Legal Insurrection has been closely following the news related to the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic from the beginning of January.
In February, we covered the report from China on the probable laboratory origin of the virus. In March, we noted that there was a report that Chinese officials ordered the destruction of coronavirus laboratory samples in December.
Now, a dossier compiled by the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance asserts that China intentionally hid or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak.
The 15-page document from the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, was obtained by Australia’s Saturday Telegraph newspaper and states that China’s secrecy amounted to an “assault on international transparency.”The dossier touches on themes that have been discussed in media reports about the outbreak of the virus, including an initial denial by China that the virus could be transmitted between humans, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors who tried to speak up, the destruction of evidence in laboratories and refusal to provide live samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.Specifically, the file notes that China began censoring news of the virus on search engines and social media beginning Dec. 31, deleting terms including “SARS variation,” “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.”
Intelligence agencies are reviewing the research led by scientist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute. According to this report, several studies they conducted focused on areas of concern.
In fact, the Daily Telegraph’s compelling report on the dossier also discusses how the team at the Wuhan Virology Institute was genetically modifying coronavirus.
It notes a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers, including Dr Shi, who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19.The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species.Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help.The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting.“The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote.You have to be a scientist to understand it, but below is the line that the governments’ research paper references from the study.“To examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein — from the RsSHCO14-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats — in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone,” the study states.One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.”
In essence, the Chinese team appears to have purposely built a Franken-molecule that couldn’t be killed by the available antiviral treatments. Keep in mind, though, that whether or not the Wuhan coronavirus is genetically modified has yet to be officially determined.
Even if it is “natural,” that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have originated from a laboratory sample.
Increasingly, it appears as if investigators are heading toward the conclusion the coronavirus started to spread after accidental release from a laboratory.
Meanwhile, more countries are joining the Trump administration’s call for an investigation into China, the World Health Organization. and the origins of the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s a global recognition that China is responsible for this crisis, wasn’t transparent, and that not getting to the bottom of this could lead to future pandemics,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig, author of a new book, “The Return of Great Power Rivalry,” told the Washington Examiner.“This is a good sign that we’re seeing a number of key democratic allies in Europe and Asia with a pretty unified voice saying, ‘China is a problem, we need more information, and [to not be] intimidated by China’s heavy-handed response,’” Kroenig said, referring to the ruling Communist Party’s economic threats against nations that have been critical of the regime’s handling of the pandemic and lack of transparency.“You’re seeing a consensus among America’s closest allies that values and national security interests, with regard to the relationship with China, now trumps economics,” former Australian defense ministry adviser Patrick Buchan told the Examiner.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY