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This should be their flag from now on, forever. The BFD.

As writer David Cole has pointed out, the evidence for the theory that COVID-19 was engineered in the Wuhan lab remains elusive. So far, all we have is coincidence and possibility. A smoking gun is yet to be found – even if there’s a distinct whiff of gunpowder in the air.

But the chain of coincidences linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology just keeps getting longer and more troubling.

The latest winds all the way to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

It’s the last place on Earth you would expect to have developed ties with Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who, in turn, are engaging in secret Chinese military activity.

An investigation by The Australian has revealed senior personnel at USAMRIID — its chief science officer, a laboratory director, a former commander and a research contractor — have been involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even visiting its laboratories where risky research on coronaviruses took place.

The WIV has also been strongly tied to the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (as it happens, a stone’s throw from where I grew up). In a sense, this might be considered normal: scientists around the world regularly share research and collaborate.

On the other hand, this is China we’re talking about. These latest revelations highlight, yet again, the dangerous naiveté of Western scientists, governments and even military, when it comes to dealing with China.

Chinese scientists are known to have engaged in intellectual property theft on a staggering scale. China even had an official program for stealing research: the “Thousand Talents” program. Chinese scientists have been repeatedly caught smuggling biological material out of Western countries. The WIV was also conducting secret research for the Chinese military.

Despite all of that, scientists from USAMRIID were regularly dealing with the WIV, as were other top American public health officials.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has come under pressure for providing $US13m in funding to a not-for-profit organisation, EcoHealth, with $US598,500 funnelled through to the Wuhan Institute of Virology[…]

The emergence of various scientific links have shed light on the reticence in the scientific community to call for an investigation into a possible laboratory origin for Covid-19 throughout 2020.

We know for a fact that the WIV was researching coronaviruses in bats. Right up until the first days of the pandemic, the lab was recruiting researchers in that area. Leading the research was and is “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli. In early November 2019, Shi was given permission by the Chinese government to conduct risky experiments with “highly pathogenic organisms”.

In late 2019, Shi attended an annual emerging infectious diseases conference in Mozambique. USAMRIID scientists attended, as was normal practise.

But things were about to get far from normal.

A week later, on September 12, the Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database was taken offline. It has not been published since and has not been made available to World Health Organisation investigators, who did not ask for it during their Wuhan visit earlier this year. Shi has claimed the virus database was taken offline after 3000 hacking attempts.

Last Friday, the Wuhan Institute of Virology disclosed the ­genomic sequences of eight new viruses that were the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight and ninth genetically closest ­viruses to SARS-CoV-2. Their full sequences were only disclosed on May 21, even though the viruses were obtained from a mine in ­Mojiang in 2015 – the same mine where RaTG13, a virus that shares a 96 per cent sequence identity with Covid-19, was found.

That mine remains resolutely closed off by the Chinese military. Foreign journalists are driven off with vague warnings about “rogue elephants” in the area. A foreign journalist who reached the mine – which was sealed up and overgrown – was arrested, detained and had his recording devices confiscated.

In 2017, a former commander at USAMRIID participated in a workshop with the Wuhan Institute’s top scientists, including Shi.

Gain-of-function research, laboratory risks and gene editing were key topics during the conference held from May 17-19.

Shi and George F. Gao, the ­director at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, gave presentations at the conference.

But the entanglement of the Shi, the Wuhan lab, the Chinese military and the US’ biological defense agency goes much further.

The editorial board of Shi’s journal consists of People’s Liberation Army members, a virologist who was kicked out of Canada for ­security breaches, the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control, many esteemed international scientists and two employees at USAMRIID[…]

One concerned member of the editorial board is award-winning virologist Xiangguo Qiu, who was escorted out of a Canadian laboratory in July 2019 after being caught sending deadly virus samples back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Qiu, her husband Kedin Cheng and her students from China were removed from Canada’s only BSL-4 laboratory amid an official investigation.

Four months earlier, a shipment containing highly virulent viruses — ebola and nipah — were sent from her laboratory to China. It was reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had requested the shipment.

Chemical and biological warfare specialist Dany Shoham, from the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, wrote an article claiming Qiu had made at least five trips over the academic year 2017-18 alone to the Wuhan ­National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Qiu had also done joint ­research with USAMRIID on ebola, which was received by ­Nature in October 2018.

Former officers and scientists at USAMRIID are at pains to try and distance themselves from the risky research at Wuhan and the regime of theft by Chinese scientists. “They may have friends [at Wuhan],” says one, but strenuously denies collaboration.

Fort Detrick scientists became the suspected victims of intellectual property theft from scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The theft in question was of an anti-viral compound called GS-5734: better known as Remdesivir, touted as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The patent for commercial use of Remdesivir was filed in China. The application was made by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The institute lodged the patent application on January 21, 2020 — one day after China confirmed human-to-human transmission of the virus.

The Australian

So, there’s still no proof that the virus was engineered at the Wuhan lab, but we have means, motive and opportunity – and a distinct smell of gunpowder.

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