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COVID-19

Evidence on the origin of Covid leads to lab in Wuhan – Former NY Times Science Editor

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In the millions of articles, opinion pieces, and news stories written about Covid there is one topic that is more important than all the others.  It’s more important than masks, vaccines, or lockdown measures.  The origin of the virus is critical because no matter how many people die from covid, or how many businesses are wiped out, it’s critical that IF the next virus can be stopped, it mu st be.  

A science writer named Nicholas Wade has written the most thorough study on the origins of Covid to be released to the public.  Wade has worked with Nature, Science, and the New York Times, but this article was released on the public platform Medium.   In this article Wade goes through three possible scenarios and then draws the most likely conclusion.  This is a long read, but it might be the most important article yet written during this pandemic.

Here is the beginning of this extensive article from Medium. Click  here to read the full article on Medium.

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

A Tale of Two Theories

After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged to a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the only other point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. 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.”

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus”. But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). But since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.

The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.

Doubts about natural emergence

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic?

To read the rest of this article on Medium click here

Nicholas Wade

I’m a science writer and have worked on the staff of Nature, Science and, for many years, on the New York Times. [email protected]

 

By the way.. Medium is a fascinating place.  If you haven’t checked it out yet here’s a link to medium.com.

From About Medium:

We’re an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Our purpose is to spread these ideas and deepen understanding of the world.

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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COVID-19

WHO urges countries to sign globalist pandemic treaty by May: ‘A new threat will emerge’

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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The urge by the WHO for countries to sign onto its ‘Pandemic Accord’ comes after Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis warned provisions contained in the document would give the globalist group unreasonable power over Canadian citizens.

The globalist World Health Organization (WHO) has issued an “urgent” call for countries around the world to sign on to their sovereignty-undermining “Pandemic Accord” by May.   

In a March 20 press release, the WHO called for “accelerated progress” from countries joining their proposed treaty, the Pandemic Accord, which critics such as Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis have warned would give the WHO increased power over Canada in the event of another “pandemic” or other so-called emergencies.

“We call on leaders of all countries to step up their efforts and secure an effective pandemic accord by May,” a joint-letter from high profile political figures read.   

“A new pandemic threat will emerge – and there is no excuse not to be ready for it,” it warned, calling for negotiators “to redouble their efforts” to meet the “imminent deadline” of May 2024. 

The letter also advised countries not to believe the “malicious misinformation campaigning against the WHO.”  

“This global effort is being threatened by misinformation and disinformation,” it claimed. “Among the falsehoods circulating are allegations that the WHO intends to monitor people’s movements through digital passports; that it will take away the national sovereignty of countries; and that it will have the ability to deploy armed troops to enforce mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns.”  

“All of these claims are wholly false and governments must work to disavow them with clear facts,” the letter continued.  

While the WHO claims the accord would not undermine national sovereignty, in January, Lewis revealed that the new International Health Regulations (IHR) contained in the proposal will compromise Canada’s sovereignty by giving the international organization increased power over Canadians.     

“Canada consented to the amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), which limits Canada’s time to respond to further amendments, despite thousands of Canadians signing a petition expressing their concerns,” she warned.   

Lewis’ January statement followed her October endorsement of a petition demanding the Liberal government under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “urgently” withdraw from the United Nations and its subgroup, the WHO, due to the organizations’ undermining of national “sovereignty” and the “personal autonomy” of citizens.    

It warned that the “secretly negotiated” amendments could “impose unacceptable, intrusive universal surveillance, violating the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”    

Despite nearly 19,000 Canadians signing the petition, the Trudeau government adopted the amendments proposed by the WHO.  

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Elon Musk pledges support to doctor fighting sanctions for opposing COVID vaccine mandate

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Dr. Kulvinder Gill

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The Tesla billionaire said X will help Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, an Ontario pediatrician who has been embroiled in a legal battle with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for her anti-COVID views.

A Canadian physician who became well known for speaking out against draconian COVID mandates in her home province on social media and then was sanctioned by her medical college and forced into costly legal battles, has received the support of billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk.

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, an Ontario pediatrician who has been embroiled in a legal battle with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) for her anti-COVID views, last Thursday asked Musk for help.

“As one of the first Canadian MDs to oppose lockdowns on Twitter in 2020 … I’ve been persecuted for four years solely due to my tweets. Please help a fellow Canadian! ~$300k in court-ordered costs due in four days,” Gill wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on March 21.

Gill included an image of a screenshot from an August 2023 X post from Musk in which he vowed to support anyone facing hardships from anything they said on X and were then censored or attacked for it.

“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know,” Musk wrote in August 2023.

A short while after Gill’s Thursday post, Musk replied, writing, “We will help.”

Gill thanked Musk after his post, writing, “Thank you @elonmusk@X! Welcome to #TeamHumanity I hope your team reaches out very soon.”

Gill’s X post also linked to a recent interview she had with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who created the Great Barrington Declaration, about her ordeal with the CPSO.

“I was starting to read about the devastating, catastrophic harms of the actual lockdowns. All of this compelled me to speak out in the summer of 2020 about everything that was being ignored, both in the media’s coverage and in the daily conversations that Canadians were having. I didn’t anticipate the response that I received,” Gill said.

Gill is a specialist practicing in the Greater Toronto area, and has extensive experience and training in “pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology.”

Last September, disciplinary proceedings against her were withdrawn by the CPSO. However, last year, Gill was ordered to pay $1 million in legal costs after her libel suit was struck down, and she has now been told she must pay ordered to pay $300,000 by the end of March.

The CPSO began disciplinary investigations against Gill in August 2020, with The Democracy Fund (TDF) noting she was the target of “an online campaign by other doctors, media and members of the public to generate complaints against her.”

Gill has a large following on X (formerly Twitter) and since mid-2020 has been active on the platform criticizing COVID mandates. She was one of the few Canadian doctors who spoke out strongly against the COVID dictates early on and would take to X regularly to share her views.

Due to Gill’s social media posts, she has faced continued investigations as well as disciplinary actions by the CPSO. There have also been public complaints made against her, which the CPSO investigated.

The Democracy Fund has full details of those proceedings against Gill.

In late 2020, she took legal action against a group of some 23 doctors, academics, reporters and even the former president of the Ontario Medical Association, who she claimed had allegedly damaged her reputation as a “medical professional for unfairly attacking her anti-lockdown stance.”

Physician confirms Musk’s offer to her all set to go

On March 24, X News posted that X it “is proud to help defend Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill against the government-supported efforts to cancel her speech.”

Musk also wrote to Gill that he is in full “support of your right to speak.”

On the same day, Gill confirmed that X reached out to her “directly” about their offer to help her appeal her three CPSO cautions relating to her 2020 tweets.

“@elonmusk’s @X contacted me directly confirming Elon’s commitment to pay remainder of campaign to reach $300K AND Elon has committed to assisting my appeal of 3 CPSO cautions, for my 2020 tweets opposing lockdowns, to the very end (ONCA & SCC if needed). May Waheguru bless you,” she wrote.

Gill also launched a fundraiser of her own to help her pay her legal costs. Thus far, Gill has raised close to $200,000 of her $300,000 goal.

Many Canadian doctors who spoke out against COVID mandates and the experimental mRNA injections have been censured by their medical boards.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews at its annual general meeting in July 2023 near Toronto, canceled doctors Mary O’ConnorMark Trozzi, Chris Shoemaker, and Byram Bridle were asked to state their messages to the medical community regarding how they have had to fight censure because they have opinions contrary to the COVID mainstream narrative.

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