Could Covid Have Come From A Chinese Lab?
Coast to Coast AM, the 545-station radio show I appear on at 1:06 am every Wednesday night, threw me a surprise a few nights ago. The host, George Noory, asked me to report on a disturbing poll figure about Covid.
Here are the details. Fox News hired two independent research companies to run a poll from June 19th to June 22nd. The pollsters interviewed 1,001 randomly chosen registered voters on their cellphones and landlines. It turns out that a 60% majority of registered voters now believe that the Covid virus was created in a lab in China. Yes, a 60% majority.
But as important as the Fox News poll is a flood of meticulously researched stories in the New York Times investigating whether the massive Chinese research complex called the Wuhan Institute of Virology could possibly be the source of the Covid virus. The most illuminating of these New York Times pieces digs into an anthrax outbreak that killed 69 people in 1979 in the Soviet city of Yekaterinburg.
Way back then, 40 years ago, the question was whether this anthrax outbreak had come from a nearby Soviet military bioweapons lab. The Soviet authorities said no. Absolutely not. They claimed that the outbreak had been caused by tainted meat. In fact, they put researchers to work going through sample after sample of meat just to prove it.
And they made such a convincing case for their claim that one Noble Prize winning American biologist, Joshua Lederberg, made a fact-finding trip to Moscow in 1986 and concluded that “The current Soviet account is very likely to be true.”
What Lederberg did not know was that the Soviet secret police, the KGB, had seized the medical records of doctors in the vicinity of the outbreak and had made survivors sign papers swearing them to secrecy for the next 25 years.
Over a decade later, in the 1990s, it would turn out that indeed the source of the anthrax had been a leak at the military bioweapons lab. A technician had failed to replace a safety filter.
Plotting the locations of the anthrax victims and the times of their infections showed that they had all had been infected by what appeared to be a slender plume of northeasterly wind carrying just a few milligrams of anthrax spores from the bioweapons lab a distance of 30 miles. And the medical records pinpointed the date of release of those anthrax spores– April 2, 1979.
But the truth only came out because the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and the new leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, admitted the government coverup and allowed Westerners to investigate. The same sort of coverup could be happening now with the Covid coronavirus and the Chinese.
But there are three more facts you need to know. First, the New York Times has investigated the possible role of gain of function research in the Covid virus in a series of crucial articles. In gain of function research, scientists add new genes to a virus, for example to see what enables the virus to move from one species to another. Gain of function research has been used to create a vaccine against yellow fever, to get bacteria to produce human insulin for diabetics, and to get viruses to attack cancer cells.
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been aggressively researching how coronaviruses like SARS can jump from bats to other animals, including humans. To do it, she has been manipulating coronaviruses.
Shi is doing her research with what appears to be total transparency, publishing her results in the highest ranking international science journals. In fact, she’s a national hero in China. But, to repeat, Shi is manipulating the genes of coronaviruses.
Item number two: The official theory in China is that the American military fashioned the coronavirus and planted it in Wuhan. And official Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao tweets “US, you owe us an explanation.”
And the final item: it doesn’t matter where this virus comes from. A fourth wave of Covid may sweep over us in the fall. But this time it will be a new variant, the Delta variant, the variant that first emerged in India, the variant that is 60% more transmissible than previous strains and is more than twice as likely to land you in the hospital or in a coffin.
But our current vaccines can stop it.
Which means that if you want to save your life and to make sure you never infect those you love, you must get vaccinated. Twice.
References
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-coronavirus-lab-link-Covid-19-poll.print
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/science/Covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-Covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html