Back in 2020, Trump said China caused the CoViD-19 pandemic, and the establishment media all agreed that everything Trump said was false, so the virus never came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting
that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” was written by a group of virologists
and others in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, and this was widely quoted (and referenced) by those who wanted to refute Trump's claim. Most of us expected the teams researching the virus to find the original bat version and the intermediate host. It was thought to most likely be a pangolin. Only the infected pangolin has not been found. Still, it was early. Surely the bat and the intermediate species would eventually turn up.
However, after 20 Jan 2021, Trump was no longer president, and was barred from all social media. The establishment media still run anti-Trump articles, but no longer runs multiple such articles on a daily basis.
And then President Biden said the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and this quickly became the standard corporate media theory of how it originated.
In support of the now accepted Biden theory, which, of course, had no relation to any of Trump's ridiculous ideas of how the virus originated, Nicholas Wade wrote "The origin of COVID: Did people or nature
open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?" The paper has a long and detailed argument that strongly suggests the virus was developed in a lab. He wrote about that Lancet article that ' It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted
by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.
Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute
of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he
funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of
interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the
letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” ' which rather reduced the weight of that Lancet article. We all know that the scientists on the payroll of tobacco companies continued (until it was legally prohibited) to publish papers saying that the science proved that smoking was harmless, and probably had many health benefits. And it now looks like Daszak's paper fits that category.
Wade notes that, in the case of SARS and MERS, it was quickly discovered that the virus had started in a bat, then infected a civet in the case of SARS and a camel in the case of MERS, and was then transmitted to humans, where is was more deadly than CoViD-19 in terms of infection fatality rate (IFR), but less transmissible. However, we still have not found the original bat virus nor the intermediate host.
Mr Wade says there is strong evidence CoViD-19 must have been created by what is called gain-of-function research. This is done in military biological warfare labs, especially in Fort Dettrick in Maryland. It is also done in civilian virology laboratories where they are looking to first develop particularly infectious and deadly viruses and then study how to stop them. The virus sequence is such that it would be very difficult for it to have occurred in nature, it looks like it could only have been created in a gain-of-function research lab. Mr Wade provides ample evidence in support of his claim, and, now that it's President Biden, not Trump saying it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, many accept Mr Wade's contention that it was a biological weapons project that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What strongly weakens Mr Wade's contention that it was a biological weapons programme at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that it was proved in 2021 that the US funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology research. Dr Fauci said the research was too dangerous to perform in the US, so the US funded it in Wuhan. The PRC responded that the US would be insane to fund biological warfare research in a country it considered one of its two worst enemies. Which is a very convincing argument that Wuhan was doing prophylactic gain-of-function research before 2020 in an effort to discover new and better ways to stop any future pandemic, and not as a biological warfare project (unlike Fort Dettrick).
It is also obvious, since the US was funding the research, that material was going back and forth, so the CoViD-19 virus might have been created at Fort Dettrick and sent to Wuhan for further study, where a researcher, who had no idea how dangerous it was, studied it in a BSL-2 (biosafety level 2) laboratory, which is about the same as a normal dentist's office, got infected and then went shopping in the Wuhan Wet Market.
While it now looks obvious from Mr Wade's paper that a virus engineered in a gain-of-function research programme escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not clear if the virus was engineered in Wuhan or in Maryland.
It is clear that if, as seems highly likely, the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, it was accidental and not a PRC conspiracy to infect the West.
The claim that the PRC covered up the virus has a tiny bit of truth in it. The PRC released a report on 31 December 2019 that they had a few patients with a new respiratory virus, and the new virus might be as deadly and infectious as SARS. The comments on the report was that there was no evidence it was actually transmissible between humans, nor that it was deadly. The first patient was admitted on 1 December 2019, most of those infected had proven links to the Wuhan Wet Market, and no one had died.
The first death was on 10 January 2020. A doctor wanted to raise the alarm, but the Wuhan CPC ordered him not to say anything, because they had planned a huge party with 40,000 guests to celebrate Chinese New Year. So the doctor called Beijing, and on 19 January 2020, a team from Beijing came, studied the cases for one day, and went back to Beijing. On 20 January 2020, the PRC announced to the world that it had a new, infectious, and deadly virus in Wuhan. On 23 January 2020, the PRC closed Wuhan: no one could leave, and only essential workers could enter. Tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, and construction workers flew into Wuhan, but no one flew out after 23 January 2020. And Beijing fired the entire leadership of the Wuhan CPC.
The West had from 20 January 2020 to get ready (it would have been much better if the Wuhan CPC had started taking steps against the virus on 10 January 2020, which is why they were all fired for incompetence).
Sadly, the West had outsourced all PPE manufacture to the PRC, so the PRC had plenty of PPE to fight CoViD-19 in the PRC, but not enough to supply the rest of the world. And without adequate PPE, it was very hard to fight the virus. The US had the most infections and deaths because it is the 3rd largest country. In terms of per capita deaths, the US is about the same as Europe and Latin America.
But the Democrats figure CoViD-19 was a G_dsend, because it got rid of Trump. They all figure 600,000 US deaths was a miniscule price to pay to not have another 4 years of Trump.
