Thank you, Roger, for formulating these major questions about the origin of Covid-19. After we have some answers to these questions, there will be more questions. As of now, I hesitate to speculate, we want all or most of the facts on the table first.
(1) Why did leading scientists in the US and UK vigorously suppress any suggestion that COVID-19 might be the result of a research-related accident?
(2) Can we trust scientists doing or overseeing research into potentially pandemic pathogens to regulate themselves after this display of bias?
(3) Why is anyone allowed to do experiments that increase the risk of potentially pandemic organism infecting and harming humans? It is NOT necessary to develop vaccines or drugs and increases the likelihood of future pandemic.
Mass amnesia--helped along by most mainstream media--is now the fallback, aided by the very human trait of not wanting to admit that you fell for a mass of pottage.
If the intention was to stop gain of function research, what were the internal dynamics at NIH such that the regulators were negotiated out of regulating via definition changes and arguments about risk, by individuals from the regulated industry (in this case, researchers). What would NIH need to tighten up to effectively regulate GOF?
One point that we should bear in mind is that as far as dual use technologies are concerned in many cases the only real difference between a bioweapon and a 'valuable research tool' is one of intent. This question is insoluble.
'Patient zero'-type question have a history of manipulation to stoke a variety of racist, homophobic, etc. narratives (see Richard A. McKay's work on patient zero and the AIDS pandemic for example) and I don't see why this one will be any different
I certainly have no faith in capacity of the US security state to either investigate itself or be investigated by other branches of government. This is all just stoking the already insane levels of Sinophobia we are seeing coming out of the organs of Western states in an effort to build a consent for Cold War 2.0.
The intent of a statute is often reflected more by that which omitted from its requirements, rather than what is actually required by the statute.
The statute requires the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information on links related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Covid. The statute does not require the DNI to declassify any information on links between any western institutions or individuals and Covid.
That information would be most enlightening to the general public, but most consequential to influential people in the west, who we could realistically hold accountable. Which is why it is omitted from the language of the statute.
Virologist, Dr. Li Meng Yan, one of the first to study the virus at the beginning of the Pandemic in China, claims that a coordinated coverup was done to deceive & mislead the public of a Zoonotic virus origin:
SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud:
The virus was partly engineered at the lab in Wuhan but a lot of the work was done at labs in the USA and elsewhere. It really seems that China was tricked into developing the bioweapon, just as Putin was tricked into invading Ukraine, by the Western Oligarchy or Corporatocracy whatever you want to call it. It sure ain't a Democracy.
Evo Morales: "...I continue having doubts about …corona virus. I read…a report from the IMF that said…it’s important to reduce unnecessary population, & who are they? The old, the disabled, poor people, the working class. It looks like, brothers & sisters, that this pandemic is part of a biological war. Let the poor die, the old die, the disabled die.. It looks like… this pandemic is part of a biological war…”
This is Evo Morales, the former President of Bolivia that the U.S helped coup out of his own country.
A big one was the Iranian leadership who were badly affected by Covid right at the very beginning of the plandemic. Even before Italy. So how did Covid spread so early to the holy city of Qom in Iran which had negligible Chinese, unlike Italy which had Chinese garment workers? Ron Unz wrote a lot about it:
"...Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected[35] and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians[36] dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior[37]. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting.."
"... initial Iranian outbreak was also strangely centered on the Holy City of Qom, the home of that country’s elite political and religious leadership rather than in the far larger metropolis of Tehran....Wuhan is some 5,500 kilometers from Qom, so the latter city would hardly seem the most likely location for the next major appearance of the virus...By March additional major Covid outbreaks had also occurred in Northern Italy and soon afterwards Spain, but the circumstances were quite different. According to Wikipedia, some 300,000 Chinese[38] live and work in that Italian region while another 150,000 Chinese reside in Spain[39], ...By contrast, Iran’s total Chinese population is one of the smallest in the world, numbering just 5,000-9,000[40], and overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran rather than Qom...."
"This long article will explain how Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created as a result of intentional laboratory work. It will also show that the blueprint for Sars-Cov-2 was described in the “Project DEFUSE” proposal by Peter Daszak, which was preceded by years of relevant lab work and virus manipulation..."
A few important facts:
" Prashant’s Jan 2020 article about strange HIV Gp120 and “gag” inserts in Sars-Cov-2 was withdrawn in haste and under pressure during the weekend, which is unusual.
HIV-originated Gp120 inserts in Sars-Cov-2, described by Prashant, are meaningful and instrumental to COVID-19’s infecting immune cells, similarly to HIV.
Furin Cleavage Site in Sars-Cov-2 does not exist in other betacoronaviruses and is instrumental for pathogenicity.
Dr. Fauci is an expert on HIV and Gp120 glycoprotein and is a co-author of many articles and a coinventor of three Gp120 related patents, and no doubt understood what Prashant’s preprint meant, right away. Fauci and his associates, together with the likely creator of Sars-Cov-2 Peter Daszak, set out to cover up the origin of Sars-Cov-2.
Peter Daszak’s 2018 “Project DEFUSE” proposal describes exactly what Sars-Cov-2 actually is.
Sars-Cov-2 was possibly cultured on a Moderna MSH3 cell line containing a patented Moderna gene sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG."
Call me superficial, but the main reason I would bet my money on the lab leak origin, is the effort the chinese government is making to convince us otherwise. The series of «remarkable coincidences» that are described in the book «Viral» are also quite convincing
I got a different impression by reading the book I mention. Indeed some US govt officials were/are trying to censor this line of speech, but the centralized effort from the chinese govt is on another level
I read (and enjoyed) the most recent version of Alina Chan's Viral. I have also done a fair amount of reading about the history of the post-WWII US security state. I find her coverage of the science good; I find her lack of questioning of the science policy in the context of the US's geopolitical stance naïve.
I want to know why Bill Gates' activities in 2019 are best explained by his having knowledge that the virus was about to be released. E.g. Event 201 and buying shares in BioNTech. Also did the US Deep State have anything to do with one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 being in Iran?
No scientist would talk like that. Might say "I think there is a good chance there will be a pandemic in the next few years" but not:
"...2:28 we are now a few days away from a new administration (trump)... 3:05 the topic of today, the issue of PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS... 3:19 there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases, both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease... but also there will be a surprise outbreak... 3:51 there is no doubt in anyone's mind. 39:05 what we are extraordinarily confident about is that we will see this in the next few years...."
"The short of this (and you NEED to read the long version) is that Sars-Cov2 has a genetic sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, that is the mirror image (complement) of the same sequence called “MSH3”, in the Moderna patent 9,587,003 from 2018.
How did bats copy the moderna patent sequence into their coronavirus, as @JikkyKjj asked? Of course they did not, and this is a further proof that it is a lab virus.
Still, why is the sequence there?
There is actually a possible reason of how this happened: the Covid virus was grown (cultured) in cell lines that used the MSH3-mutated cell lines:
Yes, that’s right. Every single one of these patents that contains that 19nt sequence (for which the probability of occurring by random chance is less than 1 in a billion) is from Moderna. [Note the sequence is actually the reverse complement sequence but this is likely a direct result of the cell lines that it occurred in – MSH3_mutated cell lines designed for developing cancer vaccines, the Moderna patent was actually for a mutated MSH3 gene for this purpose]
This sheds some light on lab origin of Sars-Cov-2. Whoever designed it, used Moderna-patented genetically modified cell lines containing the complement of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, to grow the virus.
This might also explain why Moderna “only needed two days” to come up with a vaccine for a completely novel virus. The explanation, of course, is that it had plenty of time to develop the vaccine well in advance. It was not quite as novel to Moderna as it seemed, containing a Moderna patented sequence.
They still cannot figure out how to make the “Omicron vaccine”. "
The first question “In 2019, did Chinese researchers perform risky research on dangerous viruses?” is to me the most interesting but also the most ill-defined.
I don’t know much about virus research and would be interested in background information about risks and safety procedures. Have lab leaks occurred in the past?
The question is not well defined — what counts as “risky” research? What is a “dangerous” virus? Some coronaviruses can cause very mild illnesses and others very lethal illnesses. Are coronaviruses “dangerous”?
Thank you for putting this list together and I’m looking forward to follow-up posts!
We already have pretty strong answers for over half these questions from public records.
WIV was adding furin cleavage sites to locally sourced viruses. The safety protocols were abysmal. The Eco Health Alliance led by Peter Danzig had a contract for research there funded by the NIH and Fauci. There was a huge cover up by both the Chinese and US governments to avoid blame for unleashing a pandemic.
Whether the intelligence agencies confirm the obvious is up in the air. They are not trustworthy
Obviously I have no real information, but given how the science and medical powers-that-be acted to squash any talk of the lab leak theory despite involved scientists raising questions and including publishing that embarrassing hack job letter in Lancet, I think it highly likely the story is exactly what has been reported. The US funded Chinese research, which turned into military research, which was released by accident from the lab.
I don't think it will happen either but if that story turns out to be verifiable truth, all those in power who took action to squash the lab leak theory should lose their job, at a minimum. The damage done to the public trust in science if that were found to be true will be even more enormous than what already exists.
I understand dangerous research needs to happen. However, this incident has proven we need to go even farther with protocols. The labs need to be under direct control of Western countries, extremely transparent, and perhaps located in extremely remote locations where any accidental leak is less likely to spread to a large population and perhaps could be quickly contained to those living in the remote area.
Thank you, Roger, for formulating these major questions about the origin of Covid-19. After we have some answers to these questions, there will be more questions. As of now, I hesitate to speculate, we want all or most of the facts on the table first.
My questions are
(1) Why did leading scientists in the US and UK vigorously suppress any suggestion that COVID-19 might be the result of a research-related accident?
(2) Can we trust scientists doing or overseeing research into potentially pandemic pathogens to regulate themselves after this display of bias?
(3) Why is anyone allowed to do experiments that increase the risk of potentially pandemic organism infecting and harming humans? It is NOT necessary to develop vaccines or drugs and increases the likelihood of future pandemic.
Mass amnesia--helped along by most mainstream media--is now the fallback, aided by the very human trait of not wanting to admit that you fell for a mass of pottage.
If the intention was to stop gain of function research, what were the internal dynamics at NIH such that the regulators were negotiated out of regulating via definition changes and arguments about risk, by individuals from the regulated industry (in this case, researchers). What would NIH need to tighten up to effectively regulate GOF?
One point that we should bear in mind is that as far as dual use technologies are concerned in many cases the only real difference between a bioweapon and a 'valuable research tool' is one of intent. This question is insoluble.
'Patient zero'-type question have a history of manipulation to stoke a variety of racist, homophobic, etc. narratives (see Richard A. McKay's work on patient zero and the AIDS pandemic for example) and I don't see why this one will be any different
I certainly have no faith in capacity of the US security state to either investigate itself or be investigated by other branches of government. This is all just stoking the already insane levels of Sinophobia we are seeing coming out of the organs of Western states in an effort to build a consent for Cold War 2.0.
The intent of a statute is often reflected more by that which omitted from its requirements, rather than what is actually required by the statute.
The statute requires the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information on links related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Covid. The statute does not require the DNI to declassify any information on links between any western institutions or individuals and Covid.
That information would be most enlightening to the general public, but most consequential to influential people in the west, who we could realistically hold accountable. Which is why it is omitted from the language of the statute.
Why did the US ban funding of gain of function research in US laboratories in late 2014, but allow funding of it overseas?
If such things can be known I would like access to any further evidence of efforts to deliberately suppress public knowledge of the above items.
Virologist, Dr. Li Meng Yan, one of the first to study the virus at the beginning of the Pandemic in China, claims that a coordinated coverup was done to deceive & mislead the public of a Zoonotic virus origin:
SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud:
https://zenodo.org/record/4073131#.X8E3S7NlBPZ
More efforts at ass-covering by Western experts, compromised by their involvement in this crime of genocide or mass murder:
The Wuhan Laboratory Origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the Validity of the Yan Reports Are Further Proved by the Failure of Two Uninvited "Peer Reviews":
https://zenodo.org/record/4650821#.YJcUJqFMFPa
Also here:
Unredacted Emails Finally Reveal the Shocking Truth, Fauci's emails reveal Lab-Leak Plot, by Dr. Chris Martenson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc9YHBXad5o
The virus was partly engineered at the lab in Wuhan but a lot of the work was done at labs in the USA and elsewhere. It really seems that China was tricked into developing the bioweapon, just as Putin was tricked into invading Ukraine, by the Western Oligarchy or Corporatocracy whatever you want to call it. It sure ain't a Democracy.
Evo Morales: "...I continue having doubts about …corona virus. I read…a report from the IMF that said…it’s important to reduce unnecessary population, & who are they? The old, the disabled, poor people, the working class. It looks like, brothers & sisters, that this pandemic is part of a biological war. Let the poor die, the old die, the disabled die.. It looks like… this pandemic is part of a biological war…”
This is Evo Morales, the former President of Bolivia that the U.S helped coup out of his own country.
A big one was the Iranian leadership who were badly affected by Covid right at the very beginning of the plandemic. Even before Italy. So how did Covid spread so early to the holy city of Qom in Iran which had negligible Chinese, unlike Italy which had Chinese garment workers? Ron Unz wrote a lot about it:
"...Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected[35] and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians[36] dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior[37]. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting.."
"... initial Iranian outbreak was also strangely centered on the Holy City of Qom, the home of that country’s elite political and religious leadership rather than in the far larger metropolis of Tehran....Wuhan is some 5,500 kilometers from Qom, so the latter city would hardly seem the most likely location for the next major appearance of the virus...By March additional major Covid outbreaks had also occurred in Northern Italy and soon afterwards Spain, but the circumstances were quite different. According to Wikipedia, some 300,000 Chinese[38] live and work in that Italian region while another 150,000 Chinese reside in Spain[39], ...By contrast, Iran’s total Chinese population is one of the smallest in the world, numbering just 5,000-9,000[40], and overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran rather than Qom...."
Sars-Cov-2 was Lab Made Under Project DEFUSE:
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/sars-cov-2-was-lab-made-under-project
"This long article will explain how Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created as a result of intentional laboratory work. It will also show that the blueprint for Sars-Cov-2 was described in the “Project DEFUSE” proposal by Peter Daszak, which was preceded by years of relevant lab work and virus manipulation..."
A few important facts:
" Prashant’s Jan 2020 article about strange HIV Gp120 and “gag” inserts in Sars-Cov-2 was withdrawn in haste and under pressure during the weekend, which is unusual.
HIV-originated Gp120 inserts in Sars-Cov-2, described by Prashant, are meaningful and instrumental to COVID-19’s infecting immune cells, similarly to HIV.
Furin Cleavage Site in Sars-Cov-2 does not exist in other betacoronaviruses and is instrumental for pathogenicity.
Dr. Fauci is an expert on HIV and Gp120 glycoprotein and is a co-author of many articles and a coinventor of three Gp120 related patents, and no doubt understood what Prashant’s preprint meant, right away. Fauci and his associates, together with the likely creator of Sars-Cov-2 Peter Daszak, set out to cover up the origin of Sars-Cov-2.
Peter Daszak’s 2018 “Project DEFUSE” proposal describes exactly what Sars-Cov-2 actually is.
Sars-Cov-2 was possibly cultured on a Moderna MSH3 cell line containing a patented Moderna gene sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG."
Call me superficial, but the main reason I would bet my money on the lab leak origin, is the effort the chinese government is making to convince us otherwise. The series of «remarkable coincidences» that are described in the book «Viral» are also quite convincing
Your analysis is indeed superficial, the US spent just as much effort trying to convince us otherwise.
I got a different impression by reading the book I mention. Indeed some US govt officials were/are trying to censor this line of speech, but the centralized effort from the chinese govt is on another level
I read (and enjoyed) the most recent version of Alina Chan's Viral. I have also done a fair amount of reading about the history of the post-WWII US security state. I find her coverage of the science good; I find her lack of questioning of the science policy in the context of the US's geopolitical stance naïve.
If both the House and Senate passed that act unanimously, my expectations for truth are about zero.
That said, all of your questions are valid and deserve answers. It would be nice to have more solid information outside of FOIA tidbits and lawsuits.
I want to know why Bill Gates' activities in 2019 are best explained by his having knowledge that the virus was about to be released. E.g. Event 201 and buying shares in BioNTech. Also did the US Deep State have anything to do with one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 being in Iran?
And Fauci stated in 2017 that Trump would have a Pandemic during his term.
That's suspicious sounding, but experts had been warning of a pandemic for a long time.
I'll go out on a limb and predict that we will have another pandemic some time in the future.
No scientist would talk like that. Might say "I think there is a good chance there will be a pandemic in the next few years" but not:
"...2:28 we are now a few days away from a new administration (trump)... 3:05 the topic of today, the issue of PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS... 3:19 there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases, both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease... but also there will be a surprise outbreak... 3:51 there is no doubt in anyone's mind. 39:05 what we are extraordinarily confident about is that we will see this in the next few years...."
However much worse evidence than that is:
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/how-did-modernas-patented-sequence
https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus-vaccine-in-2-days-2020-11
"The short of this (and you NEED to read the long version) is that Sars-Cov2 has a genetic sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, that is the mirror image (complement) of the same sequence called “MSH3”, in the Moderna patent 9,587,003 from 2018.
How did bats copy the moderna patent sequence into their coronavirus, as @JikkyKjj asked? Of course they did not, and this is a further proof that it is a lab virus.
Still, why is the sequence there?
There is actually a possible reason of how this happened: the Covid virus was grown (cultured) in cell lines that used the MSH3-mutated cell lines:
Yes, that’s right. Every single one of these patents that contains that 19nt sequence (for which the probability of occurring by random chance is less than 1 in a billion) is from Moderna. [Note the sequence is actually the reverse complement sequence but this is likely a direct result of the cell lines that it occurred in – MSH3_mutated cell lines designed for developing cancer vaccines, the Moderna patent was actually for a mutated MSH3 gene for this purpose]
This sheds some light on lab origin of Sars-Cov-2. Whoever designed it, used Moderna-patented genetically modified cell lines containing the complement of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, to grow the virus.
This might also explain why Moderna “only needed two days” to come up with a vaccine for a completely novel virus. The explanation, of course, is that it had plenty of time to develop the vaccine well in advance. It was not quite as novel to Moderna as it seemed, containing a Moderna patented sequence.
They still cannot figure out how to make the “Omicron vaccine”. "
The chance of us having a pandemic in the future is about the same as the chance that there will be an earthquake in the future.
Historically major earthquakes are more frequent. I can't see any geophysicist claiming we there will be a major earthquake in the next term.
I didn't say the next pandemic would happen in the near term, or any time frame. But it will happen unless life ends.
Fauci's prediction was probably just pimping for a budget increase.
This is true
The first question “In 2019, did Chinese researchers perform risky research on dangerous viruses?” is to me the most interesting but also the most ill-defined.
I don’t know much about virus research and would be interested in background information about risks and safety procedures. Have lab leaks occurred in the past?
The question is not well defined — what counts as “risky” research? What is a “dangerous” virus? Some coronaviruses can cause very mild illnesses and others very lethal illnesses. Are coronaviruses “dangerous”?
Thank you for putting this list together and I’m looking forward to follow-up posts!
We already have pretty strong answers for over half these questions from public records.
WIV was adding furin cleavage sites to locally sourced viruses. The safety protocols were abysmal. The Eco Health Alliance led by Peter Danzig had a contract for research there funded by the NIH and Fauci. There was a huge cover up by both the Chinese and US governments to avoid blame for unleashing a pandemic.
Whether the intelligence agencies confirm the obvious is up in the air. They are not trustworthy
Obviously I have no real information, but given how the science and medical powers-that-be acted to squash any talk of the lab leak theory despite involved scientists raising questions and including publishing that embarrassing hack job letter in Lancet, I think it highly likely the story is exactly what has been reported. The US funded Chinese research, which turned into military research, which was released by accident from the lab.
I don't think it will happen either but if that story turns out to be verifiable truth, all those in power who took action to squash the lab leak theory should lose their job, at a minimum. The damage done to the public trust in science if that were found to be true will be even more enormous than what already exists.
I understand dangerous research needs to happen. However, this incident has proven we need to go even farther with protocols. The labs need to be under direct control of Western countries, extremely transparent, and perhaps located in extremely remote locations where any accidental leak is less likely to spread to a large population and perhaps could be quickly contained to those living in the remote area.