Saturday, April 18, 2020

Coronavirus trail leads to Wuhan labs (II)

The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs | National Review - Jim Geraghty

April 3, 2020 - " {A] documentary filmmaker who used to live in China ... Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out. [see video]

"The Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, 'asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats'.... On December 24, 2019, the [WIV] posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, 'long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin [in] bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified'....

"Scientific American verifies much of the information Tye mentions about Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist.... 'Shi — a virologist who is often called China’s "bat woman" by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years — walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. "I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong," she says. "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China" Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, "could they have come from our lab?"'....

"In his YouTube video, Tye focuses his attention on a researcher at the [WIV] named Huang Yanling: 'Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.' There was enough discussion of rumors about Huang Yanling online in China to spur an official denial. On February 16, [WIV] denied that patient zero was one of their employees, and interestingly named her specifically.... Press accounts quote the institute as saying, 'Huang was a graduate student at the institute until 2015, when she left the province and had not returned since. Huang was in good health and had not been diagnosed with disease, it added'

"The web page for the [WIV]’s Lab of Diagnostic Microbiology does indeed still have 'Huang Yanling' listed as a 2012 graduate student, and her picture and biography appear to have been recently removed.... Her name still has a hyperlink, but the linked page is blank....

"Tye says, 'everyone on the Chinese internet is searching for [Huang Yanling] but most believe that her body was quickly cremated and the people working at the crematorium were perhaps infected as they were not given any information about the virus'.... As Tye observes, a public appearance by Huang Yanling would dispel a lot of the public rumors, and is the sort of thing the Chinese government would quickly arrange in normal circumstances — presuming that Huang Yanling was still alive....

"At some point in February, Botao Xiao posted a research paper onto ResearchGate.net, 'The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus'..... The paper was removed a short time after it was posted.... The first conclusion of Botao Xiao’s paper is that the bats suspected of carrying the virus are extremely unlikely to be found naturally in the city, and ... bats were not sold at the market.... Botao Xiao’s paper theorizes that the coronavirus originated from bats being used for research at either one of two research laboratories in Wuhan....
Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention. WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province.... Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market.... The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to [WIV]....
"[I]t is a remarkable coincidence that the [WIV] was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that 'a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.' And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification."

Also read: Coronavirus trail leads to Wuhan labs (I)

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