Dr. Alice C. Hughes is one of many scientists whose research on bats has been stifled by the Chinese Government. The Associate Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Hong Kong, recalls how research into the origins of Covid was encouraged at first. But that changed abruptly early in 2021. She analyses major flaws in a recent study published by Nature to elaborate on this state intervention in academia.
Hughes argues that if we want to be better prepared for the next pandemic, it is time to stop focusing on finding ‘animal zero’, and direct efforts towards understanding the process of viruses spilling over into human populations.
She has written about this in the Spectator.
As Covid spread through China, scientific institutes were initially encouraged or requested to develop task forces to chase down the origins of Covid. Even researchers who had never worked on bats – which at the time were believed to be the most likely origin of the virus – were suddenly going into the field to find a wild source. At the same time these institutes were placed under intense scrutiny. Any publication had to be vetted and approved prior to submission if it mentioned the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2, and scientists were virtually forbidden to talk to journalists, even about their published work.
Then the political climate began to shift once again, and the Chinese Government began to make research into Covid’s origins more difficult. By early 2021 the ability to conduct field research on bats became more and more challenging, and within provinces such as Yunnan, where the most similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 had been found in bats, scientists were told that bat research was no longer permissible by the middle of the year. This included me and my research team. Whilst we had conducted our bat work unhindered in Yunnan since 2013, and like so many scientists were encouraged to take more samples in 2020, by 2021 we were the subject of intense scrutiny, sometimes involving police checks, interviews and monitoring even before our sampling became impossible. …
In early 2022 China finally acknowledged that it had taken swabs from the Huanan wet market, when it published a preprint (a study which has not been peer-reviewed) by George Gao of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, along with several other academics. The underlying data it was based on was not publicly released.
This preprint is the basis of a peer-reviewed study in Nature which was published this month by China’s CDC, on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. How this paper came to be published in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, when it contains so many apparent errors and obfuscations though, is not clear.
The Nature publication is based on swabs from the Huanan wet market, the cages, and other samples taken directly from animals. Unlike the cage swabs, it’s impossible to know where these animal samples came from and how they relate to the market. Several stray animals around the wet market were tested at the end of March, after the virus had already peaked and waned in Wuhan. The value of the animal data, three months after the market was closed, is very limited. …
Perhaps rather than continuing to try and find ‘animal zero’, it is finally time to refocus our efforts on understanding why viruses like Covid spill over into human populations, to better understand what conditions may increase this risk. Because Covid will not be the last pandemic we witness, and we are yet to learn the lessons needed to prevent making the same mistakes again.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
There’s so much wrong with this article.
Oh FFS there was no pandemic
The only issue to my mind is, If it was lab engineered weather it was deliberately released or accidentally. I’m coming around to deliberate. And I say if because was there ever a Sars-cov2 have we been psyoped into believing. And yes TMF I’d like to know all about this pandemic people keep talking about because I haven’t seen one.
I’m not sure and doubt anyone can ever be sure.
However there have been over $100bn reasons it could very well have been deliberate. It is mighty odd it was, right from the outset, so mild. Odd that the group it effected adversely was so precise – the old, vulnerable and those with co-morbidities and your chance of dying if you aren’t in that group is almost zero.
Whilst having no knowledge of the real reason for the lab release, there are a few other notable facts.
Coronoviruses are highly transmissible. A requirement for surety and rapidity of worldwide spread. I also understand there is an inverse relation between transmissibility and the efficacy of vaccines. So effectively, if one were to plan a worldwide pandemic, the agent that can achieve that is also more likely to be one where vaccines are not particularly effective (and indeed in this case have a bad case of negative efficacy and propensity to maim or kill). If this were an engineered bio weapon, it is a remarkably bad one and, since from early on it was clear to me this virus was mild, I have always bridled on hearing that phrase, thinking it discredits those who use it.
If there were anyone planning such a thing in order to be able to profit from Pharma product mandates, I would think it fairly important to them it that the agent shouldn’t really actually be dangerous. After all any such putative planners also have to live in this world, there would be no prospect of a vaccine approaching anything like 100% absolute efficacy and they will also have friends and family in this world.
From that standpoint a mild virus, one which affects only a very specific very circumscribed group, one that kills almost nobody with good vitamin D levels and a healthy immune system, but one that can nevertheless be used to generate moral panic, would be the perfect product.
Please, people, stop calling it a bio weapon when it is clearly nowhere near any such thing. Instead think of it as providing the seed of truth for a financial propaganda based coup. IMO when thinking about it this way, I think the chances of deliberate release are pretty high. Though I have also experienced from the inside of a organisation the fact that “cock-up” is so much more often the truth than conspiracy. So while I have an open mind either way, I do think there remains a high chance a lot of parties of low moral character simply took the opportunity and capitalised on an accident.
There are two other ways in which you could use the word “bioweapon” for what happened: 1 – the “vaccines” and 2 – look at the enormous destruction that the Covid scam is wreaking on the world
Opportunists taking advantage of a situation knowingly distorting facts for their own gain is a conspiracy
What about the little nugget that the some of the personnel at Wuhan labs were selling test animals, on the wet markets to earn a bit of cash?
Limited hangout, fake news, distraction, BS. Think I’ve covered all bases there..
Can we discuss the efficacy of masks now please? 
Another load of boll ox. Not you Mogs, the article.
Whoops.
Good idea – let’s do some gain of function research and see if that solves the question.
We can’t possibly do that. That would be immoral unless we do it in another country. So let’s do directed evolution instead.
“… spill over into human populations, to better understand what conditions may increase this risk. “
We already know, but like so much else have forgotten everything prior to March 2020.
The answer is poverty – as with so much. Impoverished Humans in agrarian societies live in close contact with animals and each other, and eat just about everything that moves, and all their body parts.
However such infection rarely translate into subsequent Human to Human transmission. But close contact with animals will select for those pathogens most adaptable for transmission to Humans, and close Human contact will select for those most adaptable for transmission Human to Human.
The answer is more prosperity – the opposite of protectionist trade barriers and climate change lunacy and conservation projects.
Well if covid exists I suppose it might be interesting to find out the origins especially if they were man made and especially if various powerful actors have been lying to us – both seem quite plausible.
But the origins of the covid scam are much more important. An unholy alliance of globalists, collectivists, chancers and freeloaders aided and abetted by a decadent society of pampered, safety-obsessed sheeple.
“Dr Alice Hughes argues that if we want to be better prepared for the next pandemic…”
Let me stop you right there chuchy face.
There was NO pandemic.
Wholly discredited from that point on. No wonder this is in the Speccie.
“Because Covid will not be the last pandemic we witness, and we are yet to learn the lessons needed to prevent making the same mistakes again.”
A bit of inside intell eh? Not the last pandemic. I haven’t even lived through one yet.
And ‘lessons need to be learned to prevent the same mistakes.’
Where have you been sleeping doctor? There were no mistakes in the Scamdemic commencing March 2020, all those countries invited to participate did so, excepting Sweden, and all operated in lockstep as per orders.
She is either very, very stupid or all of a sudden very wealthy.
There was no need for a virus. The just concocted something with the same symptoms as cold and flu, faked PCR tests and put Covid on the death certificate no matter what the real cause of death was.
************************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
This could be readily weaponised: people are isolated in cities, the remainder is re-wilded. No contact, no spill-over with the added bonus of ticking some other “sustainability” boxes also.
“Worth reading in full.” Really DS? We knew where it came from in Spring ’20. And why is she priming us to expect another pandemic? And still trying to blame animals? We know the creatures who caused this, and they had their publicly-funded contract renewed to keep on doing it.
Just another squirrel.