Investigating the source of the virus, mysterious account exposes Shi Zhengli’s three-student theses
In the past two weeks, a whirlwind of public opinion has suddenly blown in the world and the eye of the storm is the source of the virus. The mainstream political and academic elites in the United States as well as the intelligence circles in the United States, United Kingdom suddenly began to face up to the "laboratory leak theory" of viruses that used to be regarded as conspiracy theories.
On 13 May, 18 scientists published an open letter in the Science magazine, calling for a more extensive evaluation of the "laboratory leak theory" and "animal transmission theory" of the virus.
It is worth mentioning that among these 18 scientists, including the coronavirus expert Ralph Baric, he used to cooperate with Shi Zhengli and Wuhan Institute of Virology to artificially synthesize a kind of coronavirus infecting human cells in the laboratory. He has joined the call to investigate the "laboratory leak theory."
Just one day before the publication of this open letter, an anonymous Twitter account "The Seeker" published 3 academic papers allegedly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of which was a doctoral dissertation and two. It is a master's thesis, and the tutors include Shi Zhengli, a researcher from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
These three papers were defended in 2014, 2017 and 2019 respectively. Among them, the topic of the 2017 doctoral dissertation is "Reverse Genetic System of Bat SARS-like Coronaviruses and Function Study of ORFX", and the titles of the other two master's theses are "Geographic Evolution of Bat SARS-related Coronaviruses" and "Serological Cross-Reactivity Analysis of Coronavirus Based on Nucleocapsid Proteins".
We searched through the Internet and found these three papers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Document Information Center, but they were restricted to borrowing inside the Chinese Academy of Sciences library, and we did not provide any abstracts or previews to the outside world.
In other words, the three papers disclosed this time may be the first time that the outside world has obtained these three internal papers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The New York Times reported on 27 May that before Biden ordered, intelligence officials told the White House that they had a large amount of uncensored evidence that needed further computer analysis to reveal the mystery.
In addition, French scientists pointed out that the original data released by the Wudu Institute is not enough to reconstruct the genome of RaTG13, and requested the Wudu Institute to explain how to obtain the complete sequence of RaTG13; and Wudu said that they have no corresponding biological samples and it is impossible to reproduce The sequencing worked. Why is the integrity of this sequence so important?
The "complete genome sequence" of RaTG13 was first submitted to GenBank on 27 January 2020.
Wang Yanyi, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told CCTV in May 2020 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology only knew the sequence information of the RaTG13 virus in the process of sequencing bat samples, but had not isolated and obtained the live data of the RaTG13 virus. So there is no possibility of leaking RaTG13.
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WIV diverting attention? Suddenly announce another strain of "cold storage" after 6 years
Soon after these three papers were leaked, Shi Zhengli and others published a paper on the preprinted thesis platform bioRxiv, declaring that "existing evidence does not support the 'laboratory leak' speculation."
In this paper, they announced for the first time the RaTG15 virus strain (at the same location as RaTG13) collected in a mine in Yunnan customs clearance in 2015. The study claimed that the gene sequence homology between RaTG15 and the novel coronavirus is 77.6%, and that human ACE2 cannot be effectively used, thus concluding that the bat is not the source of SARS-CoV-2 again.
The current potential for infecting humans is limited according to Shi Zhengli's team.
The paper claims that in contrast, pangolin coronavirus has a higher zoonotic risk but the pangolin is not the source of SARS-CoV-2.
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Evidence suggests US taxpayers funded coronavirus
Reporter : Sandy Fitzgerald / Source : Newsmax / Image courtesy: Dreamstime
Evidence is showing that the United States most likely paid for work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that ended up creating the deadly coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, argues author Peter Van Buren.
"A series of cover-ups means we are unlikely to ever know the truth of why our loved ones died," Van Buren writes for The American Conservative.
He notes that there are two origin stories for COVID-19; one pointing to it having emerged naturally but the other that it was created by the Chinese laboratory and was released.
Science writer Nicholas Wade, he added, "makes a strong case" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the United States was behind the virus' financing.
EcoHealth Alliance in New York has "created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature" for the past 20 years, writes Van Buren.
"Scientists argue that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent 'spillovers' from animal hosts to humans," he said. "Like something out of Jurassic Park, this is known as gain-of-function research, genetic manipulation to 'improve' nature."
The work has enabled scientists to synthesize the nearly-extinct polio virus, introduce a smallpox gene into a virus, and more, he said.
And the Wuhan lab, writes Van Buren, teamed with the University of North Carolina to "enhance the ability of bat viruses to attack humans," including creating a virus in November 2015 that was once dangerous "only to bats but now able to infect the cells of the human airway."
Meanwhile, Wuhan's key researcher, Shi Zhengli, called "the Bat Lady," engineered coronaviruses, said Van Buren, with her research "funded by the Obama administration's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health."
The NIH assigned the grants to EcoHealth, which then subcontracted the work to the Wuhan lab, meaning "the work which likely created COVID-19 was paid for by the United States."
Shi, however, has denied being in contact with the virus or studying the specific virus that caused COVID-19 before she and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019 in samples from patients who suffered from a pneumonia of unknown origin.
Before that, "we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence," Shi wrote in a document for Science Magazine.
But Van Buren writes that the Wuhan lab pulled its virus database offline after a lecture from Shi in September 2019, and the Chinese government is still refusing to provide raw data or lab records.
He also noted that in 2018, State Department inspectors were alarmed by what they found when visiting the Wuhan lab, and warned that the facility's work on "bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
Van Buren notes that one of the strongest supporting documents concerning the theory of a natural origin was in the British medical journal Lancet, but "the letter had actually been written not by the scientists, but by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth.
He also pointed out that Dr. Anthony Fauci has denied that the NIH funds gain-of-function research.
"He appears to have committed perjury, as Fauci now admits 'there’s no way of guaranteeing' American taxpayer money routed to Wuhan didn’t fund gain-of-function research," said Van Buren.
He also criticized the media for aiding the "cover-up" and noted its continued embrace of the natural origins theory and its slam of former President Donald Trump's China travel ban.
"It is only now, months into the safety of the Biden administration, that the media is willing to take a peek inside Pandora’s Box," he said.
"We do know Wuhan conducted gain-of-function research aimed at doing what COVID-19 does, making a virus originally not dangerous to humans into a super-infector designed to spread quickly while resisting then-existing cures and vaccines," he said.
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Beijing's mouthpiece calls for equipping PLA with more nuclear weapons to intimidate the US
Reporter : Nicole Hao / Source : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
Chinese state-owned media urged the regime to equip the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the largest possible number of nuclear warheads and missiles in a short time, to “make the U.S. elites tremble when they think about fighting with China.”
“We must prepare for a tense ending to the United States’s and China’s relationship,” Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, wrote in a May 28 editorial. “Once this happens, having a big stock of DF-41, JL-2, and JL-3 missiles will be a pillar of strength to support China’s will to fight.”
The DF-41 is China’s solid-fueled, road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, and the JL-2 and JL-3 are China’s intercontinental-range, submarine-launched ballistic missiles. All three of these missiles can carry nuclear warheads.
Hu’s comments are in response to Kurt Campbell, President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, who recently said the United States and China are competitors.
In a May 26 speech, Campbell told an online event hosted by Stanford University, “The dominant paradigm [with China] is going to be competition … a period that had been broadly described as engagement has come to an end.”
Campbell said in the speech that the Beijing regime’s behavior is shifting toward “harsh power, or hard power,” which “signals that China is determined to play a more assertive role.” To support his opinion, Campbell mentioned China’s recent clashes with India regarding the border and against Australia in trade, as well as the aggressive diplomacy style the regime has launched worldwide.
In the responding editorial, Hu expressed a wish that the United States could reduce its hostility toward China.
“We should use our power and their intolerable risk to force them [Americans] to calm down.”
Zhang Tianliang, a U.S.-based current affairs commentator, said on his media channel on May 28 that he thinks the reason why Hu published the threat theory is that the Beijing regime is worried that the Biden administration will implicate it for its role in the pandemic.
On May 26, Biden said that the U.S. intelligence community believes there are “two likely scenarios” that may have caused the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak in China, noting that a significant number of officials believe the virus was spread due to a “laboratory accident.”
Zhang points out that Hu took the same action last year when the Beijing regime was alarmed on May 3, 2020, when then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed that significant evidence linked the CCP virus to a Wuhan laboratory, and the international community asked for an investigation into the origin of the virus.
On May 8, five days after Pompeo’s comments, Hu called for the production of at least 1,000 warheads and 100 DF-41 missiles in an editorial. Hu claimed that nuclear weapons would threaten the United States into being more friendly to China.
Chinese people don’t buy into Hu’s threat theory.
Liu Xiaofei, a military commentator from the School of International Relations at China’s Huaqiao University, said on May 30 that the United States won’t fear China even though China has more nuclear warheads because China’s weapons are far inferior.
Chinese netizens posted on Hu’s Weibo—China’s social media platform—that Russia has more nuclear warheads than the United States, but still is weaker than the United States. Also, they note that a large number of the children of Chinese senior officials and military senior commanders are in the United States, making it unlikely that the parents could launch missiles against cities where their children live.
Visitors are on a tour of the “816 Nuclear Military Engineering” installation in the mountains of Fuling district, in southwestern China’s Chongqing Municipality, on Feb. 21, 2017. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)
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Is the WIV the source of the epidemic? Biden orders Supercomputer Co-investigation by 17 Institutions
Image : On 31 May (Monday), US President Biden delivered a Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
The CCP virus epidemic has infected more than 170 million people worldwide. Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate the origin of the virus and submit an investigation report within 90 days. British media disclosed that Biden requested 17 national laboratories under the Ministry of Energy to assist intelligence agencies in thoroughly investigating whether the virus has leaked from laboratories in China.
The British "Daily Mail" reported that Biden directed 17 national laboratories on 26 May to assist intelligence agencies in further tracing the source of the virus, including carefully checking a large amount of previously unreviewed data and submitting reports within 90 days to understand whether the virus leaked from a laboratory in China, and whether the CCP covered up the virus leak.
A White House official revealed that the national laboratory received instructions mainly because it "has advanced supercomputers" capable of processing large amounts of data and tracing the true source of the virus.
The report said that White House officials did not specifically disclose the type of data submitted for analysis, but only disclosed "hope that science will become an important part of it" and used all the resources of the intelligence community and the scientific community to try to find out the truth about the CCP virus epidemic.
Some experts believe that these data are likely to be previously collected intelligence, such as signal interception or biological evidence. Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than their analysts can effectively mine. Advanced algorithms for finding patterns in massive amounts of data may also bring new breakthroughs.
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Biden's attitude changed suddenly
The New York Times reported on 27 May that in the past few days, the White House has downplayed the need for an investigation led by the United States and insisted that the WHO is the appropriate agency to conduct international investigations. Biden's statement is a sudden change.
However, the report also emphasized that Biden’s order was a sudden example of the president’s intervention in the work of collecting raw data from those responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence for him. Presidents are often unwilling to show excessive involvement in the preparation of the intelligence briefings they receive.
The report said that it is unclear if Biden’s actions were due to a change in public opinion from some scientists or political pressure from former President Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill, who has repeatedly accused him. Biden and the Democrats refused to take the laboratory origin theory seriously.
In the evening of 26 May, Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun and Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley passed a bill to combine relevant Chinese laboratories with the source of the epidemic. Declassification of intelligence on any potential links between.
The day before, the Senate unanimously agreed to include two Republican clauses in a huge package of China-related bills aimed at prohibiting the transfer of US funds to the WIV, or "gain-of-function" research in China. Scientists in this type of research of China will deliberately make a pathogen more powerful.
Holly said, "For more than a year, anyone who has raised questions about the WIV has been labeled as a conspiracy theorist." "The world needs to know if the pandemic is the result of the negligence of the Wuhan laboratory, but the CCP has tried its best to prevent credible investigations."
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Pompeo: The virus may come from Wuhan Institute of Virology
The New York Times also mentioned that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a briefing on the WIV a few days before his departure, outlining the evidence that the virus may have accidentally leaked from the institute.
One of the data released by Pompeo is that the government “has reason to believe that before the first confirmed case of the epidemic appeared, several researchers within the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in the fall of 2019, and their symptoms were similar to those of covid and common seasonal diseases".
On 23 May, the Wall Street Journal quoted a US intelligence report saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to the hospital for treatment in November 2019. This report has encouraged more and more calls for more comprehensive investigations and the source of the virus in American politics and public opinion.
On 25 May, Trump issued a statement saying that he had long insisted that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the virus. "In my opinion, it was obvious from the beginning."
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209 Republican congressmen call for Congress to investigate
At the same time, Steve Scalise, the Republican Party of the House of Representatives, and more than 200 Republican members of the House of Representatives jointly wrote to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her to instruct the chairpersons of relevant Democrats committees to participate in the tracing of the virus under the bipartisan Congress investigation.
The open letter said, "More and more evidence shows that the epidemic came from a Chinese laboratory, and the Chinese Communist Party covered the epidemic."
Scullis said, "Despite these new evidence, the Democrats in the House of Representatives remain indifferent to the CCP's role in this pandemic. It is also obvious that the CCP has the ability to influence the World Health Organization in the past year. (WHO) review process, the United States cannot rely on this agency to conduct a thorough investigation."
209 Republican members of the House of Representatives told Pelosi in an open letter that it is clear that the WHO failed to provide a final opinion on the origin of the CCP virus and the CCP’s responsibilities. This task fell to the US Congress. Republicans in the House of Representatives have been calling on Pelosi to uncover this truth. It's time for her to join this battle.
The CCP virus epidemic broke out in Wuhan in 2019. Because the CCP concealed and lied that it was preventable and controllable, and would not spread from person to person, it suppressed the whistleblower of the epidemic, which caused the epidemic to spread globally. It has infected 170 million people worldwide, more than 350. Ten thousand people died.
Republican lawmakers stated in the letter that if the CCP covered up the epidemic, it would be responsible for the deaths of nearly 600,000 Americans and millions of other people around the world.
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Reporters say Wuhan lab leak theory was disregarded because it came from Republicans
Reporter : Masooma Haq / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
A number of reporters from mainstream media outlets have recently admitted that the Wuhan “lab leak” theory was originally dismissed because it came from Republicans.
Jonathan Karl, ABC News Washington correspondent admitted to ABC’s “This Week” host on Sunday that the lab leak theory was not taken seriously because it came from the Trump administration but, “now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.”
“Yes, I think a lot of people have egg on their face,” Karl said. “This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Donald Trump, and look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. Because Trump was saying so much else that was just out of control … he said flatly this came from that lab, and it was widely dismissed … but now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.”
Besides Trump and Pompeo, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argued that the origin of the virus should be investigated because it does not appear to have come from the animal market, as claimed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Cotton told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, in a February 2020 interview, that the CCP has not been honest about when they first knew of the virus and the United States cannot trust CCP officials about the origin of the virus.
“Here’s what we do know, this virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market. Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China have published a study in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market. The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market,” said Cotton.
“So we don’t know where it originated, but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question,” added Cotton.
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt also said on Sunday that many journalists disregarded the lab leak theory because Cotton proposed it.
“I think people made this mistake. I think a lot of people on the political left and a lot of people in the media made the mistake. They said, ‘wow if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can’t be true.’ Or they assumed that. And that’s not right,” he said on CNN.
In addition, NBC’s Chuck Todd from “Meet the Press” admitted that investigation into the origin of the virus got neglected because of politics and anti-Republican sentiment.
“The WHO has dismissed the idea for months, most scientists scoffed at it, and for many, the lab leak idea got tangled up in politics,” said Todd.
Mainstream media outlets are now giving the idea of the lab leak theory credibility and urging for a new probe into the origin of the virus, pointing to China’s refusal to share crucial raw data.
President Joe Biden announced on May 26 that he has ordered a closer intelligence review of what he characterized as two equally plausible scenarios of the origins of the CCP virus—one natural, the other a lab leak.
