Posted on 05/19/2021 5:03:37 AM PDT by RandFan
... Among the most controversial aspects of the Wuhan Institute of Virology's coronavirus research has been its funding from the U.S. government. In the years leading up to the pandemic, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to the WIV to study coronaviruses.
Those funds originally came from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That agency, part of the National Institutes of Health, has for several decades been headed up by Anthony Fauci, one of the chief architects of the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The federal government pulled the Wuhan funding last year at the outset of the pandemic amid the earliest fears that the WIV may have played a role in the outbreak. The Chinese government has denied that the lab had anything to do with the pandemic.
Workers at the lab reportedly became sick with COVID-like symptoms prior to pandemic
A State Department memo released just prior to the end of the Trump administration claimed that workers at the Wuhan lab became sick with hallmark COVID-19 symptoms weeks before the outbreak was first identified.
"The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses," the memo declared.
The memo noted that, for over a year at that point, the Chinese Communist Party had "systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic's origin."
The lab allegedly supplied COVID material to be used in 'gain-of-function' research
One of the key questions surrounding the Wuhan lab is whether or not it was conducting, or has ever conducted, "gain-of-function" research.......
(Excerpt) Read more at justthenews.com ...
The Chinese government also has a bio lab which has been studying bat coronaviruses and researching the possibility of what could happen if one of these viruses could gain the ability to infect humans in Wuhan. The bio lab had staff publicly and specifically focused on this research, not just viruses, but bat coronaviruses. In 2019 there were job postings for research assistants to help look into new developments in bat virus research. Chinese bio labs have a terrible track record for lab safety. The bat virus scientist went missing and the bat virus research, which was partly funded by the US government for some dumbass reason, was scrubbed from the Chinese websites. The Chinese government, which not only has the ability to completely control commerce inside china, but readily employs that ability when it seems it worthy, is allowing the wet markets to stay running.
Oh, but it's a conspiracy theory to blame the lab.
This has been stickied on patriots.win! Woo!
Very cool.
Decent article, no new details. However, nice summary, including the most recent Rand Paul/Fauxi exchange citation.
Irony:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3959012/posts?page=27#27
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3960356/posts?page=29#29
——A bat virus, coming from a cave bat——
I know it is perhaps traitorous to defend Dr Fauci for funding the Wuhan lab but the action probably had some justification.
There are two separate and distinct issues included in your post. The first is cave bats as a disease vector and the second is the Covid virus
Decades ago as an avid cave explorer, I and my peers were made aware of the fact that the US Government was studying bats as disease vectors, specifically of rabies. Most of the caves we entered were bat habitat.
The second issue is the Covid virus transmission possibly related to bats. Therein lies the controversy because although bats as vectors are blamed, there is no conclusive smoking gun because of Chinese clamp down on information.
So, if we back off and look at the funding issue from a distance, the amounts of tax payer money said to have been granted to China is not tremendous. I would suggest that said funding is but a part of the ongoing American studies of bats as disease vectors budget that has been in process for say 50 years or so.
Further, if you are a scientist and learn of other scientific studies of bats as disease vectors, it would be rational to see what they have learned. That is much more important if the transmitted disease is something other than rabies about which a great deal is known.
The question begged is why has the CDC not told us of it’s bat disease vector studies in process for such a long time?
Please read and spread!
Spread like a virus. You’re a super spreader, RandFan. : )
They must think - like us - this is important.
Someone said “after the Audits this should be a priority”
Can anyone explain why, if COVID was really a Chinese government plot, that government would not have hit us with a disease which was far more lethal? They could not have created COVID just for the fear because nobody could have predicted how quickly and massively Americans would become fearful.
Can anyone explain why, if COVID was really a Chinese government plot, that government would not have hit us with a disease which was far more lethal? They could not have created COVID just for the fear because nobody could have predicted how quickly and massively Americans would become fearful.
this Covid pandemic was spread in such a way that the communist government could easily disclaim ownership.
Top Chinese academic says they won the biological warfare of 2020.
I for one don't think it's wrong to study obscure cave bat diseases, or even (at least in abstract terms) let the Chinese do it. I do think it's China's fault for letting the disease spill out into the public with their terrible safety record, and Fauci is dead wrong to fund it and then lie about it when asked specifically about it in Senate testimony. In practical terms, I also think the funding was irresponsible knowing China's track record of safety.
I believe Fauci is sincere in his aims but wholly incompetent as a public official. He lied to the public about masking last spring because he saw the public as a threat. He downplayed the effectiveness of and discouraged the use of treatments and wanted everyone to stay at home for two years while a vaccine was developed (something I understand he also did while he worked on AIDS research in the 80's). He made the whole masking thing even more comical when it became clear that the public wasn't masking "correctly", and then lied about the effectiveness of masking after vaccination because he doesn't trust the public to comply with his plan, then flipflops over the span of a weekend for political expediency. He deliberately avoids the issue of natural immunity from recovered patients because you can't track recoveries, only vaccine shots. He may have been trained as a medical doctor, but his public actions have little to do with science or relaying accurate information to the public and much more to do with controlling behavior.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3958177/posts
This and links therein.
There are also a LOT of links recently from Gateway Pundit.
(Note, I stress, *links*; not Gateway’s often excited interpretation).
In the meantime, you know, there are two Nobel Prize winners (Luc Montaigner, who co-discovered HIV; and David Baltimore, who discovered reverse-transcriptase) who say COVID-19 was bio-engineered.
Even Ralph Baric (who led gain-of-function research in the US before it was forbidden by the O’Muslim Administration, and sent to Wuhan) says COVID-19 was bioengineered.
What if China wanted to just screw with the US economy and the election? (remember how the House delayed delivering articles of Peach-Mint to the Senate until the first cases appeared in the US? And mail-in ballots wouldn't have happened without the coof.)
US policy for decades has been "we don't do biological warfare. If you use it on us, we will consider it a weapon of mass destruction and use nukes on you."
So China had to be careful not to do something that'd kill too many Americans, without massive deniability.
I am making no claim pro or con about Covid. Nothing in my post suggests otherwise.
My point is that there is more to the bat cooperation story than Covid and the CDC has been studying bats as disease vectors for longer than there probably any such labs in China
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