IN THE PANDEMIC There is no mystery how the coronavirus could have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2018, a State Department team found that the institute was not taking adequate precautions and warned a SARS-like pandemic could result. And China Daily , an official Communist Party newspaper, posted photos of the lab to show how safe it was, but the images were deleted when people noticed that seals on a refrigerator storing pathogens were warped. The lab-leak theory is now gaining adherents. For one thing, the possibility of a zoonotic – animal to human – jump of the virus is not consistent with the facts on this situation. For instance, The Lancet , a peer-reviewed medical journal, reported last January that the earliest COVID-19 case and many of the other initial ones had no contact with the Huanan Seafood wet market, the original suspected source of the disease. Moreover, if the virus did not leak out of the lab, why did Beijing send Major General Chen Wei, often described as China’s top biological weapons expert, to head the P4 lab in January of last year? This looks like a belated effort to clean up the facility and perhaps hide the existence of a biological- weapons program. China is a party to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which prohibits biological weapons. Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger told British MPs at the end of December that the U.S. believes the most likely source was the Wuhan Institute. “Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story,” he said. The State Department’s Fact Sheet released mid-
January reports that several researchers at the institute showed “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in the fall of 2019, suggesting the coronavirus could have been engineered there. Beijing has a fundamental problem. It cannot marshal scientific proof for its weird theories. “The Communist Party has not provided any evidence of zoonotic transmission of the virus from animal to human for the Wuhan outbreak,” Sean Lin, the microbiologist, points out. “Bats or pangolins that are potential reservoirs for the virus were identified thousands of miles away from Wuhan. So far, no animal reservoir for the virus has been identified in Wuhan.” Even if the bug wasn’t engineered to be a weapon, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, may have turned it into one. Ultimately, the issue of origin raises the issue of whether or not the novel coronavirus was a biological weapon. But even if the bug wasn’t engineered to be a weapon, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, may have turned it into one. WAS THE SPREAD DELIBERATE? As noted, sometime during the second half of 2019, people in Wuhan began showing symptoms of a mysterious flu-like disease. Whenever symptoms first appeared, doctors in Wuhan knew by the second week of December 2019 that the disease was highly contagious, as it was obviously spreading by human-to-human contact. Xi had to know
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