Novel Coronavirus: A Shift in the Narrative

The mainstream narrative about the origin of the 2019 coronavirus is shifting. There are reports circulating that a non-peer-reviewed pre-print paper has been published by a mainland China scientist, indicating that the virus was lab-created in Wuhan. To give an idea of how sensitive, challenging, and disputed this information is, the pre-print disappeared off its Research Gate link over twenty-four hours in North America between 15 February and 16 February 2020. The abstract ran as follows:

"The 2019-nCoV has caused an epidemic of 28,060 laboratory-confirmed infections in human including 564 deaths in China by February 6, 2020. Two descriptions of the virus published on Nature this week indicated that the genome sequences from patients were almost identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus. It was critical to study where the pathogen came from and how it passed onto human. An article published on The Lancet reported that 27 of 41 infected patients were found to have contact with the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. We noted two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus in Wuhan, one of which was only 280 meters from the seafood market. We briefly examined the histories of the laboratories and proposed that the coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory. Our proposal provided an alternative origin of the coronavirus in addition to natural recombination and intermediate host."

The authors are Botao Xiao of the South China University of Technology and Lei Xiao of the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. I do not know if the authors are related, or if Lei Xiao is still in Wuhan. These questions may shed light on the authors' motivations.

Zero Hedge - an Austrian economic financial blog roundly condemned by the mainstream media, but supported by the Internet Underground - has maintained all along that the virus is synthetic and shared a copy of the pre-print. To Zero Hedge's credit, they have done more public digging than anyone else has online into the origins of the novel coronavirus. Their disputed commentaries got them banned from Twitter for doxxing one of the Wuhan scientists; before dismissing them, see their reports on this, here, here, here, here and here.

According to the Xiaos' paper, there were two labs working on bat coronavirus in the city. At the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, bat coronavirus experiments were being conducted on live animals. This facility is a three-minute walk away from the infamous wet market in Wuhan. The paper describes the scientists who were collecting bats for experimentation from Hubei province and other Chinese provinces, as well as their dangerous, bat-handling mishaps.

Zero Hedge posted a copy of the pre-print for viewing, here, and provided the following quotations from the document:

"We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC) ... WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. ... Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital ... where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.

The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This laboratory reported that the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the 2002-3 pandemic. The principle investigator participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence. A direct speculation was that SARS-CoV or its derivative might leak from the laboratory.

In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan."

The above map appeared in the February 2020 paper linking the coronavirus to labs in Wuhan. You can see other city maps for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its distance from the wet market at the bottom of one of my earlier blog posts on this subject.

The paper was published with the sanction of the Chinese government through the National Natural Science Foundation. This is a huge admission on the part of the Chinese Communist Party, and we have to wonder why they would permit this information to reach public scrutiny after heavily censoring their own citizens for disclosing how terrible the epidemic is on social media.

Perhaps the Chinese government is trying to use the lab origin story in a propaganda spin, to win back their citizens' sympathies by playing on conspiracy theories related to bioweapons research in the United States, Israel and Russia. This spin would cast China as the victim of a bioweapons attack.

This odd, indirect admission by way of a quasi-research publication is part of a trend that changes the virus's official story. Originally, the Chinese government and all mainstream western media outlets denied any possibility that the 2019 novel coronavirus was bio-engineered. Now, here and there, they hesitantly acknowledge it.

As members of the public are slowly introduced to the dismal facts, the dire implications of those facts are still played down by authorities in a series of mixed messages. At first, foreign audiences saw it as a 'Chinese problem.' A terrible crisis unfolded for the people of Hubei province, which is now spreading throughout China. The BBC reported on 16 February 2020 that all private car travel in Hubei province has been banned indefinitely. The gas stations are closed. There are food shortages. The crematoria are burning bodies day and night. People are sealed inside their apartment buildings. Roving gangs of quarantine men are intimidating citizens in their homes and the streets and sometimes drag them off forcibly to quarantine camps. There may or may not have been an explosion in Wuhan near one of the hospitals on 13 February 2020. These incredible facts are coming through the news drip feed and social media, but we are not grasping that this will happen to us too. The message is, yes what is happening in Wuhan will happen to us too; but please don't panic.

Authorities may be playing down the seriousness of the situation because they want things to stay stable and normal for as long as possible. This is condescending and unhelpful because it is creating a huge section of the public who are complacent and misinformed. They are lulled by officials' false assurances and they will indeed panic in the worst way - and soon - because they will be completely unprepared for quarantine conditions, travel bans, and gas and food shortages. This was why one Youtuber posted a compilation of cinematic dramatizations of what a global pandemic looks like:

Meanwhile, the information about the virus and the disease it causes is shifting too. The R0 measure of contagion is higher than initially reported; according to one study, it lies between 6.11 and 8.18. To give an idea for comparison, whooping cough (pertussis), which is extremely contagious, has a R0 of about 17.

SARS-CoV-2 has a much longer period of incubation, at least 24 days, and possibly 42, which means that all those people who have been released from various quarantines in different countries after one fortnight should have stayed in quarantine. The test is faulty, such that infected people often come out negative. Testing kits sent to thirty countries are flawed. One of the most thoughtful Youtube commentators on the outbreak, Dr. John Campbell, has been slowly reaching the conclusion that this is a pandemic and is very, very serious. When he starts making videos like the one he made on 14 February 2020 (below), we should pay attention.

Everywhere you look, it seems that the original reports about the virus were delayed, misleading, false or incomplete. And while that can be attributed to the suddenness of the outbreak, we still see indications that there is something wrong with how the information is being presented, as though there is a concealed backdrop of information and planning, which has not been made public. The epidemic actually began in late November, 2019. There are many rumors that asymptomatic travelers passed through airports all over the world since before Christmas, so that the virus is already spreading, and the media are not reporting this.

The voicemail in the above video was left for Dr. Paul Cottrell and later posted on his Youtube channel. A commenter under the Cottrell video on Youtube stated:

"He’s 100% true I’m a police officer and the feds have forced a verbal gag order on first responders and medical personnel. I am personally verifying a North Tonawanda (City[, New York]) Male tested positive and was taken to the hospital to be quarantined. WHAT THIS MEANS IS THIS IS THE GOVERNMENT PROTOCOL TO STAY QUIET. The only cases that are told are the ones that could not be silenced due to overwhelming circumstances. God Bless."

If the virus was sourced from a lab and synthetically constructed, there is further speculation as to whether it is a bioweapon. There is a hypothesis that Asians were ethnically targeted by this bioweapon, particularly Han Chinese, because the virus connects to ACE-2 receptors which are supposedly more plentiful in Asian males' lungs. As the above tweets from Roland Baker III indicate, this issue is still being investigated by scientists, despite an official blackout on the matter.

Again, there is a top-down assumption that denial of information and cover-ups are constructive because people cannot handle the truth. Citizens must be misled so that they will remain pacified. This is quite wrong. We will not survive unless we know what we are facing, beyond something that is highly contagious, airborne, has asymptomatic transmission, and is durable for around six hours in the air and at least nine days on surfaces.

Quite obviously, if this virus was lab-made and/or was a weapon, no one is going to confess how it was made or released. That would be a state secret, or several state secrets. So we will never get a straight answer or complete information. Asking for a straight answer at this point is a waste of time. Regardless, the toxic culture of weaponized and corporatized Big Science which potentially got us into this nightmare must step back and allow health officials and the public to determine how best to respond to the epidemic.

Even without taking into account the horrific possibility that we are dealing with a bioweapon, it is clear that COVID-19, the complex disease caused by the coronavirus, will overload the health care systems in developed countries and could overwhelm the health care systems in less developed countries. As for Africa, look at the odd wording in the tweet below: the coronavirus has "finally" arrived there?

NCOVID-19 was just found to cause long term testicular and kidney damage, as well as damage to the heart and lungs among those who survive. Moreover, those who recover can get it again and when they do, the disease is worse. It is not clear whether they catch the disease again after getting better, or whether they only seem to get over the disease and then relapse. This means that the story about the disease is changing because we have not seen the full picture of what it is, nor its real trajectory.

While the mainstream media have presented a picture of COVID-19 disease manifesting in mild, moderate and severe forms, the Internet Underground widely believes there are no mild or moderate cases of the disease. Rather, once infected, one is never rid of the virus. There are stages of apparent recovery, followed by relapses and exacerbated and increasingly deadly conditions. This is possibly why the narrative keeps changing as the first full cycle of the disease unfolds. People appear to get better and there are optimistic reports about recovered patients being released. But it may be that they are in for another stage in the disease which attacks a different area of the body. And it may be that they remain contagious.

If this virus is a bioweapon, it also means that China and possibly other countries are manufacturing biological weapons of mass destruction. This has been denied by respectable mainstream sources, but as the virus begins to spread in the USA and the UK, the tone is starting to change from encouragement of (and restrained annoyance with) the Chinese authorities to open criticism and shrill urgency. Behind the scenes, there may be reckoning taking place.