In a recent article I asked why U.S. intelligence officials were following the coronavirus outbreak in China in November 2019 when there is no evidence anyone in China was aware of or concerned about the virus at that point. I noted that no evidence had been produced to explain how they spotted it and why they were concerned. Combined with a lack of cooperation with investigations into Covid origins and multiple signs of a cover-up, this unexplained early awareness of the virus is not just mysterious but suspicious.
Since publishing that piece I have been reminded about a report from Harvard University produced in June 2020 (apparently with intelligence community involvement) that appeared alongside a companion news report for ABC News and showed satellite images from Wuhan in the autumn of 2019 along with some data analysis, indicating increased hospital activity and other possible signals of disease outbreak.
The clear implication of the Harvard study is that these are the data (or some of them) that the intelligence community relied on in November 2019 to identify the outbreak and raise the alarm. The news report states the study used “techniques similar to those employed by intelligence agencies” and was “similar to work done by analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency”. The Pentagon’s Chief Spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, told ABC News he had “nothing to add” to the Harvard study, implying endorsement.
It’s therefore worth asking whether the data in the study can account for the U.S. intelligence community’s early awareness and alarm. Let’s take a look.
Here are the first two figures from the report.
The top chart (a) shows hospital traffic estimates from satellite images for six hospitals in Wuhan and an orange trend line that shows a smoothed overall figure. There is clearly a rising trend of overall hospital activity during October and November that wasn’t present the previous year (note that the middle vertical dashed line is December 1st and the third vertical dashed line is January 23rd). So we seem to have here a signal of modestly increased hospital activity which may be indicative of an outbreak. However, on closer inspection, the fainter hospital-specific data points reveal that this extra activity was focused in two hospitals in particular: Hubei Women and Children and Wuhan Tianyou. The data points are also erratic, spiking for one data point in early November but dropping sharply again later in November before spiking again in December. It’s fair to say this is not the clearest of signals. But perhaps the other data will be clearer.
The second chart (b) shows ‘Baidu’ search queries – which capture the frequency of internet and mobile phone searches – for ‘cough’ and ‘diarrhoea’ in Wuhan. The authors rightly draw attention to a signal of elevated searches for ‘diarrhoea’ after August (the first vertical dashed line). However, they also claim there is a signal for ‘cough’, but as can be seen in the chart, compared to the previous year no such elevated level of searches occurs prior to December. There is then a modest spike in searches for ‘cough’ during December, but even then it is well below the level of the previous year. In other words, there is no indication from these data of an outbreak of a coughing disease in Wuhan during autumn 2019, i.e., there is no Covid signal.
Noting the rise in ‘diarrhoea’ searches, the Harvard researchers suggest this means we should pay more attention to unusual symptoms in identifying a Covid outbreak. A more convincing conclusion, though, is that there was an outbreak of an unrelated diarrhoea bug during late summer and autumn in Wuhan. Such an outbreak may be sufficient to explain the increased hospital traffic at the time, particularly at the children’s hospital – which would also be less likely to be explained by a Covid outbreak. At one hospital the traffic was shown to be particularly elevated in October (see below), which is way too early for the ‘cough’ signal, but fits with when diarrhoea searches were elevated.
The third chart (c) from the report, above, shows the proportion of influenza-like illness admissions in two Wuhan hospitals. It again notably reveals a lack of admissions for influenza-like illness during October and November (prior to the middle vertical dashed line). There is then a spike in December, which matches the spike in ‘cough’ searches. But, importantly, nothing in November when U.S. intelligence analysts claim to have spotted the Covid outbreak. This means, whatever was causing the elevated hospital traffic at some Wuhan hospitals in September, October and November 2019, it wasn’t an influenza-like illness such as COVID-19.
On these data, then, it’s not at all clear how U.S. intelligence analysts could have seen a signal of a ‘cataclysmic‘ outbreak of a respiratory virus in Wuhan in mid-November 2019 that they felt compelled to warn their Government and allies about. There is no sign of a respiratory virus outbreak here – searches for ‘cough’ remained low in November and admissions for influenza-like illness were normal.
In a way, this lack of signal from Covid is, we should note, unexpected. After all, we know from other sources that the virus likely was already spreading both in Wuhan and more widely by November 2019, so we might have expected there to have been some signal for U.S. intelligence to have picked up on. On the other hand, we also know that this early spread was undetected everywhere at the time and did not cause large waves of hospitalisations and deaths. Since no country including China appears to have spotted the virus spreading within its own borders during November 2019, the question of how U.S. intelligence spotted it in Wuhan (and only in Wuhan) remains salient.
Thus this Harvard report, intended to show how U.S. intelligence analysts spotted the virus in November 2019 in China even though China itself had not noticed it yet, has ended up inadvertently revealing there was no signal of a respiratory viral outbreak in Wuhan at that time and thus no way that U.S. intelligence analysts could have spotted one.
Naturally, this does nothing to diminish the growing suspicions about how U.S. intelligence came to be following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, and only Wuhan, at a time when no one else, including the Chinese, were even aware of its existence.
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Apology not accepted. The top brass were and still are on board with the aims, and will have known the general drift if not the fine detail. Apology to the whistleblower not accepted either as their first instinct was to silence and punish. They got caught but will do it all again tomorrow more carefully.
My thoughts, exactly: They’re dishing out some money the government collected from the taxpayer and will henceforth cover their tracks more carefully. The mere fact that the air force has a diversity plan, IOW, that objective requirements are lower for the right kind of applicants, should be sufficient grounds to get rid of everyone involved with this starting with the top brass. Richard Knigthton is responsible for ensuring that something like this doesn’t happen, not for apologizing after his subordinates where caught breaking the law for the personal benefit of applicants to their liking while harming national security as a side effect.
Pushing the boundaries for positive action implies that they were well aware that they were acting illegally but hoped to get away with it in order to create a precedent for more law breaking with damaging side effects by other departments.
Ridiculous. People should be hired purely on their suitability for the role and nothing else. Speaking of diversity, more on the delusional fibber, Sadiq Khan and the state of the UK;
”Sadiq Khan’s claim that London was “built by migrants” is bizarre and without foundation, unless he means to refer to the Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes – who arrived in England two thousand years ago, and whose major legacy was linguistic: the Anglo-Saxon that developed into English. These tribes did not “build London.” Unlike the U.S., Great Britain is not a country of immigrants, and there was little immigration until the mid-20th century, when migrants started to arrive from the Caribbean in the 1950s, and then, in the 1960s, the migration of Pakistanis began. The Pakistani presence has been an unalloyed catastrophe. Many of them arrived – and continue to do so — as economic migrants, eager to take advantage of the full panoply benefits offered by the British welfare state, including free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits (even without having held jobs in the U.K.), family allowances, and more.
Muslim migrants have had difficulty integrating into a society of Infidels, whom they are taught to regard as “the most vile of created beings.” Their unemployment rate is three times that of the British. Their rates of criminality far exceed those of the native British, and of other, but non-Muslim, immigrants as well. Muslims make up 7% of the population, but 30% of those in prison. Perhaps most unsettling has been the deliberate debauching of many thousands of English girls by grooming gangs of Pakistanis, who first ply the girls, many of them in their early teens, with drink and drugs, engage in sex with them, and then pass them around as sexual toys to be used, repeatedly raped, by dozens of fellow Pakistanis. The police often chose to look the other way, afraid that they would be accused of “racism” if they started to round up Pakistanis.”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/06/sadiq-khan-claims-london-was-built-by-migrants
A tenuous link to the article being; just as you should face no discrimination in getting any job and nobody should be overlooked or turned down based on race etc, the same would naturally apply to criminals. The law should prosecute the person who commits the offence, irrespective of race etc. Not turn a blind eye and give a free pass to reoffend because police are performing some sort of tick box exercise, thereby basically enabling and encouraging the criminals to just keep at it. Have people not learnt anything from the whole Jimmy Saville fiasco?!
Should it be concluded that, for the purposes of justice, it was an advantage that Saville wasn’t a migrant?
That’s a generic lie. It’s mirrored by the German Greens claiming that Turkish immigrants were really responsible for rebuilding Germany and reacquiring general prosperty after the second world war when – in reality – the so-called Wirtschaftswunder happened in the 1950s while so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers) weren’t imported in numbers before the 1960s. Why did none of these supposed extraeuropean Übermenschen ever accomplish anything noteworthy in their native countries?
In the late 19th century, Chinatown in London consisted of just one street, Limehouse Causeway. At the time, the population of London was about 3 million.
In the 1911 census, the number of people in England and Wales with the surname of Patel numbered just 11 people.
In the late 1930s, a newspaper article called ‘The Foreign Bits of Britain’ related how a small country estate in Hertfordshire had been purchased by a German count in 1901 to be used as a ‘farm colony’ where German immigrants who had fallen on hard times could go to live and work at their trade to earn enough money to return home. The several hundred men who had lived there before the Great War had, by the 1930s, become a handful of old people. That was the extent of the ‘foreign bits of Britain’ that this newspaper could identify.
Today, in Tooting, South London, there is a blue plaque on a building which ‘celebrates the migrants who built Tooting’. Photographs of this area from the 1950s show no obvious migrants. Admiral Lord Nelson referred to the estate of the Hamiltons, not far from Tooting, as ‘paradise Merton’. The area was built up in the late 19th century and, as the 1911 census shows, was inhabited by lower middle class tradesmen, clerks and their families.
But all this is irrelevant. The claim that London, or any part of it, was built by migrants is not an assertion about the past. It is a claim to current ownership.
How do you square the circle of practising affirmative action whilst not discriminating against those you’re not affirming? Like everything nowadays, the policy appears incoherent.
You can’t and everyone knows that but they don’t say it.
So the result is that officials must prepare abject apologies both for not selecting minorities AND discriminating against majorities, and trot them out as occasion demands, without meaning either.
Likewise when an MP offends trans activists, they fill in a boilerplate apology form and mean nothing, because they would as readily apologise for insensitivity to de-transitioners. And in this way, basic morality soon disappears from a nation.
The primary cause of this is the Equalities Act 2010 brought in by Harriet Harman and immediately adopted by the following Tory government. Bin this and we could return to leading a normal life whereby we can call anybody names without fear of prosecution.
Just imagine for a minute that the discrimination had been against black men.
And then try and imagine that an apology would be all that was required.
Air Chief Sir Richard Knighton should resign or be sacked.