Delta variant and all future global variant surges (all are free post)

[shunyadragon]

So this researcher found evidence that COVID was natural but then the data was removed from the database? Evidence that would prove that it was natural was deleted? Why would they do that Shuny? Why would they delete evidence that supports the idea of a natural occurrence? So that the only evidence it existed is by this one scientist?

First, it was a group of scientist outside China. The data still exists as the scientists collected the data and confirmed by the group of scientists, but deleted from a previous report.

[Sparko]

First, it was a group of scientist outside China. The data still exists as the scientists collected the data and confirmed by the group of scientists, but deleted from a previous report.

Riggghht. So how do we know the scientist didn't just make it up, then claim it used to be there but was deleted? Basically "the Dog ate my homework?"

Why would China delete data that would exonerate it from the lab leak theory?

Or maybe the data was wrong in the first place and that is why the submitter deleted it?

[shunyadragon]

Riggghht. So how do we know the scientist didn't just make it up, then claim it used to be there but was deleted? Basically "the Dog ate my homework?"

Why would China delete data that would exonerate it from the lab leak theory?

Or maybe the data was wrong in the first place and that is why the submitter deleted it?

Nothing was deleted. The DNA evidence was simply still available and public, but not included in the initialpublication.

All of the above is hypothetical based on your biased agenda. The data is simply data on the DNA of the Racoon like animal involved in the sale at the Wuhan Market, nothng less and nothing more. The scientists involved said it was not definitive evidence for concluding it was a natural source and not a lab leak.

I seriously doubt you are remotely knowledgeable concerning the science involved.

[Sparko]

Nothing was deleted. The DNA evidence was simply still available and public, but not included in the initialpublication.

All of the above is hypothetical based on your biased agenda. The data is simply data on the DNA of the Racoon like animal involved in the sale at the Wuhan Market, nothng less and nothing more. The scientists involved said it was not definitive evidence for concluding it was a natural source and not a lab leak.

I seriously doubt you are remotely knowledgeable concerning the science involved.

Me not knowledgeable? You are the one who can't read your own source. It isn't a "publication" - GISAID is a database. The scientist claims he found the information in the database but then they deleted it from the database at the request of the person who submitted it (the Chinese team). That could mean that the person (the Chinese researchers) who put the information in the database realized it was incorrect and deleted it, or that it never existed in the first place and the scientist who claimed it did was lying.

Here read it again slowly.

Florence Débarre, a theoretician who specializes in evolutionary biology and works at CNRS, the French national research agency, unearthed the data, which consist of genetic sequences posted in GISAID, a virology database, by Chinese researchers. The Chinese team had collected environmental samples from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was connected to a cluster of early COVID-19 cases and despite its name also sold a variety of mammals for food. Since Débarre spotted the sequences, GISAID has removed them, noting that this was at the request of the submitter.

[seanD]

Rand Paul, always a fighter for the American people, which is why the left hates him so much because they deplore truth...

I wonder what that weasel face Blinken is hiding?

[Ronson]

Rand Paul, always a fighter for the American people, which is why the left hates him so much because they deplore truth...

The Leftist elite hate transparency.

I wonder what that weasel face Blinken is hiding?

I think they're afraid of implicating China, or Fauci, or both.

[Gondwanaland]

And so it continues to become clearer and clearer.

First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources



The three scientists were engaged in “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses when they fell ill

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

Public officials in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly suggested that uncovering the pandemic’s origin may not be possible. “We may never know,” said Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who oversaw pandemic response for two administrations.

Now, answers increasingly look within reach. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

Hu and Yu researched the novel lineage of SARS-like viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 hails, and in 2019 coauthored a paper with Shi Zhengli that described SARS-like lineages they had studied over the years.

Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

Sources tell Public and Racket that other news organizations are chasing aspects of this story. On Saturday, The Times of London quoted an anonymous U.S. State Department investigator saying, “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence.

Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

A bill signed by President Biden earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the sick researchers at the WIV, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, and whether these researchers had been involved with or exposed to coronavirus research.

On Dec. 29, 2017, two years before the pandemic began, Chinese state-run television aired a video that includes a scene of Ben Hu watching a lab worker handle specimens. Neither are wearing protective gear. The same video shows WIV scientists hunting for bat viruses with little protective gear. “If they were worried about being infected in the field, they would need full body suits with no gaps” to be safe, said Chan. “That’s the only way.”

The WIV research with live SARS-like viruses was performed at too low of a safety level, “BSL-2,” explains Chan, “When we now know that the pandemic virus is even capable of escaping from a BSL-3 lab and infecting fully vaccinated young lab workers.”

While scientists justify such research as necessary for developing vaccines, President Barack Obama banned federal funding for gain-of-function research of concern in 2014, because experts had come to the consensus that it was too dangerous. However, the National Institute of Health and NIAID headed by Francis Collins and Fauci, and a major U.S. government grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, deemed their work on SARS-like viruses as not falling under the gain-of-function research of concern definitions and funded this project in China and Southeast Asia.

In March 2018, the WIV, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the University of North Carolina applied for a $14 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA to engineer “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like coronaviruses to study how this affected their ability to grow and cause disease.

Scientists say the key piece of the COVID-19 virus, which made it so transmissible compared to its closest relatives, was its unique furin cleavage site.

DARPA rejected the grant, but it now appears the WIV went forward with the research anyway. The Times of London reported that US collaborators of the WIV had come forward and said the Wuhan scientists had put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in 2019.

Hu co-authored multiple papers on coronavirus research, including a 2017 paper on chimeric bat coronaviruses with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which was funded in part by the NIH and the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT Program. Data privately shared with the NIH revealed that these chimeric SARS-like viruses grew far more quickly and caused more severe disease in humanized mice in the lab.


When the WIV put out their first paper about the pandemic virus, they failed to point out the novel furin cleavage site despite having had plans to and allegedly putting such gain-of-function features into SARS-like viruses in their lab. “It’s as if these scientists proposed putting horns on horses, but when a unicorn shows up in their city a year later they write a paper describing every part of it except its horn,” said Chan.

Public sent emails and made phone calls to the NIH, WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak, Hu, and Shi over the last several days and did not hear back.

It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. “You would expect the country of origin to be defensive,” said Chan, “but you wouldn’t expect a country receiving the virus to be withholding key evidence.”

On January 15, 2021, five days before President Joe Biden took office, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak as the cause of a pandemic.

Already, the State Department in 2021 suspected that the WIV had lied to the public. “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. That raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”

In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

The Times of London reported that State Department investigators “found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.” As previously reported in Vanity Fair,some of the information State Department investigators found in 2021 was “sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.”

“Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”

Identifying the first COVID-19 case as a Wuhan Institute scientist overseeing gain-of-function research has significant ramifications for investigators in search of a motive for a cover-up.

Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China.

Publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal have uncovered suggestive details, including the fact that the NIH awarded funding for at least 18 gain-of-function research projects between 2012 and 2020, and NIH scientists in 2016 expressing concern about supposedly paused hybrid “chimera” virus research.

Had the information come out earlier, governments may have responded to the pandemic differently. After Public shared the information with Chan, she said, “I feel vindicated, but I’m frustrated. If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently. This whole pandemic could have been reshaped.”

Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”


https://public.substack.com/p/first-...ed-by-covid-19

[Stoic]

And so it continues to become clearer and clearer.

If it could be confirmed that the three Chinese researchers actually had covid-19, or that WIV actually inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS type viruses, that would be significant evidence for a lab leak.

[seanD]

If it could be confirmed that the three Chinese researchers actually had covid-19, or that WIV actually inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS type viruses, that would be significant evidence for a lab leak.

And how do you figure we're ever going to know that when China scrubbed the evidence? And, btw, if they were doing nothing wrong, why do you suppose China scrubbed the evidence?

[Starlight]

And so it continues to become clearer and clearer.

Ah-ha! Now we know that it was a Fauci-funded Chinese Communist plot from US intelligence agencies to spread a deadly disease inside America by releasing it in China, so that Big Pharma could make huge $$$, because Bill Gates wanted a microchip in it for mind control, because Biden was enacting a totalitarian regime and took away all the guns because he hates freedom. Now that Klaus Schwab controls the one world government established by the permanent authoritarianism this has caused, the UN will be able to put everyone in hobbit holes.

Hope I got all that right Gond, Sean & MM. But, of course, I don't believe any of that, because I took the vaccine and it mind-controlled me.

[seanD]

Ah-ha! Now we know that it was a Fauci-funded Chinese Communist plot from US intelligence agencies to spread a deadly disease inside America by releasing it in China, so that Big Pharma could make huge $$$, because Bill Gates wanted a microchip in it for mind control, because Biden was enacting a totalitarian regime and took away all the guns because he hates freedom. Now that Klaus Schwab controls the one world government established by the permanent authoritarianism this has caused, the UN will be able to put everyone in hobbit holes.

Hope I got all that right Gond, Sean & MM. But, of course, I don't believe any of that, because I took the vaccine and it mind-controlled me.

Everything you stated is pretty much theory. All we can do is base any theory on the facts: 1) that China scrubbed the evidence from the lab, were totally uncooperative with investigations, and essentially covered it up; 2) Fauci funded GoF research at the same lab about the same exact time through EcoHealth Alliance headed by Daszak, both of whom also covered it up; 3) the scientific community, other than a few dissenting scientific voices, for the most part also covered it up and attacked anyone who questioned the official narrative; 4) the MSM and social media also covered it up. Those are the four facts we know are true, and there's got to be a reason why those facts happened, but anything beyond that is basically theory, but considering those 4 facts, one can rightly imagine some pretty disturbing scenarios.

[Gondwanaland]

Ah-ha! Now we know that it was a Fauci-funded Chinese Communist plot from US intelligence agencies to spread a deadly disease inside America by releasing it in China, so that Big Pharma could make huge $$$, because Bill Gates wanted a microchip in it for mind control, because Biden was enacting a totalitarian regime and took away all the guns because he hates freedom. Now that Klaus Schwab controls the one world government established by the permanent authoritarianism this has caused, the UN will be able to put everyone in hobbit holes.

Hope I got all that right Gond, Sean & MM. But, of course, I don't believe any of that, because I took the vaccine and it mind-controlled me.

Found the commie

[Sparko]

If it could be confirmed that the three Chinese researchers actually had covid-19, or that WIV actually inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS type viruses, that would be significant evidence for a lab leak.

What do you mean if it can be confirmed? That is exactly what they did. They even have their names. Patients Zero were scientists working at the Wuhan Virus Lab. What more proof do you want?

The 'coincidences' just keep piling up and people like you keep trying to turn a blind eye despite it being clear it was a lab leak.

Open your eyes Stoic!

[Diogenes]

Rand Paul, always a fighter for the American people, which is why the left hates him so much because they deplore truth...

I wonder what that weasel face Blinken is hiding?

Use the power of subpoenas and contempt charges.

[Mountain Man]

Ah-ha! Now we know that it was a Fauci-funded Chinese Communist plot from US intelligence agencies to spread a deadly disease inside America by releasing it in China, so that Big Pharma could make huge $$$, because Bill Gates wanted a microchip in it for mind control, because Biden was enacting a totalitarian regime and took away all the guns because he hates freedom. Now that Klaus Schwab controls the one world government established by the permanent authoritarianism this has caused, the UN will be able to put everyone in hobbit holes.

Hope I got all that right Gond, Sean & MM. But, of course, I don't believe any of that, because I took the vaccine and it mind-controlled me.

You are, of course, free to play the idiot by ignoring the facts in favor of straw man fallacies.