COVID-19/Origins

COVID-19/Origins
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The origins of COVID-19 continue to be a matter of heated debate.

The origins of COVID-19 remain uncertain. It was first publicly identified in December 2019 after an outbreak in Wuhan, a city which houses China's only BSL4 facility. The official narrative put out in early 2020 was that the virus emerged spontaneously by zoonotic transmission. In April 2020, an official opposition narrative was promoted by Western commercially-controlled media that implicated the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Original official narrative

The official narrative about the origins of the virus, which Ronnie Cummins termed the "lone bat" theory was that it occurred naturally by zoonosis. It was linked this to a seafood market, although a Lancet paper reported that three out of the first four patients had no known connection to it.

Through March 2020 the generally implicit assumption of Western commercially-controlled media was that the virus originated naturally in Wuhan. Alternative suggestions were pretty consistently referred to as "conspiracy theories" and Twitter censored Zero Hedge for challenging it.

A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin

On 3 February 2020 Nature carried this paper, which stated that "2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus". All 29 authors were Chinese, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The corresponding author was Zheng-Li Shi, who co-conceived the study.

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

In March 2020 Nature published a paper entitled The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 which concluded that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible" and that "SARS-CoV-2 originated via natural selection".

Response

ZeroHedge carried a response by 'Harvard2TheBigHouse' that criticised it as discounting the possibility of unnatural selection, i.e. not gene editing but use of ferrets to try to weaponise it.

Official Research In WIV

"The findings presented in this study serve as the first example of host switching achievable for G2b CoVs under laboratory conditions by the exchange of a relatively small sequence segment among these previously unknown CoVs." In plain English: virologists messing with a human-SARS-CoV (2002) and a bat-SL(SARS-Like)-CoV succeded in artificially making the bat virus infectious for humans - by inserting a small piece of the genome from SARS-CoV into the (bat) SL-CoV.

That is not to say that the Chinese are the only ones who can do that. The paper from 2007 explains the process so openly and detailed, as to enable other labs to reproduce and test their effords.

Official opposition narrative

In April 2020, the official narrative changed from chance zoonotic emergence in November or December 2019 to conscious production in the Wuhan Institute for Virology at an earlier date.

Wuhan Institute for Virology

In Evidenceemerged that suggested the virus may in fact have a connection to the WIV.A report in Fox News in April 2020 claimed that "There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon".

Evidence cited included the claim that "China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s – the only other regions with high-level virology labs." In January 2018, "the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)", warning of inadequate safety procedures.

Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, who discovered HIV in 1983 said that he did not believe that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus not the disease) was naturally occurring.

Earlier origins?

A story in the Daily Mail in April 2020 mentioned 3 types (A, B & C) AND suggested that the virus may have emerged as early as September 2019, and not in Wuhan.

Test detects SARS-like viruses that preexisted worldwide before Wuhan

Corona viruses are detected by a probability based method. Viruses mutate constantly and a window has to be defined, in which a common denominator can be found. This window has been defined in such a way that preexisting viruses were detected. The test was developed by German government adviser Christian Drosten from Robert Koch Institute.

"We are currently not measuring the incidence of coronavirus diseases, but the activity of the specialists searching for them." says Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg. "Without Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) Tests there would be no reason for special alarms". Coronaviruses are anything but 'novel'. nCoV-2019 shares 79% of its genome with SARS-CoV from 2002 and binds to the same receptors in humans.

US origin??

In January 2020 Zhong Nanshan challenged the assumption that the disease began in China and Chinese spokesman Lijian Zhao accused the US in a twitter post: "It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!"

July 2019 - Fort Detrick suhtdown

In July 2019 the CDC issued Fort Detrick (which the FBI concluded was the source of the anthrax used for the Amerithrax event) with a “cease and desist order” which shut it down for months.

August 2019 - EVALI

In August 2019, an new illness emerged in the US which was named EVALI (e-cigarette/vaping -associated lung injury). "The EVALI and other respiratory viruses share similar symptoms, including shortness of breath, night sweats, low oxygen levels, and hazy spots on a lung X-ray, statnews.com reported, quoting experts, who mentioned the difficulty to "tease apart a bad flu case and a vaping case.""

The illness was reported as "a U.S.-specific phenomenon” that began in Illinois and Wisconsin in April 2019. "The first death from a vaping-related illness was reported Aug 23 in Illinois."

“Patients, mostly otherwise healthy and in their late teens and 20s, are showing up with severe shortness of breath, often after suffering for several days with vomiting, fever and fatigue. Some have wound up in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator for weeks. Treatment has been complicated by patients’ lack of knowledge — and sometimes outright denial — about the actual substances they might have used or inhaled.”
'

It "sharply increasing in August 2019 and peaking in September". It was blamed on suspect vaping products. As of October 15, 2019, the CDC had reported on 1,358 people with data on age, of whom about 2/3 were male. The median age was 24 and although the median age of fatality was around 50 years.

January 2020 - CDC & FBI prohibit contact testing for COVID-19

The CDC explicitly prohibited epidemiologist Helen Chu from testing contacts of the first known case in Washington state. A paper in the New England Journal of Medicine dates the first US COVID-19 cases as a man who arrived there from Wuhan on 19 January 2020.

February 2020 Haplotype research

In February 2020 research indicated that the US was the only location with all 5 different haplotypes, suggesting that it may have been the origin of the virus.

Miscategorisation of flu deaths

On 13 March 2020, CDC Director, Robert Redfield testified to the US Congress that COVID-19 deaths had been miscategorised as the flu. This inspired questions from China, which were not answered.

Bioweapon?

Francis Boyle on Coronavirus Bioweapon

Various factors have been cited as suggestive that the event may have been a bioweapon.

Brian T. Kennedy, chair of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, has tweeted and re-tweeted a large number of Tweets, (some from corporate media with connections to the Committee), claiming the virus originates from a Chinese biological weapons program.

Francis Boyle stated in an interview for GreatGameIndia in February 2020 that he believed the virus is a bioweapon. In a March 2020 update, Prof Boyle said he believes COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan BSL-4 lab. He believes the virus is a biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with gain of function properties, which is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up. The Wuhan facility is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.

The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus

On 6 February 2020 ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. It noted that “In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”

Lawsuit

Wuhan lawyer Liang Xuguang filed a lawsuit with the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court against the US Government, CDC, the U.S. Department of Defense and the US Armed Forces Sports Council, alleging that "From Sept. 2019 to Mar. 2020, the U.S. Government and the CDC knowingly disclosed the wrong public health information in the name of “influenza”, seeking around US$28,000 in damages.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2023	“A majority of U.S. intelligence agencies has so far concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic mostly likely started when SARS-CoV-2 jumped from an infected animal host into people; a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, has received intense attention from researchers as the potential source. But the Department of Energy and FBI so far have favored the so-called lab-leak hypothesis, even though none of the agencies has expressed high confidence in their conclusions on COVID-19’s origin. CIA, for example, had reportedly said it was “unable to determine” whether SARS-CoV-2 made a direct jump from animals to humans—or came from a lab. Now, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R–OH), who chairs the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, says his panel and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower “who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer.” According to the press release, the whistleblower testified that only the most senior analyst of a seven-member CIA team investigating the origin of COVID-19 supported the zoonotic transmission theory. The whistleblower alleged the other six team members supporting the lab origin then received “a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” wrote Wenstrup and Representative Mike Turner (R–OH), who chairs the intelligence panel.”	Jon Cohen	September 2023
David Baltimore	“When I first saw the furin cleavage site <a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a> in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. (...) These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”	David Baltimore
Biological weapon	“The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus features a so-called furin cleavage site (FCS), which makes the virus more infectious and virulent than it would otherwise be. Such an FCS is not known in any other SARS-like coronavirus, but it is often inserted as part of gain-of-function studies in virus research. However, similar FCS are known to occur in non-SARS-like coronaviruses, hence a natural origin cannot be excluded based on this. The furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 uses an arginine (amino acid) double codon, which is rather rare in natural coronaviruses, but quite common in engineered viruses used in lab experiments (...)”
CIA	“A majority of U.S. intelligence agencies has so far concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic mostly likely started when SARS-CoV-2 jumped from an infected animal host into people; a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, has received intense attention from researchers as the potential source. But the Department of Energy and FBI so far have favored the so-called lab-leak hypothesis, even though none of the agencies has expressed high confidence in their conclusions on COVID-19’s origin. CIA, for example, had reportedly said it was “unable to determine” whether SARS-CoV-2 made a direct jump from animals to humans—or came from a lab. Now, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R–OH), who chairs the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, says his panel and the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower “who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer.” According to the press release, the whistleblower testified that only the most senior analyst of a seven-member CIA team investigating the origin of COVID-19 supported the zoonotic transmission theory. The whistleblower alleged the other six team members supporting the lab origin then received “a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” wrote Wenstrup and Representative Mike Turner (R–OH), who chairs the intelligence panel.”	Jon Cohen	September 2023
COVID-19/Censorship	“If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen. The Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.””	Nicholson Baker	4 January 2021
Marie-Eve Carignan	“Early findings show that there really is a rapid uptake of different conspiracy theories, particularly in the United States and France. Similar theories about other diseases that took years to establish themselves only took a few weeks to take hold, super quickly, because people are absorbing so much information! That’s what’s alarming.”	Marie-Eve Carignan	5 April 2020
Francis Collins	“Some folks are even making outrageous claims that the new coronavirus causing the pandemic was engineered in a lab and deliberately released to make people sick. A new study debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally... next time you come across something about COVID-19 online that disturbs or puzzles you, I suggest going to FEMA’s new Coronavirus Rumor Control web site. It may not have all the answers to your questions, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction in helping to distinguish rumors from facts.”	Francis Collins	8 April 2020
Jonathan Jay Couey	“I think that the origins of the virus was a lab leak drama. Probably there was a bioweapon in the beginning to seed everything because that would be necessary, but I don't think there is any evidence for a virus that has gone around the world for 3 years. And the PCR tests and the sequences are not evidence of that... we don't have any of that data from pre 2020, so you don't know whether those sequences could have been found in 2019, 18, 17, 16 because no one was looking.”	Jonathan Jay Couey	8 February 2023
Peter Daszak	“The point is that, let’s look at a balance of probability. That’s what you have to do. We have a few hundred technicians and scientists working in these labs. They do not have a problem with staff or with security or with loose controls. These are very well-run labs. They’ve been inspected by the U.S. CDC, by people working in BSL-4 labs, high-security labs, in the U.S., in France and internationally. They’re accredited by the U.S. So, it’s ironic that now we’re saying they’re not very well organized. We actually inspected them properly and allowed them to open. You know, the cables that were reported in the — [interrupted]”	Peter Daszak	16 April 2020
Peter Daszak	<nowiki>“Instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, [[[Peter Daszak]]] immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses.”</nowiki>	Peter Daszak	2021
Peter Daszak	“Well I think... coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”	Peter Daszak	9 December 2019
EcoHealth Alliance	“Once we’ve got a good group of around 20 well-known people, I will then circulate this via social media and email, with a link to a webserver for others in the greater science community (and interested public) to sign on to this statement. I will then present this to the ISID meeting in KL, Malaysia in 2 weeks and I think we’ll get a big impact from that community and it should then take off. Please note that this statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person, the idea is to have this as a community supporting our colleagues.”	Peter Daszak	6 February 2020
Event 201	“My team has been monitoring the public response. And on various social media channels and cable networks, there's been some conspiracy theories that are around about the potential that pharmaceutical companies or the UN have released this for their own benefit. So as we move forward, obviously, trust in pharmaceuticals and government is very important at this moment. And so as we move forward with developing the right scenarios, we have to make sure that the public communication is a major part of that because of these conspiracy theories.”		18 October 2019
Muammar Gaddafi	“They will create the viruses themselves and sell you the antidotes. Thereafter, they will pretend to take time to find the solution when they already have it.”	Muammar Gaddafi	September 2009
Zhengli Shi	“The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits. I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory. I advise those who believe and spread rumors from harmful media sources, as well as those who believe the unreliable so-called academic analysis of Indian scholars, to shut their stinking mouths.”	Zhengli Shi	February 2020

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US	Article	4 March 2020	Larry Romanoff	The varieties of COVID-19 in Iran and Italy have been sequenced and declared to have no part of the variety that infected China and must, by definition, have originated elsewhere.
Document:The Spartacus COVID-19 Letter	Article	28 September 2021	Institute for Coronavirus Emergence Nonprofit Intelligence	The Spartacus Letter - Rev. 2 (2021-09-28) Spartacus

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