{"id":246,"date":"2024-12-08T17:56:14","date_gmt":"2024-12-08T17:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/experimentalfrontiers.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=246"},"modified":"2024-12-08T17:56:46","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T17:56:46","slug":"246","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/experimentalfrontiers\/2024\/12\/08\/246\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the “lab leak hypothesis” another cover-up?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Very early in the pandemic, the infamous\u00a0\u201cProximate origins\u201d paper<\/a>\u00a0was published in Nature Medicine, using nonsensical reasoning to \u201cprove\u201d that COVID could not have come from a lab. The Big Lie held its ground for over two years, before\u00a0Jon Stewart<\/a>\u00a0sneered at it and\u00a0Jeffrey Sachs<\/a>\u00a0added gravitas to the case against the \u201cWet Market hypothesis\u201d. Then in December, 2023, Robert Kennedy published\u00a0The Wuhan Cover-up<\/a>, making a detailed argument that COVID originated from bioweapons research (euphemistically called \u201cgain-of-function\u201d) in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Case solved.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m writing to raise the question whether there is a deeper cover-up. I don\u2019t claim to have proof, but I think there\u2019s substantial evidence that the Pandemic was not an accidental<\/em><\/strong>
\nrelease from a Chinese lab but a deliberate bioweapon attack from a US lab.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Already in April, 2020,\u00a0I wrote about these two possibilities<\/a>\u00a0without choosing between them.\u00a0Pepe Escobar<\/a>\u00a0was even earlier, accusing the US of attacking China with a bioweapon. Recently we have two new developments:<\/p>\n

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  1. A\u00a0denial<\/a>\u00a0has come from the Wuhan Institute\u2019s \u201cBat Lady\u201d, Shi Zhengli (pronounced by swallowing the \u201csh\u201d sound, \u201cShr Jung Lee\u201d, not \u201cShe\u201d), complete with genomes of all the viruses in her freezer. There\u2019s no reason to believe Dr Shi, any more than others who have so much to lose if implicated in a disaster on the scale of a world war. Her claim is not verifiable because her high-security facility is not open to inspection. But I note that Dr Shi has been consistent in her story from the beginning, and US laboratories have issued no such denials.<\/li>\n
  2. Three weeks ago, Robert Redfield, who led CDC under Trump,\u00a0suggested<\/a>\u00a0that the COVID virus came from the UNC laboratory of Ralph Baric.\u00a0Meryl Nass<\/a>\u00a0cites evidence for this possibility.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There are several \u201csoft\u201d reasons I take this hypothesis seriously.<\/p>\n

    First,\u00a0Kennedy\u2019s first pandemic book<\/a>\u00a0described dozens of \u201cdesktop exercises\u201d that anticipated a global pandemic and a global pandemic response. All these events were organized by Americans connected to the Deep State, not by Chinese, and they all emphasized tightening social controls and censoring dissent, rather than discovering treatments that could help patients to recover. The most recent was in\u00a0October, 2019<\/a>, just as COVID was appearing in Wuhan. These exercises were not about public health but about containing public anger during an emergency.<\/p>\n

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    \"Event<\/p>\n

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    <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

    Second, COVID appeared earlier in the US than in China. In the summer of 2019, there was a\u00a0mysterious COVID-like illness<\/a>\u00a0that killed nursing home residents in the Virgina suburbs of DC. Perhaps it was related to the Fort Detrick bioweapons lab, which\u00a0closed down at that time for security leaks<\/a>. A\u00a0Red Cross study<\/a>\u00a0of blood collected during 2019 found antibodies to COVID in 1.5% donors from 9 US states.<\/p>\n

    Third, the US was motivated to slow the galloping growth of the Chinese economy which, by some measures, was just overcoming US GDP around that time. The digital yuan was designed to compete with the US dollar as World Reserve Currency, and it was scheduled for full deployment in the spring of 2020. There has been suspicion of\u00a0stealth American bioweapon attacks against China\u2019s livestock<\/a>\u00a0in 2018, and solid evidence that the US has\u00a0attacked Cuba with bioweapons<\/a>\u00a0repeatedly.<\/p>\n

    Fourth, authors of the \u201cProximate Origins\u201d paper based their whole argument on their determination that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 was not a perfect fit to the ACE-2 receptor that was its port of entry into human cells. How would they have known this so early in the game? How would they even have thought to look for this evidence back in February, 2020, when the genome had just been published? In retrospect, we know that the spike protein was the payload of the bioweapon, engineered to have many nasty effects,<\/p>\n