Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan
asiatimes.com
asiatimes.com
I spent some time looking at where the factual claims come from and I've sort of come to the conclusion that what we have here is an eco-system of sites that are publishing more and more articles, citing each other slowly moving further and further away from the core facts each time. Until you're entirely removed the facts and the whole thing is just a web of speculation. The closest I could get to any real claims about the lab was this Daily Mail article[1], but again, it's things like
>The news that COVID-19 bats were under research there means that a leak from the Wuhan laboratory can no longer be completely ruled out.
and
> According to one unverified claim, scientists at the institute could have become infected
You see, its this reporting of completely unverified speculation, that gets laundered through site after site until you end up with
>The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Well, yeah, it's the center of scrutiny because you and your buddies decided to make it the centre of scrutiny with no evidence. Here's a wild thought: Maybe it's necessary to do research on diseases near to the source of the disease. It's not a conspiracy when the lab studying mad cow disease is located in the UK either.
[1]:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8211291/U-S-governm...
This line is what makes me think I am reading propoganda. It starts as a news story but continues as a opinion piece.
It is never understandable that a lab of this nature, regardless of country, has safety issues. I don't think Chinese authorities nor US authorities would agree it is understandable. Or at least I hope they wouldn't.
Why not?
If safety relies on negligence not occuring then negligence compromises safety. If safety is regularly comprised that would be considered "struggling with safety".
Safety systems are there to catch when people make mistakes and/or don't do things they should do. There is a level of negligence that no system can cope with but up to that point they safe systems should be able to cope with mistakes.
Like cities have pollution problems because of thermal engines. Like airplanes or ships.
We know we should fly on Pegasus feeding themselves on rainbows but that is not feasible on the short term.
All human activities have risk. You can minimize those, but never made them zero.
The issue is not whether there are risks. Clearly there are. The issue is whether the proper mitigations were being followed.
The post incident information flow from the Chinese makes it very difficult to believe this was an unavoidable accident. Seems more likely it was a ticking time bomb of safety violations.
People asume that all this writing is "organic". It is not. It is orchestrated and coordinated. Basically the current US administration gains politically by keeping war rhetorics; the "maybe the virus is created in lab, maybe released by accident, maybe on purpose, we don't know, China is not being transparent" is a key part.
Accepting the virus as a natural phenomenon puts the focus on the actual policy response and that is much less of a winner.
There is no "conspiracy" in the theory in fact. The most probable cause is an accident. Nobody is going to create it as a weapon without creating the vaccine first.
We should not be "accepting" any prejudice, the one that "favors" US administration, or the opposite one, but we should be studding and working around evidence.
By the way, if it actually was an accident, accepting that it was a natural phenomenon favors the interest of China administration too.
It can't be natural, even accepting China's side's theory of the market, it would be made by human intervention mixing in the market bats with Armadillos.
This is one of the many papers on the subject:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
So why are we still discussing this? Because we are being manipulated.
"If evidence is found that Covid-19 is a biological weapon, some pundits such as Fox News host Lou Dobbs have called for the US to declare war on China.
Nonetheless, it is unclear what the legal ramifications would be if the virus was indeed leaked from a Chinese lab, but as a result of a research project that was outsourced and funded by the US government."
All other work is outsourced.
Secondly, they cite a weird website called nationalfile.com for the claim Fauci funded the Chinese lab (in an article written now, not at the time the funding was claimed to be made) - I don't believe that. If you actually look at the NIH website what they're passing off as Fauci fundign the Chinese lab, is a 2018 article about collaboration with the lab in studying an outbreak of a disease in pig farms in Guangdong. Which is not exactly the shooting up bats with SARS is it, and it's certainly not the type of research that was effected by the GOF moratorium.
>The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.
This is entirely speculation. There's no evidence of this being the case.
Basically what I'm saying is that this website is a fake news site. It's citing other fake news sites, spreading misinformation and mis-representing government reports.
The controversial claims are baseless - and often uncited, and the citations that are there are either to other misinformation sites- literally, waht is the nationalfile.com?
[1]:https://osp.od.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/NSABB_Fina...
Then there is smallpox. The idea of doing anything with smallpox samples other than placing them in an ultra high temperature autoclave is horrifying. That stuff is extinct in the wild. It should be extinct from the timeline entirely.
I am suspicious of Asia Times, but also of the drive to blame this on China. I raised my question in the abstract since so far I see no concrete evidence that COVID-19 originated in anyone's lab whether Chinese or American.
Does the notion of ex-post-facto not apply to foreigners? (Although the concept of a domestic lawsuit against foreigners is itself weird to me.)
But that legislation sounds weird. I wonder whether those republicans have any idea what Westphalia is or what was agreed there.
Ex post facto is a term of art for retroactive criminalization, this addresses civil suits.
So what is the source of this info? Turns out it is the Daily Mail, a right-wing UK rag of highly questionable quality and history of economy with the truth. In the referenced DM article, the only attribution we hear about are "documents obtained by the Mail"... Fake FB news are also documents obtainable by the Mail. Post originals or it didn't happen.