CHINA'S ROLE
microbiologist and a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told American Consequences : There were reports about positive detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in patients in other countries during the summer or fall of 2019, but those studies have not clearly ruled out the potential of antibody cross reactivities. In other words, they do not necessarily show the hosts had COVID-19. They could have had, for instance, the common cold caused by other human coronavirus strains. China is keen to prove the disease started elsewhere because that would absolve the Wuhan Institute of Virology of responsibility. China is keen to prove the disease started elsewhere because that would absolve the Wuhan Institute of Virology of responsibility. Many have suspected the institute, which houses China’s first P4 biosafety lab, of being the contagion’s source. After spending a grand total of three and a half hours at the lab earlier this month, Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization’s latest COVID-19 mission to China, said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus escaped from the institute. He also shut the door on further investigation of the facility. The WHO mission to Wuhan, like the
organization’s previous two visits in January and February of last year to the city, was severely restricted as to both the scope and duration of the investigation. “CSI Hubei visits the crime scene a year after yellow tape has been removed and is surprised by lack of evidence,” Paul Midler, a China analyst and author of Poorly Made in China , told me, referring to WHO’s 13-member team of international experts. “What a charade,” he said. The Wuhan lab should be a prime suspect. It was, by its own admission, storing more than 1,500 strains of coronavirus – it took down the claim from its website after the outbreak – and it was engaged in the risky “gain-of- function” reengineering of these pathogens, creating chimeric viruses (artificial, man- made products). The institute, incredibly, was injecting bat coronavirus into “humanized mice.” Moreover, according to the State Department, it “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.” Initially, the scientific community attacked the lab-leak theory, and some did so for what seemed to be purely political reasons. Peter Daszak, a leading American-based scientist who worked with the institute and was a member of the most recent WHO mission, admitted this January he was trying to protect Chinese colleagues when he organized a campaign in early 2020 to show that COVID-19 did not start in the lab. As the Daily Caller correctly points out, “Deadly viruses have a history of escaping from Chinese laboratories.” There was, for instance, a leak of the SARS virus in 2004 from a Chinese facility.
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February 2021
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