Before COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic, nearly 20,000 coronavirus samples in a database (http://batvirus.whiov.ac.cn) were removed by the Chinese government. Prior to that, I had noted a suspicious passing of a Chinese whistleblower, Li Wenliang, who had been arrested by the government and suddenly died. Many other doctors were arrested for 'promoting' dissent.
On January 30th, 2020, Republican Senator Tom Cotton worried the disease China said was not even transmissable from human to human could be “a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China” and further that “the coronavirus could result in a global pandemic”. The President of the United States called for a moratorium on travel from China and states like California and New York, citing the World Health Organisation, which claimed there was no pandemic, dismissed him as racist and xenophobic.(1) That the COVID-10 pandemic erupted in a wet market near two coronavirus labs, in a country where they give themselves their own Biosafety Levels, even if researchers are selling lab animals to merchants in wet markets, well, it looked suspicious.
But a year later, when WHO was allowed to 'inspect' the labs and wet market, only after China hand-picked the Westerners who would be on the panel, there was nothing to be found.
Yet it's hard to erase the truth outside dictatorships. Before China silenced everyone, US government documents show that virologist Lili Ren of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences had uploaded a virus sequence of COVID-19 to the NIH GenBank. That was on Dec. 28th, 2019. Communist party officials then sent data a few weeks later.
What were they doing in the meantime?
Trying to figure out a pathogen they didn't understand and were desperately trying to cover up. While they were claiming only a few thousand had died - in China, a country of over a billion - people using VPNs to access Twitter showed videos of crematoriums running day and night and citizens being boarded up into their homes.
Ren had been funded by the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used by NIH to funnel money for 'gain of function' research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Before they could publish it, GenBank needed some additional information, which Ren never provided. A few weeks later, China declared they had released the sequence as soon as it was available.
Clearly not. Why does it take a Congressional hearing by Republicans to discover this, when it was a global pandemic, it didn't have a political side?
“We agree that valuable, bipartisan work remains to address the Chinese government’s lack of transparency and ensure investigators can access critical information about the origin of COVID-19, so we can better understand how to prevent future pandemics,” wrote an HHS statement.
If South Africa were really ethical and not simply anti-Semitic, they'd have filed suit in the International Criminal Court against China long ago. But we're in the real world. China will deny blame no matter what evidence comes to light, and the UN will ignore the facts anyway.
NOTE:
(1) The Mayor of New York City even told everyone to go to bars for one last drink because the hysterical federal government was making him shut everything down. And kept saying it.
A few weeks later President Trump ordered a navy hospital ship out of maintenance so it could rush to New York, where hospital beds were well beyond capacity. The New York mayor's subsequent presidential campaign failed as spectacularly as his efforts to understand how diseases work.
