A 2018 State Department cable noted “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory . . .the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.”
Any suggestion that a Wuhan lab may have been involved in the origin of the COVID-19 coronavirus has been treated as a dangerous conspiracy theory that results rapid removal of offenders from Twitter and other social media.
Are the State Department, the Washington Post, and Fox News risking permanent banishment?
In spite of the condemnation in most of the media, 30% of Americans believed that the virus came from a lab in a recent poll. Is that number ready to grow?
The truth of the source of this virus will eventually come out.? Did it come from nature…or did it come from man? If it’s man made, was it released with a purpose? If so, what was that purpose? As far out as this sounds, I wonder if the answer could potentially lead to WW III?
My opinion is that the evidence all points to an accidental release from a Wuhan lab. There has been a history of dangerous gain-of-function research that is intended to understand how to deal with possible future naturally occurring diseases, but that research involve creating new viruses that can infect humans.
That article says it could have been released from a lab that studies existing coronaviruses in bats and that was open to US scientists and diplomats. That is very very different than the conspiracy theories I’ve seen that the virus was manufactured as a bioweapon.
I am waiting for the media to flip from “lab origin is a crazy conspiracy theory” to “Trump was an idiot to believe the Chinese government and ignore the State Department’s clear warning”.
Yes, my opinion is that virus came from a lab but was not intended as a bioweapon.
Scientists in the US and China have been doing gain-of-function research by combining features of naturally occurring coronaviruses. The idea of the work is to understand virus better, but the work involves developing dangerous strains that can infect humans. Here is one example with a lead author from the University of North Carolina and co-authors from a lab in Wuhan, China:
My opinion, is the COVID-19 is the result of an accidental release of a similar virus.
Work in Wuhan involving coronaviruses was no secret, and there are reports the US government actually spent $3.7 million to fund research that brought bat coronaviruses from remote parts of China back to Wuhan for laboratory study. Lab origin and natural origin are not mutually exclusive.
It does if it offends Xi-who-must-not-be-named or the left-wing establishment:
Here are some of its offenses: the blog is still publishing panic-inducing stories about the coronavirus, like one entitled: “‘Corpses Taken Directly To Crematorium’ - New Accounts Detail Grisly Operation At Wuhan’s Fifth Hospital.”
. . .The more people listen to conspiracy theories, the more they panic, the more credence it gives to other conspiracy theorists that claim the virus was created by the Trump administration to distract us from the impeachment trial, and so on.
Any reporting that actually burst our blissful complacency or distracted from more important matters such as the bogus impeachment trial must be silenced! That was the party line at the end of January.
Perhaps Zerohedge’s real crime was it got the coronavirus story right while the rest of the media was still blathering about why the flu is really much more dangerous.
the worst case scenario is that the lab, which experiments with corona-virus’ was injecting animals with this version from horseshoe bats (which are from about 600 miles away from Wuhan) and once studied, idiot workers at the facility were selling the animals to the wet market.
