"Carlson's comments came after Facebook slapped a warning label on video of his Tuesday interview with Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who claimed to have evidence showing China "intentionally" released COVID-19 onto the general population.
"Within a few hours of her interview last night," Carlson said, "a video of the segment reached 1.3 million people on Facebook."
"And why wouldn’t it? The coronavirus pandemic has touched the life of every American. And justifiably, people want to know where it came from. But Facebook still doesn’t want you to know that. So Facebook suppressed the video, presumably on behalf of the Chinese government. Facebook executives made it harder for users to watch our segment. Those who found the video had to navigate a warning that the interview 'repeats information about COVID-19 that independent fact-checkers say is false," he added.
CHINESE VIROLOGIST: CHINA'S GOVERNMENT 'INTENTIONALLY' RELEASED COVID-19
————-
"Independent fact checkers?" 25 year old Humanities and Social Sciences grads working for Facebook? Independent of what? Independent of their mommies and daddies at long last?
TC points out that what is needed in the censorship struggle is a change in the federal law that protects social media platforms from law suits. This law was created originally for the purpose of nurturing the growth of these institutions but it now protects them from litigation in arbitrary censorship cases like this one.
BUT!
The main point in this virologists' exposition is her opinion and claimed knowledge that the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army created the COVID-19 virus as a weapon of war in the Wuhan lab and then at CCP direction deliberately launched it at the world and ultimately at the US in a bioweapons attack.
If this is true, then what we can look forward to is a series of such attacks, with each succeeding virus being engineered to be just enough different to be unaffected by vaccines developed to counter previous viral attacks.
The apologists for the Chinese Communist Party will howl at the thought. pl
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-facebook-censor-chinese-virologist
james
Why on earth would you favor the Chinese Communists? Why” Racists? Are you mad? Have you not noticed that the lady in question is Chinese? You do not know that I was among the foremost opponents of the Iraq WMD Koolaid?
Months ago, several virologists, geneticist and other biologists like Eric Weinstein identified the fingerprints of what Dr. Yang has revealed. They were ignored and censored, called crockpots. This is further evidence that they were right.
The PRC was very successful in isolating Wuhan and tracking down carriers. Was this capability spun up before or during the initial outbreak and if the latter was it manned and equipped to a significantly unusual degree ?
To what extent did the PRC allow international flights out of affected areas while simultaneously blocking internal movement ?
If this is true, then what we can look back to the weak signals of a rehearsal, or was there sufficient information available to them to just confidently game their plan to a conclusion ?
And if true, then follow ups would have increased latency, stronger long term effects that we are starting to see as the real issue with Covid19, and develop from a Patient Zero far far away from the PRC.
Please don’t call Bellingcat.
Straight from the wikipedia entry:”The paper was uploaded to the Zenodo website, an open-access repository where anyone can post their research.[28] The paper is affiliated with the Rule of Law Society, founded by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui.[26][28] The Rule of Law Society had not previously published scientific or medical research.[28] Yan had previously appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.[27][28]”
Wondering Messrs. Bannon and Guo have any ulterior motivations?
MAD by nuclear weapons seems tame in retrospect. Or is it a Final Solution? Sorry to even be asking this question.
All:
I watched her interview but it was hard to follow her English. She appeared to say that the virus had been manipulated and changed and that it was readily apparent that it had been bio-engineered. I would very much appreciate if someone with some knowledge about this virus would share their opinion with us.
james
Do you not see the problem with demanding proof while at the same time suppressing every attempt to offer such proof?
Col. Lang,
These are serious allegations. The US government and its bio-weapons apparatus should investigate it seriously. Lee-meng Yan says that a bat virus was modified. She’s rather specific it would seem.
All the politically correct, the bought & paid for and the reflexively anti-American Chinese Communist Party apologists are providing all sorts of excuses. The world needs to know the true origins of this virus and every possibility should be thoroughly investigated including the possibility of bio-warfare.
I wouldn’t trust any of the “experts” who claimed earlier this year that millions would be killed by the Wuhan virus unless we immediately destroyed the global economy. Thank goodness some countries like Sweden didn’t fall for the manufactured hysteria so we can have some basis for comparison.
james
Not true. You are a communist sympathizer.
blue peacock
There will be no investigation when Harris wins the election “with Biden as president.” IMO, they are paid agents of China.
How did the Chinese manage to spread the virus around the whole world almost a year before intentionally activating it on their own people in Wuhan?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ
Col. Lang
Would Trump and the Republicans investigate it? They should have already been doing it. They’ve still got another 4 months.
Reminds me of the suppression of the involvement of the Saudis in 9/11.
James,
I thought you told us recently that you don’t even believe in objective reality. Why so concerned about it all of the sudden?
I don’t see the WMD angle, but at the same time without producing direct evidence it’s hard to take her at her word. A babies thrown out of incubators (1st Iraq war) type PR stunt seems just as plausible as her story. Even Tucker admits there is no way of knowing whether her statements are in fact true. She does have pedigree, but at the same time her first interview was with a fervent anti-china news organization owned by Guo Wengui (per wiki link) so curious if there are other motives.
And yes, Facebook is garbage and should be broken up. Came across this yesterday which goes to show recent grads are being tasked with monitoring:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo
I obviously can’t evaluate any of her claims, but I would just be a bit wary of what she’s saying….this woman used to appear on Bannon’s War Room show, and she’s clearly part of a network of dissidents who regularly and as a matter of course criticize the Chinese govt.
I have no factual reason to doubt her, nor believe the Chinese govt. which I assume knew more than it let on. But I’m not sure she is the most trusted source for this sort of charge.
Hmmmm….from Hong Kong …..trust, but verify. One vivid quote coming through the heavy accent and accentuation – the virus has the head of an ox and the hands of a monkey – which means it had to be biologically engineered and could never come from Nature; only a Lab.
Pretty much like UC Davis putting cells from a salmon into strawberry plants to keep them from freezing out in the growing fields. Frankenstein and Dr Frankenfuters do walk amongst us.
Nano-technology is just one of the newer transport agent for this brave new world. It can make naturally repellent molecules adhere to each other and create new functionality.
Having seen Falong Gong adherants in operation in the West Coast – I did have a bit of a flashback listening to her talk. Hall of mirrors, are those who we call “Chinese”. Not a monolith by any means.
At last!
Does no one wonder why and how China is back to normal with the rest of world still going through severe infections and lockdowns. Are they so much better or is there another, more straightforward reason?
About why no one is criticizing CCP… well, the answer is that China has bought the media. I am talking not only about the MSM and the new age media like Facebook and Twitter, but also non-conventional outlets. Facebook and Twitter immediately ban anything that criticizes China. Nothing of that sort will be allowed on the major teevee channels or on NYT, WaPo etc. And to top it off, the CCP has bought and paid for blogs like moonofalabama which publishes a stream of pro-china content on his blog. Any criticism of China is deleted.
And of course, there are id**ts like james who scream racism at any hint of finger pointing at China. We are not all virtue signallers. And is your name really james and not something a bit more Chinese?
The Chinese are praying (and probably doing a lot more than that) for a Biden victory. All this will be pushed under the carpet (red, by then) if he wins.
I listened to this lady on Tucker and found her quite believable in that she had the CCP by the nuts on this Lab created virus. She is not the only one who has determined this independently. Thus when I see smoke I know there is fire.
With Trump and a few others maintaining their “China Virus” statements it will not surprise me that our military and intelligence apparatus’s already know this.
Obviously 2020 has become the Year of the Rat.
I will go back to an approach that served me well with regard to the Iraq WMD story. I have no way of evaluating Yan’s claims, but there are a fair number of people and organizations that do have the resources to evaluate. I rejected WMD claims in 2003 simply because none of the other players with relevant competence acted in ways that indicated serious concern. What is Yan Li-meng’s evidence that others do not have? This issue of origin has to have been pursued by at least a couple dozen organizations with the necessary competence. None of those has made any such claims. That doesn’t mean that the claims are false. But if the claims are true, then there must be very strong motives for keeping silent. So what would be the common interest between, say, the intelligence agencies of Germany and those of India?
Without such evidence this turns into a she-said-he-said story. Now that does not mean that it is wrong. Suppression and intimidation would not be out of character for the Chinese government. But again the world is loaded with very paranoid people who are capable of evaluating that. And who are pretty much immune to Chinese intimidation. They don’t have to face off against the Chinese state. There are plenty of more roundabout ways to get the word out if you want to do so and have government-level resources to put into the effort.
The obvious alternative to publication of the logic for detecting human agency is to engage in simple human retaliation. Are the Chinese the only ones capable of such producing such a catastrophe? Pretty unlikely. Would such a counterstroke catch the Chinese by surprise? Again unlikely if they are aware of having stepped over the line. The measures they are taking against virus outbreaks are more extreme than what western countries have imposed, but not (yet) indicating panic. If somebody let some 1918 swine flu loose in Shanghai, would their measures be able to counter it? (Five times as contagious as what we seeing in covid-19.)
Bernard
There are these machines called commercial airliners on which infected people were allowed to travel to the wide world. Travel out of Wuhan was closely controlled. We have no idea how many Chinese have died of this.
I am reminded of a local CFR dinner meeting in the very early days of the new “capitalist” China when two speakers we could barely understand came to cheer lead for investments in China, through their giggling, nods and smiles we kept hearing them repeat …10% …10%…10% ……earnings. As if they were programmed to makes sure at least that part of their message was understood.
Of course after China started roaring and decrepit Shanghai outstripped Hong Kong in this “new” China, I had moments of regret that I did not lock in 10% on anything Chinese but that is another story.
Now I am glad I did not, since I am lousy about market timing and knowing when to get out. I just have to forgive myself for not knowing when to get in either. The tortoise did win the race with the hare.
In other words, one voice from China is one voice from a county of over one billion. They have 5000 years under their belt; we have 250. They are masters at going long; we remain instant gratification junkies. So she fails test one – she is telling us what we want to hear.
Red State raises additional skepticism about this “scientist’s interview”, as well as the oddities of the very original days of reporting about the Chinese t “flu” coming out of China. Remembering also one of the very first ways we even started hearing about this “new Chinese virus” in the US were reports about the Great Toilet Paper panic, even though people here did not know why they were supposed to be hoarding it.
https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/09/17/920958/
Best I could trace was to an earlier Australian toilet paper panic they claimed was hawked by Yahoo News in Australia, and then spread via social media to the US. And our Great Toilet Paper Hoax began in earnest here too. China was allegedly the source for all Australian TP, so it was claimed with so many people sick in China with this “flu” there would be no more toilet paper Down Under for their down unders.
But the US did not rely on China for TP, so the TP panic was not warrented to be set in motion here. But it did capture attention and did trigger panic before we even knew what to be afraid of. Greasing the skids in some manipulative way could be one jaundiced conclusion.
Hope someone with better skills can really trace the origins of the Great Toilet Paper Hoax, because it did wipe us out in the US. No sheet. Was that the covid panic transmission route; and not really on a flight from Wuhan to Seattle?
Who funded the movie Contagion?
‘Dr. Li-Meng Yan is not a quack’ Tucker Carlson
No – but she may be another in a long line of useful idiots.
“Independent fact checkers?” 25 year old Humanities and Social Sciences grads working for Facebook? Independent of what? Independent of their mommies and daddies at long last?
Countervailing research goes light-years beyond “Independent fact checkers?”.
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene a report titled:
The Origin of COVID-19 and Why It Matters
In 2007, scientists studying coronaviruses warned: “The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV–like viruses in horseshoe bats… is a time bomb. The possibility of the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses… should not be ignored.”1
Studying animal viruses that have previously spilled over into humans provides clues about host-switching determinants. A well-understood example is influenza virus emergence into humans and other mammals.2 Human pandemic and seasonal influenza viruses arise from enzootic viruses of wild waterfowl and shore birds. From within this natural reservoir, the 1918 pandemic “founder” virus somehow host-switched into humans. We know this from genetic studies comparing avian viruses, the 1918 virus, and its descendants, which have caused three subsequent pandemics, as well as annual seasonal influenza in each of the 102 years since 1918. Similarly, other avian influenza viruses have host-switched into horses, dogs, pigs, seals, and other vertebrates, with as yet unknown pandemic potential.2,10,11 Although some molecular host-switching events remain unobserved, phylogenetic analyses of influenza viruses allow us to readily characterize evolution and host-switching as it occurs in nature.2
It should be clarified that theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.21,28,29 SARS-CoV-2 contains neither the genetic fingerprints of any of the reverse genetics systems that have been used to engineer coronaviruses nor does it contain genetic sequences that would have been “forward engineered” from preexisting viruses, including the genetically closest sarbecoviruses. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any previously identified coronavirus from which it could have been engineered. Moreover, the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain, which has affinity for cells of various mammals, binds to human ACE2 receptors via a novel mechanism.
Engineering such a virus would have required 1) published or otherwise available scientific knowledge that did not exist until after COVID-19 recognition; 2) a failure to follow obvious engineering pathways, resulting in an imperfectly constructed virus; and 3) an ability to genetically engineer a new virus without leaving fingerprints of the engineering. Furthermore, the 12 amino acid furin-cleavage site insertion between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein’s S1 and S2 domains, which some have alleged to be a sign of genetic engineering, is found in other bat and human coronaviruses in nature, probably arising via naturally occurring recombination.24
It is also highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a laboratory by accident because no laboratory had the virus nor did its genetic sequence exist in any sequence database before its initial GenBank deposition (early January 2020). China’s laboratory safety practices, policies, training, and engineering are equivalent to those of the United States and other developed countries,32 making viral “escape” extremely unlikely, and of course impossible without a viral isolate present. SARS-CoV-2 shares genetic properties with many other sarbecoviruses, lies fully within their genetic cluster, and is thus a virus that emerged naturally.
http://www.ajtmh.org/content/journals/10.4269/ajtmh.20-0849
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic
There are outstanding evolutionary questions on the recent emergence of human coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 including the role of reservoir species, the role of recombination and its time of divergence from animal viruses. We find that the sarbecoviruses—the viral subgenus containing SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2—undergo frequent recombination and exhibit spatially structured genetic diversity on a regional scale in China. SARS-CoV-2 itself is not a recombinant of any sarbecoviruses detected to date, and its receptor-binding motif, important for specificity to human ACE2 receptors, appears to be an ancestral trait shared with bat viruses and not one acquired recently via recombination. To employ phylogenetic dating methods, recombinant regions of a 68-genome sarbecovirus alignment were removed with three independent methods. Bayesian evolutionary rate and divergence date estimates were shown to be consistent for these three approaches and for two different prior specifications of evolutionary rates based on HCoV-OC43 and MERS-CoV. Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
With horseshoe bats currently the most plausible origin of SARS-CoV-2, it is important to consider that sarbecoviruses circulate in a variety of horseshoe bat species with widely overlapping species ranges57. Nevertheless, the viral population is largely spatially structured according to provinces in the south and southeast on one lineage, and provinces in the centre, east and northeast on another (Fig. 3). This boundary appears to be rarely crossed. Two exceptions can be seen in the relatively close relationship of Hong Kong viruses to those from Zhejiang Province (with two of the latter, CoVZC45 and CoVZXC21, identified as recombinants) and a recombinant virus from Sichuan for which part of the genome (region B of SC2018 in Fig. 3) clusters with viruses from provinces in the centre, east and northeast of China. SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are also exceptions because they were sampled from Hubei and Yunnan, respectively.
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses. Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans—a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein—has not yet been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
As if on cue Li-Meng Yan appears like manna from heaven aiding/abetting in foisting forth the current dominant Western government/media narrative that China is bad.
How convenient.
personanongrata
How long did your group have to work on finding these quotes? Your side will probably win because people like you are too full of themselves to see the truth. Enjoy!
I felt this woman was completely credible. She was from Taiwan, I believe. Her account mirrored the early accounts that were found on the Internet regarding the lab in Wuhan. She discounted the wet market theory that had originally been put out by the media–and which was also soon discredited by the media. She talked about the lab in Wuhan, which had been mentioned early in the news about this virus. And she mentioned bats, another piece of information mentioned early.
To overcome one’s need to seem objective and circumspect, a person could first study the long, long, long history of biological warfare in various periods of human history. Why should this time period be different? I like that Trump calls it the “China virus.”
Then a person could actually easily review the timeline of the virus’s damage to our country. Trump has lined it out on many occasions. And let’s not forget the Chinese connection to the WHO through, perhaps, its influence in Ethiopia.
China’s government had lost a less skeptical leadership in the U.S. when we voted in Trump instead of Hilary and her Obama/Biden and other deep-state friends.
Trump had already begun to change the trade dynamics with China. There was no longer a “one-world government” dreamer in the White House. This was a U.S. First President, breaking a long-time trend toward a George Soros style one-world government, in which China would be treated as not the thieves of technology and the thought police in regard to Hollywood film plots.
I believe this woman. I believe the stories about what the Chinese government did to its own citizens who were infected. I believe also because of my own ancestors’ experiences dealing with communists and of their “illegal” escape from Russia when the Bolsheviks were running amuck.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching a young girl grow up who was given away by her parents during the one-child rule in China. If the first baby was a girl, they gave it away so they could try for a boy as their “one child.”
I enjoy the idea that this young girl I know is now at only 17 through her first year on college. She is studying microbiology. Who know if she might be able to help defeat this or the next attempt at biological warfare against our country.
Regardless of whether China create this or not, the fact of the matter is it was supposedly unsafe to attend a loved ones funeral, birth of a child, etc…..but it was OK to go out and protest.
Those two facts are really the only ones you need to know…
Col.,
The Chinese propaganda campaign has lots of allies in their war against Trump and the resurgence of the West. I’m only mildly surprised the same crew who was out in March and April waring us all of another Black Death and a need for mandatory economy closures haven’t returned to double down. Back then there were multiple stories, mostly quickly shunted asside in favor of ratings boosting death counts, indicating this might have come from China’s virology lab. The shift to the martyrdom of George Floyd and the resurection of the ’60s Black Power movement shoved most of the remaining coverage of this aside. Googel and Twitter have been rather adept in imposing one sided censorship and Facebook is coming along due to the pressure from the left. I notice none on the left ever mention the crushing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement or even the Uighur reeducation camps.
Take it FWIW, but the Redstate blog has a provocative item which opines it’s possible that Dr. Li-Ming Yan may be a CCP agent whose real intention is to stoke continuing fear of COVID-19, especially now that the public is relaxing somewhat due to lower death rates, etc. (BTW this is just my succinct synopsis of the essay and maybe I interpreted it incorrectly). The author seems to think it’s significant and telling that the doctor seemed insufficiently afraid for her life in the TV interview with TC the other night.
I occasionally find Asians to be relatively inscrutable when it comes to the manner in which they express themselves, so I don’t put much stock in that aspect of his theory. Besides, she’s been in the US since April and is still alive.
Any motives aside, she’s making assertions that already have and probably will continue to be either refuted or proved by her peers. I wonder though, would a scientist risk professional standing by making totally unsupported or false claims? I guess if she were truly a CCP agent it’s possible.
Who knows who or what to believe anymore?
Oops, here’s the Redstate link for anyone interested:
https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/09/17/920958/
akaPatience
So, by this tortured logic she is a CCP agent. If you believe that, you, too, are a sick f–k.
All
As I expected, the apologists for communism and for the CCP specifically have come howling out of the woodwork.
Related: https://swprs.org/covid-19-virus-origin-the-mojiang-miners-passage-hypothesis/
>[i]It has been known since February that a bat virus called RaTG13, collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2013, is the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2.
>It has been known since May (to some) that RaTG13, previously known as BtCoV/4991, was found in bat feces in a mineshaft near Mojiang in southwest China, after six miners fell ill with Covid19-like pneumonia and three of them eventually died.
…
>Latham and Wilson now propose that the Mojiang miners were originally infected by RaTG13 and/or similar coronaviruses during their up to two week stay in the mineshaft inhaling aerosols from bat feces. RaTG13 then turned into SARS-CoV-2 through mutations and/or recombinations in the lungs of the miners during their up to four month stay in the hospital (the Mojiang miners passage).
>Thus the infected lungs of the miners may have served as a ‘human incubator’ enabling RaTG13 to adapt to both the human ACE2 cell receptor and the human immune system in just four months instead of several decades as would have been expected in a natural (animal) environment.
>The Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2012/2013 received tissue and blood samples of the surviving or dead miners that may already have included what is now known as SARS-CoV-2. WIV virologists may then have been waiting five more years, until the completion of their BSL-4 (high security) lab in 2018, before beginning to do research on what is now known as SARS-CoV-2.
>SARS-CoV-2 may then have escaped, probably in autumn 2019, from the WIV BSL-4 lab, perhaps through an infected lab worker, initiating what is now a global coronavirus pandemic.[/i]
Note that at the same time, this lab was doing gain of function work on SARS-like bat viruses. They may have been trying to weaponize it. They may have been trying to make a general cold or SARS vaccine. They may have released mild version A on their own political dissidents and the general population in wuhan while keeping versions B-Z for each year to wreck havoc.
akaPatience: “I wonder though, would a scientist risk professional standing by making totally unsupported or false claims?”
She no longer has any professional standing to put at risk, not since she hitched her star to the “Law and Order Society & Law and Order Foundation”.
Whatever else that may be, it most definitely is not a scientific institution.
She’s now in Steve Bannon’s world. I wish her luck, because I doubt that’s a spiritually-rewarding place to find yourself.
blue peacock: “These are serious allegations.”
Absolutely true. Extremely serious.
“The US government and its bio-weapons apparatus should investigate it seriously.”
Again, absolutely true. They would be remiss in their duty if they did not.
“Lee-meng Yan says that a bat virus was modified. She’s rather specific it would seem.”
Apparently so.
I have been trained in the biological sciences, but I do not pretend to be a virologist. So much of her paper flies over my head. I do not claim that I understand the underlying genetics.
But there are many examples in that article (I won’t bore people, but I can itemize them if you want) where the authors describe some part of the structure of the virus only to *then* make an apparently unsupported assertion based upon that observation.
In effect, in many places within their paper they take leaps of logic.
Those logic-leaps would certainly have not survived a peer-review process, which I suggest is a big reason why it was uploaded to an open-source repository.
I’m not saying that its rubbish.
But I am doubtful that it is “science”.
Sir,
if so then it is a reposte in the vein of Sun Tze. Not nice or legal or whatever, but is something only short of a declaration of war.
Great power games are unfortunately like this.
But I have my doubts as I have seen too many false flag ops, and it the virologist claims can be verified PRC has much more to lose, than it can win with it.
akaPatience,
The Mayor of Tampa and her staff are unlikely to be RedState blog readers. They are quite happy to demand that all the surrounding counties issue mandatory mask policies because ‘cases’ and people might travel to Tampa from outside. The same goes with Nashville, where the Mayor is quite happy to suppress evidence that going to a bar doesn’t escalate the spread of the virus. Both Mayors are quite accepting of violating all those rules when coming together to condemn the US.
“would a scientist risk professional standing by making totally unsupported or false claims?”
Let’s review what Dr. St. Fauci said Febraury, March, May, and now. Lets see his conduct when he attends a sporting event, mask free, side by side with others. Looks like his professional standing with professional politicians on the left has only been enhanced. How’s the Imperial College algorithm man doing? Are any “professionals” worrying about that or the Washington State model or any others? Nope. The only “science” that matters now is political science, and rank opportunism. 15 days to slow the spread now entering month seven. 60% of small businesses declared non-essential and ordered closed by democratic governors are now permanently closed. Congradulations to Democratic Socialism for destroying the financial independence of numerous Americans who were unlikely to ever support your party.
https://nashville.eater.com/2020/5/21/21266317/nashville-restaurant-closings-coronavirus-2020-mewsic-kitty-cat-cafe-closed
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/yelp-data-shows-60percent-of-business-closures-due-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic-are-now-permanent.html
“Rejoice, we conquer” should be Biden’s campaign slogan since that appears to be what they plan on doing to America.
Yeah, right Saying that someone is a communist, or a communist sympathizer is not an ad hominem attack. It is merely a description of what I think you are. Are you not proud of what you are? It is like calling someone a Yankee. This describes someone from the North. They do not like to be called that either although it is a simple descriptor.
All:
I try and be original and otherwise keep my big mouth shut, but I feel this is an important topic. Please accept my apologies, Colonel for not being original, but I will paste this comment from another site which more closely deals with my concerns and gets to the heart of the matter. This is not a lot of technical jargon, such as some have posted, but poses a rather simple question, was this virus manipulated to speed up it’s mutation?:
“Re Bannon and allegations of engineered Covid: Well, yes, the source casts a big black pall over the allegations. But is there any truth here nonetheless?
I believe it was back in June that Bret Weinstein appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said much the same. He explained that Covid probably did originate with bats. But typically viruses from animals need to evolve extensively before they can infect human beings. And then transmission occurs exclusively between animals and people for a very long time before the virus evolves again to enable it to transmit from one human being to another.
It’s this latter crucial and quite lengthy step that Covid-19 entirely skipped over, indicating that it was engineered, Weinstein says. So yes, there’s no smoking gun to indicate that the Wuhan bio-weapons lab was the origin. But the evidence of the virus itself and the extremely unlikely scenario that it evolved overnight for human-to-human transmission is strongly suggestive, is it not?
Also, what about those very early reports from Chinese scientists that cited the Wuhan lab? Didn’t some of those guys disappear? Finally, Steve Bannon certainly has deep dark motives for casting a blanket of suspicion over China. No doubt. But don’t the Wuhan-lab-origin deniers have motives of their own — such as preserving US corporate investments and business in China while smoothing the runway for Biden’s election and further US sellouts to China? Come on, man.”
The Halabja chemical attack against the Kurds, in my mind, is proof that Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction–though not the kind some here are writing about.
Chemicals or lab-produced viruses may not be the kinds of weapons most people think of; but when chemicals and or viruses are used deliberately to cause harm and chaos, they are weapons.
Communist regimes may even use their “useful idiots” as the means by which they deliver those WMDs.
Why did the President decide to close the borders against the possible arrival of people from China?
@Personanongrata
Your proof is proof by deduction, which makes it as failure prone as all human endeavors. One need not be a virologists to examine the flaws in your cited work.
“Engineering such a virus would have required 1) published or otherwise available scientific knowledge that did not exist until after COVID-19 recognition;”
This statement is false on its face. Do governments regularly publish their bioweapons research? If so can such research not exists because it hasn’t been published?
“2) a failure to follow obvious engineering pathways, resulting in an imperfectly constructed virus; and ”
It doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before and not how we would make it so it must be made by nature…
“3) an ability to genetically engineer a new virus without leaving fingerprints of the engineering. Furthermore, the 12 amino acid furin-cleavage site insertion between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein’s S1 and S2 domains, which some have alleged to be a sign of genetic engineering, is found in other bat and human coronaviruses in nature, probably arising via naturally occurring recombination.24”
More, because we can’t think of a way to do it, it must not be possible.
Normally to catch a lie you would look to see who benefits and approach from that angle. Is there any reason for the virology community to *want* COVID to be a naturally occurring virus? Of course, research money. Imagine the outrage if a man made virus were released, like an accidental nuclear launch, it would undoubtedly be followed by a backlash that would severely affect funding, not to mention the international slush funding enjoyed by so many. We have every reason to believe the lab in Wuhan is at least in part funded by the US Government grants. Besides all the other issues with that lab, you can expect that to be cut right out if a virus were released or escaped from there, ergo it’s a naturally occurring virus.
Most than likely all the major powers are pursuing research in this area (it would be irresponsible not to if only from a defense stand point). Most likely, all researches have a incentive to keep the pubic in the dark just as much as the governments do. That’s jut on a normal virus. COVID-19, the virus used to shut down, destroy the US economy; That makes face masked rioters a “health” priority and gives the Democrats about their only ammunition in their prolific attacks against Trump. That’s the kind of stuff that destroys careers. What would the average voter thing of a person or party who took Chinese money while they were releasing a world wide pandemic? This is one of the issues where everyone has a vested interest in the outcome so we may never know the truth.
Yeah Right,
“Science” is not infallible. This cult-like adherence to justifying one’s position stating that it is based on science is the new deflection.
Many governors and Biden keep justifying the use of “science” for the lockdowns and the reopening plan. The fact is the “Scientists” got it all wrong with their projections of deaths. Their models were incorrect. The fact is no one really knows the origins of the virus, how it spreads and infects and debilitates humans at a level of detailed consistent explanation. I’ve read reports of cases rising at universities but no one hospitalized. Then there are leaked emails of the mayor of Nashville ordering suppression of data showing minimal infection from bars & restaurants to justify the destruction of all those small businesses. I recall the mantra two more weeks to flatten the curve. We need to lockdown to avoid overwhelming hospitals. Then it became we need to continue destroying small businesses because cases are rising but now ignoring that hospitals remain practically empty. There is so much diversity of opinion among scientists too. The bottom line is that large parts of the world economy have been destroyed due to the nebulous “science”.
Whatever the case may be. This virus originated in China. The CCP needs to be held accountable. The best approach is decoupling. Moving supply chains out of China. IMO, the CCP’s main vulnerability is in its financial system.
Diana Croissant
The Halabja incident occurred during the Iran-Iraq War. By the time of the US invasion of the country in 2003 they did not. The US and friends had stripped the country of that capability through inspections and destruction of surrendered materiel. See “Drinking the Koolaid.”
Reminder, the “flatten the curve” argument was never offered as a cure or even a case number reduction.
It merely projected the same number of cases, but over a longer period of time so as to allegedly not overwhelm any health care facilities, per the flawed Italian model that really had to relevance to the numbers and response capacity of US health care facilities.
Covid became the global equivalent of the childhood “telephone game” where the original message got distorted beyond belief, once it passed though many hands for any number of ulterior purposes.
Considering the economic impact, the human costs and disruption to the entire world, we still do not even know the most basic information about this condition.
And by now we should, but it was exploited early and often for such political gain that someone like Biden can make his outrageous statements yesterday and not get one murmur of pushback. There is your biggest clue about “covid”.
The biggest takeaway is “big government” solves nothing and often makes things worse. Don’t put any money or votes on more big government. CDC and NIH proved they are not far removed from the former incompetence of the VA health care delivery system.
If only there was a way to actually audit all the massive government agencies for their mission and investment value, but they are so vast and murky all they do is suck out tax dollars and leave us with the current mess we are in today with their mixed messaging, and total failure to competently gather data and plot a coherent response forward.
US “big government” has been exposed as a total fail. Glad we were at least able to win WWII, but that coordinated model had a very short shelf life. Nor did states pick up the slack. Perhaps, the message of this moment still remains buried and can only join the ranks of the Great Tulip Bubble, the South Seas Bubble and the Albanian Ponzi Scheme.
Things like this just happen – somehow at some level the “world” knew it needed a breather, a time out, a resetting of a values system careening out of control. Just like all prior wars offered in the past. Some sort of psychic catharsis at great human cost.
But the more I observe the more I conclude, this was never really about “covid”. I will leave it at that. And let the historical winners write the final chapters long after I will be gone. ‘Covid” is now a bell that cannot be unrung.
ponderer
A commentator on this forum whose name escapes me at the moment observed several months ago that the best way to breed pathogens is to infect ferrets and then select for the desired attributed; no application of gene splicing or CRISPR would be needed here.
In an interview in Persian, an expert virologist stated: “Welcome to biological warfare.” although she also stated that she had no evidence.
Massachusetts population: 6.893 million.
Covid cases: 126,000
Deaths: 9260
Victoria, Australia, population: 6.651 million.
Covid cases: 20,012
Deaths : 750.
I’ll take the scientific approach with a side order of lockdowns thank you.
walrus
Come on! Australia is a hell of a lot more spread out in its population than Massachusetts.
Col. Lang,
Melbourne (pop. 4968000) is bigger than Los Angeles (pop. 4015940). Most of Australia’s population is concentrated in a few big cities.
@Travis (second post)
This virologist verifies what has been published before — the virus has been altered through “gain of function” research to alter a bat virus to uniquely attack humans. I do not know how she would know that the CCP authorized this attack. I recall that this research was backed by the CDC. I suspect she is being used to further other agendas — or at least the possibility must be considered.
The Nature articles espousing the theory that the virus naturally evolved has been attacked by Trump defenders for the authors’ links to Chinese government-funded research just as the article posted today also has obvious problems of being biased research sponsored by political groups.
The Hong Kong researcher also loses a lot of credibility when she tries to claim the bioweapon theory as fact. It is viable, but quite weak for the obvious reasons of lack of lethality, poor transmission in open air, and rapid weakening of the virus strain.
I regard the following 4 part series as a reasonable source:
https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-series/
Summary:
I regard a chinese engineered hand as unlikely. So does the author. I do have a background in theoretical Biophysics, including mathematical modelling on epidemics (I was constantly wondering if the “authorities” were looking at drastically different data sets then I was/am, and as why they werent doing things by the book like Vietnam, South Korea et al.).
Essentially, my view is that Covid emerged when RaTG13-CoV (a virus that usually infects bats) infected a Pangolin, which was already infected with Pangolin Coronavirus. Recombination happened, and RaTG13-CoV picked up a corona virus spike protein. Due to some rotten luck, this resulted in being capable of efficiently infecting humans.
Viral recombination is how new viruses emerge in nature. While this is rare, there are a lot of viruses right now that recombine and fail.
If you look at the ratio between nucleotide changes and amino acid changes (combinations of 3 nucleotides code for 1 amino acid, there are 64 possible nucleotide combinations, of which 61 encode amino acids, and 20ish amino acids in most case so you can have nucleotide changes without amino acid changes) between covids closest known relative and covid also look natural, although an artificially enginnered virus can be made to look natural.
Another reason why I think a zoonitic spillover is likely is that the Chinese performed serological tests for antibodies against bat coronavirus in 2018 and 2019 before corona flared up, and found seroprevalence of anti bat covid antibodies of up to 3% in some rural areas. Antibodies to bat covid viruses wane fairly quickly, so this is a signficiant percentage.
This research was done quite publically, as an attempt to understand and rate possible threats from zoonitic coronaviruses. If this was part of the bioweapon research thing, the Chinese would not have published this in public databases.
To quote the author:
”
Hundreds of millions of people live in rural China, so every year millions of people are probably infected by bat coronaviruses. The overwhelming majority of those infections never result in a pandemic because those viruses are not very good at infecting humans and/or the people who are infected never transmit them to someone else because they live in low-density areas. (Even with SARS-CoV-2, which is quite good at infecting humans and for which most cases are located in densely populated areas, the vast majority of infections are a dead-end.) However, if a person contracts a bat coronavirus that has mutated to become particularly efficient at infecting humans, and if that person then travels to a densely populated area while contagious, then you have a pandemic. Of course, such a chain of events is evidently very unlikely or we’d be dealing with pandemics all the time. But if millions of people are infected by bat coronaviruses every year in China, then outbreaks will inevitably occur from time to time. This has been made significantly more likely by economic development and urbanisation, both of which have led to human encroachment on the habitat of bats and increased circulation between rural and urban areas.”
Walrus,
Massachusetts, while resting in what is a blue sea of liberalism, is not an island like Australia.
“I’ll take the scientific approach with a side order of lockdowns thank you.”
Enjoy the tyranny while it is happening to your fellow Aussies, I’m sure they’ll come for you last.