Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
COVID Origins
This piece from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the best piece I have seen yet on the probable origins of COVID-19. Very detailed and evenhanded without being so technical as to be unintelligible to the layman like me.
Published in GeneralWhere we are so far. Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.
That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.
Excellent article.
Well I think South Park already covered it.
Eh. BOAS can’t even make a clock work. Don’t pay them any attention.
Best article Ive seen on COVID. I am completely convinced it came from a lab- I suspected as much but this breakdown is incredible. Heads should roll- Daszak and Fauci, as well as everyone associated with lab funding and operation. China should be penalized heavily.
No doubt this will be buried by the media (the enemy of the people).
For me, the clincher is that the Wuhan lab was doing this incredibly dangerous work under relatively relaxed safety protocols. They had a BioSaftey Level 4 lab…but didn’t use it for their coronavirus gain-of-function research. And freely admitted as much…
Working on those purposely amplified viruses…for which there was no treatment and no vaccine … in anything but the strictest safety environment is, in my opinion, criminally negligent.
I don’t think that you should judge this one by the forum. The author is Nicholas Wade, a long-time science writer for the NYT, who has also written for Science and Nature. I’ve seen his work before, and he seems highly capable.
Yup. Just the fact that they were doing some of this work in BSL-2 laboratories is a serious issue.
Excellent article, it would seem. It’s a keeper for future reference. Thanks for posting it.
China should be penalized heavily? Our own administrative state should be penalized heavily for funding this work and allowing it to be contracted out to China, and for writing loopholes that essentially disabled any moratoriums on this kind of work. These are the experts that we’re supposed to trust, but if they are indeed responsible for the deaths of 3 million people around the world, they need to pay a price that will guarantee better behavior for all future time.
Edit: Even if they aren’t responsible for this virus, this paper has revealed some dangerous flaws in the way they operate.
Great article, but I do quibble with this: “To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. “
There was an in depth article in New York Magazine a few months ago that covered much of the same ground, although not as in depth on the biology. It also pointed out that the miners who got sick from the bat guano were steeped up to their eyeballs in it, so it was no casual contact. But it was published on January 4th and, well…
And Steve Hilton on Fox in The Next Revolution has covered all of this extensively, even reaching out to the NIH several times for comment.
And. This is a decade after they bungled/covered up/ denied the last “novel coronavirus.” See: Chinese National Security: Decisionmaking Under Stress from 2005!
This guy seems to think the lab origin is a no-brainer.
I do not have the expertise to make a judgement but if he is right…wow.
Couldn’t agree more. I stated on another post that Fauci is America’s ‘Dr. Mengele’!
I also want to know more about his role in finding this Frankenstein Virus by sending the ChiComs money to study Gain of Function research after that research was prohibited here because we were having too many accidents at our own US labs!
Nice Work Ekosj.
As I believe Front Seat Cat has posted, while we may never have all the facts, that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence points in only one direction- that it was cooked up in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by the Bat Lady and her good buddy Dr Ralph Baric of the Eco Health Alliance and nicely funded to boot against the law by our good Dr. Fauci.
Despite the wall to wall 24-7 drumbeat of the media that COVID-19 came from nature, there is not a shred of evidence that it did. Not one shred. All we have are the just the opinions of our esteemed bought and paid for Big Pharma tools.
On the other hand, it is a fact that the Bat Lady and Dr Baric were playing around with what appears to be precursor to COVID-19 since 2015 and not just that. From their own reports they were splicing into their concoctions the worst and most horrific viruses they could find. I don’t think that it then is a coincidence that the D614G strain, the new improved upgrade strain which hit New York mid march of last year that has killed the vast majority of the COVID victims here in America, is the only virus in history that attacks among other things the brain, the blood vessels, the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the kidneys, the liver and the skin. The probability of that monstrous virus coming from nature is then downright almost impossible.
Oh and I forgot to add it appears from Chinese offshore media and our own State Department that the first three victims, we are now told in a very quiet fashion, came from the Wuhan Lab in November 2019, a lab, despite being elite Level 4, that had serious problems with security of the viruses. Just another coincidence to ‘splain away, I guess.
What is the point in trying to pin the blame for COVID on the Wuhan lab? What if it did come from the lab?
It seems to me that this distracts from the real issue, which is what the Chicoms did in the early stages of the COVID outbreak. First they tried to ignore the problem, then they downplayed it, then they screwed around and allowed the virus to be spread all over the world. And the whole time they lied to the world about what was going on.
They are still lying about it and trying to shift blame.
The criminal negligence, dishonesty and incompetence of the Chicom government are the real issues.
That had been my question all along until I read this article. Although it involves the Wuhan lab, it’s really about a lot more than this particular lab. Now I know that it implicates our own administrative state in the way it contracted out this work to China and didn’t exercise proper oversight. Even if they aren’t to blame for this particular virus, our own administrative state has problems that need fixing.
It looks like compromising the WHO was a natural outgrowth of the SARS1 crisis. As the linked paper suggested more international monitoring of China to counter the CCP’s instinct for inaction and deception.
What is the point in trying to pin the blame for COVID on the Wuhan lab? What if it did come from the lab?
Does this really need answering?
From a legal perspective the Wuhan Institute of Virology chose to play around with Coronaviruses and other very deadly viruses knowing full well of the risks- an activity that had a reasonably high probability of being leaked, because that lab had serious well known lab security problems and there is a long history of labs just like the Wuhan Lab that play around with incredibly deadly having severe problems with leaks of the deadly virus they are experimenting on. From a legal point of view, since the Wuhan lab chose to take this enormous risk without the proper safeguards, an unbelievably huge liability assessment should be levied against the Wuhan Lab and it’s partners ( like the NIH and Eco Health Alliance in the US) for the gross loss of life and economic ruin as well as being prosecuted criminally for incredibly gross negligence and manslaughter.
There really was, despite all the hoohah from “renowned” scientists in the media, no inherently good reason for this research for the unbelievably risky “gain of function” experimentation taking place at Wuhan by Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. The likelihood of this research being used for good is and was very close to zero. It was known to be incredibly risky with much of scientific community absolutely against it. That is why Obama of all people banned its funding.
Furthermore, this lab was a joint venture with the CCP military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the CCP’s premier Bioweapons lab. Given the wildly aggressive pursuit of world domination by the CCP though any means possible including military, economic and geo-political means, there is almost a 100% chance that the CCP Military would use this virus against the rest of the world if the opportunity presented itself.
That said, we now know without question that is exactly what happened – the CCP did at a minimum exploit this COVID-19 crisis to inflict horrific economic pain and death upon the rest of the developed world.
But it gets worse. Far worse. Continued on the next post.
Continued..
The original strain of COVID-19 until Mid-March of last year despite all the handwringing, had only killed 79 people in all of the United States. It was then in Mid -March that the D614G COVID 19 strain hit New York and the surrounding environments. ( It had already been responsible for a huge loss of life in Italy and the rest of Europe starting in Mid-February). Within two weeks over 11,000 more people were dead in New York and the deaths escalated from there. Like COVID-19, the bought and paid for Big Pharma “scientific community” assured us almost immediately that it was just a natural mutation of the original strain and in fact very little reporting of this strain has been reported since. According to a study by Scripps Institute in April of 2020, this new strain, among other things, through manipulation of the lab inserted “Strike Protein” increased the number of Corona Heads of each virus molecule by 4 to 5 times and increased the strain’s ability to infect and to kill by a similar amount. Mutations through nature are almost always a minor incremental change in a virus, but this was anything but a minor incremental change – it appears to be a massive lab designed major upgrade in the lethality of COVID and the consequences were devastating. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people worldwide are dead by this new strain. Dr Shi and Dr Baric had been experimenting on all sort of horrifically lethal combinations in their CoronaVirus experiments and in this D614G strain it appears that they dumped in all of their diabolical bag of tricks to make it as deadly as possible.
But stepping back a moment from the idea of an “exploitation” of the virus – this new strain appears to be more than an exploitation – it appears to be an intentional seriously deadly upgrade to the virus. From that point of view we should no longer look at the release of COVID-19 as a “lab accident”; we should look at the D614G Strain as a purposeful release of an incredibly deadly BioWeapon on the world outside China. We should look at it not as a an accident but as an purposeful Act of War, and we should act accordingly.
So, it started out as Chernobyl, and ended as a dirty bomb?
If Chernobyl did help end the Soviet Union, wouldn’t an undeniable proof of the lab creation and release undermine the credibility of the CCP with the people?
Muleskinner – The Soviet Union had nothing like China’s Social Credit system and 250 million cameras around the country monitoring every citizen’s ever y move. I also question whether Chernobyl was a significant reason why the Soviet Union collapsed. There were many, many reasons – Chernobyl was just one.
I think a greater concern is that China is seeking to totally dominate the world. They are seeking to put a stranglehold on all the key industries and raw material sources around the globe to the point where they can coerce submission in any country they choose.. Soviet Union was never even close to being in that position.
But that’s just Free Markets, so it’s all good.