A Daily Mail investigation has uncovered additional evidence that the COVID-19 coronavirus may have originated in a military virus lab in Wuhan, China, despite denials from the Chinese Communists that the military was involved.
In February, the World Health Organization concluded that there was no evidence for the lab origin theory, and that the team investigating the virus’s origins should stop pursuing that theory. Hundreds of scientists around the world were outraged and demanded the WHO continue looking into the Wuhan lab hypothesis.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology project began nine years ago and was tasked with studying bat viruses. It was a maximum-security facility overseen by the Chinese army.
Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that a nationwide scheme, directed by a leading state body, was launched nine years ago to discover new viruses and detect the ‘dark matter’ of biology involved in spreading diseases.
One leading Chinese scientist, who published the first genetic sequence of the Covid-19 virus in January last year, found 143 new diseases in the first three years of the project alone.
It would be logical for someone familiar with the COVID-19 virus to be the first scientist in the world to sequence its genome. But it’s the involvement of the military and the research to find viruses that might be weaponized that has raised red flags with Western intelligence agencies. It should be noted that there is no direct evidence for a military bioweapons program in China. But it’s hard to find another reason for the military’s interest.
The fact that such a virus-detection project is led by both civilian and military scientists appears to confirm incendiary claims from the United States alleging collaboration between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the country’s 2.1 million-strong armed forces.
The scheme’s five team leaders include Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’ for her trips to find samples in caves, and Cao Wuchun, a senior army officer and government adviser on bioterrorism.
Prof Shi denied the US allegations last month, saying: ‘I don’t know of any military work at the WIV. That info is incorrect.’
The U.S. State Department has raised concerns about the “gain of function” work done at the lab. Basically, gain of function “places positive selective pressure on the microorganisms to effect mutations that would increase their pathogenicity, transmissibility, and antigenicity.” In other words, gain of function takes a bad bug and turns it into a very, very bad bug.
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Now, why would civilian scientists do something like that? The standard response is that they were trying to explore life at its most basic level. But with the confirmed military connection, gain of function takes on a whole, new, dark meaning.
The documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday detail a major project called ‘the discovery of animal-delivered pathogens carried by wild animals’, which set out to find organisms that could infect humans and investigate their evolution.
It was launched in 2012 and funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The project was led by Xu Jianguo, who boasted at a conference in 2019 that ‘a giant network of infectious disease prevention and control is taking shape’.
The professor also headed the first expert group investigating Covid’s emergence in Wuhan. He denied human transmission initially, despite evidence from hospitals, then insisted in mid-January ‘this epidemic is limited and will end if there are no new cases next week’.
We’re never going to get the truth out of China. And once the pandemic fades into a bad memory, the impetus to discover its origins will also disappear.
China is going to get away with it. Helping them do so will be their wholly-owned subsidiary, the World Health Organization. It would take guts for an American president to demand accountability and put our money where his mouth is. Stiff economic sanctions on China would invite retaliation, but also could damage their economy more severely than their sanctions could damage ours. This would be especially true if we managed to get the rest of the industrialized world to act in concert with America.
China is not the preeminent power in the world — yet. Until it is, the Chinese Communist Party must be shown that their failures to contain the pandemic have a steep real-world cost.
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