Joe “they’re not bad folks” Biden ain’t no Dubya. Looks like we’ll have to wait for the next president.
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That doesn’t make sense (the on purpose part). If it were deliberately released by the Chinese you don’t make ground zero 300ft from an institute that studies Coronaviruses and 20km from a level 4 lab that studies deadly viruses.
If it were the Chinese deliberately releasing a virus, they would do it far away from China and probably nearby someone else’s bio lab research facilities to make it look like someone else had accidently leaked the virus.
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Well, unless they were trying to make it look like an accidental lab leak. Just playing Devil’s advocate here.
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Which is fine, some facts like people being hospitalized as far back as October that worked for the institute seem to suggest they had an accident. If it came from a lab.
If it were deliberate and someone other than China, I would expect them to have done a better setup and use some documented strain they could pin on the institute without question.
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If he was working in a lab then an accident wouldn’t be much of a surprise.
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Let’s look at it from CCP perspective.
What is the Wuhan Lab?
It’s dual purpose. 1 is obvious, they study viruses there.
2 is not obvious - the Wuhan Lab is an “emergency shutdown switch” built into their supply chain. Would you build a nuclear power plant in downtown? Of course not, but China built this BS4 lab right in the heart of their supply chain and we didn’t realize the problem until China “activated” their emergency trade war button.
That’s why they released the virus in Wuhan, because it is the heart of China’s and the World’s Supply Chain.
And that’s why China wants desperately to make it look like it came from an animal and natural origins.
Lastly, for their plan to work, they need to allow it to spread for months under their oppressive censorship and then quickly do full scale lockdown once the world catches on. China must be first to recover in order for their plan to work. If they released it somewhere else where they can’t control and censor on a mass scale, the alarm bells would ring much earlier and the virus would be quickly under control similar to how SARS-1 happened. Still damaging, but nothing like what we saw with the entire world locking down.
China sees the Virus as an all-in-one solution to all their problems. Companies fleeing to Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Philippines, etc to manufacture there? Well China quickly made those places unable to meet demand, and those businesses have since come back to China in some form, and paid even more than before. It also pre-occupied the west and allowed them expert full control over Hong Kong, expand Xinjiang Concentration Camps, practice more air , land , and sea military exercises, and engage in mask and vaccine diplomacy.
As for “when did China release it” - I think they released right after US Treasury officially labeled China a Currency Manipulator in Aug 2019:
Another reason China would self-inflict a pandemic virus is the same reason we always see the bad guy in movies shoot themselves in the arm, to make it look like they are the victim. And we would all say “why would anyone do that to themselves, that’s crazy! They clearly are the victim…”
yeah, I was wondering how many accidents he personally might have been responsible for back in the day 
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Tedros is in charge! Oh, bugger.
Why would China release a highly transmissible virus on its own population, threatening not only the livelihood of 1.4B people, but also stop decades of economic growth to negative resulting in trillions in loss exports?
If Wuhan was the origin of the virus, why then were neighboring provinces, let alone bordering countries even less developed, not impacted severely by the virus compared to Europe/US?
How did a highly contagious virus circumvent vastness of China and neighboring countries–the most densely populated areas of the world, yet cause untold devastation in countries thousands of miles away protected by vast bodies of water?
Is it just a coincidence that US has several hundred biolabs around the world? Or that military personnel stationed near one (Ft Detrick) happened to have gotten sick during olympic games in Wuhan–central transportation hub, just before the largest mass migration holiday in the world?
Because…Air transport from major cities point to point. That long been predicted how a global pandemic would spread rapidly and that’s exactly what happened.
Wuhan was the epicenter who is denying that ?
Let’s look at the samples from the Wuhan Virology lab, let’s see their medical records.
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So it seems Fauci’s reasoning on his recent denial of US funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan does not involve the chain of funding, but alleges that the research in question was not GOF research at all. @urodacus or anyone, any opinions?
i would have to read the terms of the grants very carefully to see what NIH did actually fund through EcoHealth Alliance. it is possible that the GoF research was undertaken by the Chinese without the NIH’s knowledge, or they may have considered they were not actually funding that at all. GoF research on humanized virus was banned in 2014, at least from NIH money, but was permitted again a few years later when (according to the Axiom article) “an oversight mechanism was established”. But we all know how much attention China pays to such rules.
one interpretation of GoF research might be that as long as you don’t deliberately engineer new sequence into the virus, but are just allowing evolution to its stuff while you passage the virus through new hosts (such as humanized mouse cell lines), then it is not GoF. But it still has much the same end effect.
but it is an interesting tack Fauci has taken, and one that may well run him aground. Sorry for the sailing terminology, but that’s just where the winds are taking me right now. This is swell!
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Elsewhere in the hearing, Fauci said that the study in question was reviewed and approved at several levels.
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true, but how much extra was done without NIH scrutiny? they had to jump through hoops to get the money in the first place, and this may be what he is referring to.
i don’t know that anyone outside the Chinese bioweapons programs actually knows the extent of coronavirus research/weaponization at Wuhan. they had been blocked from open access for years (yes, i know there were a few western scientists working there all along, up until October 2019, but it is SO easy to keep them out of the loop. I know, i worked at Sinica for years).
It’s a damned BSL4 facility. you expect locked doors and access swipe cards control everywhere. you don’t go beyond your little bubble.
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It seems though he is clearly acknowledging that they fully approved that study, so one question at least is whether the approved content fairly constitutes GOF. I guess they must have some strong way of explaining why it’s not GOF.
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i would like to see that and their definition of GoF. it seems unlikely that Fauci would support a weaponisation program, no?
or maybe he did, and he trusted that their lab security would be better than the really piss-poor standard that has become evident.
Living in China or Taiwan for a few years beforehand would have schooled him on that! Cha bu duo la!
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Yeah, it seemed like Paul had a point, the resulting virus certainly seems to have gained a function.
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You wouldn’t need to read the grants very carefully at all, in my opinion - it’s stated pretty clearly what they were funding even in the abstracts of the grant applications.
For example:
- Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.
I don’t see any way that it’s possible to claim that looking for, introducing, and experimentally testing gene sequences that are more infectious or have a broader host range (i.e., improved function) isn’t gain-of-function research. It’s literally the definition of it.
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…in China. Well that worked out well!
Perfect human ACE-2 receptor binding, what could go wrong.
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