No sooner had the World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday published its report into the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus, than the Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was making a public statement distancing the organisation from what observers are calling a “whitewash”.
The report, which had been conducted with heavy reliance on Chinese scientists and under pressure from Chinese authorities, concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that SARS-CoV-2 had escaped from a lab, claiming instead it was most likely the novel virus had passed from bats via an “intermediate animal host” before sparking an “explosive outbreak” in Wuhan in December 2019.
With a rare and welcome criticism of the Chinese Government, Dr Ghebreyesus said: “I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing” and insisted that “all hypotheses remain on the table”.
The United States, the UK and 12 other countries (Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, South Korea and Slovenia) issued a joint statement echoing the Director General’s concerns: “It is equally essential that we voice our shared concerns that the international expert study on the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples.”
The European Union, more meekly, said that it regretted the delays and the “limited availability of early samples and related data”.
Dr Peter Ben-Embarek, head of the WHO mission at the centre of the controversy, defended his report, saying the “zoonotic origins” of the pandemic had been the agreed remit of the investigation rather than a potential laboratory accident. A defence which rather begs the question as to why the investigation was disbarred by design from looking into one of the key possibilities.
Dr Ben-Embarek, for reasons best known to himself, felt moved to offer a rather feeble defence of the Chinese Government’s lack of cooperation.
Of course there are areas where we had difficulties in getting down to the raw data, and there are many good reasons for that. In China, like in many other countries, there are restrictions on privacy laws that forbid the sharing of data, including private details to outsiders in particular. Where we did not have full access to the overall data, this has been put as a recommendation for future studies. So the idea is that, because we didn’t have time or because certain authorisation needs to be given before we could get access to the data, all that could be done in the second phase of studies.
Science journalist Matt Ridley aptly called it a “pure whitewash” when he appeared yesterday morning on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s show on talkRADIO. He pointed out that although the report concludes it’s very likely that an animal carried the virus to Wuhan, this conclusion is at odds with the 20-30 pages in the report which note that 45,000 animals in China have been tested for the virus and none have been found with it.
A lab escape was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Back on February 19th 2020, 27 prominent scientists declared in the Lancet: “We stand together to condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Another group of experts, on March 17th, proclaimed in Nature Medicine: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Now, though, it is very much regarded as a plausible hypothesis. Matt Ridley, who is writing a book on the subject, and Harvard medical geneticist Alina Chan explained why it is being taken seriously by experts in an eye-opening article in the Telegraph.
They write that, unlike SARS from 2003, SARS-CoV-2 was not found to mutate rapidly in early human cases, suggesting it was already well adapted to infecting human beings. Furthermore, in May 2020, the director of the Chinese CDC announced that none of the animal samples collected from the Wuhan wet market had tested positive for COVID-19.
Ridley and Chan write:
Yet there is little doubt that the pandemic began in Wuhan. All the early cases were in the city and the majority of the first recorded cases in other countries were among people who had travelled from Wuhan. Persistent attempts by the Chinese Government and scientists to play up possible origins in frozen-food imports and pre-Wuhan cases in Europe have been unpersuasive so far.
There is still no sign of an original animal source of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, or the rest of Hubei province. Horseshoe bats that live in the area have been extensively sampled for viruses for years without SARS-CoV-2-like viruses showing up. Therefore, the strongest connection between such viruses in Yunnan and the human outbreak in Wuhan is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the fact that it had collected SARS-like viruses from the Mojiang mine.
But this is circumstantial, not direct evidence. Although SARS leaked from a Beijing laboratory twice in 2004, infecting 11 people, there have been no public reports of an accident at the WIV. Moreover, RaTG13 is not SARS-CoV-2: there are significant differences between the viruses. This is why full transparency about all the viruses held in the WIV would be helpful, including all of the SARS-like viruses collected in the Mojiang mine.
Unfortunately, the Institute’s database of more than 20,000 viruses was taken offline around the time of the outbreak for “security reasons”, and the WHO team were not given access to it. The WIV is the foremost laboratory for studying these kinds of viruses in the world, and had collected large numbers of coronaviruses from hundreds of miles away. With no sign of a source in the wet market or animals, the coincidence that the outbreak began in the vicinity of such an institute is too great to be easily dismissed.
The theory was given a boost in January 2021 when the US State Department released a statement saying it had “reason to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses”.
More worrying is the prospect that the virus might not just be an escaped sample of a naturally occurring bat coronavirus, but an engineered virus from gain-of-function research. This may explain, for example, why it was already well adapted to human-to-human transmission.
Ridley and Chan again:
We know from published work that Dr Shi and her colleagues were not only analysing the genomes of viruses, they were also manipulating them. This includes the creation of ‘chimera’ or hybrid viruses with genes taken from two different viruses. It also includes the testing of these viruses in ‘humanised’ mice, endowed with a certain human gene.
The practice of building chimera coronaviruses, sometimes leaving no trace of manipulation, is not new. Such experiments have been conducted in select laboratories such as the WIV for years, for the purpose of understanding how novel viruses could spill over into humans. The ultimate goal is to create a universal vaccine for all SARS-like viruses.
The scientists might find it unbearable if they instead caused a pandemic. But they did not find it unthinkable. In a 2015 article co-authored by Dr Shi these words appear: “Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue… The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.”
SARS-CoV-2 is not so deadly as the bat virus that killed three of the six miners who caught it directly from the bats in 2012. The WIV held samples of nine bat viruses sourced from that Mojiang mine, one of which, RaTG13 was noted (though without making the link) by WIV researchers themselves to be very similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Could SARS-CoV-2 be an engineered version of those viruses, perhaps made less deadly but ready for human-to-human transmission? It’s one possibility, but without further access to samples and data, repeatedly denied by the Chinese authorities, scientists have no way to find out.
It’s very important we find out soon, though, so we can know exactly what we’re dealing with and what lessons we should learn.
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I wouldn’t be too blasé saying “Gov inevitably lost..”, but it does increase my confidence in the judges! Also reported on GBN recently.
Call me paranoid but my guess is the judges’ motivation is to expose evil Tory incompetence and corruption rather than getting to the real truth about covid.
“unredacted”….. Highly unlikely.
BREAKING.. the Daily Sceptic has received the first glimpse of Johnson’s papers.. verdict.. clear as mud..
Squeaky bum time for Gove, Cummings and Sunak me-thinks.
I wish I could believe that, but the whole premise of the inquiry is that there was a pandemic, so the focus will be on poor execution of the stupid, evil rubbish they made up pretending it was to do with public health. The basic lie will not be exposed in our lifetime because there are too many vested interests who were all in on it in some way or another. In fact, name a powerful institution in the rich world that wasn’t an enthusiastic supporter of the covid scam.
Yes TOF.. name one indeed.. I certainly can’t..
We were lied to about the efficacy and safety of the jabs just like we were lied to about the severity of the pretend ”pandemic”. The maniacal obsession with getting everybody jabbed, using whatever means necessary ( not just the PsyOp, remember the crazy examples of bribery from all around the world? Remember when they did that for previous years’ flu vaccines? Nope, me neither! ) looks even more sinister now doesn’t it? That’s why I’ve personally done a 180 and now think no world leaders and no people with real influence took the damn things at all. They’d have just had placebos, I’m convinced of it. Because they *knew* the whole thing was a hoax and the death jabs were both unnecessary and highly risky, in a dangerously ‘mass global human experiment using novel technology’ kind of way.
”Drug regulators and public health agencies have saturated the airways with claims that serious harms following COVID-19 vaccination are “rare.”
But there has been very little scrutiny of that claim by the media, and I couldn’t find an instance where international agencies actually quantified what they meant by the term “rare” or provided a scientific source.
The best evidence so far has been a study published in one of vaccinology’s most prestigious journals, where independent researchers reanalyzed the original trial data for the mRNA vaccines.
The authors, Joseph Fraiman et al., found that serious adverse events (SAE)—i.e., adverse events that require hospitalization—were elevated in the vaccine arm by an alarming rate—1 additional SAE for every 556 people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.
According to a scale used by drug regulators, SAEs occurring at a rate of 1 in 556 are categorized as “uncommon” but are far more common than what the public has been told.
In response to the criticism, Fraiman, an emergency doctor and lead author on the reanalysis said, “To be honest, I’m not that surprised that agencies have not determined the rate of SAEs. Once these agencies approve a drug, there’s no incentive for them to monitor harms.”
He said it’s hypocritical for health agencies to tell people that serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines are rare when they haven’t even determined the SAE rate themselves.
“It’s very dangerous not to be honest with the public,” said Fraiman, who recently called for the mRNA vaccines to be suspended.
“These noble lies may get people vaccinated in the short term, but you’re creating decades or generations of distrust when it’s revealed that they have been misleading the public.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sorry-but-serious-harms-from-the-vaccine-are-not-rare_5373840.html
We still have the core question: why? To me the elephant in the room is that only the (gullible) people of the collective west were given deadly mRNA, while China’s sphere of influence were given what I assume were basically placebos. This seems incredibly significant to me. If the shots are a bioweapon, which I think they are, and the mRNA tech is owned by China, which Naomi Wolf and others have shown, what does that suggest? To me it suggests that world war 3 is a biological war…
Anyone else having probs with the site being slow or not loading tonight? I posted something over an hour ago and it’s disappeared into the ether. Oh well…just some friendly neighbourhood gremlins perhaps…
From Peter McCullough’s Telegram;
”After high volumes of downloads overnight @TheLancet censored our paper. They don’t want the truth to get out on autopsies in C19 deaths. Why not let people read it and make their own conclusions?”
No wonder the shady buggers censored it. Look at the authors and you’ll see at least six names of doctors/experts who have been outspoken and opposing the narrative from the start. You can still access it here;
https://www.zenodo.org/record/8120771
All a pantomime for those that believe any of this stuff still matters.
The fact is that during the “deadliest virus the world has ever seen” members of the govt, opposition, civil service and expert class were swanning around drinking and screwing while they told the rest of us it was too dangerous to sit in a cold church 20 feet from someone else. If you can’t work out what that means then you need to listen to a little more “London Calling”.
Described brilliantly AMAT..
Never mind, the waste of yet more taxpayers’ money is par for the course of all governments.
Nothing like this happens by accident. I suspect they want to paint the picture of the chaotic response to Covid by our elected government so that they can push the line that we need to hand over our sovereignty to unelected technocrats at the WHO.