November 5, 2020 - 11:29am
When Scientific American published an article entitled ‘Eight persistent COVID-19 myths and why people believe them’, number one on the list was “the virus was engineered in a laboratory in China.”
The author, Tanya Lewis, quoted from an intelligence agency press release: “the Intelligence Community… concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”
That statement was from back in April. Is that scientific consensus quite so solid today?
Well, take a look at this: It’s an opinion piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by David Relman of the Stanford University School of Medicine. It begins with one thing that we definitely do know, which is that there’s an awful lot that we don’t know:
We find ourselves ten months into one of the most catastrophic global health events of our lifetime and, disturbingly, we still do not know how it began.
- David Relman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
He adds that efforts to investigate the origins of the virus “have become mired in politics, poorly supported assumptions and assertions, and incomplete information.”
To be clear, ReIman doesn’t have much time for the notion that the virus was deliberately engineered with the intention of releasing it to cause deliberate harm. However, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t engineered in order to better study samples found in the wild — for instance, by bringing together key features from different strains to investigate how they work in combination:
…there is probably more than one recent ancestral lineage that contributes to SARS-CoV-2 because its genome shows evidence of recombination between different parental viruses. In nature, recombination is common among coronaviruses. But it’s also common in some research laboratories where recombinant engineering is used to study those viruses.
- David Relman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
To know for certain, we’d need to identify what Relman refers to as the “immediate parents” of SARS-CoV-2. And so far they’re missing.
Given that this vital evidence is not yet available, why the dogmatic statements that the virus was definitely not engineered?
Obviously, the origin issue has become highly politicised — not least in the rhetoric of Donald Trump. It was therefore important for the scientific and intelligence communities to remain objective — and not to be drawn into political spin, let alone outright conspiracy theories.
And yet, as with all things Covid, there is a danger of overkill — of ruling out all scenarios involving genetic engineering (or even anything involving a laboratory release) just because a subset of those scenarios (the most lurid and sinister of them) are implausible.
We should therefore welcome the fact that journals like PNAS are allowing reasonable possibilities to be raised and evidence-based investigation to be called for.
Perhaps, in the post-Trump era, that research can take place in a less febrile atmosphere — assuming of course, the Chinese government have the slightest interest in the truth being known.
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SubscribeWhy the lack of curiousity around the origin of Covid-19? Because acknowledging it’s origins from a Chinese state lab highlights the short-sighted, delusional stupidity of the liberal globalist mindset. Yes, you coddled Western elites, you have just spent the last 30 years handing over your birthright to an evil xenophobic, duplicitous dictatorship, condemning your children to a future of increasing poverty and dysfunction, all so that you can save a hundred pounds on an iPhone. Of course they have no interest in thinking about that.
Also because Liberal bias towards Communism. They just cannot bring themselves to peer under that rock and see how it has been. The Cultural Revolution? Well just them sorting their direction out.
Not too long ago Hobsbawn, the unrepentant Stalinist, passed away with the most glowing obituaries in every paper, even the Telegraph, and was idolized by the BBC as most of them had studied his works. Milliband’s Father was a Marxist, a Top Marxists Intellectual he was called, and the Milliband boys remembered fondly the father and Hobsbawn together discussing Communism around the family dinner table. If a Right Wing nation had a million religious minorities in concentration camps, were genociding the Tibetans by forced migration, and on and on, there would be outrage, but Communists are given a pass, although their horrors equal any the world has seen.
The same Milliband that I read recently earns a million quid running an international charity yeah? If ever anyone had any doubt about the rank hypocrisy of the left…. watch this space.
But the Left ideology is not about not having money. It’s about equality of outcome – for the masses – i.e. servitude. For the privileged it’s loadsofmoney.
I call to witness every single “socialist” or “communist” society ever, anywhere.
They know full well the horrors of Communism. They’re setting it up so that it’s aimed at those who who know what they’re up to and continue to oppose them.
If the modern British establishment along with the Democrat/globalist role models in the States ridicule anyone who suggest this I can assume there’s some truth in it. ‘Post-Trump era’ indeed! ,,,! What a weak man Peter Franklin is. Perfect little toady for our truly wretched establishment.
If Biden becomes next President just expect more of our (and yours Peter) freedoms to be curtailed just so the multinational PLCs can make a bit more profit and our politicians can have a bit more power over us. Not a future anybody normal should want.
A recession is the way the Global Elites harvest the wealth the workers have saved. The 2008 – 2009 one has been said to have harvested 100 Trillion by them, although that is OTT likely. But one does wonder if the coming recession/deflation is merely a much larger one of the same kind. Obviously from what we are told of covid the destruction of the economies of the West are not for health reasons. So why?
1) What do the “experts” really know about much of it & yet look what this has been used tho “justify”? 2) Why from earliest days has media being peddling “the only solution” is a “New Vaccine for all Solution” 3) Why has MSM been talking “Positive Tests” numbers …& not this vis a vie whole numbers of tests done? And total Deaths %’s in Age Bands & with co-morbitities info? And why is MSM talking Virus deaths & not this vis a vie normal flu deaths pa? And who is verifying any of the numbers we are told of…& providing proper explanations?….Why is there so much so fishy here? …$ Billions of public money handed to Big Pharma??…The residual question for me is… is ANOTHER monster “Rort” in train here?…
The most amazing thing is how NO comparisons to covid are made with things like influenza, ones which we could understand. If I was in the government info dissemination game I would show pie and bar charts showing why we ignore the Flu all together, and why covid is such a completely different thing. From what I have seen flu does make a useful tool to look at covid with. Lots of correlation factors, demographics, ages, hospitalizations, deaths, different years, different geographic effects and so on. Why is this thing we all know so well, the Flu, not used to explain covid to us in a way we could understand, used to illustrate why lock down is needed. I suspect because it would backfire and show the opposite of what is wanted.
Whether the virus was deliberately created by the Chinese is not known. What is known is that they were studying bat viruses from caves and took samples to the Wuhan laboratory to investigate. As a layman it appears to me that that is where it started, deliberately or not.
I think that most people agree that it’s implausable that the Chinese deliberately released the virus a couple of hundred yards from one of their own laboratories.
Of course that doesn’t mean a monumental mess up hasn’t occurred
Why is it implausible, they don’t care any more of their own people than they do ours?
I think you’ll find they do. The Communist Party always looks after Communist Party members first. That is who they define as ‘their people’, and who they wouldn’t knowingly spring a virus on, just for kicks and giggles.
Can you imagine the guy/gal who made the virus saying “Yeah, I’ll release it 50 yards from where I buy my sandwiches”?
Very true Tony. They found a specific virus (RaTG13) in those caves that was much more potent than other viruses they collected. But it was unbelievable that the Chinese kept this virus secret for over seven years from the International Community.
Apparently the USA were in on the secret, and allegedly funded some of the Wuhan “research”.
I don’t think anyone has the remotest idea how or where this could have occurred in nature (and I am aware of a statement by a CDC official
that the SARS prototype came from a lab) and there is the Wuhan Lab funded by the Chinese government and Dr Fauci at which such viruses are studied and modified. There was apparently an incident there in early October. Did the virus escape or was it leaked – that is impossible to tell. But people are being over-cautious or bullied if they don’t join up a few dots.
I believe people have been suggesting this possibility since March/April because the virus contained two elements that were not normally found in the same virus. Or something like that.
Nearly spot on Fraser. My own research (not clinical I hasten to add) corroborated by investigations at Exeter University suggest that there are three genetic elements in the SARS-Cov-2 that cannot be explained by natural recombination. The provisional conclusion is that it has been artificially induced.
What is quite amazing is the amount of information you can access in medical publications in relation to virus manipulation. I have been reading a publication from the National Center for Biotechnology Information titled “A SARS like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses show potential for human emergence” Principal authors were Zhengli Li Shi ( Bat woman) and Ralph S Baric . It was published in 2015. It deals with Bat viruses and the Gain of Function research they carried out to make the viruses more infectious and lethal. It appears they succeeded.
Exeter University. Best known for indoctronating students with climate change propoganda.
Google “Boston Magazine Alina Chan”. (I would post the the link, but links in Unherd comments always seem to end up in never-ending moderation purgatory.)
So we know that gain of function research was ongoing in the Wuhan lab funded by the US and others after such research ended in the US. We know the bat-lady was collecting bat viruses. We know that the lab had been cautioned about lax protocols. So why is in not plausible that an error occurred in that lab and a worker(s) were infected perhaps and were asymptomatic as well. Then the worker(s) went about their routine but infected untold others. An embarrassing accident.
The actions or lack of actions that followed can be explained as typical stupidity or intentional. Saving face in the face of stupidity is a normal everyday function in some societies. Intentional acts are much more difficult to rationalize but immediately great efforts to secure PPE occurred with little public notice. Whether the collapse of large economies could be anticipated is unknown but deaths and deprivation are permitted in pursuit of ideological objectives in some societies.
Now I’ve spun a lovely great conspiracy for some novelist to pursue.
The engineering of the virus or not is a point of interest, but of far less consequence than whether the infection of humans was accidental or deliberate. Aside from the reputational damage, China has seen the least economic damage to its economy with the pandemic negatively impacting those economies it compete’s with most. It is imperative the truth comes out – if the virus was intentionally started we now know the extent to which China will go to in order to seek global economic dominance. It has also revealed the inadequacies of our leaders and their inability to manage such events. 4-0 to China, but was it a deliberate 4-0…a very sinister though.
Wuhan Laboratories 50% funded by EU…
People have done research involving hacking bat coronaviruses to make them able to infect humans, including in Wuhan. But it’s not as scary as it sounds because they don’t make actual coronaviruses but use a “pseudovirus system”– another modified virus that only works in the presence of another component. They therefore wouldn’t have created SARS-CoV-2 and released it by mistake. It would have had to have been on purpose. This is makes it much less likely to be what happened.
My money’s on: China releasing this as a warning shot over our bows (probably with the full knowledge of international governments). “This is what we are capable of…and this is just a taster; back off!”
Correct!
Nuke them now, while ‘we’ still can.
“Actions speak louder than words”.
This I thought was an interesting hypothesis for recombination
https://www.counterpunch.or…
Whereas, these scientists definitely think it was recombined in a lab and also point out that journals have banned publication of any lab theories.
https://zenodo.org/record/4…
But apart from political consequences and law suits, etc, etc, why should it matter if it was engineered or not? There are so many natural viruses with the same mortality (around 0,23%), the flu for instance. This kind of crisis was bound to happen anyway, engineered or not engineered.
Worth a read:
https://staceyrudin.medium….