As the “lab leak” theory regarding the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus gains credibility among scientists and in the press after being previously demonized, some aren’t ready to let go: The New York Times’ leading COVID-19 beat reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed Wednesday morning that she’s unfit for her job with a tweet suggesting that even investigating the possibility the Wuhan coronavirus did not originate at a “wet market” but escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was racist.
As soon as COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China, it was a high possibility that the virus originated in one of the two high-security labs studying bat viruses in that city — the National Bio-Safety Laboratory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was of particular concern. U.S. State Department cables in 2018 warned of extreme sloppiness at the lab. Although the lab’s research on bat coronaviruses was partially funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (of which Anthony Fauci is the director), the warnings went unaddressed.
Facebook was today accused of ‘showing its true and ugly colours’ and smothering free speech to cosy up to China as it scrapped its ban on posts debating whether Covid-19 could be man-made – but only after Joe Biden ordered the CIA to probe if the virus came from a Wuhan lab.
Mark Zuckerberg’s global policy chief Nick Clegg, the former British MP and Liberal Democrat leader, has also been branded ‘feeble’ for allowing months of censorship on the social network.
Critics told MailOnline that Facebook’s behaviour had been ‘contemptible’ and hope they will now respect free speech rather than ‘ingratiating’ themselves with states such as China, which has banned the website but remains a $5billion-a-year ad market.
Makes you wonder why social media was so Trump deranged and where their loyalties lie.
You know that you’re on to something when Justin Trudeau throws around accusations of racism.
That’s where Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives found themselves on Wednesday as they asked questions about security at Canada’s top microbiology lab and the partnership with scientists tied to the Chinese military.
It has taken 17 months since the new coronavirus supposedly erupted, but the lab leak hypothesis has finally come in from the cold. At first it was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory promoted by ranting right-wingers and nasty Sinophobes; a stance inflamed by some of the wilder claims made about the deliberate release of bio-weapons and the determination of some scientists to assist the Chinese cover-up. But now an increasing number of credible scientific voices are calling for a full investigation into whether this global catastrophe was the result of some kind of human error at a Wuhan laboratory.
President Biden has asked his intelligence agencies to step up their efforts to get to the truth about the origins of COVID-19 amid growing concern that it emerged from a Chinese laboratory.
A string of senior scientists have recently admitted they may have leapt to conclusions in assuming the virus jumped from an animal host in the wild to humans.
And at the weekend fresh details emerged about how staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital treatment for COVID-like symptoms in November 2019.
President Joe Biden’s administration shut down a State Department inquiry into whether the coronavirus could have spread out of a lab where the Chinese government was studying coronaviruses, CNN reported Tuesday.
Frankly I’m astonished CNN reported this.
China has vehemently denied a Wall Street Journal report citing US intelligence materials that said several members of staff at a key virus laboratory in Wuhan had fallen ill shortly before the first patient with Covid-like symptoms was recorded in the city on 8 December 2019.
Foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said it was “completely untrue” that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became sick in autumn 2019. The report, based on “previously undisclosed” US intelligence, said the said the lab workers staff had become sick “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness”.
Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care in November 2019, a month before China reported the first cases of COVID-19, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing a U.S. intelligence report.
The newspaper said the previously undisclosed report – which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits – may add weight to calls for a broader investigation into whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.
I remember when this was “racist.”
The Public Health Agency of Canada (the very same outfit behind the federal government’s chaotic, often self-contradictory response to the pandemic) will not say whether Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were Canadian citizens when they worked at the agency’s high-security National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg – a Level-4 biocontainment facility.
The PHAC could tell us, but refuses to do so, citing privacy reasons.
President Joe Biden is moving to surrender to China U.S. patent and trade secret protections on America’s COVID-19 vaccines. Two of those vaccines, made by American-based Pfizer and Moderna, employ revolutionary mRNA technology.
Specifically, the Biden administration has agreed to support a request by India and South Africa for waivers that would permit members of the World Trade Organization to not enforce laws protecting patents and trade secrets covered under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement.
The Disney-owned studio Searchlight pressured the American magazine Filmmaker to remove a quote from its profile of Chinese director Chloé Zhao because it was critical of China’s authoritarian regime, according to a Hollywood Reporter article published Friday.
Speaking with Filmmaker about the inspiration behind her first feature film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, Zhao said that she identified with the main character — a Native American teenager looking to flee South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — because she hoped to escape the dictatorial grip of the Chinese Communist Party when she was a child.
A top French military official has said that while it will be difficult for the EU to forge a “common political identity,” Europe must not be forced to choose sides in the rivalry between the US and China.
In an interview with Le Figaro, the chief of the defense staff, Army General Francois Lecointre, spoke about the dangers coming from powers that “challenge the stability and international law,” in particular, Russia, China, and Iran.
“We are heading towards a reorganization of the world order that is structured around the competition between the United States and China,” the general said, adding that every nation “will be called upon to choose sides.”
The so-called lab-leak hypothesis for the origins of Covid-19 has been gaining more and more traction in recent months. Once dismissed as a crankish fringe theory, it has slowly been entering into mainstream scientific discussion. Just this week, America’s CDC Director said that it was ‘possible’ that Covid could have leaked from a lab as ‘significant circumstantial evidence’ emerges.
Here’s What You Need to Remember: China likely recognizes that once wars are started with America, even when militarily successful, they may be extremely difficult to end.
Late springtime is a fitting time to contemplate the origins of U.S. maritime supremacy. Over a period of about twenty-four hours in June 1942, U.S. naval aviators turned the whole course of history by putting the Imperial Japanese Navy’s four premier flattops on the bottom. This victory can be attributed in roughly equal parts to strategic acumen, code-breaking genius, dive-bombing technology, precision training, and luck, as well as no small amount of valor and sacrifice.
