Timothy Birdnow

Except it wasn't a LEAK. That presupposed it was accidental. I don't believe it was.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/case-closed-it-was-a-lab-leak.php

The Sunday London Times, out today, has a long, long article about the origins of the covid-19 virus in the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Until the far-off day when Chinese sources open up honestly, it will stand as definitive proof of not just the lab leak hypothesis, but the conclusion that covid-19 was a human creation. Its conclusions are unqualified:

Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.

The wealth of detail in this piece is remarkable. It lays out the relationships among the National Institutes of Health, American researchers, the Chinese military, and the Wuhan institute. An excerpt:

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. "The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. "That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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