New Book Points to Global Coverup of Pandemic Origins
By Lorenzo Puertas December 14, 2021 Updated: December 14, 2021biggersmaller Print
Lab leak? Bioweapon? Wet market? Two years after a new coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China, the world still knows very little about the origins of the virus, named SARS-CoV-2 scientifically. Where it came from, and how it first infected humans, are questions that have still not been answered conclusively.
“Viral,” a new book from Harper Collins, examines the start of this pandemic, and why so much is still unknown. Scientist Alina Chan of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Matt Ridley, a PhD zoologist and science writer, explore three possibilities, including an accidental release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The authors presented their findings in a recent virtual discussion with John Walters, president of the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
What emerges is a damning indictment of global health and science institutions, and a story of two years of failure to properly investigate the virus origins.
Natural Origins?
One of the earliest theories promoted in the news media was that this virus emerged naturally from animals in the Wuhan area. According to Chan, there just isn’t much evidence to support this idea. “They’ve spent a year and a half searching for an animal source of this virus,” said Chan, “and they have found nothing.”
According to Chan, Chinese authorities spent months analyzing animal tissue, human blood samples, and tracking infections. Despite all that, “Chinese authorities have not found the original animal source,” said Chan.
Instead of assuming some unproven natural origin, Chan says that scientists should be focused on what happened at the Wuhan lab. Her research has uncovered documents “showing quite extensive coronavirus collection and manipulation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“I’d say that the burden is on the natural origin side,” said Chan, “to somehow show that these activities [at the Wuhan Institute], this collection of tens of thousands of high-risk pathogens from animals and humans… collecting into Wuhan, these experiments where genetic modifications are made to these viruses—somehow all that did not lead to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.”
Missing Wuhan Data
To emphasize the possible connection between the Wuhan lab’s activities and the outbreak of the virus, Chan makes a comical analogy: “Let’s say that we found in a document from early 2018, where they [the Wuhan lab] proposed putting a horn onto a horse. Then at the end of 2019, somehow a unicorn suddenly appears in that city.”
Despite this logical inference, the evidence presented in “Viral” is mainly sourced from publicly available research papers, media reports, and funding documents—but none of it comes directly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reason: the Wuhan lab took all its data offline on Sept. 12, 2019 – three months before the first infections were reported.
In December 2020, Shi Zhengli, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,, told the BBC that the Wuhan lab database was taken off the internet because of many hacking attacks.
Co-author Ridley explained the significance of this hidden data: “There exists in Wuhan a database of 22,000 samples, specimens, and [genetic] sequences. And that database went offline just before the start of the pandemic. It has never been brought back online. So we don’t have any idea what’s in it. It could tell us a lot about the viruses they were working on in that institution.”
This deliberate suppression of scientific data, months before the pandemic began, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence suggesting involvement of the Wuhan lab in the release of SARS-CoV-2, he said.
“It is quite extraordinary,” said Ridley, “to develop a large [virus] database as part of an effort to prevent pandemics and then not release the data when a pandemic comes along.”
The CCP Virus
This data suppression is not the first coverup of pandemic information by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s part of a propaganda campaign that has been covered extensively in the pages of The Epoch Times.
In recognition of the CCP’s behavior, including censorship and arrests of doctors who warned of the danger, the Epoch Times adopted “CCP virus” as its name for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “This name,” wrote the editorial board in early 2020, “holds the CCP accountable for its wanton disregard of human life and consequent spawning of a pandemic that has put untold numbers… at risk.”
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-book-points-to-global-coverup-of-pandemic-origins_4156594.html