Bat Woman playing God: did she go too far?
Newsletter published on April 21, 2020
(1) Bat Woman playing God: did she go too far, deliberately or otherwise?
(2) Wuhan Lab Denies any Link to Coronavirus Outbreak
(3) French Gov't denies Luc Montagnier's claim Covid-19 came from Wuhan
lab, but without mentioning him by name
(4) Montagnier: "It is a watchmaker's work, the presence of certain
parts of HIV cannot be by chance"
(5) Germany's largest paper to China's president: Why are your toxic
laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
(6) Ian Frazer, who co-invented the HPV vaccine, says COVID-19 may never
have a preventive vaccine
(1) Bat Woman playing God: did she go too far, deliberately or
otherwise? - Daily Mail
From: Lasha Darkmoon <darkmoon@darkmoon.me>
China's deadly legacy: The coronavirus cover-up was one of the most
grotesque deceptions by a totalitarian government ever - now Beijing
will use the pandemic it sparked to help achieve its goal as No1 world
superpower
By RICHARD PENDLEBURY and JOHN NAISH FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 08:26 AEST, 18 April 2020 | UPDATED: 16:35 AEST, 18 April 2020
When tens of thousands worldwide are dead or dying and many thousands
more are doomed, it's an odd thing to boast about.
But when the flagship Hermès store in the Chinese city of Guangzhou
reopened after a two-month coronavirus lockdown last weekend, it took a
staggering $2.7 million — the highest one day earnings by a single
boutique in China, ever.
VIPs from Guangdong, China's wealthiest province, flocked there with
their wives to partake in what has been termed 'revenge shopping':
revenge against the deadly Covid-19 disease which prevented them from
spending lavishly for so long.
A few days later and 600 miles away, Wuhan's biggest 'wet' market —
similar to the city's Huanan seafood market which also sold live wild
animals for human consumption and has been blamed for being the origin
of the pandemic — re-opened too.
The message was the same and broadcast by state television for global
consumption. After a sharp contraction in its economy China is open for
business. World-leading business.
Meanwhile, the West, mostly still in lockdown, heads for economic ruin.
We find ourselves in a desperately weakened state, just like a Covid-19
victim on a ventilator.
But have the Chinese authorities really brought their outbreak under
control?
Should we believe their official death toll, which is relatively modest
even after Wuhan revised its figures 50 per cent upwards yesterday?
And did the pandemic truly begin in that Huanan seafood market, rather
than by accident or even design in the city's state-run Institute of
Virology, as some — including Donald Trump this week — have implied?
Responding to the suggestion that weak safety protocols at the Institute
meant it was an infected lab worker who'd gone to the seafood market
that began the pandemic, the U.S. President said: 'More and more we're
hearing the story.'
What is clear is that the Chinese Communist Party has practised — is
still practising — one of the more grotesque deceptions by a
totalitarian government.
By seeking to 'control the narrative' the authorities first created a
fatal paralysis, then an information vacuum into which has been sucked
all kinds of speculation.
In an attempt to piece together — as accurately as possible — the
extraordinary story of the pandemic's emergence, the Mail has spoken
this week to leading virologists, academics who specialise in China,
economists and activists.
Today in the first of a three part series on the Coronavirus Crisis we
can also reveal — via the world famous Pasteur Institute in Paris — the
frightening new research, as yet officially unpublished, which suggests
the new coronavirus could pass not only to domestic cats but to farm
livestock, too; thus creating new reservoirs for the pathogen in the UK.
We can tell the story of previous deadly pathogen escapes from Chinese
laboratories — and cover ups. We will examine the Chinese state's
inexplicable actions in the early days of the outbreak and the competing
claims of conspiracy theories which emerged as a result. And we will
look at where China and the world goes from here.
Should we be surprised by what has happened?
No, says Ma Jian, the author and human rights activist who is known as
'the Chinese Solzhenitsyn', after the famous Soviet era dissident.
Mr Jian, who was jailed in China and now lives in exile in London, spoke
to the Mail last night about the West's long and lucrative cultivation
of China. He said: 'It has been a disastrous experiment. Democracies
cannot engage with totalitarian regimes blindly in this way, without
suffering catastrophic consequences. The result is in the UK alone there
have been more than 14,000 deaths. That is one truth which cannot be
avoided.'
In 1977 a strange strain of flu started infecting people in Northern
China. The symptoms — mostly not fatal — duplicated those of a flu type
last seen two decades before and thought extinct.
The strain rapidly spread around the world. But it afflicted only people
under 20. How could this be?
Genetic tests by virologists indicated this was indeed the same
'extinct' flu from the late 1950s. In its prime, the strain had been so
widespread that anyone alive was likely to have been exposed to it and
developed immunity.
Where had it been for two decades? And why the comeback?
The virus had another quirk. It would only survive in a 'middling'
temperature range — as though it had been bred to do this.
In fact it had been scientifically selected to flourish in lab
temperatures. Gene testing further showed it hadn't mutated over 20
years in the way it would certainly have done if it had been replicating
for generations in the wild.
All the evidence suggested the virus had been frozen and stored in a lab
for years. Then it had been thawed, and somehow escaped to prey on a new
generation that had no natural immunity, according to a report by the
University of California, San Diego, in the journal PLoS One in 2010.
Fingers immediately pointed to Chinese virology labs as the source.
Investigators suggested the virus may have escaped from a lab where
researchers were working on a new vaccine in response to warnings about
an expected pandemic of a form of swine flu.
These facts are not well-known, because virology experts worldwide
rarely spoke about it for years.Indeed, the leak had happened in the
depths of the Cold War. Western scientists did not want to risk
humiliating Communist China, for fear it would stop cooperating with
global efforts to detect other dangerous virus outbreaks.
But this obscure story has chilling echoes today for experts who fear
the current pandemic — SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific name of the new
coronavirus which causes Covid-19 in humans — emerged not from Wuhan's
Huanan market, but escaped from one of the city's two laboratories
experimenting with bat coronaviruses.
The SARS catastrophe
One of these laboratories — run by the Chinese Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention — is very close to the Huanan market.
Certainly China has form with virus escapes from laboratories. Worse
still, it has already experienced catastrophic accidents with SARS
(Severe Acute respiratory Syndrome) viruses which first emerged in China
in 2002. In April 2004, China reported a suspected case of SARS in a
20-year-old nurse in Beijing who'd cared for a female lab researcher.
That researcher took a train home to be looked after by her mother, a
doctor — who died from SARS pneumonia within a fortnight.
The lab researcher had worked at the Chinese National Institute of
Virology in Beijing. So too had a young man who fell ill that month.
Neither had worked with live SARS virus. Seven other people were
infected before a mass quarantine stopped the outbreak.
World Health Organisation (WHO) investigators later reported 'serious
concerns' regarding the lab's security. Five senior officials at the
Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention were sacked. But the
WHO wanted more, and called for future Chinese work on SARS-related
viruses to be conducted using high level virus-containment measures
called Biosafety Level 3 (BSL 3).
However, it is reported that the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and
Prevention lab in Wuhan has also been conducting research into animal
coronaviruses — with only a Level 2 certificate of biosafety.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has the highest biosafety certification
level — 4 — but has been accused of poor work protocols and being a
source of the new virus by multiple sources.
Only last December, Chinese health authorities were promising in the
national China Daily to boost their labs' biosafety — this time in the
wake of an incident where the cattle-borne disease brucellosis had
infected several lab technicians in Gansu province.
Fortunately, the infection could not spread from human to human.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak however, such official candidness has been
replaced by censorship.
Mystery disease and cover-ups
In late December — before the outbreak was publicised — doctors at Wuhan
Central Hospital who posted a message alerting colleagues to the mystery
new disease were accused by security forces of 'making false comments'
and forced to sign statements agreeing not to discuss the disease.
Earlier this month, Chinese authorities began to crack down on
publication of academic research about the origins of the novel coronavirus.
Pasteur report bombshell: Cattle, sheep and even cats can catch it
The novel strain of coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic may
have evolved to infect domestic cats and many species of farm animal —
potentially creating a vast haven from which it may repeatedly invade
humans, new research has found.
A scientific report, submitted to a journal run by the world-renowned
Pasteur Institute, in Paris, has been seen by the Mail prior to publication.
Researchers at the University of Hunan have studied the lung structures
of 251 different animals to determine which could be infected with
Covid-19 through contact with either bats or humans.
Their findings suggest that, beyond infecting bats, pangolins and
humans, the virus has evolved the ability to infect at least ten other
creatures.
The danger list includes cats, cows, goats, pigs, sheep, buffalo and
pigeons.
This raises the possibility that, having jumped from humans into these
mammals, the virus might mutate into new, even more lethal forms that
could then emerge to infect people again.
The study team is led by Xing-Yi Ge, a virologist who previously worked
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology's Centre for Emerging Infectious
Diseases.
The virologists' report is due to be published in the journal Microbes
And Infection.
It warns that 'interspecies transmission is believed to be a major cause
of coronavirus epidemic'.
The report adds that this happened in the 2003 Sars epidemic, when the
virus moved from bats into humans via infected civet cats and raccoons.
To create their species risk-list, the scientists studied the structure
of a protein receptor on animal cells called ACE2 — the same receptor
through which Covid-19 enters human cells and takes over the cell's
machinery to make copies of itself that infect other cells.
The new research indicates that dogs, unlike cats, should not be
susceptible to Covid-19 because they do not have the same vulnerable
entry point in cells.
Covid-19 originated in horseshoe bats, but the new study says bats are
unlikely to have passed it to humans through direct contact because that
is so rare.
There are two main theories to explain how Covid-19 entered humans: that
it was passed on via an intermediary animal, such as a pangolin sold at
Wuhan's food market, or that a sample of the horseshoe bat virus escaped
from one of two laboratories in Wuhan that were studying the creatures.
The ability of Covid-19 to infect animals that share space with people
may create a real, long-lasting threat.
One of Europe's foremost virology experts, Simon Wain-Hobson, of the
Pasteur Institute, says the new Chinese study may have alarming
implications.
He told the Mail: 'If they had recently isolated a novel coronavirus
from a mammal in the list, then I'd gulp.' The study's author, Xing-Yi
Ge, told the Mail the research is in its preliminary stages, adding: 'No
living virus has yet been isolated from any of the animals on our list.
However, some early studies have reported animals such as cats with
positive blood tests for coronavirus.'
Indeed, one such victim has been a tiger at the Bronx Zoo in New York.
The peril of pandemics caused by viruses that have jumped from animals
to humans looks set to grow, according to a report this month led by
Bernard Bett, a senior scientist in Kenya.
He warns the danger is increasing due to population growth and increased
urbanisation, with human settlement expanding into areas once occupied
only by wild animals.
Increased proximity fuels the transfer of viruses.
'Already three quarters of emerging human infectious disease outbreaks
originate from animals,' he warns.
Recent examples include HIV and Ebola, which both emerged in Africa.
Climate change is another factor, according to respiratory disease
researchers at the University of Miami.
Variations in rainfall and temperature may cause food scarcities for
animals such as bats, chimps, pangolins and deer, which can all carry
dangerous infections.
A search for food is liable to bring such creatures into closer contact
with humans, they say in the journal Annals of the American Thoracic
Society.
Furthermore, if crops fail and livestock die due to increased flooding,
droughts, heatwaves or pests, we may start hunting more animals for food.
One Ebola outbreak in 1996, for example, is believed to have been the
result of villagers eating a chimpanzee.
Two leading Chinese universities published web notices requiring
academic papers dealing with Covid-19 to be scrutinised first by the
Ministry of Science and Technology.
Research on the origins of the virus is particularly sensitive and
subject to checks by government officials, according to the notices
posted by Fudan University and the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan).
Jane Duckett, a professor at Glasgow University's Scottish Centre for
China Research, told the Mail: 'It is a typical response by the Chinese
authorities to try to control the narrative on any story they might
think threatens them.' Professor Duckett, who focuses on Chinese policy
and health, adds: 'With coronavirus, this may be for example because
they know that their initial response to the outbreak was not good
enough and would cause dissatisfaction among the Chinese people.
'We have seen the same before with the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan
province where some 80,000 people died.
'The authorities did not want people protesting at how planning
corruption had allowed buildings to be constructed that collapsed during
the quake.'
In similar fashion, the authorities muzzled media coverage of a
high-speed train crash in 2011 that killed at least 38 people and
injured 192. Footage emerged of bulldozers shovelling dirt over
carriages in an apparent attempt to hide them.
Scandals over train crashes and earthquakes take big lies to cover up.
Now we must consider an almost unthinkable question: is the Chinese
government also lying about how the world's biggest pandemic began? It's
little wonder then that conspiracy theories have come to the fore, which
brings us to a leading scientist known as 'Bat Woman'.
The rise and rise of 'Bat Woman'
It had seemed that 2017 was an annus mirabilis for Dr Shi Zengli and her
team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
After 13 years of research they had found the genetic source of the SARS
coronavirus which killed 750 people worldwide between 2002-2004.
Among the samples taken in 2013 in the caves of Yunnan province, one was
labelled RaTG13. It came from a variety of horseshoe bat.
Bats have an extraordinary resistance to disease and can act as living
reservoirs to viruses which cannot kill them — but which may be lethal
to other mammals, including humans.
Scientists had suspected that civet cats — sold for human consumption in
Chinese wet markets — were the source of the SARS virus. But the civets
proved only to be an intermediary for the fatal transfer to humans from
bats.
Similarly, the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus
outbreak of 2012 which killed 850 people, transferred from bats via
camels to humans.
In 1994, the Hendra coronavirus infection also jumped species from
horses to humans. Malaysia's 1998 Nipah virus outbreak — from pigs to
humans — also originated in pathogens from bats.
The brilliant Ms Zengli had other research interests and was
experimenting in synthetic viruses which could pass from animals to humans.
Recent research has suggested the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (which
causes Covid-19) can pass directly from bats to humans which posed the
question: had she gone too far in playing God, deliberately or otherwise?
Enter the CIA and MI6. This week, following the leak of 2018 American
diplomatic cables expressing concerns about the allegedly reckless way
the Wuhan Institute of Virology was being run, the intelligence services
became involved in solving the mystery of Covid-19's emergence.
Their intervention is a potential game changer in understanding why we
are in lockdown; why so many of our grandparents' generation is dying;
why our economy is tanking.
To date, the Chinese Communist Party's leadership has been unwilling to
provide the explanatory narrative. And so the conspiracy theories and
educated guesses have proliferated.
So who was Patient Zero?
In late January, after Wuhan's belated lockdown, Twitter banned
libertarian website Zero Hedge for 'doxing' — publishing private
information with malicious intent.
The site had tweeted in a piece headlined 'Is This The Man Behind The
Global Coronavirus Pandemic?'
There followed a flurry of similar accusations on Chinese social media
that the cause of the outbreak was the Wuhan Institute of Virology and
its poor practices.
On February 7 Ms Zengli said the claims were the work of 'conspiracy
theorists who don't believe in science'. By that time rumours were
abroad that one of her recruits — in late 2019 there were at least two
online advertisements for bat virus-related research jobs — had become
'Patient Zero': the first person to die of Covid-19.
The speculation about an individual called Huang Yanling was enough to
cause the Institute to issue a denial on Febuary 16.
'Recently there has been fake information about Huang Yanling, a
graduate from our institute, claiming that she was patient zero in the
novel coronavirus,' it said. 'Huang was a graduate student at the
institute until 2015.'
So there. But where is she now?
A plot by anti Beijing activists?
Last month an internet documentary drew together and interpreted many of
the accusatory threads. It was made by a media group linked with groups
opposed to the Chinese leadership and called Tracking Down The Origin Of
The Wuhan Coronavirus.
Certainly it made diligent use of the available material.
On January 24 one of the first studies of Covid-19 cases appeared in
highly respected British medical journal, The Lancet. The co-authors
were medics from hospitals in Wuhan and elsewhere in China. The paper
took as its evidence samples from 41 Covid-19 victims in Wuhan who had
contracted the virus by January 2.
The film seized upon the claim that the study's Patient Zero — the first
man to suffer symptoms, which he did as early as December 1 — had no
known direct interaction with the Huanan seafood market. Nor did 13
others of the 41.
It was also claimed no bats were sold at the market. The Huanan link was
'highly unlikely, if not impossible' the film suggested. The Chinese had
been imposing a false criteria by concentrating on the market. The
authorities had closed and cleansed the market, destroying potential
evidence. It was a clear 'cover up'.
But of what? The results of a second scientific paper were also
highlighted by the film. This report was published in Nature, another
globally respected journal, in early February.
It drew attention to the genetic similarity found between the new — then
as yet unnamed — Wuhan coronavirus and two coronaviruses previously
found in bats in Zhoushan. The only Westerner among the report's 19
co-authors was British-born Professor Eddie Holmes of Sydney University.
'These data suggest that bats are a possible host for the viral
reservoir of (the Wuhan virus),' said the Nature report. 'However, as a
variety of animal species were for sale in the market when the disease
was first reported, further studies are needed to determine the natural
reservoir and any intermediate hosts.'
The documentary stated that the two bat samples had been found by 'the
People's Liberation Army' (in fact a scientific institute linked to the
military).
The plot thickened.
According to one ex U.S. Department of Defense scientist in the film —
the Mail has discovered he also happened to be Executive Director of an
organisation called the Global Alliance against Communist Propaganda —
all the indications were that the new coronavirus was the result of
'reverse engineering' of the SARS virus.
Another expert argued 'it could not possibly be a natural mutation'.
The new coronavirus was not naturally occurring at all, they argued. It
had been artificially 'manipulated' in a laboratory so that it could
enter and destroy human cells.
And the person allegedly at the centre of this sinister manipulation was
the Institute of Virology's famed 'bat woman', Shi Zengli.
British born Professor Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in
Paris was cited in the film as being 'deeply concerned' by her work. And
why shouldn't he be, the lay viewer might ask? There was a sequence in
the new virus's genetic make-up which, the film said, mimicked HIV, the
virus which causes AIDS.
Was the Wuhan virus being developed in the Institute of Virology to
create a 'bio-weapon?' Or a virus for which the Chinese had the only,
highly lucrative, cure?
A second paper in Nature, submitted this February by Zengli and her
team, was offered up by the film as further proof of malfeasance.
This new report revealed a faecal sample — RaTG13 — taken by Zengli's
team in the bat cave in 2013 demonstrated 'an overall genome sequence
identity of 96.2%' to the new coronavirus. It was its closest relative
and formed 'a distinct lineage from other SARS-like viruses'.
Dr Zengli appeared to be waving a smoking gun.
She emphatically denies the cause of the virus was her laboratory work.
She has admitted to Scientific American magazine that after reports of
an outbreak she had been worried of an accidental escape of her material.
Then she had checked her lab samples against those taken from Covid-19
victims and been reassured they were not to blame.
What of other scientists mentioned in the film?
Earlier this week Prof Wain-Hobson told the Mail the film 'suffers from
a large number of problems, starting with things called facts. As far as
we virologists can see this virus is natural,' he said. 'That means with
the data we have that is available in the public domain. And that's it.'
Of the possibility of a lab escape Professor Wain-Hobson said: 'It is
very possible that the Chinese haven't told World Health Organisation
(WHO) and the West everything. And yes, they don't like the U.S. and
Trump. They want to be Number One on a small planet.
'But an engineered virus? There is nothing about this virus that
indicates it's out of a lab. I say that with the info available and my
appreciation of virus evolution.'
In a Twitter post Prof Holmes concurred: 'I think there are a number of
really clear reasons to believe that this is not in any way a lab
construct or a lab escape.'
Will CIA and MI6 crack Covid-19?
That position is backed by senior U.S. scientists.
But then came a report this week in The Washington Post story based on
those leaked diplomatic cables from 2018. The leak coincided,
conveniently you may think, with President Trump's announcement that he
was withdrawing financial support from the WHO which he felt was too
cosy with Beijing.
After the story broke Prof Wain-Hobson told the Mail: 'Without knowing
what was going on in the lab we cannot say more. As mentioned earlier,
it doesn't look an engineered and others feel this way too, which is
comforting. But this is because we're using the same data.'
Professor Holmes agreed with this view in a social media statement
released on Thursday. 'There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus
that causes COVID-19 in humans, originated in a laboratory in Wuhan,
China,' he said.
'Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are commonly found in wildlife species
and frequently jump to new hosts. This is also the most likely
explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.'
For its part China has even attempted to blame America. In October 2019
a team of U.S. athletes travelled to Wuhan for the World Military Games.
'It might be U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be
transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!' a
Chinese Foreign Minister said last month
Who can say definitively yet — if ever — whether infected bats were sold
in the Huanan seafood market? Or other animals, such as pangolins, which
might have served as carriers of the virus?
Credible voices in the Western scientific community maintain the
evidence suggests the pandemic is a natural occurrence. But thanks to
the inaction and secrecy of the Chinese authorities, Western
intelligence services have now been tasked with determining the truth.
(2) Wuhan Lab Denies any Link to Coronavirus Outbreak
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Wuhan Lab Denies Any Link to First Coronavirus Outbreak
Bloomberg News
Coronavirus didn't escape research center, director says
'Absolutely no way' virus originated from lab, Yuan says
A top Wuhan laboratory official has denied any role in spreading the new
coronavirus, in the most high profile response from a facility at the
center of months of speculation about how the previously unknown animal
disease made the leap to humans.
Yuan Zhiming, director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, hit
back at those promoting theories that the virus had escaped from the
facility and caused the outbreak in the central Chinese city. "There is
absolutely no way that the virus originated from our institute," Yuan
said in an interview Saturday with the state-run China Global Television
Network.
Yuan rejected theories that the yet-to-be identified "Patient Zero" for
Covid-19 had contact with the institute, saying none of its employees,
retirees or student researchers were known to be infected. He said U.S.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and Washington Post
journalists were among those "deliberately leading people" to mistrust
the facility and its "P4" top-level-security pathogen lab.
U.S. President Donald Trump again fanned speculation about the origins
of the virus at a Saturday news conference, in which he said China
should face consequences if it was "knowingly responsible" for the
outbreak. The U.S. president has at times referred to the disease as a
"Chinese virus," a term he said he embraced after a Chinese foreign
ministry spokesman tweeted an unsubstantiated theory about U.S. Army
athletes introducing the pathogen to Wuhan.
"What we know is that the ground zero for this virus was within a few
miles of that lab," Peter Navarro, a Trump trade adviser, said Sunday on
Fox News. "If you simply do an Occam's razor approach that the simplest
explanation is probably the most likely, I think it's incumbent on China
to prove that it wasn't that lab."
The U.S.-China blame game has helped fuel scrutiny of the Wuhan lab,
which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses like the one that causes
Covid-19. U.S. diplomats sent back warnings about safety procedures in
the lab after visits two years ago, the Washington Post reported in an
April 14 commentary, citing diplomatic cables.
"They don't have any evidence on this, what they rely on is only their
guess," Yuan told CGTN on Saturday. "I hope such a conspiracy theory
will not affect cooperation among scientists around the world."
Earlier Accidents
The P4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology began operations in
January 2018 and was the first of its kind built in mainland China.
It was designed with help from France as part of a joint research
initiative focused on infectious diseases and equipped for the highest
level of bio-containment, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
The first project undertaken at the lab was to research Xinjiang
hemorrhagic fever, a tick-borne virus with a fatality rate of as much as
50% in humans, the report said.
The facility has been the center of multiple conspiracy theories,
including one that's circulated on Chinese social media since late
January that the new coronavirus escaped from the lab. Multiple posts
have cited previous blunders by Chinese scientists as evidence that
similar research projects haven't been executed properly.
Among them was a 2017 report by the Wuhan Evening News that said Tian
Junhua, a researcher at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and
Prevention, had to quarantine himself for 14 days after accidentally
coming into direct contact with bat urine during a 2012 research trip.
Social-media users also cited a 2004 accident at a national lab in
Beijing during experiments with Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome-related coronavirus that led to infections -- and one death.
Five top officials at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and
Prevention were punished at the time, according to China Daily.
Some countries including Australia have urged an independent review of
how the pandemic came to infect more than 2.4 million people and kill
more than 166,000. "The issues around the coronavirus are issues for
independent review and I think that is important that we do that, in
fact Australia will absolutely insist," Foreign Minister Marise Payne
told ABC Australia's "Insiders" program Sunday.
While many Republicans have emphasized the Chinese origins of a virus
that has killed more than 40,000 Americans, Cotton has been among the
most vocal urging an investigation into the lab's role. On Friday, he
told Fox News that "circumstantial evidence" was "stacking up pretty
quickly that this virus may have originated in those labs in Wuhan."
Although the first known cluster centered on a wet market in Wuhan, the
ultimate origins of the virus remain a mystery and Chinese officials
have raised the possibility that the virus didn't begin in the country
at all. Meanwhile, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff, has endorsed studies that have shown the virus evolved
naturally, as opposed to being genetically engineered.
Shi Zhengli -- a researcher at the institute known as "Bat Woman" for
her expeditions in bat caves -- said in a February social media post
that she would "swear on my life" that the virus had nothing to do with
the lab.
On Feb. 19, the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a letter to staff,
saying it received its first sample of the virus from Wuhan Jinyintan
Hospital on Dec. 30, a day before Chinese authorities first disclosed
the outbreak to the world. Researchers finished gene-sequencing in 72
hours and submitted its findings to the national virus database by Jan.
9, the institute said, adding "we have a clear conscience looking back
on what we've gone through."
— With assistance by Sharon Chen, and Jing Li (Updates with background
on laboratory)
(3) French Gov't denies Luc Montagnier's claim Covid-19 came from Wuhan
lab, but without mentioning him by name
France says no evidence Covid-19 linked to Wuhan research lab set up
with French help
Issued on: 18/04/2020 - 10:22 Modified: 18/04/2020 - 10:24
France on Friday said there was no factual evidence so far of a link
between the Covid-19 outbreak and the work of the P4 research laboratory
in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which France helped set up and where the
current pandemic started.
"We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual
evidence corroborating recent reports in the US press linking the
origins of Covid-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory of Wuhan, China,"
an official at President Emmanuel Macron's office said.
The broad scientific consensus holds that SARS-CoV-2, the official name
of the coronavirus, originated in bats.
In 2004, France signed an agreement with China to establish a research
lab on infectious diseases of biosafety level 4, the highest level, in
Wuhan, according to a French decree signed by then-foreign minister
Michel Barnier.
US trying to determine if virus originated in lab
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday his government was trying to
determine whether the coronavirus emanated from a lab in Wuhan, and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing "needs to come clean" on
what they know.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on
Tuesday that US intelligence indicates that the coronavirus likely
occurred naturally, as opposed to being created in a laboratory in
China, but there is no certainty either way.
The Washington Post said this week that national security officials in
the Trump administration have long suspected research facilities in
Wuhan to be the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak.
As far back as February, the Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of
Virology dismissed rumours that the virus may have been artificially
synthesised at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such a
facility.
The allegations came amid mounting international criticism of China’s
initial cover-up of the virus and suspicions that Beijing had not
revealed the extent of the public health crisis due to economic concerns.
China on Friday revised its pandemic toll again, this time by a major 50
percent increase in the total death toll. But Chinese authorities denied
it was due to a cover-up, maintaining the revision was due to
insufficient capacity during the peak of the pandemic.
The lab at the heart of the controversy
The Wuhan research laboratory at the heart of the controversy is home to
the China Centre for Virus Culture Collection, the largest virus bank in
Asia which, preserves more than 1,500 strains, according to its website.
The complex contains Asia's first maximum security lab equipped to
handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) -- dangerous viruses that pose a high risk
of person-to-person transmission, such as Ebola.
The 300 million yuan ($42 million) lab was completed in 2015, and
finally opened in 2018, with the founder of a French bio-industrial
firm, Alain Merieux, acting as a consultant in its construction. The
institute also has a P3 laboratory that has been in operation since 2012.
The 3,000-square-metre P4 lab, located in a square building with a
cylindrical annex, lies near a pond at the foot of a forested hill in
Wuhan's remote outskirts.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)
(4) Montagnier: "It is a watchmaker's work, the presence of certain
parts of HIV cannot be by chance"
Nobel laureate Montagnier claims that coronavirus originated in a
Chinese laboratory.
Hints at the appearance of HIV World
April 18, 2020
Paris
In recent days, the French virologist and 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine Luc Montagnier took care of the commotion. Although US
secret services have acknowledged that coronavirus apparently did not
originate in Chinese laboratories, Montagnier remains convinced that
Covid-19 is of artificial origin.
According to Professor Montagnier, a new type of coronavirus was
developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, which became the center of the
epidemic at the turn of the year, and later the pandemic of Covid-19. US
President Donald Trump is also investigating a similar link, although US
intelligence has said earlier that the virus that causes Covid-19 seems
not to come from China.
Based on a study by mathematician Jean-Claude Pérez Montagnier, the new
coronavirus could have something to do with another deadly HIV virus
that causes AIDS. "The virus is like a thirty-page publication. We
scientists have the tools to find out if a paragraph from a given book
has appeared in another book, "Pérez described metaphorically. "The link
between the new coronavirus is probably as if the same paragraph
appeared four times in two different books," he added.
Virologist Montagnier states that it is fairly clear that coronavirus
was created in the laboratory and even specifically points to one of
those located in Wuhan city, Le Parisien.
"It is a watchmaker's work, the presence of certain parts of HIV cannot
be by chance," Montagnier explains. According to him, this is probably
an unsuccessful attempt to create a vaccine against AIDS, which would
explain the presence of parts of the virus in the genome. "The Wuhan
City Laboratory has specialized in these coronaviruses since the early
20th century. They have the expertise, "Montagnier explained.
According to another virologist Étienne Simon-Lorière of the Paris
Institute of Oastuer, Montagnier's conclusions make no sense. "These are
only very small particles found in other viruses of the same family,"
Simon-Lorièr said. "These are parts of the genome that resemble
sequences in the genetic material of not only viruses but, for example,
bacteria," he added.
Former member of the prestigious Pasteur Institute Luc Montegnier was
awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine. He is considered one of the
discoverers of HIV. He also received several French awards such as the
Legion of Honor and the Order of Merit.
(5) Germany's largest paper to China's president: Why are your toxic
laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
Germany's largest paper to China's president: You're endangering the world
"You [Jinping], your government and your scientists had to know long ago
that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the
dark about it."
By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
APRIL 20, 2020 13:21
BERLIN – The editor-in-chief of Germany's largest paper Bild on Thursday
launched a full frontal attack on China's communist President Xi Jinping
for his regime's failure to come clean about the coronavirus outbreak
and the massive human rights violations carried out by the Communist Party.
Julian Reichelt, the prominent editor-in-chief of the Bild, wrote to
Jinping that "Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter
because we asked in our newspaper Bild whether China should pay for the
massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide."
He wrote that, "You [Jinping], your government and your scientists had
to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the
world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn't respond when Western
researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud
and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national
disgrace."
Reichelt said that, "You rule by surveillance. You wouldn't be president
without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you
refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut
down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not
the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your
people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world."
He continued with his bill of particulars, noting that "surveillance is
a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A
nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you
have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
"China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of
inventing on its own," Reichelt wrote. "The reason China does not
innovate and invent is that you don't let the young people in your
country think freely. China's greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to
have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is coronavirus."
The spokeswoman for China's embassy, Tao Lil, published an open letter
to Bild in German on the embassy's website on Wednesday, stating that,
"I followed your reporting on the corona pandemic in general and China's
alleged guilt in particular today. Apart from the fact that we consider
it a pretty bad style to blame a country for a pandemic that is
affecting the whole world and then to present an explicit account of
alleged Chinese debts to Germany, the article ignores some essential facts."
She added that "We note that many countries now struggling with COVID-19
have had time to prepare for the cross-border spread of the pathogen
after China reported its outbreak under IHR [World Health Organization]
guidelines."
The best-selling paper Bild calculated prior to Reichelt's editorial
that China owed Germany €149 billion for coronavirus damages, triggering
the angry response from the Chinese embassy in Berlin. Bild said the
compensation amounts to €1,784 per person if Germany's GDP drops by
4.2 percent. The Bild article was titled: "What China owes us."
China's embassy spokeswoman said the article "stirs up xenophobia and
nationalism."
The Bild editor-in-chief cited a Washington Post article reporting that,
"your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching coronaviruses in bats,
but without maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic
laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons,
husbands, parents of corona victims all over the world?"
He concluded that, "In your country, your people are whispering about
you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable,
non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance
state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the
world with a deadly disease.That is your political legacy."
(6) Ian Frazer, who co-invented the HPV vaccine, says COVID-19 may never
have a preventive vaccine
So much for claims that Big Pharma inflicted Covid-19 on us for windfall
profits - Peter M.
No vaccine for coronavirus a possibility
An eminent Australian vaccine inventor says COVID-19 may never have a
preventive vaccine, but could possibly burn out.
Candace Sutton@candacesutton
APRIL 19, 20207:06AM
One of Australia's most eminent vaccine developers says there may never
be a vaccine against COVID-19 for some very good reasons.
Professor Ian Frazer, the immunologist who co-invented the human
papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine which prevents cervical cancer, said a
coronavirus vaccine was "tricky".
He told news.com.au that although 100 different teams around the world
were testing for vaccines, medical scientists did not have a model of
how to attack the virus.
The professor of medicine at Queensland University, which is testing for
its own COVID-19 vaccine, said immunisation against coronavirus was
similar to immunising against the common cold.
"It is tricky, vaccines for upper respiratory tract diseases, because
the virus lands on the outside of you," Prof Frazer said.
"Think of us as a football, with the skin and respiratory tract on the
outside of the football and the lungs are where the outside interfaces
with the inside.
"The place where the virus lands is outside us and it tries to infect
the cells within us.
"Our immune system is inside of us. When it lands inside our lungs it
tries to infect our cells and succeeds. Our immune system goes to fight
the virus and that's why people get sick.
"If the immune system turns on too strong it can cause damage to the lungs.
"The wrong vaccine could make things worse so we have to be very
selective about what part of the virus we want to attack.
"If you immunise someone with a vaccine, it goes inside and makes an
immune response within you.
"What you want is an immune response to migrate out to where the virus
lands.
"There is no vaccine against the common cold."
Prof Frazer said that with flu, the immune response inside a person's
body didn't occur until the flu virus gets inside them.
"We tried to deliver a vaccine to the lungs with the Flu Mist which you
snuffed up your nose, delivering the vaccine to the place where you need
an immune response, but it didn't work terribly well," he said.
"Coronavirus doesn't get into you, it stays on the surface cells in your
lungs. All these flu viruses get into you, so the body can fight and
makes T cells.
"This virus doesn't kill the cells, it makes them sick. At the moment we
don't know how to make a coronavirus vaccine work.
"That's why there are 100 vaccines under testing using every conceivable
approach.
"We don't know if any of them will work."
Prof Frazer said a vaccine for the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory
syndrome) outbreak was never successfully developed and then the virus
burnt out.
SARS broke out in China and didn't spread as far, partly because
overseas travel by the Chinese population was not as great 17 years ago
as it is today.
But, Prof Frazer said, it also had diluted potency as it went from host
to host.
"As it passed from animal to the first human and then through the second
human, as it passed through every human it got a little less good at
infecting people," he said.
"The virus attenuated itself; it got less powerful.
"It may well be the same with this virus. It's not very effective in
making us sick. It may become less effective.
"We are now mapping it as it goes and changes are occurring in its
genetic make-up, small changes.
"Changes to it in China led to the virus becoming less virulent or
sick-making.
"At the moment it's not passing through a lot of people in Australia."
Prof Frazer said coronavirus was less infectious and not as deadly as
MERS, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or camel flu which broke
out in South Korea in 2015.
"MERS … was very efficient infecting and making people sick," he said.
"One person who went to South Korea from the Middle East infected 170
people and a third of those died.
"He went through four hospitals before he was diagnosed, but in South
Korea they were very effective with contact tracing.
"MERS is much nastier … than coronavirus."
Prof Frazer explained the annual vaccines prepared against the winter
flu by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) were not entirely
effective.
Each year CSL "takes about a quarter of Australia's egg supply to make
the vaccine," he said.
"We purify the protein parts of the virus out of the eggs and make the
vaccine out of that.
"But it's not 100 per cent effective at all … for older people (because)
as your immune system gets weaker as you get older.
"With measles you are protected against it for life. The vaccine kills
any virus that gets into your blood.
"We don't have a mode that works against other coronaviruses."
Prof Frazer, who is currently developing vaccines for cancer, is working
with a team of medical scientists on a trial for a coronavirus treatment
drug.
The intervention drug's purpose is to dampen down the inflammatory
response in high-risk coronavirus patients.
He said for 99 per cent of people who got coronavirus it was a trivial
illness, but that was not the case for those in the vulnerable categories.
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