I'm trying to untangle the partisanship that I have to presume infects this headline: "The Biden administration confirms some but not all of Trump’s Wuhan lab claims" (WaPo).
Text:
In its final days, President Donald Trump’s State Department made a series of highly controversial claims about the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, and its possible connection to the covid-19 outbreak. Now, the Biden administration has reviewed those claims, and is confirming some of the facts within them — but not, a senior State Department official has told me, the Trump team’s theory of how the pandemic broke out. These facts suggest that more investigation is needed into the lab’s possible connection to the outbreak.
Ah! So it's not that you've determined that any of these claims are false. They're all either true or — you say — in need of further investigation.
The article ends with 2 paragraphs — a quote from an unnamed senior State Department official preceded by the assertion that credits the Biden administration with an effort to be politically neutral (though, I'd add, the effort to seem neutral is itself political):
The origin of the pandemic is not just about blame. If the source of the outbreak can’t be determined, its true path can’t be traced and crucial scientific information for preventing the next outbreak can’t be learned. The Biden administration is trying to take a neutral stance on the issue, even though the fact-finding process has become entangled in domestic politics, as well as U.S.-China relations.
“We certainly care a great deal about the origin of this virus, not only for reasons of accountability, but also for public health implications going forward,” the official said. “If we are going to prevent future outbreaks, epidemics or, God forbid, pandemics, we need to know how the last one started. . . . Whichever theory the facts bear out, that’s where we’ll go.”
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87 comments:
Blaming the Wuhan lab will obligate the world to either hold China accountable or undermine the legitimacy of the international system of nation-states. It's understandable that governments will be reluctant to admit China's culpability if the investigation goes that way, much like the Clinton administration was reluctant to declare genocide in Rwanda--they fear what comes next.
It's all narrative and which narratives will confuse the Biden audience. Those would be the unconfirmed facts, and that's as confirmed as they'll get.
I hope they are also looking into whether it was intentional or accidental.
Also into involvement, including funding, by us govt and us funded entities like universities, cdc and Anthony fauci.
John Henry
Playing politics with, literally, people’s lives.
"Highly controversial claim"s asserts the primacy of the familiar narrative.
One of the ugliest, most vicious displays I’ve ever seen was during the second debate, when China Joe looked directly at Trump and explained why he was the cause of every COVID death.
“It’s because of who you are.” the bastard said.
The true insanity of the anti-bigotry crusade was laid bare. It is racist to acknowledge that the CCP created the virus, so all we can do is blame it on the white hetero guy.
Ann asks the same question I do when conservatives say the "1619" project has lies in it.
What John Henry said. The US was funding Gain of Function work in Wuhan. To what end we'll never know. 1918 was China (per Nat Geo), Hong Kong, Asian Flu, Sars and Swine Flu. Millions dead world wide. But, hey, history starts anew each day.
“If we are going to prevent future outbreaks, epidemics or, God forbid, pandemics, we need to know how the last one started. . . .
Root causes.
How quaint.
It's a little late now, Democrats ...
Older, vulnerable Americans are more conservative. Flu is a feature for some governments, not a problem. Wouldn't want to hurt anybody's feelings now, right. One quote I remember from National Lampoon c.1974. The Chinese are not only inscrutable, but also sneaky.
"The origin of the pandemic is not just about blame. If the source of the outbreak can’t be determined, its true path can’t be traced and crucial scientific information for preventing the next outbreak can’t be learned."
This is exactly the issue and was the issue since day one. But China needed to cover up the negligence to safe face and WHO was immediately complicit in the coverup.
But China needed to cover up the negligence...
I doubt that the cause was negligence.
The CCP manufactured and released the virus deliberately, in my opinion.
And, it looks to me like the U.S. intel agencies helped them out in order to undermine Trump.
Did "the Trump team" really have one explanation of where the virus came from?
Or was it more that they had questions and suggested "that more investigation is needed into the lab’s possible connection to the outbreak."
The Biden administration and the Times are arguing against a "straw man" of their own creation, and the statement of the official is just bureaucratic boilerplate intended to make the current administration look better than the last.
Bread and circuses.
Trump designated China as the enemy they are, Biden is owned by them.
ST, I have my suspicions, as well. And have always wondered if the vaccine didn't precede the virus, if you get my point.
The "Ah! So..." triggered me into doing an impromptu Charlie Chan impersonation. Very problematic.
The next time the Chinese communist party accidentally attacks will that be Covid 20 or 2021?
How to create new viruses artificially
Following on to the “deliberately released” angle, one theory I’ve heard that seems quite plausible is that the virus was engineered explicitly to pick off old folks in China because — and here you need to think cynically, like CCP leadership:
a) there are too many of them,
b) they have no value any more, and
c) a virus looks way better than, say, digging a giant pit and mowing them all down with machine guns.
This investigation is being strung out over time just like every other politically inconvenient event, such as Benghazi, Russian hoax, Hillary’s emails, etc. If we had a functioning press, we would be a lot better off wrt this socialistic/communistic path we’re on.
Our expert epidemiologists have a resemblance to the Keystone cops.
I'm surprised the WaPo even covered this. Most real news is memory-holed these days.
Maybe they could get OJ Simpson to help them. He has experience with this type of investigation.
Most likely the virus was developed in the lab, but I doubt it was intentionally released. The Chinese government certainly did use the COVID crisis to its advantage once the virus had been released.
"going where the facts go" is exactly what liars say.
heh.
Whichever theory the facts bear out, that’s where we’ll go.
Just like reopening the schools.
I think articles like this gloss over the FACTS we know currently and how those would be judged.
1. The Wuhan Virology institute is one of the very few labs in the world experimenting on coronavirii
2. Their experiments included modifying to increase virility
3. The lab is ~2 blocks away from the "market" blamed on the outbreak
4. The lab has a history of issues with appropriately following safety procedures
5. China spent the first 2-3 months of the outbreak downplaying it, denying it, obfuscating data in the press, and destroying - literally destroying - early research, records, and samples.
6. China immediately began information control by detaining, interrogating, and surpressing medical voices not in line with their official stance.
Now if I were to take the charge of "these guys caused it" to court, and presented just the facts we know, I have to ask the obvious question: would they be convicted?
...
P.s. Biden isn't staying politically neutral, he's positioning for leverage against China. He leaves this as an open item he can claim at any time to China's detriment, he uses it as leverage in negotiation. It's not dumb positioning on their part.
Occam's Razor: they were engineering viruses at the lab, and there was an escape.
Think about the system in China. It is the same system that gave us the Great Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the subjugation of Tibet, and the Uighur vacation camps.
They don't care, and you are a barbarian.
Jack Klompus
LOL
I like to say that when you see stuff like that you should give me credit for doing it intentionally, so I need to disclaim credit in this case. If I'd thought of it myself or even noticed it after I did it, I would have rewritten it to avert microaggression. But I'm not so fussy and fearful that I'll change it now, and I'm not such a creature of The Era of That's Not Funny that I feel that I need to strike the "LOL."
We must understand that this is both a diplomatic and scientific problem. And we will be given either a diplomatic or scientific explanation.
TDS is real and reminds me of the day care fake child abuse cases from the 89s. What is wrong with these people? How does this mass psychosis happen?
It’s an airborne virus. Not so hard to believe someone in the Wuhan lab breathed the bat air, incubated the virus, maybe threw off the first variant, and the rest was history.
When is Fauci going to be asked why his bureaucracy was funding Wuhan in the first place? That would be a root cause question I’d ask.
Razib Khan has an interesting podcast with Alina Chan, the post-doc who was one of the first to publicly raise the lab escape possibility. Some on the science, and some on what it’s like to be a young whistle blower on a sensitive topic. I should say that she doesn’t think that it is necessarily of even likely lab escape in origin, just that it is a real possibility worth investigating. Her Twitter account also has lots of links and discussion.
Occam’s Razor. The CCP wanted to get rid of Trump and put their stooge in office. Of course, releasing the virus was intentional. What does the CCP care if 2-3 million of their own people died. It was a bargain.
"I like to say that when you see stuff like that you should give me credit for doing it intentionally..."
Professor, I blame you 100% and offer you full credit. I know the power academics have. An adjunct friend the other day encouraged his students to "do whatever it takes" to do well on his midterm. One of his students ingested 3700 mg of Adderall and ended up with his stomach pumped in a local hospital. The student reported to public safety, "My professor forced to us to do drugs for our midterm."
A48
I didn’t see your comment before I wrote mine. Great minds.
And ST is correct. Biden and the Dems blamed Trump and lots of people fell for it. I couldn’t believe it!
More evidence that Biden is corrupted by Chinese money.
The article is more evidence that scientific inquiry is being subjugated by politics by the self-proclaimed party of science.
When is Fauci going to be asked why his bureaucracy was funding Wuhan in the first place? That would be a root cause question I’d ask.
Exactly! Haven't seen any reference to this in over a year.
he uses it as leverage in negotiation.
I have my doubts. What's Biden going to get from a country that openly conducts genocide against minority populations and runs slave labor camps and sells us the products? That harvests and sells it's own citizens organs if they have the wrong beliefs?
But suppose Biden does use that info as a negotiating chip and gets something he wants. Then what? Biden's going to tell us, "Good news! It wasn't our friends the CCP after all. Our investigators found proof the pandemic was caused by some guy eating an undercooked bat after all?"
Look!
It's TRUE, that the Chinese OWN us now.
But That's Because We SOLD ourselves to them
AND! we Do have this mess of (DELICIOUS!*) pottage...yummmm!
DELICIOUS!* okay, okay, it's pretty crappy pottage... But, deals Are deals
Whichever theory the facts bear out, that’s where we’ll go.
That's funny. Remember the whole Russian collusion thing?
Parsing Chinese communist propaganda from the New York Times and Washington Post is an odd hobby, but to each his own.
If you take the stance that it was accidentally released, then taking into account how effective this virus was in infecting the worldwide population - even under extreme conditions to control it - should give us pause on how easy it would be to conduct biological warfare. Our preparedness for handling this virus was a Chinese fire drill in communication, decision-making, readiness, logistics, etc. Now imagine a well executed bio-attack. Maybe we should be looking more earnestly at hardening our defenses against such a future threat. (You may say that there is some of this activity going on secretly in the background, but if so, our recent demonstration of how to react to it is not reassuring).
Did they cancel that Brady Bunch episode where they go to small claims court against Jackie Coogan in the fake neck brace? I remember Mike Brady does a highly problematic Charlie Chan impersonation in the episode.
The records, including the strange 3-peak W-shaped graphs where the third peak is the highest before the steep drop to zero, indicates three waves and perhaps even three distinct variants of the virus. And contemporary reporting indicates differing transmission rates. This is strange data. Epidemiologists in general were not heard from much over the last year despite their expertise in exactly this area. But eventually we will have data that may limit reasonable explanations to this not only being purposeful but engineered to marginalize or kill the very people it affected most: old fat people.
One big hint is the early declarations by leaders that we “must protect the most vulnerable, the elderly and chronically ill. Yet five states all coincidentally run by democrat governors, purposely placed sick people in long-term care facilities by executive order. Ordered sick people to co-mingle with the most vulnerable. For no good reason well people were told to stay home and let their small business die.
The amazing coincidences cluster around these apposite facts:
+ Old people vote reliably conservative
+ Small business owners tend toward conservative
+ Regular churchgoers are reliably conservative
+ Apolitical quadrennial voters tend to start paying attention late and this year the normal gathering places to talk things out were all closed: no bars, restaurants, churches, school events, concerts, sports, conventions or other “normal” ways groups share information informally and reinforce assumptions — no way to gather and form consensus
VS
- almost all information on candidates was limited to mass media because of the above
- digital media went full censor on Trump or ANY sane voice in the pandemic
- violent mobs destroyed parts of 200 cities
- any negative news on Biden was suppressed
- the Deep State helped forever despoiling the FBI as a trusted LEOrg
- voting laws were ignored over-ridden and blatantly violated to assist Joe’s fake “win”
- the gaslighting that sold WuFlu as Black Plague Part 2 has indeed caused the fear panic and OBEDIENCE that was intended
All of the above is just happenstance. Right?
Very funny the whole den of scum amd villauny are in their debt from harris to austin,
They were studying the sars with bats from yunnan, but thats where the trail ends.
Gain-of-function virus research. The US is heavily involved, as well.
I remember linking a piece about chi haotian one of their hardliners who has speculated in the past about viral warfare
From here
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pinterest.com/amp/pin/52424783150680172/
Accountability! That's hilarious. When did you last see the word "pangolin" in print? I think it was way back when Fauci was saying we don't need to wear masks.
Nicholson baker, who is certifiable picked up the trail a month and a half ago
They are very serious though, shirley
https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1369488647028871174
Let’s look at “gain of function” research then. Congress outlawed that research in the USA, so why was Fauci allowed to do illegal research in this area in his Wuhan lab? Is he also allowed to enslave test subjects there, since Fauci obviously flouts our laws?
he's positioning for leverage against China.
Wouldn't we then be complicit in keeping China's secret from the rest of the world? And wouldn't that negate any leverage if not turn it back on us?
I would say on the whole this is one for the Biden administration. Going where the facts take them, hesitant to draw conclusions--publicly, for now--that will piss off China. Yes, trying to deny any credit to Trump for anything. It makes sense to be more diplomatic than Trump tended to be. My understanding is it is either "transmission of a very similar virus--not just somewhat similar--from another species"; or "engineering in a lab, with Wuhan an excellent candidate." No close virus in a different species has been found, China has refused any honest examination of anyone and anything in China, so the lab answer has become extremely likely. I would guess accident more likely than any kind of plan; China like other Communist and Third World countries will take huge risks with the civilian population in order to make progress. The Chinese government might act like it is covering up mass murder when they are "only" covering up something stupider.
In the coming years the Press will "discover" that much of what Trump said was true.
Another strange dog that ain’t barking?
For 50 years I’ve heard complaints that “America can send a man to the moon but can’t cure the common cold.” Cold viruses and seasonal flu are both COVID variants. The vaccines may prevent these common COVID variants. Operation Warp Speed, if that was indeed the genesis of these vaccines, should be credited with this result if it pans out. That would be yuuuuge! 100,000 deaths per year from pneumonia and flu might be prevented by these new therapies.
Why am I the only one saying this?
Why does "it make sense to be more diplomatic than Trump tended to be"?
Did they cancel that Brady Bunch episode where they go to small claims court against Jackie Coogan in the fake neck brace?
I was watching the Season 1 MASH episode on MeTV last week, the one where Hawkeye and Trapper object to a new Sgt's Moose, and cheat at poker to buy her from him.
At one point early in the episode, Sgt. Baker says that "the gooks like to work" -- except you now don't hear "gooks" -- for reasons, I guess, just "the .... like to work". But Hawkeye still says "I don't like that word".
Hokay.
Would it be crazy if in the end we find it was St Fauci who, through his promotion of gain of function virus study, was at least partially responsible for a global pandemic where he could emerge as the person who could save the world?
Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
Another strange dog that ain’t barking?
For 50 years I’ve heard complaints that “America can send a man to the moon but can’t cure the common cold.” Cold viruses and seasonal flu are both COVID variants. The vaccines may prevent these common COVID variants. Operation Warp Speed, if that was indeed the genesis of these vaccines, should be credited with this result if it pans out. That would be yuuuuge! 100,000 deaths per year from pneumonia and flu might be prevented by these new therapies.
Why am I the only one saying this?
Simply not true, colds a caused by a mixture of different types of viruses, up to 200 identified, and a few of them are corona viruses, of which there are four main types, excluding the WuFlu, which is probably destined to become a cold virus. Influenzas (flu) are an entirely different group of viruses and mutate quickly to make new variants, which is why new flu shots come out yearly (and often miss the mark, because there's some guess work involved in choosing which strains to focus on).
That said, the DNA/RNA technology used in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines offers a quick path to a vaccine for a lot of diseases. But colds are still a tough problem because of the number of viruses involved, and the "is it worth making vaccines for 200 diseases that almost never do more than make people uncomfortable?" factor. If I could get 1 or 2 shots, for all colds, bring it on, but don't ask me to get 200 to stop them.
Anyone who believes anyone on Team Biden will publicly denounce China — or even privately use embarrassing info to get negotiating leverage — is living in fantasyland.
He’s owned by them. Or more accurately, they’re on the same team.
And since China hacked our OMB database a few years ago, it’s certain that they have significant leverage over large chunks of our government and most big names. And thats just the hack we know about.
I would guess accident more likely than any kind of plan; China like other Communist and Third World countries will take huge risks with the civilian population in order to make progress. The Chinese government might act like it is covering up mass murder when they are "only" covering up something stupider.
I would tend to agree. The Soviets had mass accidents with anthrax, for example.
The Obama admin did send money to support research there because the virology research was so dangerous.
The Biden* (Shakespeare character Malvolio from Twelfth Night)Administration took only 12 hours to start its fall. Killing 70,000 jobs in oil/gas/pipe lines is no way to succeed. It followed that failure with the border crisis, its $1.9T bailout of Democrat allies, Blue-Anon hoaxes of violent demonstrations at the Capitol that never happened. Malvolio can't even handle a press conference.
Now look up flu/pneumonia deaths recorded in 2020, and let me know why they went from normal to zero. It couldn’t be misclassification of cause of death could it? Why the anomaly?
Jeff said...
He’s owned by them. Or more accurately, they’re on the same team.
Oh, NO; i Guaranty they PHYSICALLY OWN Slow Jo Biden
a) think of the pix and texts we've ALREADY seen with Hunter and Slow Jo
b) NOW, think about how many orders of magnitude Worse, is the stuff the Chinese kept
Serious Question. Do you think the Chinese Video each of their bribes?
Eric Swallowell, Hunter, all the other ugly losers that are in politics; 'cause they're too ugly for Hollywood. All the cute little Chinese honeypots that were laid out for them.... Do you REALLY think the Chinese didn't Video it all?
Our country's ONE hope, was someone that (unlike a politician) Had Bevies of Beautiful Babes that would (WILLINGLY!) let him grab them by their p*ssies.
Someone that didn't need, or even want commie p*ssie... 'cause he was getting it by the truckload here in the states
And people wonder Why they Hated President Trump
"Gain-of-function virus research. The US is heavily involved, as well."
Yes, and in fact the US government was actually paying for some of this research. (And off-topic: but why are we, the taxpayers, paying for research in China?) But in the US government's defense this research would never have been conducted in the United States in the slap-dash way that it was conducted in China.
And we know this because since the US government was paying for the research conducted at one of the two labs in Wuhan doing 'gain-of-function' research on bat coronaviruses then it was inspected by the US, and the US inspectors said that lab was absurdly lax and that some of the researchers had probably been exposed to the virus that they were working with.
If this had been in the US then that lab would have been shut down until these flaws were corrected. But of course that didn't happen. It was China. And they don't accept criticism from others.
Now this lab that had such lax safety protocols was just across the street the famous Wuhan seafood market where supposedly it originated from wild animals being sold for food.
Normally I would say, how can it not have this lab that was responsible for the release? It's too much of a coincidence.
But this is China and they may be hiding more than we know and there is reason to suspect that there was an accidental release of something from the other lab in Wuhan a month before.
China may be pushed to pay more to the Biden crime enterprise to avoid being severely reprimanded in a public way, depending on level of culpability of the CCP. Yeah, and if I were the CCP, I'd point out that previous payments could get more publicity if more payola was requested.
"Influenzas (flu) are an entirely different group of viruses and mutate quickly to make new variants, which is why new flu shots come out yearly (and often miss the mark, because there's some guess work involved in choosing which strains to focus on)."
That's true except that the influenza viruses, which are a very specific virus family, are only responsible for a small percentage, normally, of what we call the 'flu'.
Most of the time when someone gets the 'flu' no one is identifying the virus that caused that flu. There are a number of viruses that can cause flu-like symptoms in the right context. And it's even more confusing because it depends on the person also. What causes a 'cold' in one person can cause 'flu' and then lead to 'pneumonia' in another.
In fact I seem to remember reading a research paper that surveyed and identified the viruses that were causing the flu for people that where in a hospital for treatment of it. And in this study which was in Germany and went on for a while, there was a lengthy list of viruses that could be responsible, and I think, the coronavirus family, and this was before Covid-19, was slightly more likely to be the cause than an influenza virus.
And off-topic: but why are we, the taxpayers, paying for research in China?
Gain-of-function research is considered, by its nature and its implications, dangerous and difficult to justify. That's why we did it in China because China has no code of ethics regarding scientific experimentation, e.g, see CRISPR. So we could reap the benefits [!] of the research while keeping our hands clean. Like so many best-laid plans of mice and men, it went 'aft aglae'.
Forget it, Ann; it's just the WaPoo, WaPooping.
“Most likely the virus was developed in the lab, but I doubt it was intentionally released. The Chinese government certainly did use the COVID crisis to its advantage once the virus had been released”
I don’t know whether it has been determined whether the virus was created by forced evolution, using human tissues as the medium, or gene editing. But there is little chance that it occurred naturally - which means that it was created in a lab, highly likely in a virology lab in Wuhan (though which one is still unclear). The evidence of human intervention is overwhelming at this point - actually since July or August, though there were strong hints as early as a year ago (March). The virus is just way too clean to have evolved naturally. It appeared by magic optimized for attachment to cells via human ACE2 receptors, with no genetic residue of how it crossed the species boundary or how the ACE2 receptor attachment code was modified to target Human ACE2 receptors. It was being sold, at one point as having crossed from bats to civets, before jumping to humans. But the ACE2 receptor code works best for human, and not civet, cells. Or cells of any other animals, for that matter. That is part of why human cell medium must have been utilized, since it is a human specialized virus (without any genetic evidence of how it became one).
In favor of the forced (or pushed) evolution, a gene genealogy map shows maybe 20 years of evolution on one branch, and 80 years on the other, since the SARS-1 and SARS-2 viruses diverged. On the flip side, that Taiwanese virology researcher laid out a very plausible process of creating the virus through gene editing, in a very short time. Interestingly, no attempt appears to have been made to try to follow her instructions, which appears to have let researchers do it at least twice, since her work was published. Her work showed the likely source of the various gene sequences that differed from the previously known bat ancestry viruses.
My vote is that it was released into the human population negligently, and not intentionally. First, the Communist Chinese do slap dash research. They cut corners all the time. Including violating safety requirements. I expect that it is a function of being a communist country - the Soviets did the same thing, while the Taiwanese, South Koreans, and Japanese do not. It isn’t that Han Chinese researchers are susceptible to the sort of negligent safety violations that likely occurred, but rather that communist researchers are. Moreover, if they introduced it into the human population intently, they very likely wouldn’t have done it right next to one of their few virology labs doing work on this sort of coronavirus. My guess is that they would have used one of their restive Muslim populations, very possibly the one they are apparently using for organ harvesting. Anywhere else in the world than Wuhan. Anywhere.
I don't buy a word out of the Biden camp.
It;s all lies. The Chi coms wanted to help the demos get Trump out by wrecking the economy and making it easy for D's to cheat at the ballot box.
Deliberate by the Chinese- remember the video that the CCP allowed out with people dropping over in the street and vans with the suited up "medical" guys jumping out to haul them away?
A wildfire scenario see andromeda strain.
Way back in the beginning- the Chinese government was welding people into their apartment complexes in Wuhan and literally spraying the streets with disinfectants.
There are many, among them me, to whom this is evidence something REALLY dangerous was released in Wuhan- and the Chinese succeeded in containing it. They didn't really care about containing the dreaded covid- it only kills off the already sick and weak among us.
There is, of course, no way of confirming this. Our entire human intel network in China was rolled up thanks to Hillary and her lax, and by lax I mean, non-existent, computer and communications security. Oh, just because you never read about the humint network being rolled up in the MSM doesn't mean it didn't happen, it means you're ignorant because you rely on the MSM. It's possible our military intelligence knows the answer to this. Our electronic intelligence gathering networks are still the best. But info like that is classified at really high levels.
And here's an interesting question. The entire intelligence establishment, both the military and civilian side, is 100% fully aware Biden in non compos mentis. Is he actually receiving briefs with sensitive classified intel? Or is there a shadow government running things behind the scenes until he's replaced? Let's face reality- as we saw during the Trump years- more than 90% of the government is on auto, and doesn't much care what the POTUS orders. It would take another two or three Trumps to bring it under control.
This is interesting: New Book Confirms Fauci's NIH Funded Wuhan Bat-COVID Experiments At Understaffed Chinese Lab.
Last April, the Washington Post's Josh Rogin revealed that in January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing "took the unusual step of repeatedly sending US science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)," and subsequently sent two official warnings back to Washington about "inadequate safety at the lab."
Now, Rogin is out with a new book; "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century," where he offers a 10,000-foot view of the evidence implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also confirming that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) - headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, "had funded a number of projects that involved WIV scientists, including much of the Wuhan lab's work with bat coronaviruses."
The punchline hasn't changed; if one simply connects the dots and applies a modicum of logic, the fact that COVID-19 emerged "on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world's largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2," after years of performing so-called "gain-of-function" research modifying animal viruses to better infect humans (and which the Obama administration banned in October 2014 in the United States), and you have American diplomats reporting that they were "shocked" that Chinese researchers "didn't have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab," and the likelihood of COVID-19 having escaped from WIV seems like a foregone conclusion.
If this is accurate, the one guy in this country who knew what was happening was NIH Director Fauci, who ended up running our COVID-19 response, and he knew about it, because his agency apparently funded much of the research, after having been forbidden doing it here in the US.
SARS-CoV-2 is likely to have originated in the Wuhan lab and escaped into the wild, either intentionally through a whistleblower, of which there have been several, or accidentally through incompetence or negligence. The handling has been necessarily tempered because the lab was funded through the Obama administration, that apparently shared/shifted/outsourced responsibility after restricting the practice domestically.
Gospace asks: Or is there a shadow government running things behind the scenes until he's replaced?
Yes, the same shadow government that ran things under the Obama administration. The Trump victory threw the whole thing into a tailspin from which it has not yet recovered.
Article kind of doesn't say anything at all.
@Blogger Mike (MJB Wolf):
Call me cynical/a conspiracy theorist (I freely admit to being both, in spades) but I suspect that curing the common cold is more about revenue than a lack of ability. IOW, there's more $$$ to be made in putting out temporary remedies to treat the symptoms. I really believe that's what's happened in treating cancer. With all the money invested in chemo/radiation, etc., why would the medical "industry" kill the golden goose?
It's hard to be neutral when the entire world, including the paid off employees of the W.H.O. understands that China not only knew about the strange virus that had been killing their own and infecting the masses at an alarming rate, but they held off telling the rest of the world about it until it had been out and about for 2-3 months. And in the interim period, they continued to send planeloads of their infected populous around the world. Australia, Italy, UK, US, etc.
Neutral? There is no neutrality on this. The third largest problem with the Wuhan virus is the coverage by a press more interested in damning Trump than stating the obvious truths about this.
The issue with the Wuhan virus was China and China alone- from the beginning. But the pandemic became worse by the W.H.O. and public health officials taking sides on a pandemic instead of doing their job. And the media/press? Ignorant and irresponsible as usual.
Yes, the same shadow government that ran things under the Obama administration. The Trump victory threw the whole thing into a tailspin from which it has not yet recovered.
Yes. The FBI seems to be the kinetic arm, aside from BLM and Antifa. All lead back to the same source of funding.
I suspect that curing the common cold is more about revenue than a lack of ability
The common cold refers to diverse (several hundred) viruses that produce a common basket of symptoms. Infections happen. However, disease progression is neither inevitable nor uniform. Immune system function varies across time, space, and individuals. The system can react with variable protection (e.g. antibodies) and with long-lived protection (e.g. t-cells).
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