The COVID-19 pandemic timeline may bet getting a significant adjustment after the publication of a new report.
According to cyber security analysts from Australia, laboratories in Wuhan, China, ordered a substantial number of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and associated equipment in the second half of 2019. The purchases indicate that Covid-19 was “spreading virulently” in the area as early as the summer of 2019, months before the government officially reported the first case to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Data compiled by Internet 2.0, an Australian cyber security company, found that the Chinese government spent nearly twice the amount on PCR tests — used to detect certain viruses — in 2019, compared to the previous year. While China procured the PCR equipment for 36.7m yuan (£4.1mn) in 2018, it spent 67.7m yuan (£7.6m) in 2019.The report also found that the total PCR procurement contracts rose from 89 in 2018 to 135 in 2019.The “notable, significant and abnormal” increase in purchases was mainly from four institutions — the People’s Liberation Army [PLA] Airborne Army Hospital, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and the Hubei Province Districts Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The analysts assert that the data indicates Chinese authorities addressed a coronavirus outbreak earlier than December or an increased focus on virological and pandemic research in Wuhan laboratories.
“You can see across the trend that, starting in May and all the way through to December, you see a massive increase in PCR procurement data. Some of this may be benign but taken together it gives us a trend that comprehensively challenges the official narrative that the pandemic started in December,” Cybersecurity analyst Robert Potter, who recovered the data, told The Australian.”It also shows there’s a significant amount of procurement from the government level, the PLA and the Centre for Disease Control, as well as sensitive laboratories that are in the Hubei province.”Former director of U.S. National Intelligence John Ratcliffe also told the news outlet that the increased purchase of PCR equipment in Wuhan in 2019 is significant.”I think there’s more than just smoke here, I think there’s fire from a whole bunch of different sources,” he said. “I think that would be another compelling piece of evidence, if you need more. I don’t need more.”
Tied to this information is a report I had touched on last month mentioning a surfaced 2018 grant proposal showing that Wuhan scientists planned to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the Chinese bat populations. This proposal is now making its way through the British media, as The Telegraph article reviewing the project shows.
A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.So far the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was reported from Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Yet scientists expect a direct ancestor to be around a 99.98 per cent match – and none has been found so far.The [US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Darpa proposals, leaked to the pandemic origins analysis group Drastic, show the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence that was an average of all the strains.
The Daily Mail also reported the expert’s assessment of the proposal.
The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.”They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses.’Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it.’This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones,’ the expert said.
British zoologist Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the US-based organization, made the bid. His company has worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), researching bat coronaviruses.
The WHO source who provided the analysis for the UK Telegraph revealed that he had raised a lab leak issue with other scientists and had been warned not to go on the record with his concerns.
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