Covid Friday

May as well circle back to the world’s third biggest pain in the ass (after Putin and Xi) for the last three years: your disease and mine, Covid-19 and all its many variants.

Remember when Donald Trump pounded the podium and called Covid various ray-ciss names like  Kung Flu,  Wu Flu, etc. and all the intelligentsia said he was racist, it came from bats (or more recently dogs) or “jes’ happened”?

Now after 18 months of extensive research and analysis, a US Senate Committee has published its full 304 page report into the matter – and it makes for compelling reading.

The committee concludes that: “The preponderance of circumstantial evidence supports an unintentional research-related incident.”

Of all the cities in the world, a deadly coronavirus had popped up just eight miles from laboratories where scientists were importing and tinkering with deadly bat coronaviruses.

Even Wuhan scientists themselves were concerned. Dr Shi Zhengli, WIV virologist, told Scientific American that she remembered thinking if coronaviruses were behind the outbreak “could they have come from our lab?”

It should not have been so controversial. Laboratory leaks are fairly common, with smallpox, swine flu, anthrax, and foot and mouth disease all known to have escaped from facilities in recent decades.

In 2004, the Sars virus leaked from a high-containment research laboratory in Beijing at least three times, causing local outbreaks – so such a scenario was far from unprecedented.

Behind the scenes, international scientists were also worried. The virus had come out of nowhere, seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans, and no intermediary host could be found.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, in February 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security laboratory.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, of the US National Institutes of Health, said that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

Sir Jeremy warned that research in Wuhan was like the “Wild West”, with experiments carried out at worrying biosecurity levels.

But Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, argued that further debate on the subject could damage “international harmony”. The comment would come to typify why it has been so difficult to get to the bottom of the origins of Covid.   The Telegraph via Yahoo

I know some have advocated extreme measures against Fauci, but this indicates Dr. Collins could sure be added to the list, right? But wait – it just gets better:

Chinese researchers may have begun developing two Covid vaccines in November 2019, before the official start of the outbreak, a US senate report has claimed.

It said the theory that Covid-19 jumped from animals to humans in a market no longer deserved the “presumption of accuracy”.

The report argued that Chinese researchers appeared to begin development of at least two Covid vaccines at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in November 2019, meaning “SARS-CoV-2 would have been present at the WIV before the known outbreak of the pandemic”.  The Telegraph via Yahoo II

Well, it’s not like we didn’t know that Xi and company weren’t lying in their teeth…but does seem to indicate that some severe consequences should somehow follow. Of course, we paid for some of that ‘gain of function’ research in Wuhan, too.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", China, COVID-19