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So where did Covid come from? It's not mere conspiracy theory to ask if this new coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab

Batty: capturing the animals for research purposes. Credit: Steeve Jordan / AFP

Batty: capturing the animals for research purposes. Credit: Steeve Jordan / AFP


June 12, 2020   9 mins

Last year, Yuan Zhiming published an article in the Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity confessing to concerns about high security laboratories in China. He admitted maintenance costs were “generally neglected” and several of their top-level research centres lacked sufficient funds for “routine yet vital processes”. He said openly that “part-time researchers” performed the work of skilled staff, which “makes it difficult to identify and mitigate potential safety hazards”.

In a second article co-authored with four colleagues, he wrote that their biosafety systems needed to be “further improved and strengthened”.

Today, his words carry greater significance. For Professor Yuan is head of biosafety at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV), the first lab in China with top-level biosecurity status. It carries out cutting-edge research into bat viruses and has been named by the US President as the possible source of the coronavirus behind the global pandemic. But Yuan now denies there is any chance this disease could have leaked from his laboratory, insisting they followed strict safety procedures to protect staff and the environment from contamination. “There is no way this virus came from us,” he told state media — and like other Chinese officials, even hinted it might have emerged in the United States rather than his city.

Given the stakes, it is not surprising Prof Yuan has suddenly become so convinced about his laboratory’s security. He is also the most senior Communist Party official on the premises. If this pandemic were ever proven to be down to mistakes or poor safety, the consequences would be huge — and not just for him and his laboratory. It would devastate public faith in science, especially for those explorers pushing at frontiers of biological knowledge. It would turbo-charge the bubbling demands around the world for reparations. It would also shake — and possibly shatter — the dictatorial Chinese regime if it was exposed for connivance in history’s worst medical cover-up just as it attempts to assume global leadership.

Donald Trump’s public condemnation of the Wuhan lab, saying he had seen “strong evidence” to back his case, only makes these matters more complex. His allegations, lacking any data, served to inflame a contentious and toxic issue. Some prominent scientists and journalists have been quick to dismiss the idea as a conspiracy theory. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” concluded one influential paper in Nature Medicine (although it failed to mention one author is a guest professor at a body running one of the suspect units while another has just been honoured by Beijing for his work in China).

Another tireless figure insisting “scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” is former Kingston University parasitologist Peter Daszak, $402,000-a-year head of a charity that investigates spillovers of disease from animals. Daszak is understandably furious after his 15-year collaboration on bat diseases with Wuhan was disrupted by the National Institutes of Health’s decision to stop funding their research due to biosecurity concerns. This was widely seen as typical Trump, lashing out at his enemies. Yet the health body’s director is Francis Collins, a well-respected geneticist appointed by Barack Obama.”Whether [the coronavirus] could have been in some way isolated and studied in this laboratory in Wuhan, we have no way of knowing,” he said later.

He is right. For scientists, like journalists, should deal in facts — and at this stage we have no clear idea about the origins of this nasty disease. It may be a natural zoonotic virus, crossing over from animals like several previous epidemics including Ebola and the Sars outbreak at the start of this century. Few experts would be surprised if this turned out to be the case, although any intermediate host species has yet to be found. Meanwhile there are some wild conspiracy theories swirling around about bio-weapons and deliberate release by the Communist regime. Yet anyone who denies with certainty that Sars-Cov-2 — the new strain of coronavirus — might have leaked accidentally from one of Wuhan’s high-security laboratories is talking tosh.

We know one thing for sure: this pandemic did not emerge from the Wuhan wild animal market instantly identified as the source by Beijing. This market was closed and cleaned up the day after Chinese officials told the World Health Organisation about a strange new disease in the city, home to 11 million citizens and a vital transport hub in the middle of the country. They failed to share data from samples collected on site. Yet, in January, George Gao Fu, director of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), declared with total assurance this was the place of origin. Then, last month, after a series of studies cast doubt on this concept, he admitted in a television interview that he was mistaken.

Gao, China’s top epidemiologist, also said something intriguing in a previous television interview. He observed that this was the seventh coronavirus to infect humans, then added that none of its predecessors had acted in similar style. “The behaviour of this virus isn’t like a coronavirus,” he said.

This has been noted by other experts investigating the virus. Last month, I revealed in the Mail on Sunday the results of an important study by two scientists at the Broad Institute, a top genetic research unit set up by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a colleague from the University of British Columbia. It disproved the market source idea based on available genetic data. But the scientists also expressed surprise that Sars-Cov-2 was “already pre-adapted to human transmission”, contrasting its genetic stability as it rampaged around the planet with the coronavirus that evolved rapidly during the global Sars epidemic between 2002 and 2004.

Such stability is good news for finding a vaccine. Yet if this coronavirus can be traced back ultimately to bats, as seems near-certain, some scientists are puzzled that it emerged in such well-honed shape to wreak havoc on humans. As Collins has noted, and diseases such as Ebola have proved, nature can be the most lethal bio-terrorist. Yet that fascinating study implied single introduction of a human-adapted form of the virus into the population — and as the authors said, this means all routes for zoonotic transmission must remain in contention unless otherwise proven. “The possibility that a non-genetically engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered,” they concluded.

Then came another significant pre-print paper by an Australian team of vaccine researchers, which found the virus was “not typical of a normal zoonotic infection” since it was “uniquely adapted to infect humans”. Nikolai Petrovsky, the professor of medicine at Flinders University who led the study, echoed Gao when telling me he had never seen a zoonotic virus behave in such a way. He dared point in public to something being muttered privately by some other scientists: the coincidence of the most closely-related known viruses to Sars-Cov-2 being studied in Wuhan in conjunction with collaborating US laboratories. “There is currently no evidence of a leak but enough circumstantial data to concern us,” he said. “It remains a possibility until it is ruled out.”

The closest relative to the new virus is called RaTG13, which was disclosed in a paper submitted to Nature on the same January day that China belatedly admitted human transmission. It was found by Shi Zhengli, a famous scientist from WiV who helped discover that Sars was ‘amplified’ from bats by civet cats. Although little information has been shared about this virus strain, it seems to have been collected from horseshoe bats living more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan and has 96% genetic similarity to Sars-Cov-2. This sounds close — yet as pointed out by the first scientist to publish the new virus’s genetic composition, this “likely represents more than 20 years of sequence evolution”.

Some experts wonder why more information has not been shared about this strain, which fuels the idea of zoonotic transmission and was revealed so quickly by Shi and her team. I have even seen one unpublished paper questioning the validity of the Nature paper. Certainly Shi is a fascinating character. A brilliant scientist, she is known as ‘Bat Woman’ for leading intrepid sample-hunting expeditions in caves. She reacted angrily to social media suggestions that her work might be responsible for the pandemic. But she also admitted to Scientific American that she never expected such an outbreak in Wuhan, so far from the sub-tropical home of the bats she studied, and that her first thought was: “Could they have come from our lab?”.

After investigating her records to check for any mishandling of materials, especially during disposal, the virologist told the magazine she breathed a sigh of relief when none of the genome sequences for the new disease matched those of viruses they had sampled. “That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days.” Subsequent reports in Chinese media exposed that Shi was muzzled after finding the genetic sequence of Sars-Cov-2 for more than a week before it was published by another scientist. Regardless, Shi’s reaction underlined that leaks can occur from laboratories, even those with highest global levels of bio-security, as has been seen often before in recent history.

Shi’s lab was not the only one in Wuhan working on bat-borne diseases. There was another one with lower level biosecurity run by the CDC just 500 yards from the animal market. A paper posted by two Chinese scientists in February on a site for sharing research — then pulled two days later — claimed that 605 bats were kept at this laboratory, describing how the creatures had attacked, bled and urinated on a researcher. “It is plausible that the virus leaked,” the mysterious study concluded. There is also a cluster of laboratories at a university hospital, which includes a high-security research unit into infectious diseases and a breeding centre that has made more than 1,000 types of genetically engineered animals from mice to monkeys.

Now go back to Sars-Cov-2. This disease is far more infectious than the previous Sars that sparked a global epidemic, partly due to its efficient ability to enter different human organs. One specialist told me to think of viruses like hitchhikers seeking a lift from cells in the human body, which they then enter to infect. Something found on this new parasite, the furin cleavage site, ensures its spike protein — sticking out of the virus particle — can bind on to cells in human tissues including the lungs, liver, small intestines and even nerve cells. This is not found on either Sars or the most similar coronaviruses — and those coronaviruses that do have this feature are genetically very different.

We also know that WiV — the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia — had been carrying out ‘gain-of-function’ experiments on bat coronaviruses since 2015. It had been playing around with the Sars virus, inserting snippets from other bat diseases and constructing new chimeric coronaviruses. Barack Obama’s administration stopped funding such work in 2013 on grounds it was too dangerous, although ironically this ban was lifted under Trump after scientists argued that it aids understanding of how pandemic viruses evolve. But critics such as Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, insist that the only impact of such work is creation of “a new, non-natural risk”. He points out WiV was creating chimeric coronaviruses using “seamless, unidirectional ligation” procedures that leave no signatures of human manipulation in the resulting genome sequences.

Ebright is an outlier on these issues. Another microbiologist who works with viruses in high-security labs told me she could never “design a virus that is this diabolical”. But others have expressed alarm over China’s rush to develop a network of high-security research centres to win primacy in biosciences. The BSL-4 level laboratory in Wuhan, for instance, was built with French help against advice of its intelligence services, while the Washington Post found that, two years ago, US experts warned the State Department of safety concerns after visiting the site. Now other leading figures insist we should not discount the idea of an accident. “It’s important to be upfront that we do not have sufficient evidence to exclude entirely the possibility that it escaped from a research lab doing gain of function experiments,” tweeted Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at Washington University.

https://twitter.com/ct_bergstrom/status/1250827416232062976?lang=en

Professor Bergstrom believes a natural zoonotic spillover is a “far more plausible” explanation. But he added that “whatever the origin of Sars-Cov-2 may have been, going forward we need to carefully assess and manage the risk associated with a range of activities from wildlife markets to gain-of-function research to BSL4 labs in urban areas where spread would be rapid”. His comment highlights how these are, in many different ways, testing times for science and the scientific establishment.

Indeed, it is hard not to wonder why some other prominent scientists insist this virus must be a natural zoonotic transmission — and also question why some key research centres that specialise in virus evolution have stayed silent. Could it be more evidence that academic institutions fear Beijing’s retribution if they raise challenging questions? We know, after all, that US federal authorities are investigating some major universities for failing to disclose hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts and contracts from foreign donors while earlier this month Charles Leiber, a world-renowned Harvard nanoscientist, was indicted on charges of lying over lucrative links to China. In Britain, MPs on the foreign affairs select committee recently highlighted “alarming evidence” of China’s efforts to restrict academic freedom in universities.

Clearly we must be cautious when there is so much at stake — unlike former spy chief Sir Richard Dearlove when he blamed a lab leak based on a weak new Norwegian-British study. But, equally, we cannot simply dismiss the idea as conspiracy theory. Not least when the Chinese government engaged in a cover-up over the initial outbreak of the disease, even silencing doctors trying to warn people in Wuhan — and then moved fast to tighten laboratory safety, especially for handling of viruses, in February. Beijing’s suggestion the virus may have arisen in a US lab also shows acceptance such events can happen. “In making this suggestion they are endorsing the possibility the Covid-19 virus has a lab origin – just not in China,” said one sceptical Western scientist.

There is no firm evidence of an accident or leak beyond a set of strange biological quirks and suspicious coincidences. But nor does the alternative hypothesis — that this is a freak event of nature and humans were the perfect host for a new zoonotic virus —  have indisputable supporting evidence at this stage. No one has discovered an intermediate host, nor offered credible explanation of how a coronavirus moved from some bats in dank Yunnan caves to infect people hundreds of miles away in the bustling city of Wuhan. Indeed, in many ways this is the more frightening concept: if it has emerged in such natural spillover style, surely next time it will be even more lethal.

These are early days in our understanding of this coronavirus. Despite the stunning work of scientists around the world as they unravel its behaviour, components and impact, it continues to confound on so many levels. And at the moment we still have no definitive proof of where it came from and so no one is yet off the hook. This isn’t conspiracy theory, simply the facts.


Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.

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Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

Related to all this, one story the MSM studiously ignored was that of a Chinese person attempting to smuggle various SARS viruses into the US a couple of years ago. He was caught at the airport after initially denying that he had any vials in his luggage. He then admitted that he was taking them to a scientific colleague at a US college. For every one of these people that is caught, I would imagine there are plenty more getting through.

Mairi MacThomais
Mairi MacThomais
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

But why?

Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson
4 years ago

The virus originated from the only city in China with a Biosafety level 4 laboratory. If it occurred naturally, consider the probability that it would happen to arise in that location. I don’t think you need to look any further than that.

Kenneth MacKillop
Kenneth MacKillop
4 years ago

One thing that still puzzles me a bit is how there could have been so many cases associated with the wet market if the initial contagion did not originate there.

That is, unless all of that was indeed a fraudulent fabrication on the part of the CCP after all. Since the recently publicized notion (out of Harvard, of all places) that SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in Aug. 2019 in Wuhan, it seems more plausible that the entire wet-market thing was fab’d, but I had been initially surprised how well accepted this claim appeared to be by CCP critics.

I will have to take a look at the MIT/Harvard study, but I do not see how it could possibly “disprove” that the wet market was a source of the virus. It could “suggest”, but not disprove, based upon genetic analysis of known bat viruses and human CoVs, etc.

One thing is for certain — any individual, regardless of credentials, that has ever made a claim that a lab origin is not possible is either an ignoramus or a fraud. And there have been many who have made such statements. There have been too many experts shooting off their self-interested mouths with this pandemic, be they epidemiologists or virologists or whatever. There have been very, very few truly knowledgeable and honest or disinterested people speaking publicly about any aspect of this pandemic — it is been remarkable in that respect I think. Both leaders and experts have been shown to be fools or worse IMO, but I reserve a special disdain for the so-called experts.

Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin
4 years ago

There is too much Grant money involved to get the truth.

Graeme Mochrie
Graeme Mochrie
4 years ago

When the USA, France, Georgia, Italy, Switzerland… are all in bed doing gain of function research, who in the know is going to tell tales? It takes a bravely foolish person to do that.

The media (if the BBC is anything to go by) has been playing a propaganda game, which suggests that at some level there is more knowledge than is in the public domain. Even today the BBC was poo pooing the idea that this was not of animal origin, though it did not say “not of laboratory animal origin”.

Why are the media not making good in depth investigative programmes that explore gain of function research and the ethics and validity of performing such research? Why are educated, knowledgeable, dissenting voices not heard on mainstream media?

Neil Colledge
Neil Colledge
4 years ago

Very good point Kenneth …… The Chinese economic miracle has been impressive, but many of them are still dirt poor. The daughter of my neighbour has been working in China, Speaks mandarin, and shared a story gaining some traction – that animals used for experiments in the laboratory were irresponsibly discarded …. then sold to wet markets. God knows what the truth is, but it seems that the situation in that country is still primitive enough to allow conditions, where this MIGHT happen.

Kenneth MacKillop
Kenneth MacKillop
4 years ago

It took many years to collect most of what is known about SARS-1. It will be the same for SARS-2, but there is likely to be far more deception and interference and lack of cooperation from the CCP this time. Evidence from within mainland China is likely to be covered up or destroyed or otherwise lacking.

After what I would think should be several years, individuals will be able to form their own opinions as to origin. I doubt any comparable evidence to that of the civets and horseshoe bats found in Guangdong will ever emerge in this case. The CCP has been lying and covering up since early on for sure. But this is not evidence of a lab origin in and of itself. They sure did seem to be taken by surprise by the spread in late 2019, but maybe some of the commies were just overconfident earlier that it could be contained.

The CCP will act in a dishonest and immoral manner without reservation, regardless. That is the nature of such a communist party — its preservation, and monopoly, of power towers over all other considerations.
The CCP is a malign entity for the world at large, but if the new virus was at least partly engineered in the virology lab this seems like an unfortunate and very damaging but understandable accident. The behavior of the CCP has been selfish and evil regardless of what the virus’s origins were, but I would expect nothing else. The rest of the world probably could have been given many months more of preparation time if not for the CCP. Possibly few, if any, countries and leaders would have heeded an earlier warning anyway.

slorter
slorter
4 years ago

individuals will be able to form their own opinions as to origin.
That is part of the problem!

Konstantinos Stavropoulos
Konstantinos Stavropoulos
4 years ago
Reply to  slorter

I don’t get your point. Are you really implying that individuals should not be able to form their own opinions..?

slorter
slorter
4 years ago

No! You can form any opinion you like just as long as you identify it as an opinion!

Lindsay Gatward
Lindsay Gatward
4 years ago

China’s hugely successful and brilliantly stealthy takeover of so much of the World has been so exposed by this virus – A key moment was the attack on Australia for asking for an investigation – That attack was surely a strategic error of growing magnitude and domino effect – You have to wonder if one of the dominoes is the collapse of the Chinese economy and would the next one be the CCP and what would be the collateral damage of its writhing demise?

Raymond Hayes
Raymond Hayes
4 years ago

There is no mention in the article of Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier who accused biologists of having created SARS-CoV-2 in a lab.

Luc Montagnier, won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work on HIV said that “the virus has come out of a laboratory in Wuhan, which has been specialising in these types of coronaviruses since the beginning of the 2000s”.

Dave Smith
Dave Smith
4 years ago

Me i just do not believe in coincidences. Started in Wuhan. Labs in Wuhan. Join the dots.

Konstantinos Stavropoulos
Konstantinos Stavropoulos
4 years ago
Reply to  Dave Smith

Why not..? This looks like a very true co-incidence..! As in co-ops..! No..?

Kenneth MacKillop
Kenneth MacKillop
4 years ago

As a technical comment, SARS-CoV-2 seems to have chimeric characteristics. And these could very plausibly have been derived from typical lab work that is known to have been done at the Wuhan lab for many years, and indeed with collaboration by researchers from several Western countries including the US at times.

But a chimera could also have been generated in wild host species (including humans, quite possibly), and this is common as a general phenomenon. One can argue, at the detailed level of the RNA features, about likelihoods or probabilities. But nobody can absolutely rule out a natural cause — nobody in the world knows enough to do this.

Careful and truly knowledgeable scientists will frame any of their statements appropriately. But so many have not — they are not to be trusted under any circumstances.

Graeme Mochrie
Graeme Mochrie
4 years ago

Until you know, you don’t know and even if a wild animal with the original virus was found, you would not know if it had been intentionally infected. It is indeed strange that everything originated from one zoonotic infection and that there has not been more seep from a wild (or domesticated) population.

robertbutterwick
robertbutterwick
4 years ago

As the virus spreads it mutates, thanks to which it’s possible to track back the source of any infection. The UK now knows that of the 1356 patient zero’s in the UK only 1 came from China. The main sources appear to be from Spain, Italy and France. Of course all the infections ultimately originate from China, so it should be possible to establish who was the original patient zero. The reluctance of China to be transparent speaks volumes. I’m sure patient zero has already been identified, but will now never be revealed.

slorter
slorter
4 years ago

This all happened during a global trade war between a declining empire and a rising economic power ! It is a politically charged environment and most media play to that theme!

The world is a global one movement of people is unprecedented and the west has fallen in love with the cheap labor they have opened up with the globalization under neoliberalism. Capitalists had no problem neglecting and abandoning their own work force for the global party and should bare a significant responsibility for the world they thrust their own people.

These pandemics can start anywhere as the swine and Spanish flu started in North America. The latter being transported by American soldiers during the first world war.

Graeme Mochrie
Graeme Mochrie
4 years ago
Reply to  slorter

I read an interesting piece of historical research recently that suggested that the Spanish Flu may have had its origin in a vaccination delivered to troops before they set out to Europe. I am however wary of believing anything nowadays without sight of hard empirical evidence and even then I want to be able to dissect it.

Gilles Demaneuf
Gilles Demaneuf
4 years ago

If someone just awoke from a 6 months coma today and was told about the whole covid19 story, most likely their first reaction would be: ‘What, you are telling me that nobody knows where it comes from, even the Chinese? Seriously!’

– The official Chinese story is that it happened and nobody knows how. And thanks but don’t ask, or something bad may happen to you.
– The Western reaction is too often that even hinting that the virus could be the result of an accident must be a conspiracy theory pushed out by some kind of crazed Trump worshipper.

There is no need to be defensive. Nor is there any need to bring everything back to Trump. But what we can do is just crunch a few probabilities.

What we know for sure is that (1) the outbreak started in Wuhan, (2) the market does not seem to be the source, (3) there is no horseshoe bats colony in Hubei and (4) there were no bats sold at the market.

This leaves us with a few possibilities:
a. Some bat to human transmission happened in Wuhan
b. Some animal (not bat) to human transmission happened in Wuhan.
c. Some bat to human transmission happened in South China (where the bat colonies are)
d. Some animal (not bat) to human transmission happened somewhere else than Wuhan

Let’s look at these:
a. Since there are no population of bats in Wuhan and none were sold at the market, what were the bats doing there? How did they get there?

Clearly they must have been transported. If it was for food then the chance of these bats to go infectious in Wuhan and only Wuhan is rather small ““ they are many other cities were you would expect bats to be sold. Wuhan has 1% of China’s population, so 1% is a good probability to start with.
Hence most likely not transported for food. So most likely transported for lab work. And since Wuhan is the Chinese were the lab work is concentrated, it would make sense.

b. Same argument as above. If the animals are transported for food, then why Wuhan of all Chinese cities? The probability of such an event is small. So most likely not-for-food. Which means lab animals. Likely animals collected close to South China bat caves.

c. If the bat-to-human transmission happened in South China, then why did the outbreak happened in Wuhan only of all Chinese cities?
The probability of such an event is very small. The only thing that would select Wuhan as likely end destination is again lab work. So that would be someone collecting bats getting infected at the collection point.

d. Same argument as above. Why would again the infected human then pop up exclusively in Wuhan of all Chinese cities?
Most likely scenario: because the animals, rodent, whatever were part of a study in pathogenes ““ where Wuhan was again having a leading role.

Conclusion:
Whatever way you look at it, the fact that it happened in Wuhan and only in Wuhan ““ where there is no bat population ““ points back to a collection, transport or lab accident.

Tony Edwards
Tony Edwards
4 years ago

I saw myself the proximity of chickens being killed close to vegetable stalls in Guangzou city some years ago blood probably on the vegetables. As Dr Greger in an article at nutrition.org has at length described factory farming is dangerous (as well as inhumane) a very high risk for the transfer of diseases. The meticulous levels of bio security needed in huge communities of poultry kept indoors are unlikely to be met in developing countries, difficult even here. Wild meat so prized in SE Asia is frequently coming from crudely caged animals kept in appalling conditions in the African bush, maybe carrying disease. Foods with anti viral benefits in particular raw garlic may be protective unfortunately there is no profit in the thorough testing of this. In times of plague in China mixtures of garlic and wormwood and other herbs have been consumed for protection as did the four grave robbers at the time of the black death in French city.

Lee Johnson
Lee Johnson
4 years ago

Too many coincidences.

Charles Rogerson
Charles Rogerson
4 years ago

I highly recommend this article by Yuri Deigin on the genealogy of Covid-19. It is long and difficult, but I think many educated laymen could understand his argument, which is that it appears that a bit of DNA from another virus, which made the virus ‘spike’ much more effective against humans, was inserted, either through evolution in the wild or in a lab, into Covid-19.

The article is very, very detailed, and you will learn a lot about virology. Deigin’s conclusion is that the ‘lab origin’ hypothesis cannot be dismissed, but that, although there are several indications of lab involvement, it cannot be proven.

https://medium.com/@yuridei

Another note: if the edit/addition were artificial, it would likely be lost during mutation rather quickly, which might account for the observations that Covid-19 seems to be becoming less virulent. The rate of new deaths seems to be dropping rapidly worldwide.

chris j
chris j
4 years ago

Until the guilty party raise their hands and admit their wrongdoing (highly unlikely to happen) the issue will continue to grow. China’s sabre rattling at Australia I think is evidence of some smoke trails, possibly from the Covid gun.
I think we’re being set up for the third and final world war.
And I so wanted to go out blasting the alien bugs (a la Starship Troopers) rather than at the behest of the grey men in power here on earth.
Still, Ma nature won’t miss the human race when we’ve smited all the creeds and colours that make up the hairless apes.

jonathan21s
jonathan21s
4 years ago

So this virus has suddenly evolved to a state of such sophistication that it is enabled it to efficiently and effortlessly envade not only the human body but many different human organs in the human body and also to multiply within the human body with lethal efficiency. Would natural evolution in nature have suddenly pulled off something like this?? If so which virus is next going to suddenly achieve such highly specific changes targetting itself specifically on the human body?

Philip Burrell
Philip Burrell
4 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com

I think I prefer this version of events but then again it probably won’t play well on here given the knee jerk reaction to anything MSM which is ironic really, given the list of contributors to UnHerd. Back in the mid-70’s when I was doing a History degree, there was talk of two ways of looking at the subject. The c**k-up approach or the conspiracy approach. I have always believed the former to be the most likely and definitely more interesting.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
4 years ago
Reply to  Philip Burrell

Well, I’m with you, Philip, re the c**k-up theory of history, although The Guardian seems very wedded to the idea that everything is a wicked Tory conspiracy, preferably traceable back to Dominic Cummings.

gehan.amaratunga
gehan.amaratunga
4 years ago
Reply to  Philip Burrell

Lab leak is a cockup

Graeme Mochrie
Graeme Mochrie
4 years ago
Reply to  Philip Burrell

c**k-up I hope, but what was the aim of gain of function research? If the intention was to make a vaccine, then was there an intention to control by only making the vaccine available to conformers, or just a simple money spinning exercise? What sort of c**k-up are we looking at?

Robin Lambert
Robin Lambert
4 years ago

well Wuhan happens to have most ”Artificial Virus” Biologists on the planet .If it isn’t a Bioweapon,Why 1) did China have Genome within 7 days 2) Why haven’t they shared their Genome Map with Western Scientists? 3) Anyone having pangolin &chips I dont buy it spread that Gateway. 4) West wouldn’t have been told anything without South korea, Taiwan detecting SARS2 in early January. a good documentary Was on ”Russia today”….If SARS3 happens at end of this Year ,will we be told it was ”An Accident” Again. China has bought up Rainforests and Western companies under the smokescreen ..Time will tell

Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin
4 years ago

Listen to Chris Martenson on You tube Coronavirus: are our Scientists lying to us. You’ll be a virologist after this. He goes through things methodically. For instance did you know they can make a synthetic version of the virus? Despite many America scientists claim it was natural Chris has taken them to task to know how that Furin cleavage site appeared in this virus as it does not exist in any in any other member of the Coronavirus family.

Bill Bolwell
Bill Bolwell
4 years ago

Look up Chimera in Wikipedia. It is a mix of genetics. If you have a bone marrow transplant you become a chimera of your DNA and the donor’s DNA. They say Bill Gates RNA vaccine will turn people into chimeras. SCAREY. An article I read said the recipient became virually all the donor’s DNA.

Bill Bolwell
Bill Bolwell
4 years ago

Australian government information:
https://www.tga.gov.au/covi

Tests for COVID-19 aim to detect the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2, or an immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

The reliability of COVID-19 tests is uncertain due to the limited evidence base. Available evidence mainly comes from symptomatic patients, and their clinical role in detecting asymptomatic carriers is unclear.

andysocial21
andysocial21
4 years ago

Well there is no Conspiracy involved in this one – I totally recommend a ridiculously researched history of electricity – ‘Invisible Rainbow’ – it would be criminal to avoid this though! (No, it is NOT 5g)

James Fisher
James Fisher
4 years ago
Reply to  andysocial21

The author of that book comes across as sonething of a krank unfortunately…

stuuey
stuuey
4 years ago

I’d like to know why the US were funding research on Corona viruses in Chinese labs?

Neil John
Neil John
4 years ago

Working in a class 2 lab, with potential class 3 pathogens in unscreened cadaver samples being a possibility, I’ve had enough conflict with lazy, ‘it’s beneath me’, Chinese s-too-dense who refuse to clean up after themselves in the past. Leaving samples that by law must be autoclaved before disposal for others to clean up is bad enough, but some simply rinsed the lab ware out in the lab sink relying on the sewerage plant down the road to deal with anything nasty, that said Pirbright’s class 4 labs were leaking pathogens like a sieve for years too…

Bill Bolwell
Bill Bolwell
4 years ago

If SARS2 is from the Wuhan lab, it came from USA originally. Bill Gates and Fauci are from USAnot China.

Bill Bolwell
Bill Bolwell
4 years ago

There are two types of test. They don’t seem to be accurate. So what is the point? They seem to rely on symptons then say people often don’t have symptoms. Some people say the virus has never been truly identified and hence discovered. It seems to me they know you have it if you get the bad symptons.

carolstaines8
carolstaines8
4 years ago

So, several questions have not made it to the public forum: Q what were the scientists trying to do when they were tampering with, probably, an existing virus? Q to what end were they working on it? Who was funding the research?

Neil Colledge
Neil Colledge
4 years ago

This is a complex and dirty business, the truth of which will probably take years to unravel. In April of this year, I contracted a moderate manifestation of Covid-19. Mercifully I survived but because of what happened to my own physiognomy, find it very difficult to believe that this is a naturally evolved coronavirus.
As in many (alleged) 9/11-type, false-flag operations, the truth will always end up more complicated than (one-trick pony) conspiracy theories from Alex Jones, David Icke and Russel Brand..
The Chinese are subtle, clever, devious, sensitive and proud and will want to avoid having to pay billions in reparations to families who lost loved ones to the virus. American virologists would have wanted to be involved in research at Wuhan, just in order to keep an eye on The Chinese (which is understandable).
Predictably, mainstream media will publish whatever information is desirable to those who sponsor them (or grant their annual broadcasting licences).
The whole thing is a filthy cesspool of right/left wing opinionated dogma, quite deliberate misinformation, watered down truthfulness or downright lies – from ALL parties.
My own reaction to this multitude of information on the web is to focus on the writings, thoughts of, and youtube interviews with just three people ….. Yannis Varoufakis, Noam Chomsky and Johann Galtung. This struck me as a reasonably good way of distilling information & simplifying understanding of what now invades people’s minds, souls, perceptions and bodies.

Neil Colledge
Neil Colledge
4 years ago

The recovery from Covid-19 became in my case, the most interesting part of it’s unwelcome twelve-week invasion. It took two full months for the cough to depart, two months for taste, smell, appetite to return. Although grateful for the resulting weight-loss, an unpleasant salty taste lingers in the mouth, stubbornly refusing to depart. There was a small published piece (subsequently buried) by a group of young scientists, comparing the Covid virus to the HIV virus. The immune system is weakened, lung tissues are gratuitously destroyed & coughed up by bucket-fulls. Whatever disease your body is prone to, the Covid will act as a conduit for this disease, helping the body to turn against it’s host. This (at any rate) is exactly what it felt like for me. This experience was entirely new in manifestation, infection & departure, I’ve never experienced anything like it.
A viral bouillabaisse this clever and sophisticated was created in a laboratory. How could it possibly be perceived otherwise?
One of the reasons for stepping back from other discussion channels, is the fast developing rabid, anti-China, warmongering rhetoric, pointing the finger of blame uniquely on them for cursing us with this virus. To aggressively & belligerently challenge China in this way would be counter-productive and will produce terrible results. They are a proud and sensitive race and their recent economic achievements are nothing short of miraculous.
They are plagued by an Achilles Heel of poor food hygiene and inadequate food distribution. The paradigm shift of taking home a tortured dead squirrel covered in it’s own excrement or bringing home a Labrador’s head for a family meal …….. to bringing home a vacuum packed joint of beef or chicken, hygienically wrapped, stamped with a trusted seal of approval from a government agency, trusted & verified, is a huge cultural reincarnation but it HAS to be done. The world cannot afford to get sick every year because it hasn’t …
With all our faults & failings, the west has achieved this paradigm shift. Notwithstanding the odd dumb idea concerning chlorinated chicken (non merci), our food hygiene is world-class. We can gently teach the Chinese how to achieve a tremendous health benefit, that would be a win-win for all parties. Considering their current situation, it would not be too much to ask that they cough-up an eight-figure sum for advice from us, priceless to their future.
All we need is a diplomatic genius, non-judgmental, fluent in mandarin, with the ability to sell this idea to them. The old-guard is far too set in their ways for this. Trump is unquestionably NOT the man ….. Smart money should be on a woman perhaps? The question …. is who?
Unless I’ve got this backwards – the food hygiene/food health/sustainable hygiene card, is among the strongest we have to play in dealing with China.
We should find one of our very smartest negotiators and play this card brilliantly, respectfully, perceptively, with love and respect.

mlipkin
mlipkin
3 years ago

Good piece but in fact circumstantial evidence for a laboratory leak is overwhelming.

viz The outbreak is in Wuhan and is similar to a bat coronavirus

In a 2018 study by batwoman Shi et al, 218 villagers living near bat caves in Yunnan had blood tests for bat coronaviruses: 6 individuals were positive for (non pandemic) coronaviruses. There was a negative set of controls: 240 people from Wuhan – why Wuhan? – there are no bats there and so the researchers considered it impossible they would have been exposed to bat coronaviruses.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Orwell

So yes, there is evidence for the leak theory. It is just so simple that no one can see it.

Richard Slack
Richard Slack
4 years ago

5 minutes of my life I will not get back. At the end of it all we know is that we do not know yet. It will not help us fight the virus though it might help Trump’s reelection prospect to continue speculating, if that is your intention

andysocial21
andysocial21
4 years ago

The incredibly well researched history of electricity called ‘The Invisible Rainbow’ will give you a completely different view of the current crisis there’s no conspiracy just intellectual neglect

Gio Con
Gio Con
4 years ago

You cite nothing but coincidences–no new scientific studies. The vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists are in agreement with Kristian G. Andersen, et al, (The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2) that the virus originated, not in, but near the Wuhan market, that it was transmitted from bats via an intermediary animal, and that it was neither created nor manipulated in a lab.