May 2, 2023 - 10:30am
The silence speaks volumes. Where are the politicians showing solidarity with a colleague who has been no-platformed by a leading Edinburgh venue? Joanna Cherry is an Edinburgh MP, a human rights lawyer and a powerful voice for women’s rights. It’s another example of the demonising of women who hold perfectly legitimate views, allowing them to be picked off and isolated from mainstream politics.
Anyone who claims to believe in basic freedoms should be horrified. So where is Humza Yousaf, leader of the SNP and Cherry’s long-standing colleague? Where is Stephen Flynn, the party leader at Westminster, where Cherry is an MP? The fact that she doesn’t support the SNP’s gender reforms should pale into insignificance when a fellow politician is turned into a hate figure for expressing opinions that are neither illegal nor offensive.
This is a cross-party issue, affecting elected representatives from other Left-of-centre parties, so where is the outrage from the Labour and Lib Dem leaders in Scotland and the rest of the UK? Even Sir Keir Starmer, who has so signally failed to stand up for one of his own MPs, Rosie Duffield, must by now be aware of what’s going on — and that the law is being broken.
Starmer is a KC, like Cherry, and leading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”.
Such things should not be happening in a democratic country, governed by the rule of law. On this occasion, the venue has put out a mealy-mouthed statement, blaming the cancellation on the fact that a number of key staff, including management and box office personnel, “are unwilling to work on this event”. They say they are ensuring that their employees’ views are respected, a position that suggests those views are reasonable.
They are not. Every time this happens, the objections are based on things the victims of no-platforming have not said. None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. They have not demanded that trans people should lose their jobs, be prevented from holding meetings or stopped from carrying out academic research. They are simply upholding the rights of another group, women and especially lesbians, to whom all these things are being done in the name of “trans rights”.
The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing. At protests organised by trans activists, we don’t see placards demanding “let men use women’s toilets now” or “make women share cells with rapists”. Instead, we see banners claiming that feminists are calling for “genocide” and comparing a belief in biological sex to Nazi eugenics.
It couldn’t have happened without the collusion of leading politicians, whose silence in the face of widespread bullying of women undermines their claim to be progressive — or just decent human beings.
Joanna Cherry is one of the bravest, most principled and funniest women I know. The fact that a venue called The Stand hasn’t taken one on her behalf is an indictment of the intolerant culture gripping Scotland, and the political heavyweights throughout the UK who have failed to call it out.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeI began my journey down this road in 2020 with this article by Jonathan Latham, PhD. Very interesting and compelling.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Fauci’s NIH sure picked a lucky time to patent mRNA vaccines, better lucky than good dr Fauci always says!
I assume that at least most contributors will have read Kennedy’s latest book which gives a history of the development of bio weapons. This understanding is essential to appreciate the corruption, greed and stupidity that led to the Covid outbreak.
Inventing, developing and exaggerating threats which then need to be addressed is a well established ( and well documented) pattern to then attract greater funding/power/influence etc.
It seems in this reckless world that “ the ends justify the means” and if you come up with a “ just end” ( vaccine/cure/peace etc ( along with military potential) then all is well…
Covid pandemic is a story of moral bankruptcy, greed and dishonesty masquerading as science and protection of the public.
It seems to me we have learnt next to nothing, and The Powers That Be continue to gaslight the gullible majority and will pull all the same stunts when the next opportunity arises.
Sadly, we are too busy watching reality tv, playing computer games whilst pigging out on Deliveroos, to be bothered with something as demanding and out of fashion as Critical Thinking.
Good hypothesis, but another factor may be that Dr Battacharya is about to be confirmed to head NIH and the full truth may come out in a few days or weeks, so the NYT wants to get ahead of it, thinking it still has some shred of credibility to save.
You hit the nail with the proverbial hammer with that comment.
“Was the Covid-19 virus a chance case of animal-to-human transmission, or a deliberately engineered virus escaping from a gain of function laboratory?” Or indeed a natural virus which escaped from a laboratory in which natural viruses were studied?
The article a few days ago by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times was not particularly surprising. She is a regular columnist in that newspaper, and she has long thought that the Covid-19 virus came from a lab leak. That the newspaper let her write that column means little.
What was surprising was when the New York Times let Alina Chan write an op-ed article last year on June 3. Her article was an expanded article with interactive graphics, not just a casual piece. The newspaper caught a lot of flak in reader comments for publishing the piece. That decision did mean a lot.
Here’s a link to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html?unlocked_article_code=1.404.3xki.6q1mZpqumTRV&smid=url-share
Yyyyy
Why are the proposterous mortality figures still being bandied about. The pcr attributed covid deaths was a complete farce. 1 million USA deaths? Some deaths, yes of course but those figures are just a legacy of the propaganda fear campaign
the real question to ask , which is either result in 2 things, Traitorous actions or immense stupidity , sure you want to some research on a bioweapon lets say that is either illegal to do in your own country or would face massive backlash.
So you say alright lets do it elsewhere, why China of all places, it would be like the US doing the Manhatten project in Japan
….and dropping “Little Boy” on Cleveland.
the NYT next week, hey those moon landings where real, not done by Stanley Kurbrick at Pinewood, the Earth is also not Flat like we said
After The Lancet’s infamous letter of 19 February 2020 signed by 27 prominemt scientists (some with obvious conflicts of interests) dismissing the suggestion of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory, I have taken all such scientific community pronouncements with a grain of salt.
All of these people involved in scientific research appear to be bought and paid for, along with their opinions.
I don’t think most were ‘bought and paid for’, I believe they were virtue-signalling in the strongest possible way. The leftist press called lab leak proponents ‘racist’ etc, so they had to go the other way to show their purity to the cause.
Every now and then one is reminded that the honest truth is not the mission of the NYT. It has always had bigger fish to fry. When Stalin was starving to death millions of Ukrainians to consolidate the Marxist revolution back in the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties , the Times man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, covered up the mass murders by the simple expedient of not reporting on them. He was no better than a stenographer for the Politburo. Sound familar? He had deep leftist sympathies as did many journalists then as well as now. Malcolm Muggeridge, a minor figure at the time, shared their views but was honest enough to describe what he had seen during a daring trip into the countryside where he was witness to the horrors. He would have been executed or sent to Siberia if caught. The details are in his autobiographical works. Muggeridge wrote a long article about his experience but no one in the British press was interested. The fix was in like it is today in America’s legacy media, an opinion factory like the BBC combine. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for this infamy; it’s still on the wall at the Times. That was when the award meant something more than a dressed up participation trophy hailed within the shrunken newspaper bubble and generally ignored outside. People have wised up to the con.
The outbreak of what became Covid-19 happened in December 2019, some, but not many say earlier but the the crucial aspect was the unfortunate coincidence that the solar system dictated Saturday 25th of January 2020 would be the start of the solar New Year, a national holiday period in China, when it’s said, with little exaggeration, ‘one half of China travels to see the other half’.
(Google – ‘photos of Chinese new year travel crowds’).
Wuhan, where the virus originated is the eighth most populated city in China, and has a population of over eleven million many of whom travel home for the national holiday, taking and bringing back the virus. It was this cruel coincidence that caused the pandemic.
Along with mainly western leaders and ‘influencers:
In a tweet on 24 January 2020, Richard Horton, Editor of the Lancet with 106,200 followers accused the media of:
“escalating anxiety by talking of a ‘killer virus’ and ‘growing fears’. In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.”
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
It is amazing to me that people are still going on about this after five years. It is also amazing that the Right always acts like Covid happened under Biden and memory hole the fact that it started under Trump and if he had responding quicker there wouldn’t be anything to argue about now.
Trump wasn’t the loudest cheerleader for lockdowns, but he deserves condemnation for going along with the COVID panic, and eventually promoting the widespread use of novel vaccines.
We’ll probably never know whether he was in on the scam, or just outmanoeuvred by the likes of Fauci.
Things did get markedly worse under Biden, though.
The outbreak happened under Trump but the work had been long going on after Obama winked his approval provided the experimenting was done in some foreign country. As for Trump’s response, you may recall nobody knew nothin’ at the time.
There are currently 16 states that despite the progress made by international conventions, have biological and chemical weapons that still pose a threat to humanity.
Strangely the UK isn’t in the list:
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/chemical-and-biological-weapons-status-glance
I’ve been unable to find those states who are researching biological and chemical weapons but for whatever reasons, don’t have any, yet.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/chemical-and-biological-weapons-status-glance
I seem to recall a hastily abandoned bio lab was found in California.
Not a British one, surely?
What is strange is the idea that these ideas are news. In Jan 2020 a couple of clicks would get you to Nature Magazine article from, I recall, 2017. Made clear the research at Wuhan and concerns over security.
Research of open sources made absolutely clear that any dismissal of the Lab Leak hypothesis was not just ignorant and unscientific but almost certainly corrupt.
No need for a crack team of scientists or intelligence experts just a little critical thinking.
The suppression of non compliant opinion and the cancellation of truth tellers should always point an intelligent investigator to “ follow the money”.
Look at those who have been enriched through the research funding controlled by Fauci and co. Look at those individuals and corporations who have been enriched by the Covid responses.
You will find all the answers but no one will be held responsible let alone punished.
And if anyone really imagines that we are anywhere near the truth regarding MRNA vaccines then maybe, indeed “ you can fool most of the people most of the time”……and repeatedly so….
Many folk who should really know better are still bought into the nonsense peddled by the establishment- preferring to cling onto demonstrable nonsense than admit to having been cynically duped on so many fronts.
We can not trust science in its present corrupt state and cannot trust politicians ( full stop).
I cannot agree more with you. Frankly, in the US the likes of Fauci and Collins should be punished severely. Not jailed or prosecuted but simpkly shamed and stripped of all their honors and prizes, etc…..,
As for the lab leak vs natural origin, anybody who even thought this was of natural origin simply doesn’t understand common sense, aka Occam’s Razor. If an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever occurred close to Portland Down, would you suspect the local Waitrose or a lab leak fromPortland Down. Likewise, if an outbreak of anthrax or some wierd viral disease occurred in Frederick, would you suspect the local Mom’s or Whole Foods, or a lab leak from Fort Detrick. And that’s never mind the furin cleavage site, the failure to find any intermediate host, etc….
Seems like the German secret service was 80/20 for lab leak in 2020 but we plebs only find out now. And of course Mary forgot to mention the Dasak/Fauci Eco Health Alliance/NHI connection to Wuhan that makes the geopolitical implications a little bit wider than a simple US/China power spat. But Rand Paul exposed all this years ago and no one cared. These people are some of the biggest criminals in history although some of them now enjoy blanket immunity from Federal courts. State Attorneys however may care to pursue matters independently.
Whether the Covid-19 virus was a lab leak or transmission from bats in sub-tropical southern China, also the subject of a long term scientific investigation, or a combination of both, is largely irrelevant as the vast majority of the 7,010,681 Covid deaths world wide, were the result of ignorant and arrogant world leaders and the media refusing to accept the evidence. This was all to obvious to those, like me, who were in China at the time when the first rumours of pneumonia like deaths in Wuhan in December 2019, were followed by reports of a new ‘mysterious virus’, such as:
‘That Mystery Disease Outbreak in China Could Be Caused by a Newly Discovered Virus.’ By JING XUAN TENG & YAN ZHAO, AFP, 09 January 2020.
From the article:
“China believes a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that struck 59 people is caused by a new strain of virus from the same family as SARS, which killed hundreds of people more than a decade ago.
“Lead scientist Xu Jianguo told the official Xinhua news agency that experts had “preliminarily determined” a new type of coronavirus was behind the outbreak, first confirmed on December 31 [2019] in Wuhan, a central Chinese city with a population of more than 11 million.
“It initially sparked fears of a resurgence of highly contagious Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and prompted authorities in Hong Kong – badly hit by SARS in 2002-2003 – to take precautions, including stepping up the disinfection of trains and airplanes, and checks of passengers.
“China has since ruled out a fresh outbreak of SARS, which killed 349 people in mainland China and another 299 in Hong Kong.
“A total of 15 positive results of the new type of coronavirus had been detected” in the lab, through tests on infected blood samples and throat swabs, Xu said.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the preliminary discovery of a new coronavirus in a statement.
“Further investigations are also required to determine the source, modes of transmission, extent of infection and countermeasures implemented,” said Gauden Galea, the WHO Representative to China.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/china-thinks-mystery-pneumonia-outbreak-caused-by-new-coronavirus?perpetual=yes&limitstart=
The Covid deaths in the USA were very largely due to President Donald Trump, (Jan 2017 – Wed, 20 Jan 2021) and in the UK Boris Johnson (24 July 2019 – 6 September 2022).
Both of them became infected and Johnson almost died.
(Other arrogant and ignorant World leaders are available via various search engines).
Blaming Trump is wrong. He said some foolish things like “It’ll be gone by Easter” and “I hear that bleach may be useful” (paraphrased), but he had ZERO to do with the lockdowns, mask wearing, school closures, or patient movements. Those were all put in place by State and Local authorities. Trump initiated Project Warp Speed to develop a vaccine, and the pharma companies did their best but misrepresented the results. Trump also correctly blamed China.
“We were badly misled” —- Uh, no; were lied to. Repeatedly. And when people called Covid the Wuhan Flu, the race-baiters went into overdrive, partly because it’s what they and partly because they have to be on the opposite side of anything Donald Trump says or does. The people who were right about the lab leak then were attacked with a zeal usually reserved for child molesters and the people who did that will likely never be held to account.
The NYT was as much a house organ for the likes of Fauci as anyone and given its perceived status in media, it often serves as the assignment desk for other outlets. The paper was part of the attack on lab leak proponents, just as it was culpable in ignoring the US role in gain of function research, the moving targets on vaccine efficacy, or the reality of which populations were genuinely threatened by the virus.
In short: the NYT has embraced the deterioration in US-China relations.
No. The NYT is using that as cover for an attempt to whitewash one of their most heinous crimes of activist journalism. Freedom of the press does not include the freedom to dox and slander people. Battacharia and others should win huge lawsuits against them.
Let’s be blunt. The Powers That Be did a number on us ordinary people. Maybe they were trying to avoid panic, or maybe they were trying to avoid blame and/or prosecution. Even if the virus was natural the governmental response was disproportionate.
Truth Passes Through Three Stages:
First, It Is Ridiculed.
Second, It Is Violently Opposed.
Third, It Is Accepted As Self-Evident – and the MSM try to rewrite the past as if they had no role in supressing the truth.
Forth. Now they suppress the truth in opposite direction. Business as usual
Scientists who proposed the lab-leak concept were vilified (by the NYT inter alia), some were cancelled, and others were denied access to mainstream publications (e.g. Nature, Scientific American, etc.).
The involvement of the American establishment in the Wuhan laboratory was deliberately suppressed or minimised. Trump himself was censured and labelled racist for referring to Covid 19 as ‘the China Virus’.
Let’s hope we never again have to suffer under such horrendous governance as we have over the past 10 years particularly – but more generally since the time of Clinton.
I’d suggest accident, followed by cover-up – somebody very junior knocked something over and hid the evidence – by the time it was found by somebody a bit more important it was too late to identify the culprit and get them into trouble – so they did the same – and so on, right up to the top boss – and his boss – and so on…
This is a good example of the mess that inspired sensible people to crack down on the lab leak theory in the first place. The odds that the virus was generated in a lab and leaked are pretty substantial – maybe 50:50 with a natural origin on the information we have had for the past several years. This is NOT the same as saying that it could have been a bioweapon. There is ZERO evidence that this was a weapons development AFAIK, and if you look at how the pandemic panned out it is obvious that this would have been completely useless as a weapon anyway. When idiots and demagogues claim this was a weapon – and formerly sensible people like Mary Harrington say that ‘We may never know if the virus was a military project, or whose‘ – the only responsible reaction is to deny it. Absolutely. If that means that the sensible theory that it might have been a non-military lab leak gets denied as well, the main blame is on the people who were unable to distinguish the two in the first place.
On the contrary, it is an ESTABLISHED FACT that the coronavirus research in Wuhan and elsewhere had a perceived military application. The US NIH funded Eco-Health alliance submitted a proposal to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA – the US military science wing) in 2018 to fund Wuhan Institute of Virology research – including a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS like coronaviruses – exactly the characteristic which made SARS-COV2 so infectious the following year, creating the pandemic.
Moreover, the US $billion Biodefence budget was handed over to Anthony Fauci’s NIH in 2002. Gain of function research of the kind carried out in Wuhan, in collaboration with their colleague and mentor Ralph Baric in the US was/is biodefence, bioweapons research, whatever you want to call it, and whatever other applications it may have.
Search – Expanded Biodefense Role for the National Institutes of Health | Office of Justice Programshttps://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/expanded-biodefense-role-national-institutes-health
Why these facts are not more widely acknowledged I do not know, but they are known to all who take an interest in the issue.
The fact that the military funded some of the research does not mean that COVID was ever intended as a bioweapon. DARPA funded the original internet, but that does not mean the internet is a weapon, does it? The very site you linked to suggests the NIH research was intended for biodefense, research and preparation against bioterrorism. Which actually makes sense, whereas developing COVID as a weapon does not. Also, no offence, but how much sense does it make that the US should develop a bioweapon – and outsource the research to a lab in China, of all places?
Suppose you’re right, and this gain of function research really was about “biodefense”.
Does it make sense to outsource the research to a lab in China, of all places?
If it is 1) basic research, 2) defensive, not offensive, 3) not intended to be kept secret, there is nothing particularly wrong with doing it in China, if that is more practical. Suppose they were researching wound healing – it might have military implications, but what is the problem,, no matter where you do it?
Arguably they should not have been doing this gain-of-function research in the first place, but one way or the other doing it in China pretty much proves that this was not a weapons project.
When research produces militarily-useful information (whether about wound healing, or strategies for fighting a virus), you’d expect the US to keep the information to itself, rather than share it with adversaries.
The reality is that gain-of-function isn’t “basic research”.
It’s implausible that wild viruses would have spontaneously mutated into SARS-CoV-2, considering the peculiarities in the furin cleavage site.
The research is clearly dual-purpose: you create a dangerous virus that you could use against adversaries, and you have the opportunity to develop defences against it.
Or … the web of allies and adversaries isn’t what you’ve been led to believe.
So the US and China are collaborating on a clandestine weapons program. All… right!
Are the Illuminati involved as well? Or is it related to Pizzagate?
You really are a complete fool. There is everything wrong with outsourcing this work to China because the appropriate lab safety conditions were never going to be met there. Hence the inevitable disaster that occurred. The reason it was outsourced is because Fauci and Collins believe they are God-like and can do what they want, circumventing bans imposed by none other than the Obama administration. It should be self-evident, with a little reflection, that if something can go wrong it will go wrong, especially in the realms of pathogenic virus research.
Indeed, Fauci, Collins and Nebel penned an editorial in I believe the WSJ but perhaps it was the NYT in 2014 that even if a pandemic resulted, the information obtained from gain-of-function research would have been worthwhile. Well it wasn’t worthwhile, it has destroyed the credibility of the NIH, the return on investment at the NIH is now deeply in the red (for every dollar invested over a thousand dollars have been lost), the credibility of the NIH, FDA and CDC are in the toilet with the majority of US citizens. And the 2014 date, by the way, is very significant because that’s when Fauci’s pardon was backdated to.
And a very good morning to you too, sir! As for the advisability of doing the gain-of-function research at all, let alone in Wuhan, it looks like we actually agree – apart from the purple prose, of course.
Obama banned GOF research in his presidency. Fauci went behind Trump’s back.
You mean behind Obama’s back.
No, the grant shenanigans occurred while Trump was president. Fauci went behind everyone’s back.
“Sense”? It is an established fact that common sense flew out of the window several decades ago.
You haven’t refuted what I said. It doesn’t matter what is intended. Bioweapons research and biodefence research is much the same research – engineering new viruses, usually to make them more pathogenic and transmissible, trying to manufacture vaccines etc. There are civil applications as well – or supposedly – the benefits are dubious, the costs are catastrophic.
There were several things wrong with that research. It was too risky, and it was pretty clearly organised to get it done in Wuhan to circumvent US rules for research safety. But all your talk about weapons research is just a smear job, guilt-by-association. This was basic research on how viruses get pathogenic. It was never designed to make a weapon, so going on about military interest is just irrelevant – misleading noise. If you want a serious discussion you need to stop pretending that this was a weapons project.
Not so fast because you realize there was a military/bioweapons lab doing that sort of research in very close proximity to the WIV. Further, the Chinese regarded this as a bioweapon. Now I don’t believe it was released on purpose, and an accidental lab leak was always going to occur, not matter how safety conscious one would be, especially with a lab located in the middle of a city, unlike Fort Detrick that is at least located on a massive plot of land, even if it is in close proximity to a city (Frederick).
In the olden days we didn’t have to engineer a new biological agent. We just put it in bottles, transported it to Sydney (and I believe also to places in the Americas), spread it around on blankets and donated the blankets to the indigenous people whose continuing presence was proving a problem for the invaders. It was called Smallpox.
Tbf the internet is proving to be highly damaging to our society. If the internet and covid are to be deemed weapons then they should both be considered own goals.
“This is a good example of the mess that inspired sensible people to crack down on the lab leak theory in the first place.”
A sad attempt at post event justification of your own position?
Quite. Some of us still have memories.
Some of us are still incredulous. To paraphrase Dickens
It was the strangest of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of stupidity, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of lies, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of Deception, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of delusion, it was the winter of despair, we had decimation before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to oblivion, we were all going direct damnation, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
50:50. You’ve changed your tune. But the chances were never 50:50. They were 99:1 in favor of a lab leak. It’s just common sense of which you seem to be sorely lacking because you are incapable of independent thinking but just follow the line of establishment experts who have proven wrong or complicit at every step of the game.
It was a bioweapon.
Curiously absent from this article (and no doubt from the NYT too) is that it was developed with American support, via Fauci and Daszak.
The interesting question is whether the bioweapon was deliberately released.
That was my immediate thought too. The U.S. was involved up to its armpits in the wuhan lab.
Germany was also involved up to its wallet pocket in the other Wuhan virus research lab – the one much closer to the much maligned wet market.
Comforting to think that human agency is behind all giant screw-ups, but not most likely it was an accidental release.
Of course research there was done in an extremely reckless manner, so an accidental release at some time was basically inevitable.
Also the overall Wuhan facility is dual use so the military is working there and overseeing civilian experiments in case anything of use to them crops up. But coronaviruses are probably not militarily useful. I am sure they have other stuff under development there.
Well, there is famously no cure for the common cold, so it might make a good carrier for nefarious genetic instructions. Mainstream science tells us that viruses shaped evolution; could engineered viruses shape it further?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20230519-the-viruses-that-helped-to-make-you-human
Genetic engineering aside, consider that with a mere coronavirus as pretext, the transnational ruling class locked down “liberal” democracies and scared most of their inhabitants into accepting novel injections. Even if we think this batch was benign, the next batch might not be.
Yeah, nowhere near lethal enough. A modified MERS virus however with the infection rate of measles… now you’re talkin’. Astonishing isn’t it that there’s no push whatsoever to ban this ‘research’?
More importantly, not very controllable. Any very virulent virus will spread back to those who released it and not be confined to their target. This type of bioweapon is foolish.
Agreed. If the COVID-19 virus spread to the public through carelessness at the Wuhan facility, it was most likely a wild-type virus that had been discovered in bats or some other animal and then brought to the labs for examination, not an engineered virus. I say this because no one has found evidence that the COVID-19 virus contains any human-inserted sequences.
A brief summary of the arguments can be found here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7982270/
I’m no bio-scientist, but it has been widely reported that the C19 virus contained a furin cleavage site which is not naturally occurring in coronaviruses.
The furin cleavage site is unusual, and involves a twelve-base insertion (coding for 4 amino acids). But the bases coding for the amino acids are phase-shifted so that they comprise 10 of the inserted bases and two of the adjacent ones. This is not the way a human engineer would do it, suggesting the insertion was not by active engineering. But it’s quite possible the virus was put through multiple rapid cycles of mutation and selection to evolve a variant that was more infective in human cells. Such techniques are used in so-called Gain of Function research, which was being carried out at Wuhan. Or it could have evolved naturally.
Do you know what gain-of-function research entails. I think not., All it requires is passage of the virus through humanized mice. And there is plenty of evidence for genetic alteration and insertion including the infamous furin cleavage site, the key to transmissibility in humans.
Similar, in a way, to the end of the Cold War nuclear stand-off. As soon as this began to subside we started hearing stories about how close we had come to accidentally launching something that would have likely led to the end of the world as we know it. I can only imagine how many stories were never heard.
And just like then, we’ll probably never know the full origin story of Covid. We can, though, learn to stop sending money to China for work we couldn’t legally do at home.
Are we still paying them?
I read in 2020, in connection with patents that were granted 20 years ago, that the US was researching a gain of function for medical use, when it was banned in the US they paid the lab in Wuhan to do it. I cannot see the US developing a bioweapon in China. There seems to be lots of evidence for an accidental release, infections in lab personnel in about November 2019. There is evidence of the virus mutating quite quickly – over a few months and the strain dying out. In that case the pandemic was spread by a succession of new variants that regained potency. The idea that a new variant out competes the old is illogical – they could only compete in the same person and that was comparatiively rare. What needs to be understood is what fostered new variants – did they come from hotbeds of the virus in particular forms of medical treatments? Also was dosage key to mortality – which suggests medical staff should have been rotated out on a regular basis. And in the UK heat maps on rate of infections. the colour increased with age with an odd exception, those in their early seventies had a lower rate in infections than those in their late sixties. Had there been an infection in their childhood that gave them protection?
Indeed Erstwhile…. but the question then is ‘Why were the US investing in this work at the WIV?’ Was it :
(a) to get work of supposed academic/medical interest done on the cheap, far from gain of function restrictions, at what turned out to be catastrophic risk, or
(b) to keep a ‘watching toe-hold’ within the WIV, which doubtless also has bioweapon interests?
Those reasons, and to hide it from the US government that had forbidden it. It was criminal and Fauci et al should be in jail or worse. But Biden, that completely amoral fool (or his autopen).
Exactly. The US funded gain of function research. I believe Obama banned that process from happening domestically so it was outsourced. To China, of all places. Brilliant. Then came the attacks on the people who rightly questioned the party line and dogma about the pandemic, from origin to fatality rates to the efficacy of the vaccine and other attempts at mitigating the spread.
There are so many levels of failure on the part of our media, politicians, corporations, and scientists to consider, and COVID was just one of the many tragedies to come out of the ill advised decision in 2000 to open trade with China. It will probably take decades if not centuries before there’s a full accounting of the mistakes made by the internationalist blob over the past two decades.
The Chinese bio-sector is now more free & easy about commenting, because they are also free to say that the gain-of-function work would not have occurred without American support anyway [shrug]
A bioweapon designed to kill off all the enemies octogenarians?
Right! We old folks are the rock-solid foundations of everything that is good and right. Without us you’d be sitting in the dirt eating with your fingers. Y’all can’t thank us enough! So put that damned mask back on!
You’re right about the cooperation, but it wasn’t a bioweapon, not in and of itself anyway.
Exactly, if it was a bioweapon, with a fatality rate less than 1%, it’s not a very good one.
The only reason that the lab leak was covered up by Fauci and Collins is that they and the NIH were complicit, given that they funded and provided the technical know-how to the WIV to carry out gain-of-function research, bypassing the ban that had been put in place by the Obama administration. The implications are of course massive, given the number of deaths that have occurred worldwide as well as economic destruction. Many have argued that for every dollar invested in the NIH, the US accrues two dollars in return (which is actually not a particularly good investment and could easily be improved upon). However, the fatal mistake the NIH made in facilitating the work at the WIV actually means that for every dollar invested in the NIH, has resulted in a loss of one thousand dollars. Once that is fully realized and grasped by the citizens of the US, the NIH as it stands will be gone and done in a NYC instant.
The NIH should not be gone, but anyone who touched that decision should be in jail, and the rest of the NIH should be very severely cut back.
Agreed