Early in 2020 a novel coronavirus, reportedly originating in China, began aggressively spreading throughout the world.1 By March, the epidemic caused by the coronavirus, named COVID-19, had caused a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization.2 By April, there were 1.6 million cases worldwide in 177 countries, according to The New York Times.3 Did the pandemic "just happen" as did other pandemics of the past, like plague or AIDS? No, says an alarming documentary from The Epoch Times, "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus." Produced and narrated by award-winning investigative reporter Joshua Philipp, an expert on espionage and unconventional warfare,4 "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus" unearths facts that mainstream media have largely ignored. Why, for example, were the cases of many COVID-19 patients ignored during scientific investigations? Why were researchers who disagreed with the COVID-19 party line explanations silenced5 and important academic papers withdrawn and buried?6 Why were National Institutes of Health-funded gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with deadly coronaviruses, including those in China, ceased?7 "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus" presents disturbing evidence that COVID-19 did not naturally develop as widely believed, but may well have been engineered in a Chinese laboratory to be used as a bioweapon. While the world is succeeding in defeating this ominous virus, its murky origins must be explored. Did COVID-19 Originate at the Wuhan Seafood Market?One of the most well-accepted "facts" about the COVID-19 pandemic — that the virus originated at the Wuhan Seafood Market — may not be a fact at all, says "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus." A bat virus connected to the seafood market, which also contained wildlife and game mammals, was widely indicted as the source8 but the conclusions may be too hasty, says Philipp. Quickly attributing the outbreak to the market and shutting it down on January 1, 2020, felt like "destroying a crime scene" and had the effect of stopping further investigations though many questions remained, he says. Some scientific journals agreed. Soon after the shutdown of the market, a description of the first COVID-19 cases published in The Lancet9 and an analysis in Science magazine10 that summarized The Lancet's findings questioned the Wuhan Seafood Market as a source of the virus. According to Science magazine:
Experts in the Documentary Express Their DoubtsIn the film, Sean Lin, former lab director of the Viral Disease Branch, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, also questions the abrupt attribution of the virus' cause to a bat virus connected to the seafood market. This assumption not only ignored the nearly one-third of patients who had not had contact with the market, but bats are not even sold at the market, he points out.11 Judy Mikovits, a molecular biologist and antiviral expert who worked at the National Cancer Institute for 22 years,12 calls the seafood market hypothesis "highly unlikely and improbable.” Concurring with The Lancet article, she points out that:13
Also skeptical of the dismissive explanation is Dr. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University. The 13 patients whom The Lancet article reported had no link to the seafood market is "a big number," Lucey told Science magazine.14 Lucey rejects the seafood market hypothesis because it rules out the human-to-human transmission that is known to occur. In a Science Speaks interview he says:15
Shutting down the Wuhan Seafood Market so quickly allowed other contamination sources to proliferate, especially with no testing program, says Lucey:16
A Chinese Virologist Created New, Synthetic VirusesMuch of the film focuses on the work of Shi Zhengli, a Chinese virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which hosts the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory and is located17 only 10 miles from the Wuhan Seafood Market.18 Zhengli, who has a lab at the institute called P4, is considered an expert on bat-originated diseases like SARS and their transmission. A quick look at journal contributions that Zhengli co-wrote reveals the researchers created new, synthetic viruses. For example, a letter published in Nature Medicine says:19
Spike proteins, also called S proteins, use the human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2)20 to infect humans.21 That means, say Zhengli and her colleagues in a previous Nature article, that "intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection.”22 Coronaviruses' use of the human ACE2 molecule as their entry receptor "is considered a hallmark of its cross-species transmissibility," the researchers write in an article in Nature.23 After creating the synthetic virus, which they call SHC014, Zhengli and her coauthors write that they "next synthesized a full-length SHC014-CoV infectious clone based on the approach used for SARS-CoV."24 Other papers Zhengli co-wrote focus on the transmission of coronaviruses from one species to another, according to the documentary. Is Covid-19 a Re-Engineered Virus?Zhengli and her fellow researchers admit they used a "reverse genetics system" to generate "a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus,"25 raising legitimate fears that COVID-19 is also reverse-engineered, according to "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus." Virologists wrote to Nature that they were uncomfortable with the fabricated chimeras Zhengli and her colleagues produced. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, warned, "If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory."26 A withdrawn paper posted on bioRxiv, a preprint biology server where scientists can post their work before it is published, said of the COVID-19 genome:27
According to Mikovits, the S proteins seen on COVID-19 that make it so transmittable to humans come from "cutting and pasting of two different viruses" and the apparent insertion of four new genes could not have been generated from a natural "zoonotic transmission."28 They had to come from a medical, bioweapons or lab setting, says Mikovits. Other scientists in the film agree that COVID-19 is a re-engineered, laboratory-driven virus.29 General Robert Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior strategy director at the National Security Council, believes the media have suppressed coverage of lab-driven viruses to keep lucrative Chinese revenue streams. The viruses could be intended by the Chinese to reap rewards for a vaccine that targets them or as bioweapons, he says:30
US-Funded Research in China Was Temporarily HaltedIn 2014, the NIH announced a halt to research that few Americans were aware of — gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with the SARS, MERS and influenza viruses awarded to Chinese entities:31
In her 2015 Nature Medicine article that discussed chimeras, Zhengli refers to the U.S. funding pause. She writes that ongoing research into engineering viruses:32
The research in the paper mentioning the GOF studies was funded by grants from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease and the National Institute of Aging (both part of NIH) as well as awards from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Technical help was received from the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas.33 Censoring Science and WhistleblowersCensorship by the Chinese government is the rule, not the exception, according to "Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Virus." On January 10, 2020, a Chinese lab released the entire genome sequence for the scientific community to analyze, but subsequently the lab was closed.34 Zhengli's Institute of Virology's P4 Lab was taken over by the military after COVID-19 surfaced, says the film.35 The censorship was reminiscent of the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing Chinese doctor who contracted the virus while working at Wuhan Central Hospital, and who tried to warn others. Wenliang was investigated for "spreading rumors" and died of the virus on February 7, 2020.36 The Chinese government later apologized. Chinese researchers who originally talked to Philipp later refused to do so, he says.37 The deadly characteristics of the COVID-19 virus, the engineered viruses and the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory to the Wuhan Seafood Market raise serious biosecurity and global health questions. Let's hope the truth comes out. from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/04/24/how-did-the-wuhan-virus-start.aspx
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