Chinese scientists knew about the dangers of bats before the outbreak of coronavirus
A dossier prepared by the intelligence agencies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is described by the Australian publication, says that the Chinese authorities were hiding the news about the virus. At the same time, no convincing evidence of the “man-made” nature of the appearance of Sovid-19 is given in this dossier.
However, the published material sheds some light not only on the actions of Beijing, but also on the work of Chinese virologists. In particular, the dossier talks about the activities of the famous Chinese scientist in the field of virology Shi Zhengli.
“In Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei, not far from the now infamous Wuhan market, Dr. Shi and her team work on highly secure equipment in Level 3 and Level 4 biological containment laboratories, studying deadly coronaviruses obtained from bats,” the Australian publication retells. report of five intelligence services.
“At least one of the approximately 50 virus samples found in Dr. Shea’s laboratory is 96 percent genetically compatible with Covid-19. When Dr. Shea heard the news of an outbreak of a new virus that looked like pneumonia, she began to worry about sleepless nights – was her lab to blame for this outbreak? ”
After these initial fears, Dr. Shea became convinced that the genetic sequence of Covid-19 did not match any of the viruses studied in her laboratory.
“Nevertheless,” the Daily Telegraph continues in Sydney, “given the scale of lies, deliberate obfuscation and the angry refusal of the People’s Republic of China to allow any investigation into the causes of the outbreak, international intelligence agencies are currently closely monitoring her laboratory.”
The position of the Australian government is that the virus most likely arose on the Wuhan market in the open air, but there is a small – five percent – chance that it could accidentally “leak” from the laboratory.
The American position, judging by reports that appeared in recent days, is that the virus most likely leaked from the laboratory, but it could also appear in the market where wild animals are traded and where other diseases occurred, including bird flu H5N1 and SARS .
The material also refers to a study conducted in 2013 by a group of scientists (including Dr. Shi), during which feces of horseshoe bats were collected in caves in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Later, a virus was detected in these samples, 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV 2, the virus that caused Covid-19.
The research dossier also refers to the work done by the team for the synthesis of SARS-like coronaviruses to analyze whether they can be transmitted from bats to other mammals. This means that scientists have modified parts of the virus to check whether it is transmitted to various species.
Their study, conducted in November 2015 with the University of North Carolina, concluded that a virus similar to SARS can be transmitted directly from bats to humans, and there is no cure that could help.
The study recognizes the incredible danger of the work that the researchers did: “The potential for preparing for future outbreaks and mitigating their effects must be correlated with the risk of more dangerous pathogens.”
A few years later, in March 2019, Dr. Shih and her team published a review entitled “Bat Coronaviruses in China” in the medical journal Viruses, where they stated that “they seek to predict the occurrence of foci of the virus and their interspecific transmission potential.” The authors spoke of “the urgent need to study bat coronaviruses in China to understand their ability to cause another outbreak.”
Chinese scientists predicted in their material: “It is very likely that future coronovirus outbreaks like SARS or MERS will come from bats, and there is an increased likelihood that this will happen in China.”
While foreign intelligence agencies are figuring out whether the Wuhan laboratory is responsible for the outbreak of coronavirus, Dr. Shi does not pause in his studies, which, she claims, are more important than ever to prevent a pandemic. She plans to lead a national project on systemic selection of viruses in bat caves. It is estimated that there are more than 5,000 strains of coronaviruses “pending detection in bats around the world.”
“Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause new outbreaks,” says Dr. Shea in Scientific American. “We must find them before they find us.”
By the way, Dr. Shi, director of the Center for New Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, spent three months in 2006 as an invited scientist in Australia, where she worked at the Organization for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIRO).
Dr. Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou, currently managing the bat viral infection and immunity project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, spent three years in the bio isolation facility of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in 2011-2014. During this time, Dr. Zhou arranged for the transportation of live wild bats from Queensland to a laboratory in Victoria, where they were euthanized for autopsy and testing for deadly viruses.
For the United States, in October 2014, Americans withdrew funding for controversial experiments that make pathogens more powerful or can spread dangerous viruses, fearing that this could lead to a global pandemic.
Controversy has erupted in the scientific community – whether it is worth developing such viruses to anticipate and prevent a pandemic if a virus leak can also cause a pandemic. There were also serious concerns about the lack of adequate security measures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when dealing with deadly viruses.
The “closed, but not secret” dispatch dated January 19, 2018, which was made available to The Washington Post, showed that scientists and diplomats from the US embassy in Beijing visited the laboratory and sent warnings to Washington about inadequate security practices and weak points of control in studies of coronaviruses in bats.
“During their interaction with scientists from the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they noted that in the new laboratory there is a serious shortage of properly trained technical specialists and researchers necessary for the safe management of this laboratory with a high level of protection,” the report said.
The scientific consensus, the Australian The Daily Telegraph continues, is that the virus came from the wet market. But the other day, an American intelligence agency first confirmed that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident in a Wuhan laboratory.
Acting Director of the National Intelligence Office Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in the laboratory: “The entire intelligence community constantly provides critical support to US politicians and those who respond to the COVID-19 virus that originated in China. The intelligence community also agrees with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus has not been created by humans or genetically modified … The intelligence community will continue to carefully review emerging information and intelligence to determine if the outbreak started as a result of contact with infected animals or whether it happened as a result of accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. “
Despite Richard Grenell’s statement and consensus among scientists that the virus was not created in the laboratory, the dossier referenced by The Daily Telegraph mentions a study alleging that the virus was created.
Scientists from South China University of Technology published a study on February 6, which concluded that “the killer coronavirus probably came from a laboratory in Wuhan. It may be necessary to increase safety in high-risk biohazard laboratories. ” This study was soon withdrawn because it “was not supported by direct evidence,” according to the author Botao Syano, the dossier says.
Not insisting on the credibility of the above study, the Australian publication mentions that it was included in the government dossier prepared in the framework of the case against China.
A document received by an Australian newspaper said that they “concealed and destroyed evidence” and that the Chinese authorities deliberately hid the coronavirus, silencing the doctors who spoke out on this subject, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide samples of live viruses to international scientists, working on a vaccine.
Of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticizing the actions of the Chinese authorities, not a single case, according to the Australian newspaper, is more intriguing and disturbing than the case with Huang Yang Lin.
This researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to rumors walking in Chinese social networks, was the first to be diagnosed with a patient with coronavirus (that is, she became a “zero patient”). Then reports of her disappearance appeared, and her biography and image were removed from the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Although the institute denied on February 16 that she was a null patient and said that the researcher was alive and well, since then no evidence has been provided.
As early as December 31, Chinese authorities began censoring news about the virus in search engines, removing queries such as SARS Variations, Wuhan Seafood Market, and Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia. On January 1, without any investigation into the origin of the virus, the seafood market in Wuhan was closed and disinfected.
A little later, on January 3, the National Health Commission ordered the Wuhan pneumonia samples to be transferred to specially authorized testing facilities or destroyed, while at the same time ordering to ban publications on an unknown disease.
Doctors who dared to speak out about the new virus were detained and convicted. Authorities called on citizens “not to invent rumors, not to spread rumors and not to believe rumors.” The Global Times reported on January 2 that police in Wuhan arrested 8 people who spread rumors of a local outbreak of unidentified pneumonia. ” These messages were intended to silence doctors who may have been prepared to speak up. Thus, the truth about the outbreak in China was kept secret, the Australian newspaper sums up.
“Despite the evidence of transmission of the virus from person to person from the beginning of December, the PRC authorities denied this until January 20,” the dossier prepared by the security services said. – The World Health Organization did the same. However, officials in Taiwan have expressed concern as early as December 31, and experts in Hong Kong on January 4. ”
See also: The Chinese warned of a viral danger a year ago: why they were ignored
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