The fairy tale of the origins of covid
Lynn Baber is a behavioral science expert and author of six bestsellers. In her article “The Best Ways to Sell a Lie” Lynn Baber explains that the best way to make someone believe a false story is to hide it as if it were an unspeakable truth.
We are in Virginia at the beginning of 2016, in a room of an office building there are a half dozen of marketing experts sitting around a table. A man in a blue suit enters the room and says: “Your task today is to develop a proposal for an advertising campaign.”
“The campaign in question serves to promote a product that doesn’t exist but no one should know about it.” So what you’re being asked is “how do we get the public to assume that a certain product exists when it doesn’t?” The man in the suit looks at the faces of the candidates called to solve that advertising puzzle. Then he approaches the door and as he is about to open it he says: “you have three hours to develop your proposals!” But as he opens the door and is about to leave one of the guys sitting at the table gets up and says: “I have the solution!” The man in the suit turns his head with his hand still on the doorknob to look at the face of the person who answered. Then he closes the door and returns to the center of the room and looks into the eyes of the guy who raised his hand and spoke. It’s a young advertiser, he’s still standing and says: “let’s open an endless debate on the origins of the product!”. The man narrows his eyes at him as if to observe him better and the boy continues: “If we have to make something exist that doesn’t exist, we just need to take its existence for granted…. we continually talk about the origin or birth of that product..where it comes from, how it was made, who made it… this way people will focus on where it comes from and take it for granted that the product exists….” The man in the suit is now standing still in the middle of the room with his arms folded and looks again at the boy. He smirks.
This is the reconstruction of how things probably went when the covid 19 project managers had to prepare the framework for the covid perception management operations.
And the idea they developed to hide the truth was simply brilliant. Together with the narrative of the deadly virus, they have activated a parallel narrative on the “origins” of the virus, committing enormous resources to this story: political, military, healthcare, scientific and obviously the media. By engaging a large part of public opinion on the origins of a thing, it is taken for granted that that thing exists. That’s all. Therefore, the story of the origins of Covid 19 was the story that, more than scientific studies, supported the existence of a virus that never existed. Just type #originsofcovid
Not only. The origin story of the virus was carefully planned according to the timing of the revelation system, used in the narrative structure of Hollywood screenplays. In fact, every story produced in Hollywood is based on a system of progressive revelations. On the one hand we have the official “truth”: in this case the virus passing from bats to humans. On the other hand we have a conspiracy narrative of a dangerous virus that escaped from a laboratory while a mad scientist was developing biological weapons.
At the beginning it is just a conspiracy theory, then this theory is fueled by suspicions, then clues are revealed, then evidence and voilà, what is the lie of the millennium is perceived by the public as the revealed Truth. And whoever runs the show doesn’t have to worry about which theory will prevail over the other because it will still be a lie. The important thing is not to ignore the fact that the virus exists and originated in China. Escape from the laboratory or bats makes no difference. In any case, they are both lies because the virus does not exist.
What absolutely should not have been discovered was the fact that there was no new virus in circulation, so the strategy was to hide the biggest lie and this was only possible by focusing public attention on the origins of the virus. If you focus on the origins of the virus, you assume that the virus exists. The imagination they put into this operation is unprecedented:
We went from the story that the United States created the virus at Fort Detrick, a US Army base in Frederick, Maryland, and brought it to Wuhan during the 2019 World Games to that China created COVID-19 to use it as a bioweapon and then leaked from the Wuhan laboratories where it was being developed.
Regarding the goal of the virus, two narratives emerged: the first was that the virus was created by the US to weaken its adversaries and destroy the Chinese economy in the context of the trade war between the two countries. The second was that COVID 19 was a genetically modified biochemical weapon to target and eradicate specific ethnic groups. Supporters of the latter theory claimed that the weapon was created in a US-funded laboratory in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus or in North Carolina (USA). Some believed the target was ethnic Chinese, others believed Iranians. All these narratives were even grouped together in a study carried out by none other than the Atlantic Council, a US think tank supporting NATO’s military activities.
Since the beginning of the pandemic farce, the regime has claimed that the origin of the disease known as Covid 19 was in China, in the city of Wuhan where, as is known, the United States had financed and installed epidemiological research laboratories. From the beginning, the regime’s narrative denied that the origin of Covid 19 occurred due to an escape from these American research laboratories, claiming that the virus had actually been transmitted from bats to humans.
As in many other operations known as psyop, the denial of a story actually serves to affirm it. Human beings adore the process of knowledge through the logical-deductive path and a conspiracy theory that later turns out to be correct constitutes great satisfaction for the biped who is believed to be its discoverer. The problem here is that the conspiracy theory was conceived from the beginning by those forces who had an interest in claiming that a dangerous virus threatened and infected billions of people.
So how do you ensure that a story that doesn’t stand up can even be claimed by those who are the recipients of it?It’s very simple: you deny it with all possible force.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, the US government has vehemently maintained that the story of the origin of Covid as a virus that escaped from a laboratory was absolutely out of the question but at the same time it was insinuating into public opinion the idea that the virus had been created by US government in an attempt to develop a biological weapon. The idea of mad scientist Anthony Fauci engaging in a dark government program was compelling. The manipulation strategy is always the same: two opposing factions are created: one which supports the animal origin of the virus, an opinion supported by the US government in the figure of Senator Tom Cotton, the other, the conspiracy theory of the escape from the laboratory supported by a member of the fake opposition: Rand Paul. It doesn’t matter which one the public believes because they are both false.
Americans are masters in the art of lying, just think of September 11, the tale of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the fake images of the moon landing and so on. The last gigantic lie was that of the covid 19 virus. It took ten months (from the publication in Eurosurveillance on 23 January 2020 of the study known as Corman Drosten, in which the German virologist Christian Drosten claimed to have isolated the SARS CoV 2 virus) to discover that it was a scam. Christian Drosten is the biologist responsible for developing the Covid 19 test by the World Health Organization. In order to develop the test of Covid 19, he needed a virus sample, an isolate to take as gold standard for developing the test. Although Victor Corman his associate claims that the Chinese government never provided Drosten a patient specimen but only a genomic sequence in digital format: “We aimed to develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratory settings without having virus material available.”
On November 30, 2020, the team of Dutch biologist Pieter Borger published Borger et al, the study that practically dismantled the entire narrative of covid 19 by challenging Drosten’s entire epidemiological architecture of the alleged virus known as SARS CoV 2.
In reality, there would not have even been a need to bother Pieter Borger and his wonderful assistants, among whom there are the best biologists in the world, to understand that something was wrong with Drosten’s architecture. In fact, if you read Drosten’s study, Christian Drosten himself admits that “the covid test was designed in absence of available virus isolates or original patient specimens. Design and validation were enabled by the close genetic relatedness to the 2003 SARS-CoV and aided by the use of synthetic nucleic acid technology”
To learn more about the Corman Drosten scam we invite you to read the article The SARS CoV2 never existed and The Corman-Drosten disaster put the word end on the Covid-19 pantomime.
This story is truly extraordinary because it gives us the measure of the mental state of human beings living on this planet. No one bothered to go read the Corman Drosten, in which Drosten candidly stated that he had never had the virus at his disposal and that for developing the covid test he relied on his 2003 study of SARS. But no one has ever even bothered to read the 2003 SARS study Drosten et al, upon which the entire architecture of restrictions put in place by governments around the world was based.
If you read Drosten et al, a 2003 study concerning the virus that should cause SARS, you are literally baffled, because what Drosten states in the RESULTS section of his study of the same name is that the conclusion of the aforementioned study is that:
1) the virus isolated by Drosten has only 50% of the characteristics of a coronavirus
2) Drosten admits that control studies, also known as clinical studies which are essential to verify whether a certain virus causes a certain pathology, have not been conducted. (I remind you that we are talking about the largest epidemic that has ever occurred on this planet)
3) Since the etiological causality necessary to establish whether the virus isolated by Drosten was the cause of SARS was MISSING, the conclusion of Drosten et al is that “the novel coronavirus MIGHT have a role in the cause of SARS”. “It might have a role.”
4) Drosten admits that his is just AN HYPOTHESIS OF A VIRUS
So on November 30, 2020, we already knew that there was no new virus circulating.
Whoever created this story knew very well that the virus story wouldn’t hold up much longer. But he also knew that the majority of people today are skeptical of what they are told by the media and governments and they thought about this too. Any behavioral expert knows that inside every human being there is an investigator and that there is no greater enjoyment for a sentient being than the satisfaction of knowing that what was thought to be true against the dominant opinion is true. Americans in particular suffer from this particular condition that the regime of lies calls “conspiracy theory” ever since common sense or common sense questioned whether Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone.
To defuse any deviation from the dominant narrative, the regime brought out the definition of “conspiracy theorist” for anyone who tried to doubt the fact that President Kennedy had been killed by Oswald. It is therefore normal that Americans, having grown up in an environment that is used to nipping any critical thought in the bud, today doubt everything the government tells them. For example, more than 50% of Americans believe that President Bush orchestrated or had advance knowledge of the attacks of September 11, 2001. (Cassino and Jenkins). According to Pew Research, only two in ten Americans trust the federal government.
So those who run the circus here at Shangri-la have done nothing but exploit the public’s distrust of institutions. Easier than stealing a candy from a child.
TIMELINE OF THE FAIRYTALE ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF NOTHING
This timeline made by Glenn Kessler for the Washington Post is very important, because as you read it you must keep in mind the perspective of those who want the story of the deadly virus to absolutely stand. I would like you to read it from the point of view of those who absolutely must prevent the public from discovering that there is no lethal virus in circulation.
Dec. 30, 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issues an “urgent notice” to medical institutions in Wuhan, saying that cases of pneumonia of unknown cause have emerged from the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Jan. 5, 2020: Earliest known tweet suggesting China created the virus. @GarboHK tweeted: “18 years ago, #China killed nearly 300 #HongKongers by unreporting #SARS cases, letting Chinese tourists travel around the world, to Asia specifically to spread the virus with bad intention. Today the evil regime strikes again with a new virus.”
Jan. 23, 2020: A Daily Mail article appears, headlined: “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’ the facility that’s become key in fighting the outbreak.”
Jan. 26, 2020: The Washington Times publishes an article with the headline: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” An editor’s note is added March 25: “Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.”
Jan. 26, 2020: A study by Chinese researchers published in the Lancet of the first 41 hospitalized patients in Wuhan who had confirmed infections found that 13 of the 41 cases, including the first documented case, had no link to the seafood marketplace that originally was considered the origin of the outbreak.
Jan 30, 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, says: “This coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China. But actually, it’s probably worse than Chernobyl, which was localized in its effect. The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic.” He adds: “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
I would like to point out here that the virus taken as a sample by Christian Drosten for the Covid 19 test used throughout the planet is the 2003 SARS CoV, which is not only just a “virus hypothesis” but above all cannot even be defined as a coronavirus .
Feb. 3, 2020: WIV researchers report in the journal Nature that the novel coronavirus spreading around the world was a bat-derived coronavirus. The report said SARS-CoV-2 is 96.2 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus named RaTG13.
It is important here to highlight the fact that RATG13 is exactly like Drosten’s SARS CoV “a virus hypothesis” because in addition to having never been isolated, it is a zoonic betacoronavirus, i.e. limited to animal species. Furthermore, the genomic sequence of the RaTG13 virus exactly as for the SARS CoV 2 scam done by Drosten was reconstructed in silico from metagenomic sampling (i.e. the sampling took place on site and not by cell culture). The technical name for this type of reconstruction is “chimera in silico”, that is, reconstructed by computer. In fact, it has never been confirmed that RaTG13 exists in nature, that it has been cultivated or isolated in any laboratory, much less that it is a viable human pathogen. A live “RaTG13” virus has never been detected in any laboratory sample at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nor in any other laboratory. You therefore understand that this report published in Nature is not only useless but is only functional to the fairytale narrative of this phantom virus that no one sees and no one knows. In the meantime, however, thousands of people in Europe are dying from this virus, how is this possible?
Feb. 6, 2020: Botao Xiao, a molecular biomechanics researcher at South China University of Technology, posts a paper stating that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” He pointed to the previous safety mishaps and the kind of research undertaken at the lab. He withdrew the paper a few weeks later after Chinese authorities insisted no accident had taken place.
Feb. 9, 2020: In response to criticism from China’s ambassador that Cotton’s remarks are “absolutely crazy,” the senator tweets: “Here’s what’s not a conspiracy, not a theory: Fact: China lied about virus starting in Wuhan food market. Fact: super-lab is just a few miles from that market. Where did it start? We don’t know. But burden of proof is on you & fellow communists. Open up now to competent international scientists.”
It should be noted that these comments by Senator Cotton not only take it for granted that the virus exists and that its origin is in China. We’re talking about a United States senator accusing a foreign country of causing a global pandemic without any scientific or other evidence to support it. None.
Feb. 16, 2020: Cotton, in response to a Washington Post article critical of him, offers four scenarios on Twitter: “1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (e.g., they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are ‘theories’ and certainly not ‘conspiracy theories.’ They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence.”
Scientists respond
Feb. 19, 2020: A statement is published in Lancet by a group of 27 scientists: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement says. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The statement was drafted and organized by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at WIV with U.S. government grants. (Three of the signers have since said a laboratory accident is plausible enough to merit consideration.)
This statement is particularly important because these scientists as such know very well that no new virus exists.
March 11, 2020: Scientific American publishes a profile of virologist Shi Zhengli, who heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at WIV. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” The article said that after the virus emerged, Shi frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, but she “breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.” She told the magazine: “That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days.”
March 17, 2020: An analysis published in Nature Medicine by an influential group of scientists states: “Although the evidence shows that SARSCoV-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 [receptor- binding domain] and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
Keep in mind that by Drosten’s own admission, the SARS CoV2 which as we know by Drosten’s own admission is the SARS CoV1 or 2003 SARS CoV has only 50% of the characteristics of coronaviruses, which is not even sufficient to characterize it as such.
The intelligence community weighs in
March 27, 2020: A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment on the origin of the coronavirus is updated to include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged “accidentally” due to “unsafe laboratory practices.”
April 2, 2020: David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, notes: “The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”
April 14, 2020: Josh Rogin, writing in The Post, reveals that in 2018, State Department officials visited the WIV and “sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.”
April 22, 2020: Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur, in a long and detailed post on Medium, reviews “gain-of-function” research undertaken at the lab and concludes that “from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain” as the new coronavirus. He adds: “The opposite point is worth repeating too: the inverse hypothesis about the exclusively natural origin of the virus does not yet have strong evidence either.”
The man in the street loves to learn new expressions that underlie scientific concepts capable of explaining a government conspiracy. “Gain of function” which doesn’t mean shit has filled the mouth of the man in the street making him aware of the true reality behind the pandemic conspiracy. The truth, that there has never been any virus, is much more banal but much more chilling if you consider that poisonous drugs have been tested on billions of unaware people.
April 24, 2020: Under pressure from the White House, the National Institutes of Health terminates the grant to EcoHealth Alliance that funded study of bat coronaviruses at WIV.
April 30, 2020: President Donald Trump tells reporters: “You had the theory from the lab. … There’s a lot of theories. But, yeah, we have people looking at it very, very strongly.”
April 30, 2020: In a rare statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified….The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
[Washington Post article: Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accidental release]
May 3, 2020: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says in an interview with ABC News: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. … Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
May 18, 2020: The Seeker, an anonymous Twitter user, posts a medical thesis describing a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, where miners fell ill with a viral-induced pneumonia in 2012.
June 4, 2020: Milton Leitenberg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the history of lab safety and the type of research conducted at WIV and argues that the lab-leak theory cannot be easily dismissed. “The pros and cons regarding the two alternative possibilities—first, that it arose in the field as a natural evolution, as many virologists maintain, or second, that it may have been the consequence of bat coronavirus research in one of the two virology research institutes located in Wuhan that led to the infection of a laboratory researcher and subsequent escape—are equally based on inference and conjecture,” he says.
New evidence emerges
July 4, 2020: The Times of London reports that a virus 96 percent identical to the coronavirus that causes covid-19 was found in an abandoned copper mine in China in 2012. The bat-infested copper mine in southwestern China was home to a coronavirus that left six men sick with pneumonia, with three eventually dying, after they had been tasked with shoveling bat guano out of the mine. This virus was collected in 2013 and then stored and studied at WIV.
Keep in mind that this article from the Times basically pulls out the fried and refried story that is that of the RaTG13 virus proposed by the WIV researchers published, no one knows how, in Nature despite it being clear that it has never been confirmed that RaTG13 exists in nature, that has been cultured or isolated in any laboratory, much less is a viable human pathogen. A live “RaTG13” virus has never been detected in any laboratory sample at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nor in any other laboratory.
July 28, 2020: Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton administration national security official, writes in The Wall Street Journal that “suggesting that an outbreak of a deadly bat coronavirus coincidentally occurred near the only level 4 virology institute in all of China—which happened to be studying the closest known relative of that exact virus—strains credulity.” He calls for a “comprehensive forensic investigation must include full access to all of the scientists, biological samples, laboratory records and other materials from the Wuhan virology institutes and other relevant Chinese organizations. Denying that access should be considered an admission of guilt by Beijing.”
July 31, 2020: Science magazine publishes an interview with Shi Zhengli of WIV. She said it was impossible for anyone at the institute to have been infected, saying “to date, there is ‘zero infection’ of all staff and students in our institute.” She added: “President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts. It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.” In the interview, she admitted that some coronavirus research was conducted at biosafety level 2, not the more restrictive BSL-4.
Nov. 2, 2020: David A. Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist, writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The ‘origin story’ is missing many key details, including a plausible and suitably detailed recent evolutionary history of the virus, the identity and provenance of its most recent ancestors, and surprisingly, the place, time, and mechanism of transmission of the first human infection.”
Nov. 17, 2020: An influential paper written by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin is published: “The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin.” The paper noted that “a natural host, either direct or intermediate, has not yet been identified.” It argues that certain features of the coronavirus “might be the result of lab manipulation techniques such as site-directed mutagenesis. The acquisition of both unique features by SARS-CoV-2 more or less simultaneously is less likely to be natural or caused only by cell/animal serial passage.” The paper concluded: “On the basis of our analysis, an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned,” referencing the Lancet statement in February.
Nov. 17, 2020: WIV researchers, including Shi, post an addendum to their Feb. 3 report in Nature, acknowledging that RaTG13, the bat coronavirus closely associated with the coronavirus, was found in a mine cave after several patients had fallen ill with “severe respiratory disease” in 2012 while cleaning the cave.
[Washington Post Opinion: We can’t discover the pandemic’s origins if China’s thought police keep watching scientists]
Jan. 4, 2021: New York magazine publishes a lengthy article by Nicholson Baker, who reviews the evidence and concludes the lab-leak scenario is more compelling than previously believed.
Jan. 15, 2021: Days before Trump leaves office, the State Department issues a “fact sheet” on WIV that states: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses. … The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the covid-19 virus, including ‘RaTG13,’ which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.”
Jan. 20, 2021: Joe Biden becomes president.
Feb. 9, 2021: A joint report by the World Health Organization and China declares: “The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain introduction of the virus into the human population.”
Feb. 11, 2021: WHO Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refuses to rule out the lab-leak scenario. “Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded,” he said. “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”
Feb. 19, 2021: National security adviser Jake Sullivan issues a statement about the WHO report: “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them. It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government. To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak.”
March 4, 2021: Prominent scientists from around the world, in an open letter to WHO, call for a new investigation into the origins of the virus, saying the previous investigation was flawed. The letter detailed the elements of a “full and unrestricted” investigation. (Additional letters are released April 7 and April 30.)
March 22, 2021: The Australian newspaper reports: “Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers working on coronaviruses were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with covid-19 in early November 2019 in what U.S. officials suspect could have been the first cluster.”
March 28, 2021: “60 Minutes” airs report on lingering questions about the origins of the coronavirus, featuring Metzl and former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger. “There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples — and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences,” Pottinger says, quoting from declassified intelligence information.
May 5, 2021: Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the evidence and makes a strong case for the lab-leak theory. He focuses in particular on the furin cleavage site, which increases viral infectivity for human cells. His analysis yields this quote from David Baltimore, a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology: “When I first saw the furin cleavage site 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.”
These people don’t know what they’re talking about. There is no study that demonstrates the isolation of SARS CoV2 because the only one that exists, i.e. Drosten et al, refers to the genomic pattern of the SARS virus, discovered in 2003 by Christian Drosten himself and by his own admission the virus he discovered it is not even a virus but “a hypothesis of a virus, which could have a role in causing SARS”. I don’t know if you realize the magnitude of the piss-taking.
May 14, 2021: Eighteen prominent scientists publish a letter in the journal Science, saying a new investigation is needed because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” One signer is Ralph Baric, a virologist who worked closely with Shi.
May 17, 2021: Another former New York Times science reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., posts on Medium: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory.” He quotes W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University — who had signed the March 2020 letter in Nature Medicine — as saying his mind had changed in light of new information.