https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratories-in-wuhan-11587486996 Coronavirus and the Laboratories in Wuhan Their researchers travel to caves across China, where they capture live bats to study viruses. By Tom Cotton April 21, 2020 12:36 pm ET The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, April 17. Photo: hector retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The U.S. government is investigating whether the Covid-19 virus came from a government laboratory in Wuhan, China. The Chinese Communist Party denies the possibility. “There is no way this virus came from us,” claimed Yuan Zhiming over the weekend. Mr. Yuan is a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. He is also secretary of the lab’s Communist Party committee. He accuses me of “deliberately trying to mislead people” for suggesting his laboratory as a possible origin for the pandemic. Beijing has claimed that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wet market,” where wild animals were sold. But evidence to counter this theory emerged in January. Chinese researchers reported in the Lancet Jan. 24 that the first known cases had no contact with the market, and Chinese state media acknowledged the finding. There’s no evidence the market sold bats or pangolins, the animals from which the virus is thought to have jumped to humans. And the bat species that carries it isn’t found within 100 miles of Wuhan. Wuhan has two labs where we know bats and humans interacted. One is the Institute of Virology, eight miles from the wet market; the other is the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, barely 300 yards from the market. Both labs collect live animals to study viruses. Their researchers travel to caves across China to capture bats for this purpose. Chinese state media released a minidocumentary in mid-December following a team of Wuhan CDC researchers collecting viruses from bats in caves. The researchers fretted openly about the risk of infection. These risks were not limited to the field. The Washington Post reported last week that in 2018 U.S. diplomats in China warned of “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the Institute of Virology. The Wuhan CDC operates at even lower biosafety standards. While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story. The Chinese military posted its top epidemiologist to the Institute of Virology in January. In February Chairman Xi Jinping urged swift implementation of new biosafety rules to govern pathogens in laboratory settings. Academic papers about the virus’s origins are now subject to prior restraint by the government. In early January, enforcers threatened doctors who warned their colleagues about the virus. Among them was Li Wenliang, who died of Covid-19 in February. Laboratories working to sequence the virus’s genetic code were ordered to destroy their samples. The laboratory that first published the virus’s genome was shut down, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported in February. This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs. Thanks to the Chinese coverup, we may never have direct, conclusive evidence—intelligence rarely works that way—but Americans justifiably can use common sense to follow the inherent logic of events to their likely conclusion. Mr. Cotton, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Arkansas.
Once I learnt about their only BSL 4 being in Wuhan I thought the chances of wet markets causing it going down. But the more interesting question is, what will the US and the world do about it? Are we going to sue them? Asking for damage payment? Retaliating actions? Stop doing business with them? etc.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-lawsuit-idUSKCN2232US?taid=5ea00a0cf87ad20001162731&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter April 22, 2020 / 2:17 AM / Updated 16 hours ago In a first, Missouri sues China over coronavirus economic losses (Reuters) - Missouri on Tuesday became the first U.S. state to sue the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus, saying that China’s response to the outbreak that originated in Wuhan city led to devastating economic losses in the state. The civil lawsuit, filed in federal court by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, alleges negligence, among other claims. The complaint alleges Missouri and its residents have suffered possibly tens of billions of dollars in economic damages, and seeks cash compensation. “The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease,” Schmitt, a Republican, said in a statement. “They must be held accountable for their actions.” The lawsuit also accuses the Chinese government of making the pandemic worse by “hoarding” masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE). U.S. President Donald Trump, also a Republican, initially lavished praise on China and his counterpart Xi Jinping for the official response to the outbreak, which has since spread to infect more than 2.5 million people worldwide. But he and other senior U.S. officials have also referred to it as the “Chinese virus” and in recent days have ramped up their rhetoric. China is already facing similar lawsuits filed in U.S. courts on behalf of U.S. business owners. International law experts told Reuters that efforts to hold China liable for the coronavirus in U.S. courts will likely fail. A legal doctrine called sovereign immunity offers foreign governments broad protection from being sued in U.S. courts, said Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago. Ginsburg said he thought the recent flurry of lawsuits against China serve a political end for Republican leaders facing an election in November. “We are seeing a lot of people on the political right focus on the China issue to cover up for the U.S. government’s own errors,” Ginsburg said. Trump initially downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 43,000 people in the United States out of nearly 800,000 cases as of Tuesday. The outbreak has also forced state governors to declare stay-at-home orders that have shuttered businesses and social activities, leading a record 22 million people to seek unemployment benefits in the past month. “If the United States wants to bring claims against China, it will have to do so in an international forum,” said Chimène Keitner, an international law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. “There is no civil jurisdiction over such claims in U.S. courts.” Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall
This little factoid, if widely disseminated, could very well become hugely consequential. It's suspicious, to say the least. This thing could get much worse. The latest news is bad. Mutations could have been underestimated. https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/21/coro...ains-deadliest-raging-across-europe-12586269/ A global famine is likely. https://www.theguardian.com/global-...mic-will-cause-famine-of-biblical-proportions
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pr...-lab-scrutinized-over-coronavirus-11588325401 U.S. Probes University of Texas Links to Chinese Lab Scrutinized Over Coronavirus Education Department investigation into foreign financial ties also seeks records of school system’s dealings with Huawei, Zoom CEO The Wuhan Institute of Virology has come under scrutiny from U.S. officials who accuse Beijing of withholding information about the origins of the outbreak. Photo: hector retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images By Kate O’Keeffe Updated May 1, 2020 6:18 pm ET The Education Department has asked the University of Texas System to provide documentation of its dealings with the Chinese laboratory U.S. officials are investigating as a potential source of the coronavirus pandemic. The request for records of gifts or contracts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its researcher Shi Zhengli, known for her work on bats, is part of a broader department investigation into possible faulty financial disclosures of foreign money by the Texas group of universities. The Education Department’s letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, also asks the UT System to share documents regarding potential ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and some two dozen Chinese universities and companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. and a unit of China National Petroleum Corp. The department is also seeking documents related to any university system contracts or gifts from Eric Yuan, a U.S. citizen who is the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc. The University of Texas System said, in a statement prior to this article’s publication, it planned to respond to the department in a timely manner. After the article’s release, it said that its lab that partnered with researchers in China complies with reporting requirements and receives no financial support or gifts from global scientific labs. Huawei and CNPC didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Zoom said Mr. Yuan has “not given any gifts to the University of Texas.” Neither the Wuhan lab nor Dr. Shi—dubbed “Bat Woman” by Chinese media—responded to requests for comment. The Wuhan lab has come under scrutiny from U.S. officials who accuse Beijing of withholding information about the origins of the outbreak, which was first detected in Wuhan. Dr. Shi and the Chinese government have said the lab isn’t the source of the pandemic. There is no concrete public evidence to confirm the theory that the outbreak resulted from an accident at the lab, which studied ways to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Some scientists say a lab accident remains a possibility, but the current dominant theory is that bats passed the virus to humans either directly, or more likely, through another animal. The Education Department’s investigation into the UT System’s disclosures is part of a continuing national review begun in 2019 that the department says has prompted universities to report more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funding. Officials have sent letters to at least eight other schools, including Harvard and Yale Universities, who have said they are responding to the inquiries. Universities are required to disclose to the Education Department all contracts and gifts from a foreign source that, alone or combined, are worth $250,000 or more in a calendar year. Though the statute is decades old, the department only recently began to enforce it rigorously. The Education Department has accused schools of actively soliciting money from foreign governments, companies and nationals hostile to the U.S. One goal of the new enforcement campaign, according to department officials, is to better enable the public to see where schools get their money. U.S. universities have defended their international collaborations and said the Education Department’s reporting requirements remain unclear. Department officials dispute that claim. In its letter dated April 24, the department asked the chancellor of the University of Texas System to provide records related to its dealings with the Wuhan lab, citing UT’s Galveston National Laboratory’s relationship with the Chinese government-run lab. The Education Department asked for records related to dealings between the Wuhan lab and UT’s Galveston National Laboratory, located on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Photo: Kevin M. Cox/Associated Press The letter cites a November 2018 article in Science magazine cosigned by officials at the Galveston and Wuhan labs stating: “We engaged in short- and long-term personnel exchanges focused on biosafety training, building operations and maintenance, and collaborative scientific investigations in biocontainment. We succeeded in transferring proven best practices to the new Wuhan facility.” The magazine article, also available on the Galveston lab’s site, adds that the Wuhan and Texas labs recently signed formal cooperative agreements but that “funding for research and the logistics of exchanging specimens are challenges that we have yet to solve.” The university system previously reported to Education Department officials a series of contracts with Chinese universities and Huawei, purportedly collectively worth nearly $13 million, according to the letter. But it questioned whether the UT schools had reported all relevant foreign gifts and contracts. The request for information about the American chief executive of U.S. videoconferencing firm Zoom stands out on a list of otherwise Chinese entities. The department has said its statutory authority enables it to seek information on gifts or contracts from any entity, including a U.S. person, who could be acting as an agent of a foreign source. Department officials believe the broad statute provides the basis for many lines of inquiry at universities, according to a person familiar with the department’s thinking. U.S. national security officials and independent cybersecurity researchers have raised concerns about Zoom and its reliance on China-based engineering, especially as more people turn to the service amid the pandemic to discuss company and government business as well as private health information. Mr. Yuan has said the Chinese government has never asked for information on traffic from foreign users. “Zoom is no different than any other U.S. technology company with operations in China, including many of our videoconferencing peers,“ the company said in a statement. “Zoom is an American company, publicly traded on the Nasdaq, with headquarters in California and a founder and CEO who is an American citizen,” the statement said, adding that his inclusion in a letter focused on UT’s ties to China indicates the letter’s authors “did not do their homework.” The Education Department’s scrutiny of money that could have flowed from the China-based lab to the U.S. comes after other U.S. officials criticized money that went in the opposite direction. In an April 21 letter to House and Senate leadership, members of Congress led by Sen. Martha McSally (R., Ariz.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) criticized a grant by the National Institutes of Health that supported global research on coronaviruses, including at the Wuhan lab. “We’re sure you agree that taxpayers’ money should not be sent to a dangerous Chinese state-run bio-agent laboratory that lacks any meaningful oversight from U.S. authorities,” the members wrote. “We hope to ensure that WIV will not receive federal funds in any future spending packages,” they wrote. Less than a week later, EcoHealth Alliance Inc., a New York-based grantee working on the project with the Wuhan lab, said the NIH had terminated coronavirus research funding. “International collaboration with countries where viruses emerge is absolutely vital to our own public health and national security here in the USA,” the group said in a statement, declining to comment further. The NIH confirmed in a statement that the six-year, $3.4 million grant had been terminated. It said the money was distributed among both the primary awardee, EcoHealth Alliance, and sub-awardees including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, East China Normal University in Shanghai, the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. The NIH added: “Please note, scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.” Write to Kate O’Keeffe at kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com
We don't know which news can be trusted. 17 years ago, US presented evidence of Iraq Weapon of Mass Destruction to the United Nations. Till today, no one can prove Iraq has WMD.
Yes, indeed. There are many reasons for certain people to lie through their nose if it suits them. Do not trust the Government. Do not trust the media. Do not trust anyone.
Trump can't run on the economy anymore so he is going to run on an anti-China platform. I kind of like Trump but this is just disgraceful. Mostly, I just want him gone so anti-trump people are also gone at this point. The idea this started in a lab is so obviously fake. It makes me uncomfortable though to be on the same side as anti-trump lunatics.
And 4 decades earlier a bamboo boat fired at a Navy ship in the Tonkin Gulf. To be frank, they did have chemical weapons because we sold it to them. But those can be highly unstable and that is a big desert out there where they possibly dumped them much earlier. Still can't believe the FBI couldn't fake a Iraqi mobile chemical lab unit, how hard is that?