Anonymous ID: 619bd9 April 7, 2025, 11:28 a.m. No.22879584   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>22879528

Canadians must know what our lab’s role was in COVID’s origins

 

We are at the bitter end of a whirlwind election campaign in which the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has killed 27,000 Canadians and counting, has been used as the debate version of a right hook to the prime minister’s jaw — as in, “why did you call this election, sir? We’re in the middle of a pandemic!”

The PM, fumbling for an answer, has insisted Canadians need to weigh in on major decisions about how we will defeat COVID-19 and how we will rebuild after it’s over (if it will ever be). But no serious questions have been raised in this campaign about how we got into this mess, and what our government must do to prevent another like it. In particular, there has been radio silence on the origin question.

Every epidemiologist will explain, if asked, that it is vital to determine the pandemic’s origin if we want to keep it from popping up all over again after we think we’ve stamped it out. If SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from an animal population in China — as some scientists argue, though they have produced no evidence — we have to find that animal population and cull it. Otherwise, it will become a reservoir for the disease.

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), spent more than $200 million over 10 years to try to PREDICT (the name of its program) when a virus might spill from an animal host to the human population. It spent some of that in China on the work of Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Though USAID funded labs in viral “hot spots” in more than 30 countries, they all failed to predict any of the viral outbreaks that have occurred since 2009. PREDICT missed the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, Chikungunya in Madagascar, the transformation of Zika in 2017 from an innocuous virus circulating mainly in Uganda to a worldwide scourge that causes babies to be born with microcephaly.

The U.S. last year created a new program which will spend $80 million on many of the same foreign labs surveying animals for signs of viral trouble. And then there’s the Global Virome Project: pharma giant Merck, along with Bill Gates and China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention leader George Gao, hope to catalogue the genomes of every virus on the planet. These programs focus on nature as the culprit; critics of them contend that they spend a bundle but deliver nothing, and that disease surveillance of humans is what we have to improve.

 

More at the website

 

Funded partly by USAID

 

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/canadians-must-know-what-our-lab-s-role-was-in-covid-s-origins/article_24cc1932-02f9-5e47-8419-80f2787be06b.html