From early on in the Wuhan Plague, anyone who expressed even the slightest suspicion that the virus might have escaped from the virology institute next door to the “wet market” was loudly denounced as a crazy, right-wing conspiracy theorist. Dare to suggest that it might be the result of a Chinese bio-weapons program gone awry and you might as well be Alex Jones in a foil hat, gibbering about gay frogs.
Except that, more and more, the evidence (scant as it is) points exactly in that direction.
As usual, independent media have been light-years ahead of the “curated media” in breaking the story. It was nearly a year ago that The BFD reported on the groundbreaking investigative work of YouTuber laowhy86, which revealed that, just a month before the outbreak in Wuhan, the virology lab there was recruiting researchers to study coronaviruses in bats. Laowhy was also one of the independent media to reveal that the suspected “Patient 0”, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology named Huang Yanling, had been “disappeared”. A year later, all that now exists of her is a blurry face in a group photo of lab workers.
Slowly, the legacy media and officialdom are catching on.
Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers working on coronaviruses were hospitalised with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in early November 2019 in what US officials suspect could have been the first cluster.
The US is also examining whether the institute developed SARS-COV-2 while working on a coronavirus vaccine.
The US State Department’s former lead investigator into the origins of COVID-19, David Asher, said the possibility could not be ruled out that the vaccine was being developed as an “antidote” to a bioweapon.
Who are the crazy conspiracy theorists, now? In fact, it’s getting to the stage where denying, as the WHO does, any link at all between China’s virus research program and the emergence of the devastating pandemic in Wuhan in 2019 requires more foil-hat denialism than simply following the trail of such evidence that China hasn’t already destroyed or covered up.
This isn’t “crazy” Donald Trump shooting his mouth off, either.
Mr Asher, who has served under both Republican and Democrat administrations, has previously led US government investigations into biological, chemical and nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea.
He said US intelligence that has now been declassified, along with information from public sources, has credibly confirmed that three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in early to mid-November 2019, prior to the official start of the pandemic.
Their illness was consistent with both COVID-19 and influenza and, in his personal assessment, was the likely cause of the outbreak[…]
Then comes the money shot:
A week ago, Mr Asher told Fox News that in his opinion, COVID-19 may have been a bioweapon […]
“There is a high probability the Chinese government was engaged in a weaponisation effort at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutes involving coronavirus research,” Mr Asher said. “Whether offence or defence, which is almost impossible to tell, it was 100 per cent undeclared and that is a serious violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and the WHO International Health Regs — to the extent it spilled out and over somehow.”
Looking at photos of the shoddy equipment at the lab, released before Beijing hurriedly moved to try and disappear them, and considering the lab’s proximity to an unhygienic “wet market” crowded with exotic animals awaiting slaughter, it would be a miracle if a bioweapon didn’t escape.
Mr Asher said one theory on the table was that COVID-19 emerged during vaccine development, potentially even as an antidote to a bioweapon. “There’s evidence[…]that there was adenovirus present in the sequences posted publicly,” Mr Asher said.
“Adenovirus means that there was a vaccine present for COVID-19; that could indicate that this was a bio-defence project putting a vaccine together.
“People don’t normally develop a vaccine for something they are working on. That doesn’t make any sense … to develop a vaccine in advance for something that would never see the light of day makes it sort of ridiculous but is totally consistent with a biological weapons program. They develop an antidote.”
The Australian
In the meantime, the WHO is keeping its tongue firmly wedged ‘twixt Xi Jinping’s arse-cheeks. Its carefully curated “investigative mission” to Wuhan last month was an obvious farce.
Above all, surveying the economic havoc and reckless trampling of democratic freedoms in the West, the simple point remains:
Maybe China didn’t deliberately engineer and release the virus, but – how would things have turned out any different, if they had?
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