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It Came From Beyond
Bit of a drive-by posting, but it’s getting close to 4 a.m. here in the Boston suburbs, and the linked resources (“Mail on Sunday” news coverage, plus the PDF of the study itself) unquestionably tell the tale far more effectively than I could. Suffice it to say that this represents a development that the redoubtable Senator Tom Cotton might well term a Big BSL-4 Deal.
First, the reportage. Second, the PDF of the actual published study:
I’ll just add — apologies for the reiteration — my own contention that the Wuhan Virus outbreak not only surely must be the result of a pathogen handling protocol mistake committed in either one of two labs in Wuhan, but also that the bat coronavirus research implicated in the outbreak was surely geared towards determining which particular strain in the labs’ ever-expanding collection should be designated for plausible-deniability ethnic-cleansing deployment in the Uyghur-detention gulag archipelago in the PRC’s far-western Xinjiang province.
Published in General
Surely the Chinese Communists would never do that!
Hold on, let me try that again. Let’s see if I can say that with a straight face this time.
Surely the Chinese Communists would never…🤣🤣
Sorry. Just can’t say that with a straight face.
I came here to chew bubble gum and to like posts that use the bubble gum/kick ass formula. And I’m all out of bubble gum.
Well done Danny!
On the substantive side (now that the important pop culture reference side is taken care of): it doesn’t take much of a leap of fevered speculation to wonder whether the Chinese might use a virus as you said. Another wild speculation I thought from the start: are they using these forced lockdowns and the disease itself as cover to disappear large sections of people they want to be rid of? Oh, sorry, all these people died from covid; they must have had a genetic predisposition. Oh sorry, I have no record of the missing people you’re referencing; are you sure you’re not just an agitator who wants to disappear himself? Oh sorry, you must be mistaken, the entire town you’re inquiring about has never existed in China.
Certainly can’t put it past them.
There’s less “here” here than the post implies.
The research paper uses sequence data to cast doubt on the notion that the virus derived from the Wuhan wet market. That same sequence data has been in the public domain for months now and numerous experts have already cogitated over it.
And precisely because of this data, many experts have been voicing skepticism about the wet market theory for quite some time now. So this paper isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been voiced multiple times by experts already.
However, just because the virus didn’t originate from the wet market doesn’t automatically mean it originated from the Wuhan lab. There are countless other ways it could have been introduced into the human population. The fact that the next-closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 is a strain from that lab is certainly noteworthy but is far from conclusive – the genetic distance between that strain and SARS-CoV-2 is still far enough to make laboratory evolution unlikely, although not impossible.
Bottom line: accidental escape from the Wuhan lab is still a real possibility, but natural transmission from an animal is still biologically more plausible. Intentional design/release remains highly improbable.
It almost doesn’t matter how the virus originated (lab or wet market), the Chicom’s reaction of freezing travel within China but allowing international travel in and out of China to coniue smacks of an intentional action to infect the world and see what happens. China saw the opportunity to use the rest of the world as a test lab for biological warfare . . .
Even though Xi shut down travel within China well before Trump (partially) shut down travel from China, Xi (along with the American Left) claimed that Trump’s actions were based on racism and xenophobia. Nice.
And about 3 weeks before Trump stopped travel to and from China, Dr. Fauci and others made public statements saying this virus was nothing to worry about.
#5 Mendel
Feedback noted and sincerely appreciated.
A couple of initial reactions from me…
First, do we outside of the PRC indeed have all the data on all the strains collected/maintained by the WIV and the virology lab at the Wuhan branch of the China CDC? Is it possible that the shortfalls/shortcomings in sequencing correspondence you mention might be down to what we’ve been “permitted” to access in these labs’ collections (even in years prior, up until, say, October 2019), as opposed to what the full/real “inventory” might be (or might have been prior to a “scrubbing” effort)?
I recognize that this above question straightaway takes on a “conspiracy theory” tone, and in essence may be unanswerable for a number of reasons — I don’t ask it with the aim of facilely trumping your feedback, though.
Second, specific to the WIV, speculation has been put out in the public realm that a post-doc researcher there named Huang Yanling was, in effect, Patient Zero. The “proof” presented is admittedly circumstantial, albeit I for one admittedly lean towards viewing her disappearance from the WIV roster as — to borrow a James Comey term from 05 January 2017 — unusual.
In any case, it may well be that the public-realm sources of this speculation are actually fronts for the US NSC and/or IC, intended to try “smoking out” better intel on all this — ditto with this Broad Institute/UBC study too, perhaps.
I agree, but if the world doesn’t care if they’re being slowly exterminated, why would the world care if the extermination’s pace was quickened a bit?
Saw a story the other day about how the Germans have a better opinion of China than the US. Bad look, Hans.
#2 Ed G.
Sincerely appreciate the kind words.
Speaking of words, on the way to placing my OP on the Main Feed, the Ricochet editorial PTB excised the “chewing bubble gum and kicking hindquarters” verbiage that I had originally crammed into the latter part of the post’s title. So your compliment was orphaned — sorry about that!…
I was certainly under no illusions that the entire original version of the title could survive the transition — but if I post something again in future on the Member Feed where the same turn of phrase seems apt for the title, I’m gonna go for it.
It sparks joy…
All communists are unspeakably evil. Our Republic has a civilizational imperative to destroy the Chinese Communist Party.
Only conservatives are unspeakably evil. Communist are just misunderstood
It’s still in the URL.