The fecal swabs, from which the virus was allegedly gathered, contained 0.7% bacteria as opposed to 70-90% in a typical fecal bat swab and the genomic sequencing is missing significant portions.(7)
Shi's proposition was that both viruses share enough of their DNA to be related in the not too distant past. However, RaTG13 was recovered from caves (or mineshafts) 940 miles south west, seven years previously. In order for the hypothesis to stick, a bat would have had to have migrated that distance, from its natural habitat to a densely packed city of 15 million people without leaving anyone sick along the way. This does not seem likely.(8)
Additionally, natural mutations in a virus are small and haphazard. In the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there is an insert of four amino acids, next to each other in a sequence of RRAR. This, in itself, is highly improbable and is not found in any other SARS viruses or SARS like bat viruses. The effect of this mutation is to increase the ability of the virus spike protein to attach itself to human cells; the insert is positioned on the surface of the spike protein, a typical gain of function attribute and 80% of the spike protein also has high human similarity, another unusual circumstance. In short, the spike protein gives every impression of having been engineered to make the virus more transmissable between humans.(9)
Is the nature explanation possible? Yes. Likely? Definitely not. In the case of Covid, in order for the natural origin theory to be possible, a bat would probably have had to infect another, yet to determined creature, which itself would have to have been suffering from another type of coronavirus and, with this recombining of two diseases, a new disease (coincidentally highly infectious to humans and between humans) was created. Or, perhaps, the disease co-mingled within a bat and simmered in the wild, possibly for years and then infected humans when it had become virulent and transmissable.
Nonetheless, the virus found its way into the human population. Despite the Chinese authorities knowing that they had a new infectious disease on the loose for at least four weeks (10), the WHO felt able to tweet the following on 14th January 2020:
“Preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities have found no evidence of human to human transmissions”(11)
Wuhan and the province in which it is situated were not sealed off domestically or internationally until 23rd January 2020. By this point, 5 million people had left Wuhan, which provides a hint that perhaps they knew something that the rest of us didn’t.(12)
All this means that, unless you are devoid of brain activity, the likelihood of a non natural origin for Covid 19 and a subsequent cover up must be acknowledged. Logically, the next question should be whether there was a lab leak or a deliberate exposure. You may feel uncomfortable even acknowledging the existence of the second scenario, but you must.
Isn't it strange that, with all this circumstantial evidence, nobody has done that? Even if someone is brave enough to state the obvious, that there is no evidence for the virus occurring naturally and plenty that it didn't, they will never take the logical next step. There is always an automatic assumption that if it came from a lab, it must have been an accident. Why? By summer 2020, China was back up and running. In fact, only one province was ever locked down and that for just over two months. So, the country of origin, has come out of this better than anyone in the West. If we were to 'follow the money', our brows would furrow, at the least.
There is other context, too. From August 2018 China had been in a trade war with the United States. First, Huawei was the subject of sanctions, extended in May 2019 and then, by August 2019, Chinese companies were banned from bidding for US government contracts and tariffs were applied to the vast majority of Chinese imports. This was impactful enough that the US trade deficit with China shrank by a quarter between 2018 and 2020 and, commensurately, the Chinese economy was also hit, the US being their largest export market.
More anomalies. We are continually being told about how dangerous Covid is and yet, China has not paid a price, never mind become an international pariah. As we’ve seen, they did nothing for at least a month (probably a lot longer), allowed infected people to travel internationally, lied about its place of origin, lied to the WHO about its transmissability, thrashed around trying to blame others and, according to our esteemed leaders, around three million people have died as a result, with no end in sight. And yet, their Premier is a keynote speaker at this year's Davos knees-up with the World Economic Forum. Do you get the feeling that there is a slight disconnect here?
I offer these observations, not as proof of malfeasance, but as possibilities; unexplored and unexplained. And I believe that the fact that there has been no proper investigation, either by China or the WHO, is an indicator. Would that have been the case if a natural event was known to be responsible? I do not possess the expertise to assert that, definitively, Covid 19 did not transfer from nature, but is instead a result of gain of function research at Wuhan. However, I have read a number of papers on the subject and the chances of a zoonotic explanation are miniscule, when compared to the reams of circumstantial evidence that indicate otherwise.
My feeling is that, as long as there is a glimmer of a chance that Covid derives from nature, the majority of scientists will, at best, sit on the fence or, at worst, attempt to mislead us. But even if you chose to ignore all other evidence, just the proximity of the outbreak to the Wuhan facilities would be problematic;
“This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?”(13)
I would go further. How compromising would it be if it turned out that the source of the virus was one of the Wuhan labs? And that Fauci and the US were funding that lab? And that they were funding the precise field of research that has probably given rise to Covid 19? It would seem that China has the US over a barrel, metaphorically speaking. America can’t risk exposing the Chinese as it also exposes them. A ruthless state actor might use that leverage, not just to cover up an error, but to deliberately manufacture an advantage.
Citations
1. Botao Xiao The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus
https://thebulletin.org/2012/08/the-unacceptable-risks-of-a-man-made-pandemic/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escpe-theory.html
https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-says-cellphone-data-suggest-october-shutdown-wuhan-lab-experts-n1202716
https://popsci.com/scitech/article/2003-07/sars-where-did-it-come
Zhou P, Yang XL, Wang XG, Hu B, Zhang L, Zhang W, et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature. 2020
https://minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TrueEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf
ditto
https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30382-2/fulltext
https://globalnews.ca/news/6527152/coronavirus-lockdown-wuhan
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html