From the start of the covid pandemic to the present day, Legal Insurrection has been monitoring developments in the investigation of the origins of the novel coronavirus known as the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
I started in February 2020 when I noted that Chinese university researchers believed the virus might have originated in a government laboratory in Wuhan.
Stories our team has covered since that time support the assertion covid’s origins were from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Interestingly, I recently reported that the former head of China’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Prof George Gao, had indicated that a lab leak origin for the pandemic could not be ruled out. I concluded that post with this statement:
Yet, this is an intriguing trial balloon that suggests more information may be revealed that the Chinese may want to get ahead of. Stay tuned!
The Sunday Times of London published a detailed article that confirms all the information in the accounts we published and may explain why Gao was offering up this new take on covid’s origins from Chinese officials.
In addition to affirming reports we published that covered humanized mouse testing, the presence of the furin cleavage site in the virus’ genetic makeup, and the astonishingly poor safety practices being used during research on this virus, the Times of London make an exceedingly persuasive case that the Chinese military was working on this particular pathogen as part of a bioweapons program.
Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.
The article is lengthy…but worth reading for anyone interested in the full history surrounding the origins of covid. One of the scientists I have referenced in my posts, Microbiologist Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, is a vocal opponent of this research and a harsh critic of Dr. Anthony Facui. He has a Twitter thread summarizing key elements of the article.
I would like to highlight a few points that go beyond the material I previously covered and which paint a truly chilling picture of what the Chinese military appears to have been doing while the EcoHealth science team led by Peter Daszak puttered in other research activities. Therefore, I will start in 2015-2017, when the samples of bat coronaviruses that killed Chinese mine employees were sent to the institute.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident.
The US investigators also indicated the Chinese were working on a vaccine during the autumn of 2019.
“I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the source said. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”
Chinese People’s Liberation Army had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists before. He apparently died after it was noted how rapidly China had prepared a covid vaccine.
In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.
After increasing levels of concern and complaints about the nature of his research, Daszak omitted significant lethality data and lied about the severity of health effects in the test animals used during coronavirus experiments when he applied for even more funding.
The experiment was part-funded by EcoHealth’s grant money, but the FOI documents show that, while the Wuhan institute’s experiments were described in Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, he did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.
The bat cave was the source of samples that were likely morphed into the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes covid. Shi Zheng-li (“Bat Lady” researcher leading the studies of bat viruses) published papers on a virus RaBtCoV/4991.
But the Wuhan institute withheld information about the mine deaths from EcoHealth and the US government. Shi’s team spent four years stripping the Mojiang mine, collecting 1,300 samples from the bats, and discovered 293 coronaviruses.The work on the mine appears to have ended in May 2015. A year later, Shi published a scientific paper referring to the discovery at the site of a coronavirus that was from a lineage of Sars never seen before. She called it RaBtCoV/4991.
4991 was rebranded when the link to covid was identified.
After the pandemic began, the 4991 virus took on ever-greater significance. It was identified as the closest known relative to Covid-19. It meant the nine viruses found in the mine were the only members of Covid-19’s lineage known to have existed prior to the pandemic.When the Wuhan institute was forced to admit the existence of 4991 — having listed a section of its genome sequence on an international database in 2016 — it changed the name to RaTG13, which meant it could not easily be linked to the mine.
One of the American scientists assisting US officials in their investigation puts the pieces together (emphasis mine):
Dr Steven Quay, a US scientist who advised the State Department on its investigation, believes the Wuhan institute’s secrecy about the mine virus never made sense. “There has never been an example of a bat virus directly infecting humans and killing,” he said. Sars was a bat virus that infected people via an intermediary animal. “If those miners died from a bat virus, that was the first time in the history of human science that that happened. And the Chinese didn’t publish it,” he added.The investigators think Daszak was kept in the dark about this part of the work.Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”This explains why from the beginning of the outbreak, he says, the pandemic virus was so remarkably well adapted to infect humans.
In conclusion, the Times of London did incredible and informative reporting on the origins of covid. The piece concludes the research associated with the virus was part of a shadow project on the mine viruses funded by the Chinese military.
No mention of raccoon dogs occurs anywhere in its piece.
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