Covid-19, was the virus already circulating in September 2019? The US Senator’s report
What emerged from the report drawn up by the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the US Congress on the origins of the Covid-19 virus. The in-depth study by Giuseppe Gagliano
What does the report by US Republican Senator Michael McCaul reveal about the true origin of Covid?
The Chinese city of Wuhan, with a population of 11.1 million, is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (IVW), administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and with a large committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among its ranks. Doctor Shi Zheng-li, director of several departments of the Institute, has been carrying out work researches on coronaviruses there for years, i.e. researches that consist in modifying the genetic information of these viruses and altering their biological functions in terms of of pathogenicity and contagiousness.
Already in June 2019, George Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, warned, "almost prophetically", about the risk of uncontrolled mutations that could ensue and the danger of an increase in the ability of coronaviruses to infect human cells. He was followed into this in September by Yuan Zhiming, director of the IVW laboratory where this research was being conducted.
The authors of the addendum also note that, in the previous months, maintenance work was carried out in one of the IVW laboratories while the toxic waste treatment plant was undergoing renovations while it was less than two years old and that the IVW was getting a new air disinfection system, all coincidences suggesting troubling dysfunctions within months of the pandemic. The date of September 12 also attracts the attention of the writers of the report, who report that on that day, between 2 and 3 in the morning, the database of samples and viral sequences, hitherto accessible to the public, was taken out of service for which "no coherent explanation" has yet been given.
Furthermore, if it is official that Major General Chen Wei, a biological and chemical weapons specialist in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), took over the lead of the laboratory in January 2020, when the outbreak broke out, that fact would actually be to be traced back to the end of 2019, according to a "former American official". When asked on the subject, Dr. Shi spoke of "rumors" and "inaccurate information" as the IVW's ties to PLA researchers were old and common knowledge, some of which have been named and are accessible on the English version of the IVW website. This inconsistency resonates with satellite images from Wuhan which show that, out of 6 hospitals in the city, 5 saw their parking lots more full in September and October 2019 than at any other time of the year. At the same time, the Chinese search engine Baidu was experiencing a surge in searches for the words "cough" and "diarrhea", later identified as symptoms of Covid-19.
For the parliamentarians it is therefore "reasonable to conclude" that, at the beginning of September, one or more IVW researchers contracted SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory and spread it around the city through the subways and buses that serve the Institute. , a hypothesis all the more logical since the genetic manipulations at work in the laboratories aimed, they write, at strengthening their contagiousness for humans.
This transmission would take place at the worst possible time.
In fact, as of October 18, 2019, Wuhan has hosted no less than 9,308 athletes from 109 countries for the seventh Military Summer World Games. One of them, from Luxembourg, said he had arrived in a "ghost town", "confined", and that he had a fever when he arrived at the airport. During the return flight, 60 Canadian athletes were isolated in the back of the plane with symptoms of "cough and diarrhea". In fact, four of the countries that sent sports delegations to Wuhan, namely Italy, Brazil, Sweden and France, detected cases on their soil as early as November or December 2019, before the epidemic was known. Located on different continents, these cases probably have the same source – they could very well be those games.
However, if the drafters qualify this trace as "entirely plausible", it remains, for them, a hypothesis: they do not claim to have certainly arrived at the truth.
There are many clues from the addendum that suggest that the IVW researchers were engaged in research aimed at making a pathogen capable of engaging the coronavirus. It would have been a matter of creating, from elements of other viruses, "chimeric viruses" capable of infecting the human immune system, researches qualified by the authors as "dangerous" and conducted in safety conditions of the same order as those of a "dental office".
The paper examines the work done jointly by Dr. Shi and Peter Daszak, an American specialist in zoonoses and disease transmission between animals and humans.
From 2005 to 2019, the two scientists co-authored numerous articles and discovered more than 500 types of coronaviruses during expeditions to the caves where bats are hiding. In 2007, they wrote that one of the "chimeric viruses" developed as a result of these experiments was capable of infecting human cells and tissues through the ACE2 receptor, a protein found on the surface of cells and tissues in the human body, in particular in the mouth, nose and lungs. With the artificial modification, a near-future coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had finally acquired the ability to infect humans. Subsequent experiments by Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak have shown that coronaviruses from bats can directly infect humans, without the need for an intermediate host. In 2016, the two said they were working to prepare for outbreaks no longer by monitoring disease, but by creating chimeric viruses, which IVW scientists later confirmed to WHO.
Thus, for the Minority Staff Committee, it is "obvious" that genetic manipulation of coronaviruses and their consequences on the human immune system was carried out by IVW researchers, supported and funded by Peter Daszak, in 2018 and 2019.
The authors also explain that their interviews with scientists and officials and former American politicians highlighted specific characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, namely its particularly contagious nature (as much as measles), the absence of a clear intermediate vector between bat. and man, and its ability to host human ACE2. In fact, by way of comparison, MERS, which appeared in 2012, infected only 4,000 people and Sars, which occurred in 2002, 10,000.
According to an American study published in February 2020, SARS-Cov-2 would bind human ACE2 10 times better than the SARS virus, a finding confirmed by Australian and British researchers on June 24, 2021 in Scientific Reports, who noted an affinity "Extremely and surprisingly high" for human ACE2, suggesting that the origin of the outbreak is not related to zoonosis. The latter referred to data indicating that SARS-CoV-2 is remarkably adapted to human infection and pointed out that this raises questions: "Is its appearance the result of a rare natural coincidence or does it have other origins?".
The addendum also highlights the presence of an enzyme in SARS-CoV-2, which promotes the contagiousness of a virus in humans and which does not appear in any of the viruses related to it.
Against those who point the finger at the lack of evidence of genetic manipulation, they highlight the work of researchers at the IVW or who collaborated with this establishment, who not only pointed out that the viruses that have been the subject of molecular cloning could not be distinct from the others, but also that such viruses actually underwent such changes at the Institute in the years leading up to the pandemic. However, if the authors conclude that a genetic modification is a "valid hypothesis", they mention twice a virus "or" of natural origin "or" genetically modified: the possibility of a Covid-19 that would not result from human activities are not, for them, to be excluded.
In their first report, the representatives – they recall in this latest report – had highlighted the indications that the CCP and WHO had tried to hide the loss. The CCP has, in fact, arrested doctors to prevent them from speaking. They also claim to have gathered "further clues" that this cover-up was maintained by WIV scientists and American physician Peter Daszak. The authorities lied about the nature of the research carried out there, as well as the inadequacy of the security protocols.
The Staff Minority Committee recalls that in April 2012, after the miners in the Yunnan region became ill, the IVW researchers opened the investigation on samples taken from them and, subsequently, in the mine where they returned every year. A coincidence of date caught the attention of parliamentarians: on January 20, 2020, both Dr. Shi and his colleagues presented their article entitled "An outbreak of pneumonia associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin" to the journal Nature and to the national health of the Chinese Communist Party. They describe it as "very unlikely" that the article was written the same day it was sent to the journal, and therefore claim that the authors of the article had known for days, if not weeks, of the contagiousness of the virus.
But there were other signs of willingness to cover up according to the parliamentarians such as the ban on access to the Yunnan cave where the RaTG13 virus was first collected, in 2013.
BBC News reporters tried to enter it in December 2020, but was prevented by the police. A video from the French Envoy Special program shows villagers living near the mine explaining that many of them had been arrested for getting too close, that it had been closed and was full of surveillance cameras. RaTG13 is in fact, according to a report made in March 2020 by Australian, British and American researchers, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV2, being 96% identical to it: the only difference lies in its affinity with Human ACE2. This particular element may have been genetically modified, giving rise to SARS-CoV2. Mention is made of emails from scientist Kristian G. Andersen to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on January 31, 2020, where the former claimed that the genome went "against the schemes of the theory of evolution ". Andersen then ceased to support this thesis: the report mentions a videoconference with Fauci and others the next day, after which Anderson would make this decision.
"CCP censors and IVW researchers" are also identified for their attitude of suppressing any element of coronavirus research that could be linked to the origins of the pandemic. Dr. Shi argued that the idea that the Chinese military took control of the Wuhan laboratory is false and that the research samples would be openly accessible. The addendum contradicts both of these claims, pointing out that, given the amount of undisclosed ancient research and military activity at IVW, it is "obvious" that all the work has not come to light. Peter Daszak himself contradicted his former colleague in an interview with Nature where he spoke of "data" that "have not yet been published".
Worse still: the regime is denounced for its "sustained disinformation campaign," as tweets by Lijian Zhao, a senior official at the Chinese Foreign Ministry who shared an article in March 2020 accusing the US military of bringing the virus in China, article by Global Times , a well-known pro Putin site.
Peter Daszak would be the tip of the iceberg of this disinformation campaign, which published on February 19, 2020 in the Lancet a condemnation of the "conspiracy theories according to which Covid-19 is of unnatural origin". A first version of this text, ultimately unpublished, stated: "for the moment, experts believe that the known data on the genome are consistent with the theory of evolution, and there is today no clue to suggest a modification aimed at making the most contagious virus in humans ". Why was this ruling withdrawn by the presidents of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine? The question was asked by the parliamentarians.
The Republican elected representatives of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Commission conclude their addendum by expressing their "opinion" that SARS-CoV-2, modified by man or not, but collected in a cave in Yunnan province, is was "released" by the Wuhan Institute of Virology before September 12, 2019, due to the lack of attention to many parameters to be considered when researching viruses. The virus is believed to have spread through the city via its transport networks and from there around the world following the World Military Games held. Parliamentarians are calling for, in addition to "sanctions", the summons of Peter Daszak before Congress and "opening international negotiations" for the development of safety standards in laboratories, similar to the IAEA for atomic energy.
However, the United States must – underline the authors – take the necessary measures to "prevent the CCP's misdeeds leading to the emergence of a third pandemic in the 21st century".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/covid-19-il-virus-circolava-gia-a-settembre-2019-il-report-del-senatore-usa/ on Mon, 13 Sep 2021 15:04:56 +0000.