Back in 2007, NATURE had published an article about the Level-4 Virology Lab in Whuan titled: "Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens".
A Biosafety Level 4 virology facility is a lab equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases.
Fifteen BSL-4 facilities were identified in the U.S. in 2007, including nine at federal labs, while there are about 54 BSL-4 labs worldwide.
The construction of the lab in Whuan was completed in 2014 at a cost of 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It started to operate after several tests in 2017. It is located 20 miles (32Km) from the Huanan market, the place that has been widely considered as the source of the current outbreak of the novel Coronavirus.
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| China's highest-grade lab for studying viruses is located in Wuhan, the same city at the center of the current coronavirus outbreak |
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| The central monitor room at China’s National Bio-safety Laboratory. |
But scientists outside China felt worried about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could 'escape' the facility.
Back on April 2004, Chinese health officials had confirmed four suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), including one death, which appeared to have been caused by a safety breach at a laboratory studying the SARS virus.
Five top officials of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were punished to take blame for this year's outbreak of SARS including center Director Li Liming.
Concerns over a possible human error in a high-bio containment labs that could be a pandemic threat were expressed last year as statistical data show that human error was the cause of, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs.
On July 14 2019 CBC news reported that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada's only level-4 lab on July 5.Back on April 2004, Chinese health officials had confirmed four suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), including one death, which appeared to have been caused by a safety breach at a laboratory studying the SARS virus.
Five top officials of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were punished to take blame for this year's outbreak of SARS including center Director Li Liming.
Concerns over a possible human error in a high-bio containment labs that could be a pandemic threat were expressed last year as statistical data show that human error was the cause of, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs.
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| Li Liming, former CDC director. |
Security access for the couple and the Chinese students was revoked, according to sources who worked at the lab but didn't want to be identified because they fear consequences for speaking out.
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| Dr. Xiangguo Qiu accepting a Governor General's Innovation Award at Rideau Hall in 2018. She, her husband, Keding Cheng, and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada's only level-4 lab on July 5 amidst an RCMP investigation into what's being described as a possible 'policy breach.' (CBC) |
The RCMP had received a referral from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) on May 24.
"Based on information received to date, the RCMP has assessed that there is no threat to public safety at this time," Robert Cyrenne said in an email to CBC News.
PHAC had described it as a policy breach and "administrative matter" saying the department is taking steps to "resolve it expeditiously," Eric Morrissette, the health agency's chief of media relations stated "No one is under arrest or confined to their home".
The agency did not clarify when the incident occurred or specify what happened, but said it notified RCMP on May 24, 2019.
On top of this, on August 2019 the Public Health Agency of Canada conducted an investigation on the Canadian BSL-4 laboratory about shipping samples of Ebola and other deadly viruses to China as concerns were reported to a paper conducted by agency researchers that the Nipah virus could be weaponized or cause a widespread epidemic. It remains unclear if the transfer had anything to do with the dismissal of Xiangguo Qiu but there is an antecedent: Back in 2009 a former researcher of the BSL-4 lab was convicted of trying to smuggle genetic material from the Ebola virus across the Manitoba-North Dakota border.
On January 25, G News reported that Chinese government was about to admit that the real source of the coronavirus is from “a lab in Wuhan” linked to its covert biological weapon programs.The source appears to be Miles Guo the ex 72th among the richest in China who after falling out with members of the Communist Party leadership, was accused of corruption and other misdeeds and forced to flee China. He fled to the United States in late 2014 after learning he was going to be arrested after allegations against him including bribing, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud and rape. Guo and G News have been linked closely with Steve Bannon, previously from Breitbart.
On January 30, Francis Boyle an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law who has drafted the US legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 in an exclusive interview given to Geopolitics and Empire admitted that the 2019 Wuhan Coronavirus is an offensive Biological Warfare Weapon and that the World Health Organization (WHO) already knows about it. Boyle claimed that Wuhan BSL-4 is the source of the coronavirus: "My guess is that they were researching SARS, and they weaponize it further by giving it a gain of function properties, which means it could be more lethal". The virus was "improved" so "it could reach out maybe six feet or more from someone emitting a sneeze or a cough". The weaponized virus wasn't released on purpose but it "leaked". "This is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it". Nevertheless there isn't any hard evidence to his statements. Boyle also gave an interview on the same topic to Dr. Joseph's Mercola site.
On February 1, a preliminary report from India that had not been peer-reviewed suggested that Covid-19 was probably engineered: "The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature". After the negative response from various scientists the controversial paper was withdrawn by its authors that "They intend to revise it in response to comments received from the research community on their technical approach and their interpretation of the results".
At about the same time it was suggested that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China resulting in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. The ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to the virology institute in Wuhan, China have been unreported in English language media thus far.
On January 25, G News reported that Chinese government was about to admit that the real source of the coronavirus is from “a lab in Wuhan” linked to its covert biological weapon programs.The source appears to be Miles Guo the ex 72th among the richest in China who after falling out with members of the Communist Party leadership, was accused of corruption and other misdeeds and forced to flee China. He fled to the United States in late 2014 after learning he was going to be arrested after allegations against him including bribing, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud and rape. Guo and G News have been linked closely with Steve Bannon, previously from Breitbart.
On January 30, Francis Boyle an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law who has drafted the US legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 in an exclusive interview given to Geopolitics and Empire admitted that the 2019 Wuhan Coronavirus is an offensive Biological Warfare Weapon and that the World Health Organization (WHO) already knows about it. Boyle claimed that Wuhan BSL-4 is the source of the coronavirus: "My guess is that they were researching SARS, and they weaponize it further by giving it a gain of function properties, which means it could be more lethal". The virus was "improved" so "it could reach out maybe six feet or more from someone emitting a sneeze or a cough". The weaponized virus wasn't released on purpose but it "leaked". "This is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it". Nevertheless there isn't any hard evidence to his statements. Boyle also gave an interview on the same topic to Dr. Joseph's Mercola site.
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| Francis Boyle |
At about the same time it was suggested that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China resulting in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. The ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to the virology institute in Wuhan, China have been unreported in English language media thus far.
On February 3, the Hindu reported that the Indian government had ordered an inquiry into a study conducted in Nagaland by researchers from the U.S., China and India on bats and humans carrying antibodies to deadly viruses like Ebola.
The study that was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) came under scrutiny as two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases and they would have required special permissions as foreign entities.
The study, conducted by scientists of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. and the Duke-National University in Singapore, was investigated for how the scientists were allowed to access live samples of bats and bat hunters (humans) without due permissions. The results of the study were published in October last in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Nagaland study suggests bats in South Asia act as a reservoir host of a diverse range of filoviruses, and filovirus spillover occurs through human exposure to these bats. For the study done in 2017, 85 individuals participating in an annual bat harvest at Mimi, Nagaland, were picked. The majority of bat hunters were male, aged between 18 and 50, and participated at least eleven times in the harvest. The study says the potential virus present in the bats may not be an exact copy of the virus responsible for various outbreaks.
On February 6 another paper (though not scientifically decent if I may say so) titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCov coronavirus" suggested that "the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Whan". The paper refers to another lab in Whuan located only 280 meters from the Huanan market where surgery is performed on the caged animals and tissue samples are collected which are source of pathogens. The Whuan Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) was founded in 2002 occupying more than 200 employees.
The Nagaland study suggests bats in South Asia act as a reservoir host of a diverse range of filoviruses, and filovirus spillover occurs through human exposure to these bats. For the study done in 2017, 85 individuals participating in an annual bat harvest at Mimi, Nagaland, were picked. The majority of bat hunters were male, aged between 18 and 50, and participated at least eleven times in the harvest. The study says the potential virus present in the bats may not be an exact copy of the virus responsible for various outbreaks.
On February 6 another paper (though not scientifically decent if I may say so) titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCov coronavirus" suggested that "the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Whan". The paper refers to another lab in Whuan located only 280 meters from the Huanan market where surgery is performed on the caged animals and tissue samples are collected which are source of pathogens. The Whuan Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) was founded in 2002 occupying more than 200 employees.
An expert of collection (of samples?) describes that once he was attacked and blood of a bat was splashed on his skin while in another case a bat urinated on him. Knowing the danger he quarantined himself for 14 days.
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| History of Pandemics |
On March 17, a study published in the Nature Medicine journal titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2" conducted by Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Garry, concludes that:
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus". Computational analysis have showed that though the virus can bind to the human cells with great affinity, still the mechanism is not optimal, a fact that points to natural selection: "Thus, the high-affinity binding of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.
Based on their genomic sequencing analysis, Andersen and his collaborators concluded that the most likely origins for SARS-CoV-2 followed one of two possible scenarios.
In one scenario, the virus evolved to its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and then jumped to humans. This is how previous coronavirus outbreaks have emerged, with humans contracting the virus after direct exposure to civets (SARS) and camels (MERS). The researchers proposed bats as the most likely reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 as it is very similar to a bat coronavirus. There are no documented cases of direct bat-human transmission, however, suggesting that an intermediate host was likely involved between bats and humans.
In this scenario, both of the distinctive features of SARS-CoV-2's spike protein -- the RBD portion that binds to cells and the cleavage site that opens the virus up -- would have evolved to their current state prior to entering humans. In this case, the current epidemic would probably have emerged rapidly as soon as humans were infected, as the virus would have already evolved the features that make it pathogenic and able to spread between people.
In the other proposed scenario, a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal host into humans and then evolved to its current pathogenic state within the human population. For instance, some coronaviruses from pangolins, armadillo-like mammals found in Asia and Africa, have an RBD structure very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. A coronavirus from a pangolin could possibly have been transmitted to a human, either directly or through an intermediary host such as civets or ferrets.
Then the other distinct spike protein characteristic of SARS-CoV-2, the cleavage site, could have evolved within a human host, possibly via limited undetected circulation in the human population prior to the beginning of the epidemic. The researchers found that the SARS-CoV-2 cleavage site, appears similar to the cleavage sites of strains of bird flu that has been shown to transmit easily between people. SARS-CoV-2 could have evolved such a virulent cleavage site in human cells and soon kicked off the current epidemic, as the coronavirus would possibly have become far more capable of spreading between people.
Study co-author Andrew Rambaut cautioned that it is difficult if not impossible to know at this point which of the scenarios is most likely. If the SARS-CoV-2 entered humans in its current pathogenic form from an animal source, it raises the probability of future outbreaks, as the illness-causing strain of the virus could still be circulating in the animal population and might once again jump into humans. The chances are lower of a non-pathogenic coronavirus entering the human population and then evolving properties similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Refraining from speculation on hypothetical scenarios and blame games I wonder what is the responsibility of the governments on the present pandemic witch started in a country that another outbreak has happened before (SARS), from the same animal (bats), amidst two specialized labs, and how effective was their response and coordination. It seems that if the Covid-19 was more lethal, it is certain that million of people would have died by now like flies. Even now we can't shut down a possible mutation.
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