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acknowledged that it had taken swabs from the Huanan wet market, when it published a preprint (a study which has not been peer-reviewed) by George Gao of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, along with several other academics.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.
The only anti lockdown candidate standing that I am aware of is Laurence Fox and he will lose his deposit
He won’t if people vote for him. I know this is controversial to some but what have you to lose? A Labour or Conservative MP will have exactly the same pro-WEF, pro-Climate change, pro 15 minute cities, pro-lockdown policies, so why not vote for someone else?
Exactly.
Oh I totally agree
Just find it immensely sad and frustrating that support for mainstream parties on both sides of the political spectrum remains so high despite their obvious disregard for the support base they pretend to represent
The implication of the article is that support for the ULEZ will damage them at the expense of the Tories. While this may be true, I don’t see it as an especially good thing. Journalists from the political right need to come and and tell people they shouldn’t vote Conservative
As will the Lib Dems and Greens were they to win.
Exactly. There is nothing to gain whatsoever by voting for establishment parties- quite the reverse those voting for establishment parties are delusional fools who encourage the scoundrels to double down on their evil agendas.
UKIP wanted to talk about a strategy for all centre right challengers to come together but Reclaim and Reform UK are so far up their own backsides they refused to engage.
Aren’t all political parties a fair way up their own backsides? I’m suspicious of any party that didn’t firmly oppose lockdowns and fake vaccines from the start.
I think that Piers Corbyn is standing too….
I don’t know much about what his economic policies would be, but he was a star during covid.
He’s continuing to be a star in speaking out about the agenda – has a raft of unpaid ULEZ fines which he continues to refuse to pay.
Good to hear. I think I’d vote for him just for that.
You still think a by-election matters? Where have you been for the last three years? The entire political class of the Western world is moving in lockstep and gets its orders not from the party or the people but from the WEF at Davos.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it is a conspiracy FACT.
MP’s don’t need orders, just a keen sense of self-preservation, some proclivities that make them suggestible, or an ideological mindset that aligns with Other Interests. Less likely to generate incriminating documentation.
Then why do they go to Davos and why can’t you know what they are talking about with the global elite? Why is every major political party rep in every country saying they same things? I grew up wathing the politics of the 1970s, MPs had al the things you stated but completely differing views of even members of their own parties. Now you could most MPs in any rosette and they’d be fine with party policy.
Wake up my friend, time is getting short.
It was an observation that we’d be lucky to find any document making this explicitly clear. People can easily prove to themselves whether their MP will represent them. I have and he doesn’t.
Why is a candidate considered mofe favourably because they are/were:
born in Hillingdon Hospital
educated at a local comprehensive
raised by a single-mother
in South Ruislip and Ruislip Manor
the first person in his family to go to university
a former charity worker
I can think of several much more important qualities in a candidate.
As a comprehensive schooled pupil myself I would think that (and several other of those traits) would make them less suited in fact.
“A policy that was introduced to create cleaner air in the city centre”
No, it wasn’t. It was introduced to force the closure of shops, convert them to housing and create a 15 minute neighbourhood in which there would be few or zero cars. Read “Absolute Zero” by UK FIRES, page 5, for further details.
https://ukfires.org/absolute-zero/
Correct.
Absolutely, Allmouth.
Air “pollution” is at all-time record LOW levels. So the premise for this scheme is weapons grade bolix.
But we have “Conservatives” who conserve nothing, “Labour” who don’t care a fiddler’s fart about working people and “Liberal Democrats” who are absolutely illiberal and actively anti-democratic. Ony Gang”Green” stand out as having an appropriate name – albeit most of their policies are actually environmentally damaging.
Vote for ANYONE other than the LibLabCon artists. Or spoil the ballot.
A more emphatic response to the whole charade would be the best choice, but won’t happen.
Down with the Tories… but hold on, no… down with Labour even more! Let’s side with the underdogs… Vote REFORM!!! Oh, shucks, they’re pro-vaccination, where are we going to go from here? C’mon Nige, we need you to form another party, or Richard Tice to form a coalition with the Conservative party, yes that would be nice. But we’ve got to get rid of that pro-vax dogma somehow. You gotta be anti-lockdown, you gotta be pro-choice, you gotta be pro-personal freedom. Perhaps, just perchance, Westminster politics isn’t the best arena to satisfy all the above criteria. Maybe the punks of the 1960s were right all along, and maybe the hippies and beatniks to boot. It doesn’t matter which way you vote, you get the same greenwashed slime either way. I suspect Joseph Goebbels is turning in his grave as we speak, smugly and posthumously acknowledging the current establishment’s inability to match up to the best of 1940’s National Socialist Propagandists.
The woke, greenwashed left, as satirized and caricatured by Kier “What Is A Woman?” Starmer, was always doomed to face such a dilemma as this, as it has unthinkingly placed itself between a “rock” (the ULEZ scheme, part of the unchallenged Net Zero Sense agenda) and a “hard place” (the Labour Party’s supposed allegiance to those whom it represents – the struggling working class majority).
I’m not sure there is a shovel, nay, a JCB digger, large and powerful enough for Mr Starmer to dig himself out of the chasm he has dug himself by not challenging the ruling party and the prevailing agenda over the past three years.
The “Green Agenda”—- Central planning with the planet as the excuse.———– You can be sure that the fence sitter in chief (Starmer) who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before deciding if men are women or if children are foxes will squirm like the social justice pretend to save the planet parasite he is on this issue as on all others. ——-Starmer needs to be viewed through a microscope like all other parasites in the hope we can one day find a cure.
Dangerous Men