The Chinese Communists are nothing if not brazen in furthering their propaganda. While much of the rest of the world is screaming at them to come clean about what went on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in late 2019 and early 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) nominated the lab for a Nobel Prize in medicine.
They also nominated the most notorious researchers at the lab: Shi Zhengli, a.k.a. “Bat Woman”; and Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. They would also be mentioned in the Nobel citation. The woman who may be responsible for allowing the virus to escape and the scientist whose incompetence made it all possible are perfect representatives of the Chinese biotech community.
“The award is mainly given to individuals or research groups who have made or demonstrated significant achievements in the past five years,” claimed Chinese state media. When you think about it, maybe they should get the prize.
Jim Geraghty, National Review:
We must admit, the Institute’s work really has touched all of our lives, hasn’t it? And just think how many medical breakthroughs we’ve seen in the past 18 months from Pfizer and Moderna and Oxford and Johnson & Johnson that never would have occurred if hadn’t been for the earlier work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The WIV’s work literally brought the world to a screeching halt. It even made late-night television funny again.
Chinese state media presented arguments claiming that the lab should win.
“CAS said the WIV quickly carried out pathogen identification after the outbreak of COVID-19, completed the entire virus genome sequencing and virus isolation within a short time, confirmed that the COVID-19 virus shares the same functional receptor as the SARS virus, systematically analyzed the basic biological characteristics of the virus, and revealed that coronavirus carried by bats may be the evolutionary ancestor of the COVID-19 coronavirus,” the report said.
It would stand to reason that a lab studying bat coronaviruses would make all those discoveries — especially if they had been studying the specific SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus itself. Perhaps the Chinese Communists are making it too obvious for us.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who broke the news about the Nobel nomination, tried a little misdirection in justifying the award.
“If those that first publish high-quality viral genomes were to be accused of making the virus, then Prof. Luc Montagnier, who first discovered the Human Immunodeficiency Virus [HIV], would be considered the culprit of AIDS rather than awarded the Nobel Prize, and Mr. Louis Pasteur, who discovered microbes, would be held accountable for the disease-causing bacteria all around the globe,” Lijian said.
Neither Montagnier nor Pasteur ever published a genome of any disease–and besides, HIV and rabies — the disease that Pasteur was working to cure — were not new diseases that literally appeared out of nowhere. The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman is being disingenuous.
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And he is probably laughing behind his sleeve. The Chinese know they aren’t convincing anyone with their ballsy move to nominate the lab from which the coronavirus may have leaked. But their own people — inured to the Chinese Communist propaganda machine — have been conditioned to swallow the lies whole.
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