Since the publication on May 14th of the letter in Science calling for a new investigation into the origins of COVID-19, the lab leak theory has officially gone mainstream. Numerous articles testifying to its plausibility have been published, and President Biden ordered intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to examine the virus’s origin.
One of the best articles that’s been published in recent weeks is a piece by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. Although she doesn’t come down in favour of one theory or the other (lab leak versus natural origin), she does lay out much of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak. And it’s not in short supply.
To begin with, you have the location of the first outbreak in Wuhan, China – home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (as well as the Wuhan C.D.C.). It would be a remarkable coincidence, many have observed, if the pandemic just happened to get started in a city that hosts one of the world’s major coronavirus research labs.
Some have countered that labs tend to be built where the viruses are. However, this simply isn’t true in the case of the Wuhan Institute, as Tufekci points out. The lab has “been where it is since 1956… It was upgraded and began to focus on coronavirus research only after SARS.” Even Dr. Shi (the “Batwoman”) has said she “never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan”.
Next, you have reports about the rather lax safety standards inside the Wuhan Institute. In 2016, for example, scientists ran experiments on a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells in a BSL-2 lab – a biosafety level that “has been compared with that of a dentist’s office”. And in 2017, a Chinese state-TV story about Dr. Shi’s research “showed researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare hands”.
Then there is the fact that Dr. Shi, her colleagues and the Wuhan Institute, not to mention the Chinese authorities, have given misleading or incomplete accounts of key events, or have simply withheld information. Aside from the location’s first major outbreak, this is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence for a lab leak. If the virus’s origin is zoonotic, why wouldn’t you let other scientists look over your files?
On 3rd February, 2020, Dr. Shi and her colleagues “announced in Nature that they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose genome sequence was 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2”. Internet sleuths then “combed through genomic databases and found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat coronavirus called 4991”, which had been implicated in an unexplained 2012 outbreak of pneumonia among miners in Yunnan. Neither the name change nor the previous outbreak were mentioned in Dr. Shi’s paper.
That same group of internet sleuths also discovered that “a genomic database maintained by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with information about thousands of bat samples… went offline in September 2019”. (The official explanation is that it had been “subjected to hacking”.)
On 10th December, Peter Daszak – organiser of the infamous Lancet letter, and a close collaborator of Dr. Shi’s – dismissed suggestions that there were live bats inside the Wuhan Institute. In a now-deleted tweet he wrote, “We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!” However, contrary evidence subsequently emerged.
As Tufekci notes, “The Chinese Academy of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan institute as having at least a dozen cages for bats, and in 2018 the institute applied for a patent for a bat cage. Dr. Shi has talked about monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not be done in a cave.”
Most suspicious of all, the Chinese authorities have straightforwardly “refused to share direct records from the lab”. After the publication of the Science letter earlier this year, Dr. Shi told a reporter, “It’s definitely not acceptable” for other experts to review her lab’s records…
Another piece of the puzzle is the genetic sequence of the virus itself, including the presence of a so-called “furin cleavage site” on the virus’s spike protein. This is something that Nicholas Wade discussed extensively in his essay back in May. Tufekci, though, isn’t convinced. She notes, “aspects of the virus that have made some suspect it was bioengineered could also be evidence that the virus evolved naturally”.
The fact that no intermediary host species has yet been identified arguably lends support to the lab leak theory. However, Tufekci raises the possibility that the virus passed straight from bats to humans. In that case, she says, “no intermediary animal is necessary, since it could have been any interaction with a bat – by a villager or a field researcher”.
Finally, there’s the frequency with which lab leaks have occurred in the past. Bayes theorem tell us that the probability of a hypothesis, given some evidence, is a function of the conditional probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, as well as the prior probability of the hypothesis.
If you take all of human history, the vast majority of pandemics have been caused by zoonotic spill-over – which would suggest the prior probability of a lab leak is quite low. However, sophisticated research labs have only been around for a few decades. (We can’t pin the Plague of Justinian on inadequate safety protocols.)
“A better period of comparison”, Tufekci notes, “is the time since the advent of molecular biology, when it became more likely for scientists to cause outbreaks.” In fact, nearly every case of SARS since the original outbreak in 2002 has been due to lab leaks. There have been “six incidents in three countries, including twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing”.
And such leaks are by no means confined to China. In 2007, foot-and-mouth disease “escaped from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the highest biosafety rating, BSL-4”. I’m not aware of what percentage of epidemics are caused by lab leaks, as opposed to zoonotic spill-over, but it’s probably larger than we’ve been led to believe.
Tufekci’s article contains a lot of valuable insights, and is worth reading in full.
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Stop The War On Cash
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
What’s really happening?
‘Russian reporter Vladislav Ugolny says Russian soldiers are stuck on the islands of the Dnipro river delta as the water froze, and travelling by boats became nearly impossible.
To quote my friend…….’there is no option other than to wait…….there’s no food…..everyone there will have to be sent immediately to the hospital for treatment.’
So there it is….’
Also:
‘On Sunday night, Ukrainian air defences shot down one of the Russian air force’s very rare, and very valuable, A-50 radar early-warning planes, likely killing all 15 people aboard—potentially including high-ranking officers. A Russian Ilyushin Il-22 command plane was damaged in the same attack.
Down one A-50, the Russian air force may have just two of the jets left; the other six A-50s reportedly are in need of upgrade and overhaul. Unless the air force is willing to risk the last two flyable A-50s, it must make peace with its new inability to provide radar coverage over all of Crimea.’
Still bleating your pro Ukraine b0££0ck$. It’s not our war. Leave it to terminally corrupt Biden and War mongering NATO.
It is not our war…..yet……
Belarus is already part of the new ‘Union State’, Ukraine next, then Moldova.
That gives the ‘Union State’ a frontier from Kaliningrad to the Black Sea, encircling the Baltic States.
Then it becomes our war….
Maybe better to do something now?
Who to believe, every Western government with a Russian border or some random punter on the interweb……
Tricky……or not really.
Not our war ever but we are paying for it anyway. Who to believe, concerned UK taxpayer or war mongering Zelensky fan boy. No, not tricky at all
The lack of a definite or indefinite article, as usual, gives the game away.
‘1. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] Final Act, to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine……..
4. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression…..’
It has been our war since 2014. You just didn’t notice.
What game, it’s not a game and you are delusional. It’s not our war, never was our war and never will be our war. It is however disgraced ex prime minister Boris Johnson’s vanity war, he needed one to bolster his Churchill credentials and which he deliberately prolonged and which for some reason current prime minister without mandate Sunak wishes to continue. If you want war go ahead, fill your boots, but not with my taxes.
English is clearly not your first language.
I very much doubt that you pay any tax in Britain, if any at all anywhere.
You don’t sound as though you are old enough.
You’re an idiot, you can’t respond to my comment so you resort to accusing me of being a Russian troll. I was teaching English when the best part of you was trickling down your mommy’s thigh.
Having your mum help you with your comments is not really working for you, is it? Presumably your dad was also Salvador Dali.
Intemperate language invariably indicates a fool and a poseur who has lost the argument and, indeed, the plot.
Not working for me? I’ll be the judge of that. As for your bizarre non-sequitur, is that all you’ve got? As I said, fan boy, you go ahead and start all the wars you like, just not with my money.
Yes European countries have been having a fertility crisis for years now, with native births falling below replacement level, so the Leftards’ answer to this is to make up the numbers ( thereby replacing us natives slowly but surely ) using limitless immigration instead. Because actually finding out the reasons why young people aren’t having babies, or are stopping at just one kid, and then doing something about it, is just way too reasonable and too much like hard work. If you voice concerns about the continuing demographic changes though, you will be the target of the predictable ”Nazi”, ”racist” and ”xenophobe” slurs, just as this Belgian MEP has found out;
”Once conservative MEP Tom Vandendriessche exposed the globalist migration scheme, threats of a parliamentary investigation were launched, accompanied by smears and false accusations, including likening his words to Nazi terminology, as globalists sought to silence any opposition to their agenda.
The European Parliament, dominated by radical left-wing politicians, has initiated an investigation targeting Tom Vandendriessche, a member of the Flemish conservative Vlaams Belang party. Vandendriessche has fearlessly exposed the European Union’s calculated agenda of ‘organized replacement’ through its migration policies.
In his powerful Parliamentary speech, Vandendriessche emphasized that the EU’s migration pact falsely claims to tackle illegal migration. He stated, ‘With the EU migration pact, they claim to address illegal migration. This is an absolute lie. There is no upper limit on the number of asylum seekers, and there is no mechanism to deport fraudulent asylum seekers. Therefore, the asylum chaos will continue.’
Vandendriessche went on to reveal the underlying purpose of the EU migration pact, citing a statement from controversial European Commissioner Ylva Johansson. She openly admitted, ‘There are too few European births, and she aims to replace them by importing 4.5 million non-Europeans annually. This represents a deliberate and organized replacement strategy.’”
https://rairfoundation.com/great-replacement-belgian-mep-stuns-parliament-exposes-their/
So glad to see that the good old Coudenhove Kalergi plan for a Europe of Mongs is going so well .
And who says a gently declining population is a bad thing? A rapidly rising one has not turned out too well for living statndards, has it.
Mogs the immigrant invasion of Europe has been planned for and current national governments are complicit in enabling this. The aim is the destruction of Europe and Western nations.
Low birth rates are simply a symptom. Why would young people want to bring children into this world while their societies are collapsing on a daily basis?
Deliberate destruction.
Is this the same Mogwai who called me a ‘Nazi’ and ‘Gestapo agent’ last week? Sauce for the goose……….
What’s ”sauce for the goose” got to do with anything? I called you those names because 1) you were sneaking around, covertly tampering with my posts for reasons unknown, not even bothering to leave any explanation, and 2) I was wanting to check you were reading what I posted. Which you were, and obviously still are.
Tell me, is there anyone else on your ”Naughty List” or am I ‘the chosen one’? When does my probation end?? Do you get a ”red alert” notification straight to DS Mod HQ whenever I post anything? Bizarro..
More on this ongoing issue of immigration and the significant impact family reunification has on demographics. And the fact the Leftards continue to dismiss anyone speaking out about this as ”racist” or that the ‘Great Replacement’ is just mere far-right conspiracy theory, when there are many sources of data to back this up, is just farcical;
”1976 is the year of the “family reunion” in France of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the institutional construction of the European Union. Giscard d’Estaing had recently expressed regret over the reunion. “The idea of bringing in immigrant families seemed natural at the time. With the massive increase in immigration from Muslim countries, it has instead produced deep divisions in French society.”
It starts with the wife and children, then come the wife’s parents, the other children of the wife’s parents and their children. And so on, in a demographic chain that has become repopulation.
A number? Christopher Caldwell provides it in the latest Compact: “By the middle of the century, a fifth of France will be Islamic.”
Caldwell in an essay for the Claremont Review talks about another country that is generous with family reunification, Sweden:
“The Pew Research Center has predicted that, by 2050, if it receives a moderate amount of immigration, Sweden will be 20 percent Muslim. If it receives high immigration, it will be 30 percent Muslim.”
Family reunification of migrants in Germany will reach a new record this year.
The former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe talks about the “avalanche effect of family reunification” in Le Figaro. “In Belgium, 50 percent of immigration is linked to family reunification. This type of immigration is, by definition, exponential and, literally, infinite, through the recognition of refugees, fake or gray marriages, the endogamous character of most Turkish and Moroccan marriages, massive fraud, etc. The almost mechanical consequences of family reunification on demography are never explained.”
37.3 percent of Belgian citizens have an immigrant background. In Brussels this percentage is already 82.5 percent, in Antwerp 62 and in Ghent 41, reveals sociologist Jan Hertogen. “Without immigration, Brussels would only have 250,000 inhabitants, Antwerp half of those it has today.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/383744
Chain migration, the gift that never stops giving !The problem is in what its called .To a westerner “Family” , is normally Western Nuclear ie mom Dad Children , not extended family including 3rd cousins and uncles etc Any famly reunion should be limited to children only and 2 maximum so we dont get families with 15 kids arriving to suck on the welfare teat for life…
Indeed and now the US and the Western press are giving cover for genocide.
This will be the end of the old global order with the US globally vilified much like the Nazis.
““New WEF participant does the unthinkable at 2024 Davos meeting””. Whereas Javier Milei actually did indirectly in a much longer and more nuanced manner.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Pfcd0gWNIog?feature=shared
“Escort services ‘completely booked’ as WEF begins”
I hope those escort agencies have good ESG ratings and meet the required DEI requirements….
Beware a sudden global emegence of monkeypox !!!
The clientele wouldn’t be seen with a counterfeit Rolex so it seems safe to assume these will be real women.
Yes but they are the ones promoting the Alphabet agenda so I am not so certain lol