Truth Starting to Sink-In About the Origins of Covid-19

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The (very strong) case for COVID-19 leaking from a Chinese lab

If it wasn't a lab leak, the fact that a novel coronavirus just happened to emerge in Wuhan

would be one of history's greatest coincidences

Author of the article:Tristin Hopper

Publishing date:May 28, 2021

National Post

In this Feb. 3, 2021, file photo, a security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology

after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit. PHOTO BY AP PHOTO/NG HAN GUAN

After months of being dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory, official support is starting to build for the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic is not a freak accident of nature, but was rather the result of an accidental escape from a Chinese virology lab.

Anthony Fauci, one of the U.S.’s most visible infectious disease specialists during the COVID-19 pandemic, said this week that he was “not convinced” that the pandemic had natural origins — contradicting statements from a year prior where he dismissed any question of a lab leak as a “circular argument.”

At the time same time, U.S. president Joe Biden also confirmed that he has ordered an intelligence review into the theory that the pandemic was sparked by a “laboratory accident.”

Anthony Fauci at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

PHOTO BY STEFANI REYNOLDS/BLOOMBERG

Global Times, one of the main English-language arms of Chinese state media, dismissed all of this week’s developments as a “blatant lie” trafficked by U.S. elites who have “festered further in morality.”

The SARS pandemic was sparked by the eating of wild meat in China’s Guangdong province. HIV leaped from apes to humans in 1920s Congo. But COVID-19, a pandemic that has thus far killed at least 3.5 million and cost the equivalent of several world wars, could well be the result of a single breach in laboratory hygiene.

A bad filter change, a faulty door seal or a specimen in the garbage instead of the incinerator could be the inciting incident for the costliest disaster of the 21st century. If true, it would be the most consequential single mistake ever made.

The National Post has been reporting since May 2020 that there was credence to the lab leak theory. The official line out of Beijing at the time — that COVID-19 spontaneously erupted at a Wuhan food market — was shown to be highly unlikely. China is still holding fast to the idea that the disease is purely natural in origin — and have repeatedly obfuscated international attempts to consider differently.

Truth has never stood in the way of Chinese progress.

While the world still has no smoking gun as to COVID-19’s origins, what we do have is an ever-lengthening record of circumstantial evidence tying the Wuhan lab to COVID-19, as well as a growing roster of official voices expressing doubt in the official Chinese origin story.

Below, why the lab leak theory has always been among the most plausible theories for the origin of COVID-19.

If it wasn’t a lab leak, COVID-19’s Wuhan origins would be one of the greatest coincidences in history

The world’s first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Wuhan, a city of 11 million located about a day’s drive west of Shanghai. Wuhan is also home to China’s first-ever BSL-4-certified laboratory; a rare classification given only to labs dealing with the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

For instance, Canada’s only BSL-4 lab — the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg — is where microbiologists deal directly with such viruses as Ebola, West Nile and the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic.

Opened in 2018, the BSL-4 campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is known to work with coronaviruses, and in particular bat coronaviruses, the likely origin of COVID-19. A January investigation by New York magazine is to date the most rigorous journalistic probe into the potential lab origins of COVID-19. Among other things, it noted that the Wuhan institute is home to the “most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology pictured in February. PHOTO BY THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN

The lab also engaged in gain-of-function experiments, wherein researchers would attempt to supercharge coronaviruses in order to infect lab mice or human cell samples. The idea with gain-of-function is to find ways to combat the emergence of new viruses from nature, as occurred with SARS in 2003. But gain-of-function is also “exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged,” read a lengthy scientific breakdown of COVID-19’s origins by the Indian news site The Wire.

In other words, if the Wuhan Institute of Virology turns out to have no connection to the birth of the COVID-19 pandemic, then a novel coronavirus with likely origins in bats will have coincidentally started infecting humans within walking distance of a lab that just happens to be the world centre of studying highly infectious bat coronaviruses.

As I have pointed out before - the odds on this happening spontaneously are mathematically impossible.

Driving distance from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market,

site of the first recorded public outbreak of COVID-19.

Top Chinese viral laboratories, including the one in Wuhan, have a troubling track record of lax security

In 2018, long before any notion of COVID-19 existed, U.S. diplomats fresh from a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology drafted a cable to Washington warning that the facility’s lax standards risked sparking a pandemic. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable said, according to the Washington Post.

This week also saw the release of a U.S. intelligence report claiming that, in the fall of 2019, three workers at the Wuhan institute were hospitalized “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory (C) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s

central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. PHOTO BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP

Wuhan isn’t the only Chinese lab in recent years to have drawn international condemnation for potentially reckless microbiology work. In 2013, when it emerged that China’s Harbin Veterinary Research Institute was trying to synthesize a new superflu, it attracted accusations of “appalling irresponsibility” from top European virologists.

The Wuhan lab also had ties to a serious security breach at Canada’s own National Microbiology Laboratory. Although the incident has no known connection to COVID-19, in July 2019 researcher Xiangguo Qiu was escorted by RCMP from the Winnipeg facility allegedly due to questions surrounding an unauthorized shipment of Ebola and henipavirus samples to Wuhan in March 2019.

The WHO’s official probe into the virus’ origins were a farce

When Australia first called for an international probe into the true origins of COVID-19, Beijing lashed back with a threat of major sanctions on Australian grain imports.

A probe ultimately did come into being, but it ended up being a far cry from anything approaching Australia’s initial vision. Organized by the World Health Organization, the probe comprised a team of 17 Chinese scientists and 10 non-Chinese investigators who spent two weeks conducting interviews under the constant supervision of the People’s Republic of China. “The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” said team member Peter Ben Embarek in February.

Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3, 2021. PHOTO BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP

Researchers spent only a matter of hours at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they requested no documents and performed no forensic examination of lab protocols. Rather, they only conducted a handful of supervised meetings wherein laboratory staff assured them that the institute saw “no disruptions or incidents” at the time of COVID-19’s emergence.

'Supervised meetings' mean those being questioned can only speak the accepted narrative, otherwise, they disappear that night and are never seen again.

The WHO investigation hadn’t even released its final report before more than a dozen international senior medical researchers signed an open letter calling for a more reliable investigation to definitively rule out the possibility of a “research-related accident.”

Then, in late March, the probe’s finding were directly questioned by WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Tedros has often been criticized for a soft touch on China in regards to COVID-19. Regardless, he wrote in a March 30 statement “although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation.”

Lab leaks happen all the time

It’s not just Chinese virology labs that screw up the handling of potentially planet-altering pathogens. All over the world, virology labs have similarly overseen security breaches with the potential to infect millions.

In 2014 it emerged that labs connected to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control were guilty of, among other things, accidentally exposing a bunch of researchers to anthrax and losing vials of smallpox, the now-extinct virus that ranks as the deadliest disease in human history.

Lab leaks have caused several verified disease outbreaks. In 1977, a strange flu began surging through the Soviet Union and China. Subsequent analysis of the virus concluded that it was exactly the same as a 1949 flu strain, raising suspicions that the outbreak had been caused by an escape from a laboratory freezer. History’s last victim of smallpox, British woman Janet Parker, was killed by a 1978 lab screw-up at Birmingham University.

There have even been two lab leaks of SARS in the months after the disease’s 2003 outbreak had been contained. One was a student who accidentally picked up the disease in August, 2003 at a lab at the National University of Singapore. The other was a SARS researcher who fell ill after handling biohazardous waste without gloves or a mask.

In March, Robert Redfield, former director of the Centres for Disease Control, became one of the most prominent early backers of the “lab leak” theory when he told CNN that “the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory.”

A career virologist, Redfield added, “it’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.”

Covid19 Origins - Another CDC Director Suggests Wuhan Virus Leak a Possibility

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

Surely it's madness to 'supercharge' viruses so they can be studied as to how to respond to them. The odds of leaking a supercharged virus have to be higher than that supercharging happening in nature. What an insane world we live in!

Politics > Le Pen Acquitted of Hate Speech; VP Harris Cites Climate for Migrant Surge; What Country Threatens Democracy Most? Global Pandemic Reset

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France’s Marine Le Pen acquitted in hate-speech trial

after she tweeted Islamic State photos

4 May, 2021 13:46 

FILE PHOTO. France's right-wing National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen (R) and MEP Gilbert Collard, Paris, France

©  Reuters / Philippe Wojazer

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has been acquitted in her trial for posting pictures of atrocities committed by the Islamic State terrorist group, including an image of a US journalist’s body.

The right-wing politician was alleged to have broken French hate-speech laws for uploading three particular images to her Twitter account in December 2015. She denied breaking the law.

La Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally (previously National Front), posted the pictures to ridicule a journalist’s comparison of her party to IS.

The pair’s exchange came just weeks after the 2015 Paris attacks, for which IS claimed responsibility, in which 130 people were killed.

One of the images featured the body of James Foley, a US journalist who was beheaded by an IS fighter in 2014. Le Pen claimed she was unaware of Foley’s identity and she later removed the image at the request of his family.

Le Pen’s National Rally colleague, MEP Gilbert Collard, who was on trial for posting an explicit image, was also acquitted.

He had also responded to the French journalist’s comparison, in his case by uploading a picture of a man with a smashed skull to his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The two politicians were charged in 2018 with distributing “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity” and that can be seen by minors. The offense is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of €75,000 ($90,000).

Le Pen previously said the case impinged on free speech, while Collard’s lawyer Jean-Marc Descoubes branded it a “political trial.”

Her acquittal comes as Le Pen campaigns for next year’s presidential election, in which she will likely face-off against the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron.

Recent polling shows Le Pen and Macron, to whom she lost in the 2017 election, are both projected to take 26% of the first-round vote.

Kamala Harris stirs critics by declaring ‘lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience’ as ‘root causes’ of migrant surge

4 May, 2021 17:55

©  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Vice President Kamala Harris again addressed the migrant surge at the US’ southern border, this time citing a ‘lack of climate adaptation’ and ‘resilience’ as some root causes of the problem. Her critics weren’t convinced.

Speaking at the Washington Conference on the Americas on Tuesday, Harris acknowledged the recent surge at the US-Mexico border, saying people are leaving their homes at “an alarming rate.”

“We want to help people find hope at home. And so we are focused on addressing both the acute factors and the root causes of migration. And I believe this is an important distinction. We must focus on both,” she said. 

She added that “catastrophes” like “hurricanes, the drought, and the extreme food insecurity” are driving people to illegally cross the border. Then she turned to the “root causes” which she named as “corruption, violence, and poverty” as well as “the lack of economic opportunity, the lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience, the lack of good governance.”

Since being charged with heading the handling of the crisis at the border, Harris has faced criticism for her lack of physical trips and direct addresses on the matter. Conservatives were instantly skeptical of her effort to connect the current border crisis with climate change.

Is she aware that climate change affects the USA as well as Central America? And that, according to Democrats, Trump did nothing to change that. 

While climate change continues to be a partisan debate, experts have pointed to events such as recent hurricanes like Eta and Iota in Mexico as pushing people to make the trip north, though it’s far from the only reason. Many critics have pointed to the current administration’s more relaxed rhetoric and policies on immigration as also driving the surge.

“It couldn't possibly be caused by the Biden admin stopping construction of the border wall or offering asylum to millions of illegal immigrants,” Rep. Jerry Carl (R-Alabama) tweeted in response to a video highlighting Harris’ climate comments. 

This is exactly what happened when Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada in 2015. He opened the borders and migrants flooded in. 

US Customs and Border Patrol reported encountering more than 170,000 migrants in March, an increase of 71% from the previous month. There has also been a record surge in unaccompanied minors being caught crossing the border in recent months. 

Biden officials have continually blasted Trump-era policies at the border, and some have said the restrictive administration even created a “pent up demand” for migrants. 

Biden administration adviser Roberta Jacobson admitted last month that the president’s “more humane policy” on illegal immigration may be driving more migrants to make the journey to the US. 

“There was a hope for a more humane policy after four years of pent-up demand, so I don't know if I would call that a coincidence,” she said at a White House briefing. “But the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision.”

It probably would never have happened if America had a more humane policy toward Latin America in the previous century instead of raping them of their natural resources, leaving them in abject poverty, and teaching them that corruption means control.

World sees US as significantly greater threat to democracy

than Russia & China – survey

5 May, 2021 17:01

© Reuters / Hannah McKay

A poll taken in 53 countries has found that 44% of people around the world consider the United States to be a threat to their democracy – significantly less more than those who believe the same about China and Russia.

Out of the 53,000 people polled across 53 countries, more respondents (44%) considered US influence on their country to be a “threat to democracy” than those who didn’t (26%). Meanwhile, only 38% considered Chinese influence a threat to democracy.

Fear of Russian influence was the lowest of the three, with only 28% considering Russia to be a threat to their democracy.

Asian countries were high among those that feared US influence, with Pakistan fearing Washington the most. Japanese respondents also consider the US to be a greater concern than China – while Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Israel, Australia, Ukraine, and Switzerland were also among the top half.

The survey was conducted by Latana in partnership with the Alliance of Democracies, which was founded in Denmark by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – a detail some on social media found interesting, given that the results inconveniently showed higher levels of fear regarding the US than Russia and China.

While people in European countries expressed lower levels of fear when it comes to US influence, they still expressed more fear about it than they did about influence from Moscow or Beijing.

Meanwhile, 64% of the world also considered economic inequality to be a threat to democracy, along with “limits on free speech” at 53%, “unfair or fraudulent elections” at 49%, and the power of Big Tech companies – most of which are based in the United States – at 48%.

Regarding the US’ “role in world affairs,” people in Russia, China, and Europe were most critical, while Latin America and Asia were more positive.

That's hard to fathom when you know what the USA did to Latin America in the last century.

The report also showed that concerns over US influence on other democracies has increased since last year – up 20% in Germany alone and 16% in China.

The Alliance of Democracies boasts that it is funded by “several democratic governments,” including Canada. It has also received money from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the George W. Bush Institute, the Atlantic Council and the George Soros-funded National Democratic Institute.

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It's funny, not funny, that Trudeau was the first world leader to drop the term 'global reset' in the media! Now, the UN is talking about a global reset in the area of fighting pandemics. Canada had such a center from very early in this century until Trudeau defunded it in his first term as Prime Minister.

'Global reset' needed to fight future pandemics, as creation of WHO research hub announced

5 May, 2021 14:26

German Health Minister Jens Spahn in Berlin, Germany, April 29, 2021 ©  Reuters / John Macdougall

A "global reset" is needed to fight future pandemics, Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn told a World Health Organization (WHO) briefing on Wednesday as the UN agency announced the creation of a new research hub in Berlin.

Spahn highlighted the findings of a review into the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which will be officially announced at the WHO's World Health Assembly later this month.

The authors of the report will call for "nothing less than a global reset in pandemic preparedness" and say that the world needs to focus on the "next crisis," Spahn said.

Spahn said that the world is "insufficiently prepared" for potential pandemic risks, including the extension of diseases to previously unaffected populations and the transmission of diseases from animals to people.

Not to mention the creation of diseases in virology labs, and the likelihood of hybrid warfare using viruses.

The minister appeared alongside WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who announced the creation of a new pandemic and health research hub in Berlin.

Set to open this year, the WHO hub for pandemic and epidemic intelligence will produce information to inform the policies of governments and other health authorities, Merkel said.

Ghebreyesus told the briefing that the pandemic has "exposed gaps" in global intelligence systems and said there will be "more viruses that will emerge with the potential of sparking epidemics or pandemics."

He said the potential risks will be addressed by the global center in Berlin, which aims to collect, analyze and disseminate health data around the world in real-time.

Which is exactly what the Canadian centre did until it was dissolved in time for the 2019 pandemic.