15-04-2020, 01:12 PM
31
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by Bread
->
The CCP should have announced this as a massive problem as soon as it started. They didn't and lied and lied, still allowing infected Chinese people to return to Europe and infect the hundreds of thousands that then spread around the world.If the CCP had followed the correct world health protocols and locked down Wuhan back in November when this started it would have reduced the pandemic by 95%.
This is all the CCP's fault - 100% they are to blame make no mistake about that. They lied about the scale of the infections and the virus spread like wildfire, all the time, the CCP lying and the WHO (CCP apologists) response was to accuse the USA of being xenophobic when they (against their advice) stopped travel from China and then Europe. No plan from these guys, just following the lead from the CCP, and you talk about "real leadership" ?
They are lying now - they will continue to lie and many more thousands will die in China because of it.
They lied about SARS, they lied about MERS and now this. If the CCP had been truthful at the start it could all have been prevented
15-04-2020, 03:44 PM
33
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
I received this in an email from an American ex-colleague:Quote:
State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
By: Josh Rogin Washington Post Columnist
April 14, 2020
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fuelled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus - even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counsellor of environment, science, technology and health.
Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)
The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
“Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
The coronavirus pandemic is too serious to let the president hold freewheeling press briefings in real time, says Post media critic Erik Wemple. (Joshua Carroll, Erik Wemple/The Washington Post)
The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.
As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.
“The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.
There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.
Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.
“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”
No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China.
Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.
As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.
Shi and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3, her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus.
The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.
On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.
The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao.
We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said.
“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.” EoQ
If that doesn't implicate the Chinese government I don't know what will.
15-04-2020, 07:44 PM
34
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by Percy Vere
->
I received this in an email from an American ex-colleague:Quote:
State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
By: Josh Rogin Washington Post Columnist
April 14, 2020
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fuelled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus - even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counsellor of environment, science, technology and health.
Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)
The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
“Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
The coronavirus pandemic is too serious to let the president hold freewheeling press briefings in real time, says Post media critic Erik Wemple. (Joshua Carroll, Erik Wemple/The Washington Post)
The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.
As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.
“The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.
There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.
Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.
“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”
No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China.
Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.
As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.
Shi and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3, her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus.
The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.
On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.
The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao.
We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said.
“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.” EoQ
If that doesn't implicate the Chinese government I don't know what will.
Your link gives a better version Thank You
15-04-2020, 09:21 PM
35
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by Bruce
->
I am not going to get into stupid idealogical arguments but all governments cover things up but I think you will find it is the Covid19 virus causing the deaths of thousands of people and the slow response with which the various government's tackled the problem.New Zealand is a shining example of what happens when a government acts fast and hard without blaming everybody else for the problem. That's what leadership looks like.
PLus a measly population of just over 4 million......
London has a population of 9 million.....
15-04-2020, 11:14 PM
36
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
In todays paper I read yet another theory of what caused all this.Now they are saying stray dogs started it all!
Stray dogs are supposed to have ate infected bats and that's how it's spread.
Good excuse for them to kill a few more dogs no doubt.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...-a9465141.html
Personally, I still believe it is man made and came from the Laboratory. Whether it was released accidentally or not is another matter.
And just to top it all, today the meat market where this is all supposed to have originated, has just re-opened again!
I can't see for the life of me, why these filthy markets are allowed to continue.
16-04-2020, 12:00 AM
37
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by mups
->
in todays paper i read yet another theory of what caused all this.Now they are saying stray dogs started it all!
Stray dogs are supposed to have ate infected bats and that's how it's spread.
Good excuse for them to kill a few more dogs no doubt.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...-a9465141.html
personally, i still believe it is man made and came from the laboratory. Whether it was released accidentally or not is another matter.
And just to top it all, today the meat market where this is all supposed to have originated, has just re-opened again!
I can't see for the life of me, why these markets are allowed to continue.
16-04-2020, 12:30 AM
38
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by OldGreyFox
->
New Zealand has been successful controlling Covid19 because no bugger goes there......PLus a measly population of just over 4 million......
London has a population of 9 million.....
Yep, no bugger goes there because they shut the borders normally 4 million people visit New Zealand each year.
Common sense dictates that in a pandemic the bigger the population the more dramatic the action needed. Sitting on your arse defending your government's lack of is not a solution.
16-04-2020, 09:33 AM
39
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by Bread
->
Good point.They did this with SARS remember ?
The CCP only care about power, they certainly don't give a toss about the people
16-04-2020, 11:16 AM
40
Re: Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Originally Posted by Bruce
->
Yep, no bugger goes there because they shut the borders normally 4 million people visit New Zealand each year.Common sense dictates that in a pandemic the bigger the population the more dramatic the action needed. Sitting on your arse defending your government's lack of is not a solution.
It's been one of the hardest decisions a Prime Minister has ever had to take; to bring the country to a standstill and risk the collapse of the economy, putting millions of people out of work, some permanently, or allow the virus to spread unabated. I believe Boris and his team have done a sterling job, who else could have done any better?
The media? Perhaps the BBC with their smug critical correspondents sitting at home picking at scabs and making the government's job harder than it is. The BBC are not the shadow cabinet! They should report the news as it is and stop pretending that they are experts in every field and winding up the general public, that is not helpful....
There are countries that seem to have acted well and prevented the virus from taking a stronghold, they are mainly at the other side of the world and have had more time to prepare after seeing the examples set by China, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Just one extra week of preparation would make all the difference to the control of this virus.
Airports in Europe, the UK and America have ten times the traffic of our southern hemisphere friends, a lot of which is business. Far more difficult to control and police.
All in all Boris has done a good job, even risking his own life, and I for one will not criticise him or his team, and I believe they will do their best to restore normality and I can't think of anyone else that I would rather have at the helm.......Well done Boris, I'll be clapping for you and your team tonight, as well as the NHS.......
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