Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Shanghai Sees Record COVID Cases For 6th Day As Unrest Spurred By
Lockdown Worsens
https://twitter.com/aliceysu/status/1511558828802068481
Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of
supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions.
Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or
sing.”




State Department Memo In Early 2020 Assessed That Lab leak Was Most
Likely Origin Of COVID-19

https://www.theepochtimes.com/memo-reveals-state-department-assessed-in-early-2020-lab-leak-was-most-likely-origin-of-covid-19_4387879.html

https://usrtk.org/biohazards-blog/lab-accident-is-most-likely-but-least-probed/
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/State-Department-FOIA-An-Analysis-of-Circumstantial-Evidence-for-Wuhan-Labs-as-the-Source-of-the-Coronavirus.pdf



A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that
government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely
originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.

That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins
for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also
suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a
lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost
entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of
information that wasn’t known publicly at the time it was written.

Although a lab leak is now widely accepted as a likely origin for the
virus, when the memo was written, a concerted effort was underway to
discredit that possibility. It also raises the question of what senior
State Department leadership—including then-Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo—knew and why the information was withheld from the public.

According to the newly released memo, the State Department knew as of
April 2020 that the central issue surrounded an obsession with
collecting and testing a massive amount of virus-carrying bats on the
part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s Wuhan-located
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The State Department noted that lab testing of the earliest-known
patient at the Wuhan Central Hospital in December 2019 determined that
the virus was a “Bat SARS-like Coronavirus.” At the time this patient
was tested, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hadn’t disclosed that
there was any problem at all.

When they finally acknowledged an outbreak, they initially blamed it
on pneumonia. It was only at the end of January that the CCP finally
started admitting that COVID-19 was caused by a new virus that was
transmitted between humans.

By that time, the virus had already been seeded across the globe and
any chance at suppression had been lost. It was during this same
period that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was made aware of the virus’s
likely origin, having been told by a group of scientists whom he was
funding that there was a high probability that the virus was
engineered.

Although it’s been known since June 2021 that Fauci and the NIH
covered up his knowledge of the virus’s origin, the State Department’s
early insight into these matters wasn’t fully known until late March
2022, when the transparency group U.S. Right to Know obtained the
April 2020 memo.
Two Labs

The memo, titled “An Analysis of Circumstantial Evidence for Wuhan
Labs as the Source of the Coronavirus,” comprises five pages and is
written in military BLUF style, meaning “bottom line up front.”

The memo begins by stating that one of two Wuhan labs is the likely
source of the COVID outbreak. The two labs identified by the state
department are the Wuhan CDC’s lab located in downtown Wuhan and the
Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli was known to have
conducted dangerous gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses.

The State Department’s focus on the Wuhan CDC lab as a possible source
is particularly significant as that facility is located only a few
hundred feet from the Huanan Seafood Market where an already infected
customer may have caused a superspreader event in December 2019.

Notably, the World Health Organization’s lead investigator of the
virus’s origin, Peter Ben Embarek, privately told a Danish TV crew
that he suspected that the Wuhan CDC lab was the origin of the
pandemic. Embarek, who promoted a natural origin for the virus in his
public report, privately noted that the CDC lab had mysteriously moved
to its new downtown location in early December and that such a move
may have increased the chances of a lab leak or accidental spillage.

The other lab identified by the State Department as the likely source
of the pandemic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been the
main focus of attention over the past two years.

The State Department memo noted that the Wuhan Institute, by far the
most logical place to investigate the virus origin, had been
completely sealed off from outside inquiry by the CCP. The memo also
noted that a gag order regarding both Wuhan labs had been issued on
Jan 1, 2020, and a major general from the People’s Liberation Army had
assumed control over the Wuhan Institute of Virology since early
January of 2020.

The State Department memo emphatically stated that “All other proposed
theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent inquiry to Wuhan CDC and
Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

It bears repeating that the memo was written in April 2020.

That’s because the State Department’s decoy argument mirrors the
actions taken by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH)
head Dr. Francis Collins who–at the same time this memo was
written–were actively suppressing and censoring any public discussion
of the lab leak scenario. When Fox News ran a story in April 2020
suggesting that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab, Collins immediately
contacted Fauci to explore ways the two men could “put down this very
destructive conspiracy.”

Collins had previously told Fauci and his group of scientists that
“science and international harmony” could be harmed if the lab leak
theory took hold. Collins’s directive led Fauci’s group to publish two
papers that categorically dismissed the lab leak theory, one in the
medical journal the Lancet and the other in the scientific journal
Nature. Those two papers would become the cornerstone of combined
efforts from Fauci’s scientists, the media, Big Tech, and the U.S.
government to suppress any discussion of a lab leak, while
simultaneously promoting the natural origin theory.

The State Department memo also lists many facts that the public has
only come to know in piecemeal fashion over the course of the past two
years. We’ve previously covered many of these details on our show,
including that the Wuhan CDC had a resident “Batman”—Tian Junhua—who
bragged about personally having collected more than 10,000
virus-carrying bats as lab samples from Chinese caves.

Tian also was widely known for his recklessness and carelessness
during his collection process.

Regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the State Department memo
noted that the director of the lab, Shi Zhengli, had conducted
gain-of-function engineering of bat viruses to make them more easily
transmittable to humans. As we now know, the defining feature of the
COVID-19 virus, its furin cleavage site, is what makes the virus
particularly transmissible in humans. While no furin cleavage site has
ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS coronaviruses, Shi was
part of a 2018 research proposal that aimed to insert exactly such a
feature into coronaviruses.

The State Department’s memo also highlights the poor safety standards
at the Wuhan Institute, a fact that could easily lead to an
unintentional leak of the deadly virus to the outside population.
Interestingly, the memo also questions the disappearance of lab worker
Huang Yanling, whose bio, profile, and picture were scrubbed from the
institute’s website shortly after the outbreak. To this day, Huang’s
whereabouts and well-being remain unknown.

Lastly, the memo takes a detailed look at a Chinese medical
professional whose online name is Wu Xiaohua. Wu claimed that Shi
Zhengli was playing God by creating coronaviruses with the specific
aim of making them more transmissible in humans. Wu also claimed that
Shi used intermediate animals in her lab and that her lab’s management
of deadly viruses was appallingly poor and negligent.

The State Department memo found Wu’s claims to be credible and that
assessment holds up well, given the information that has been made
public in the intervening two years. We now know Shi had an active
plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat viruses, we know that she
used humanized mice to test how her virus creations would affect
humans, and we know that her lab was repeatedly cited for its poor
safety record.

The most striking takeaway from the memo is that it focuses almost
entirely on the lab leak scenario, reflecting that the State
Department was almost certain in April 2020 that the virus had
originated in a lab. What remains entirely unclear is why neither the
State Department nor Secretary Pompeo released this information as
soon as they had it.

Had the memo been made public nearly two years ago when it was
written, the course of events would have been very different. Knowing
that the virus came out of a lab would have refocused public attention
and the search for remedies could have been more focused.

There also would have been more concerted efforts to prevent future
leaks. Rather than misdirecting the public toward a natural origin,
Fauci and the NIH would have been exposed for their role in funding
the work at the Wuhan Institute.

Most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party would have been
subjected to greater international pressure for its role in
suppressing any advance information regarding the outbreak. The memo
might also have had an impact on the 2020 presidential election, as
voters tended to see Donald Trump as far more capable than Joe Biden
in taking on the CCP.

While we don’t know with certainty why the memo was concealed, the
only person who had a constitutional role in deciding if suppression
of a lab leak should be the policy of the U.S. government was
President Trump. Although it’s possible that Trump decided it would be
better to conceal the facts, it’s far more likely that, like all of
us, the president was kept in the dark.