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I know you weren’t.

In my opinion it’s a nutcase article. Look how they inserted the couple of people travelling from West Africa to the UK with Lassa Fever. Lassa is endemic to West Africa. No big suprise there. It even fairly common:

An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 infections of Lassa fever occur annually, with approximately 5,000 deaths. Surveillance for Lassa fever is not standardized; therefore, these estimates are crude. In some areas of Sierra Leone and Liberia, it is known that 10-16% of people admitted to hospitals annually have Lassa fever, demonstrating the serious impact the disease has on the region.

Link: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/lassa/index.html

But, oh no, according to the fearporn purveyors at NOQ, it’s no ordinary Lassa — it’s some new GoF Lassa Frankenvirus!!! Run for the hills!

Lots of scientists from lots of countries have studied Lassa, Ebola, Marburg and other very scary viruses. Of course the Chinese have, too. Have they looked at them as possible bioweapons? Of course, as others, including us, have.

Is the CCP evil? Of course it is. Is releasing some horror Lassa-type virus at the Olympics something they would do? Nah. Why do they love to host the Olympics in the first place? Pride, “face”. Remember how they went all out with their opening and closing ceremonies last time?

These Olympics are rather a fizzle, thanks to Covid. This time around the Chinese have gone all out on Covid restrictions, much to the misery of the athletes and guests. The irrecoverable loss of face from an outbreak of a highly lethal hemorrhagic fever at the Olympics could bring down the CCP. It would also mess up their smiley-face it’s-just-about-commerce-and-free-trade plan for world domination, still in its belt-and-road phase (the Chinese wisely take the long view).

There’s also a little problem with using Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, etc., as bioweapons: human-to-human spread is via body fluids, not through the air — and would therefore not result in a global pandemic like Covid. Reengineering these filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg) or arenaviruses (Lassa, Lujo) to spread from human to human via aerosol would almost certainly be way beyond the scope of current GoF technology.

Did Covid come from the leaky lab in Wuhan? Of course it did. The real scandals are that we outsourced this GoF research to a leaky lab in China where they played with it in a BSL-2 lab, sharing such dual-use technology with the Chicomms, our dependence on China for essential goods, including pharmaceuticals and PPE, etc.

But, no, we’re not getting all het up over the *real* scary problems and scandals like these on FR. It’s much more fun to scare ourselves like kids telling ghost stories around a campfire, imagining we’re living in some end-of-the-world thriller novel about a killer virus unleashed at the Olympics, etc. Way more fun and exciting and you get that nice adrenaline rush. Never mind it’s all sensationalist nonsense cranked out by internet grifters. Use promocode NOQ!