China Slams Israeli Claim That Coronavirus Came From Bioweapon Lab

Inside Over ^ | 30 Jan 2020 | Yasmin Rasidi

[CondoleezzaProtege]

China has slammed Israel’s recent claim that the lethal new Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) originated from the mainland’s leaked biological warfare lab in the city of Wuhan as Chinese researchers are busy making vaccines to contain the epidemic that has affected 16 countries so far.

Dany Shoham—a former Israeli military intelligence officer—recently claimed that China had intentionally leaked the new coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is the only institution capable of dealing with such lethal viruses and is closely linked with China’s biological warfare program. “Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged,in terms of research and development, in Chinese biological weapons, at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Shoham said in an interview with the Washington Times.

A recent Wuhan City Administration and the World Health Organization (WHO) report stated that the first individuals were infected between December 12 to December 29 while working at an unsanitary seafood market in Wuhan which was later shut down. Subsequently to the report, however, a scientific paper written by a group of Chinese researchers published in The Lancet rebutted the previous claim by arguing that the first 13 out of 41 patients affected by the virus believed to be the 2019-nCoV had no contacts with the seafood market at all in early December.

Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, also questioned the accuracy of the previous report pinning the blame on the seafood market. He argued that if the WHO and Wuhan administration data were accurate, the first infection must have been in November 2019 because of the incubation period between infection and the apparent symptoms. If so, there would be human-to-human transmission occurring in Wuhan.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Rebuttal:

Shoham’s claim is illogical for various reasons, as Indonesian terrorism analyst Stanislaus Riyanta recently said. Riyanta pointed out that if the virus had been created in the lab, then the first person exposed to the virus would have been one of the lab’s employees and that spreading it within China makes no sense.

“Logically speaking, if China intentionally spreads the virus, the country will not do it in its region,” Riyanta told Bisnis Indonesia.

[samtheman]

From a lab but not intentionally released. Maybe some mishandled medical waste.

[rrrod]

Rubio and Cotton have mentioned this but just lightly.

[pelican001]

The story (or rumor) that I heard from China is that they were testing the modified virus in the laboratory on bats to see the effects. The bats that survived were supposed to be destroyed, but some unscrupulous employee(s) were instead smuggling them out and selling them to the live “fish” market on the other side of the city.

[Pearls Before Swine]

That’s a pretty good story, and would account for the rapid rise in infections. It wasn’t just a single person spreading it, say, six months ago.

“These bats look OK, and besides, they’ll be cooked, anyway.”

[Jewbacca]

China’s culture is such that mistakes are career ending events, so much so that employees will cover up mistakes that could be easily remedied.

I think the much more likely scenario is some tech dropped a test tube (or equivalent) and, instead of following the protocol that would have gotten him in a lot of trouble, grabbed a bottle of vinegar (the omnipresent cleaner of China) and “cleaned” it up.

[Jeff Chandler]

Israel’s recent claim
.
Dany Shoham—a former Israeli military intelligence officer

Fake headline?

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Logic governs the world of logic. And that is all that it governs. Logic sometimes governs the world of reality, in which we live. But there are no guarantees that logic governs the world in which we live. I would argue that randomness, and quite frankly, illogic have much greater impact upon the real world we live in, far more than abstract logic.

[ifinnegan]

“Dany Shoham—a former Israeli military intelligence officer—recently claimed ...”

So how is this “Israel claims”?

[ifinnegan]

Yes. Totally fake.

[Zhang Fei]

[The story (or rumor) that I heard from China is that they were testing the modified virus in the laboratory on bats to see the effects. The bats that survived were supposed to be destroyed, but some unscrupulous employee(s) were instead smuggling them out and selling them to the live “fish” market on the other side of the city.]

---

Occam’s Razor suggests that it began like every other epidemic - from a random virulent and adaptable disease that crossed from an animal to humans. I don’t doubt that they (and every other bio-warfare facility on earth, including ours, up to the point Fort Detrick was re-purposed for defensive research) want to come up with a useful bio-weapon. The problem is that biology is in the Stone Age, as regards making things not seen in nature. We can cross-breed things and so on, but they are fairly close to what nature has come up with. And mass-producing and packaging smallpox so it fits in a bomb that can be detonated without killing the pathogens is not anyone’s idea of a genuinely new bioweapon.

I don’t think anyone, including the Chinese, has the ability to come up with a useful bio-weapon that’s any more virulent than what’s available in nature. At best, we can replicate nature. Biology has no equivalent of chemistry’s plastics or physics’s space shuttle. It has only recently evolved beyond mere taxonomy - i.e. classifying and naming things. Nobody has the ability to come up with a genuinely engineered virus like the ones in Resident Evil.

[montag813]

Senator Tom Cotton has made the same claim. Go ahead and slam HIM too, Chicom bastards.

[McGruff]

How Dare You!

[montag813]

previous report pinning the blame on the seafood market.

Always been a ridiculous cover story, as retarded as so many the CIA has attempted over the years.

[null and void]

Great. Now China will feel compelled to nuke Israel to shut them up...

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

So far the false positive rate is 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

If a quarantine saves just one child's life, it's worth it.

[redgolum]

Remember Russia made a fuss over the US looking for Russian Genetic samples?

That is being played as the US looking for a genetic virus.

Of course, the Russians have as much Viking blood as half the US population so that would be interesting to release.

[vetvetdoug]

This wouldn't be the first time a bug got away from a level four facility. England saw FMD get away and started killing animals 20 miles away before they began to realize they had a problem and institute containment procedures. An Ivy league school brought Lassa Virus from Africa into their lab and a person two stories up from the lab died of Lassa. The US almost had a disaster in downtown Reston, Va, with Ebola.

The emergence of this disease reminds me of the problem of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis that emerged from Central America back in 1970-71. The US saw it coming but it got here faster than predicted and began killing horses by the dozens. Texas was quarantined the Summer of 1971. The USAF had recognized that VEE could be used as a bioweapon back in the late 60's as it wasn't lethal in most cases but debilitated the infected to where they were not effective. A bioweapon doesn't have to kill, just debilitate; the USAF had been making a vaccine against VEE and had stockpiles of it. The vaccine was made in horses so the USAF released the vaccine for horse owners and the US vaccinated horses from NM, Okla, Arkansas, La and Mississippi that Summer and Fall and stopped the progression of VEE.

[mdmathis6]

Also Israel officially didn’t make such a claim, it was some Israeli researcher offering his own view.

Just another way to slam Israel. And no one was saying China was spreading it to it’s own people on purpose, as per Riyanta. They are saying the Chinese screwed up and it got out of its lab by accident. It’s actions show that it knows what the virus is and the government is freaking out about it!

[Bob434]

[[“Logically speaking, if China intentionally spreads the virus, the country will not do it in its region,” Riyanta told Bisnis Indonesia.]]

Must be true- after all, look at how China reveres it’s own people- oh wait... nm

[tet68]

Riyanta pointed out that if the virus had been created in the lab, then the first person exposed to the virus would have been one of the lab’s employees and that spreading it within China makes no sense.

It would then be what most of us call an accident.