Made In China Pandemic

The Chinese coronavirus had leaked from a Chinese virology lab
The lone microbiology lab in China that handles viruses like the Chinese coronavirus is located in Wuhan

By STEVEN W. MOSHER

Chinese women and a child wear protective masks as they walk through a Beijing park after the official cancellation of celebrations of the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival on Jan. 25.

At an emergency meeting in Beijing held last Friday, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping spoke about the need to contain the Chinese coronavirus and set up a system to prevent similar epidemics in the future.
A national system to control biosecurity risks must be put in place “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.
What Xi didn’t say is that the Chinese coronavirus that has sickened more than 79,000 and claimed more than 2,600 lives escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. 
But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
Read that again.
It sure sounds as if China is conceding there may be a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes, doesn’t it? 
And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?
It turns out that in all of China there is only one. 
And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which, of course, is the epicenter of the epidemic.
That’s right.
China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.
According to the PLA Daily, Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax.
This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.
This suggests to me the Chinese coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Chen’s job is to try and put the genie back in the bottle.
Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. 
Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was being used in experiments. 
Both were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.
And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are believed to sell laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. 
Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash.
One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made the equivalent of a million dollars selling monkeys and rats on the live animal market, whence they likely wound up in someone’s stomach.
Also fueling suspicions about Chinese coronavirus’s origins is the series of excuses offered by the Chinese authorities as people began to be sickened and die.
They first blamed a seafood market not far from the Institute of Virology, even though the first documented cases of Chinese coronavirus (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2) involved people who had never set foot there. 
Then they pointed to snakes, bats and even a scaly anteater called a pangolin as the source of the virus.
I don’t buy any of this.
Snakes don’t carry coronaviruses, and bats aren’t sold at a seafood market. 
Neither are pangolins, for that matter, an endangered species valued for its scales as much as for meat.
The evidence, to me, points to Chinese coronavirus research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Chinese virus may have been carried out of the lab by an infected worker or crossed over into humans who unknowingly consumed a lab animal.
Whatever the vector, Beijing authorities are now clearly scrambling to correct serious problems with the way their labs handle deadly pathogens.
China may have unleashed a plague on its own people.
It’s too early to say how many in China and other countries will ultimately die, but the human cost will be high.
But not to worry.
Xi has assured us that he is controlling biosecurity risks “to protect the people’s health.”
PLA bioweapons experts are in charge.
I doubt the Chinese people will find that very reassuring.
Neither should we.

China's Crimes Against Humanity

Chinese coronavirus bioweapon theory spreading
Outbreak had started in Wuhan facility, as first patient never went to wet market identified as source
By FRANK CHEN

A masked passenger walks in front of Wuhan Station before the city is locked down on January 23. 

A Wuhan lab affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences has sought to dispel rumors that it made and leaked the highly infectious pneumonic virus that led to the still-raging global outbreak. While Chinese dictator Xi Jinping was briefed about the public health threat by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in early January, the government decided against sounding the alarm because it did not want to “mar the festive vibe” during the Lunar New Year celebrations.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the provincial capital of Hubei, which is the ground zero of the contagion, has been thrust into the media spotlight by the allegation last week that it leaked bio-hazardous agents.

Posts circulating on WeChat and Weibo claim that a researcher at the institute was the first to be infected by the novel coronavirus, now called China Origin Virus ID-19 (Covid-19) by the World Health Organization.

The female virologist and a graduate from the institute, referred to as “patient zero,” had never visited the city’s shambolic wet market – also known as the “zoo” – where a range of wild animals were sold. 

The market has been identified by the authorities as the probable source of the deadly pathogen.
In a statement released on Sunday, the lab stressed that the researcher had left the city and was in good health, refusing to release more information about her for privacy reasons.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology had leaked the Chinese coronavirus. 

The institute is said to be the nation’s only Biological Security Level 4-certified lab, the highest level in the hierarchy of biosafety and biocontainment procedures codified by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The Wuhan lab has the equipment and staff to handle the most infectious viruses, including Ebola.
Shi Zhengli, the institute’s lead researcher on bat-related viruses, said on her social media account that she “guaranteed with her own life” that the outbreak had nothing to do with the lab but was a “nemesis for the barbaric habits and lifestyle of some people – like eating wild game including bats.”
Shi’s team said at the end of January, when the acute respiratory disease started to strike down more people in Wuhan and the rest of Hubei, that bats could have been the initial host of the Chinese coronavirus and SARS virus. 

Patients line up in an outpatient department at a hospital in Wuhan. 

A woman wears a face mask as a preventative measure against the Chinese coronavirus, as she watches a race during the Hong Kong Gold Cup at the Sha Tin racecourse on February 16, 2020. 

Richard Ebright, a biology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told the BBC that genomic sequencing of the Chinese coronavirus showed no proof that it had been artificially modified, yet he could not rule out the possibility that the unfolding pandemic could be the result of a lab incident.
Ebright said the Chinese coronavirus was a cousin of one found in bats captured by the institute in caves in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 2003, and that samples had been kept in the Wuhan lab since 2013.
Also, a paper that appeared in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet at the end of last month has lent credibility to speculation about the origins of the Chinese virus. 

The paper quoted seven doctors at Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital as saying that the first patient admitted on December 1 had “never been to the wet market,” nor had there been any epidemiological link between the first patient and subsequent infection cases, based on the data from the first 41 patients treated there.
Furthermore, a note from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology is seen as a tacit admission that some kind of incident may have occurred at the Wuhan lab.
On Saturday, the ministry issued a directive mandating more stringent handling of Chinese viruses and bioagents by all labs and research institutes. 

The document alluded to the slack oversight and management rampant at some facilities, and stressed that protection and decontamination must be beefed up now that more labs across the nation are intensifying their efforts to develop medicines to treat it and a vaccine to prevent it.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao daily reported on Monday that the CCDC had sounded the alarm in a report on the emerging SARS-like outbreak submitted to the top leadership in early January. 

However, curbing the spread was not at the top of the agenda when Xi and other members of the party’s upper echelon sat down for a Politburo meeting on January 7. 

Citing its source, the broadsheet said top leaders were opposed to any contingency measures “that may mar the festive vibe and make the public panic.”
In a move seen as a bid to highlight Xi’s early involvement in combating the outbreak, state media revealed on Sunday that the president “gave specific instructions” to contain the spread in the January 7 meeting, amid people’s simmering exasperation with the state and local cadres’ tardy response to the public health crisis that has made more than 70,000 sick across the country as of Monday afternoon.

Gao Fu, chief of China’s CCDC. 

And even though the CCDC alerted Xi early on, its chief, Gao Fu, is still under fire for his public assurances last month that people were not likely to become infected as a result of normal human contact. 

Calls are being made for Gao, a veterinarian by training, to step down.