Regular readers of CHQ will note that we have said on several occasions that the evidence we’ve seen leads us to believe that the SAR COVID-19 virous was engineered by the Communist Chinese military and that its spread at the turn of the 2019 – 2020 new year was a proof-of-concept biological weapons attack.
Now, The Times, one of the UK’s most respected newspapers, has published an article, authored by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott, detailing previously secret information on the development of the deadly virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The US investigators told The Times 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 new investigation by The Times paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory, and we urge CHQ readers to read the entire original article once this summary whets your appetite for the truth, long suppressed by Anthony Fauci and his stenographers in the establishment media.
The Wuhan lab, 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. Later, one of America’s leading coronavirus scientists shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques with Communist Chinese scientists associated with the Red Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
The Wuhan 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 – however, the idea of vaccines against coronaviruses fit precisely with People’s Liberation Army doctrine calling for unleashing viruses to change the balance of power once the Chinese people were vaccinated against the weaponized virus.
This effort accelerated 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 recognized 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 program 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 quoted by The Times, the classified program was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.
They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to a hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.
An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
Separate analysis shows the center of the initial outbreak of Covid-19, which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the institute’s laboratory, rather than at the city’s “wet” wildlife market as had been thought.
Perhaps most importantly, The Times article details the relationships and the money flow – most of it United States government grants – that funded the research that circumvented US prohibitions against exactly the kind of research and genetic manipulation that created the SARS COVID-19 virus.
The Wuhan lab’s most famous scientist was 39-year-old Dr Shi Zhengli. According to The Times report she and her team zoned in on bats as part of their research into the original SARS virus. Bats had been linked to other deadly viruses, such as rabies, nipah and marburg. She began searching for bat colonies in caves in southern China in 2004, earning her the nickname “Batwoman.”
Shi was joined by a British bat expert, Dr Peter Daszak, who would become a close friend and collaborator. Dr. Daszak left the UK to take a management position in the Wildlife Trust, a non-profit organization based in New York.
According to The Times its work protecting pets and endangered species did not attract substantial funding. But after the September 11 terror attacks and the Sars outbreak, the US began to see the importance of funding work combatting bioterrorism and pandemics. The Trust began to focus on how viruses might cross from animals to people and spark a pandemic.
Shi’s team provided the fieldwork for the trust’s campaign and the laboratories to test and experiment on the viruses. In 2009, the trust was given $18 million over five years from a new program, called Predict, to identify pandemic viruses. Shortly afterwards, the trust was rebranded as the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak assumed the role of president. The Chinese collaborators who helped put him on the map were also rewarded: $1 million of the Predict grant was redirected to the Wuhan institute.
According to The Times it was Daszak who lobbied the US government for funding for the Wuhan lab and convinced the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to give Shi and the Wuhan lab a waiver of President Barack Obama’s prohibition on gain o function research.
It is not clear if Dazek played a role in recruiting veteran virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina who was doing truly cutting-edge experiments using a technique to fuse together different pathogens by mixing their genes. To test the effect of these lab-created mutant viruses on people, he created “humanised” mice by injecting them with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours.
Baric was aware this type of “gain of function” work, so-called because it can enhance virus potency, was controversial and could have a sinister application.
“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilization.”
Shi needed Baric’s expertise. She contacted him in 2013 and he agreed to help. The Wuhan Institute provided Baric’s team with the genetic sequence for SHC014 so he could recreate the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides. The American scientists then inserted SHC014’s “spike gene” into a copy of the original Sars virus Baric had created in his lab and tested the new mutant on his humanised mice.
In May 2014, Dazek’s EcoHealth Alliance was awarded a $3.7 million publicly funded grant by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). More than $500,000 of it went to the Wuhan lab for equipment and a further $130,000 was spent chiefly on pay and benefits for Shi and her assistant.
The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.
It caused a big stir, reported The Times. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
The Wuhan institute began stepping up its own lab work using Baric’s techniques. It created two new mutants by fusing viruses with the WIV1 pathogen it had found in the Shitou cave. These experiments were mentioned in Daszak’s progress report for the year to May 2016, which he submitted to the US government funders. The same report disclosed the institute planned to create an infectious version of the camel pathogen Mers by combining it with bat viruses. Mers had killed 35 per cent of people infected during a 2012 outbreak in Saudi Arabia.
According to The Times this triggered alarm bells for the US government because it would have involved the type of gain-of-function experiments that were still barred. According to documents obtained by freedom of information campaigners, Daszak argued the Mers experiment was not gain of function because it was unlikely to make the virus more pathogenic. A compromise was reached whereby the scientists would stop work and report to US officials if they created a new mutant virus that grew ten times faster than the natural virus it was created from.
That same year, Daszak announced to a New York conference that Shi was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people.”
Within a year the scientists at Wuhan had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature.
The Times further reported that in the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
The Communist Chinese military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed”.
The authors are Red Chinese People’s Liberation Army researchers, and The Times reported one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponized by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
What’s more, The Times reports investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists. Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.
A report published in April, co-authored by Dr Robert Kadlec, who was responsible for the US’s vaccine development program, concluded that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019 — just as the pandemic began. US investigators quoted by The Times said testimony from scientists connected to the Wuhan institute’s collaborators suggested Covid-19 vaccine work was going on at the laboratory before the outbreak.
Strangely, in May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died. Witnesses cited by The Times are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.
What’s the bottom line? Fauci knew the truth, Daszek knew the truth, many others involved in the NIH grants knew the truth, Baric knew the risks and they all lied to cover up their own culpability in the pandemic that killed 7 million people.
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