With the news that China has, surprise, surprise, come up with a vaccine for Covid-19 .....
..... which its 'friends' will also benefit from (meaning not us, the US or Western countries, but rather countries in Africa and its nearby neighbours in South East Asia, such as Papua New Guinea where Chinese Firms are mining its resources), we have to consider what this means.
Firstly, does it mean that the Chinese have once again played fast and loose with testing conventions, and are releasing a health product that will later prove to have been inadequately tested and have harmful side effects? Its a possibility, as like the Russian vaccine, its development and testing would be deemed insufficient or remarkably fast in normal times.
Or perhaps are all the tales that Covid-19 was in fact deliberately engineered and released (whether accidentally or deliberately), from a SARS research facility in Wuhan true? After all whilst many researchers consider that the zoonotic pathogen is just a natural development, others think that it had arrived remarkably well suited for human infection. An attribute which many consider would have been freakishly unlikely, if it is a natural developing virus in animals. However, if it is humanly engineered, then this possibility would also give the developers a head start in vaccine creation and production as well.
I ask, because there is a little reported story concerning the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which would have been the likely source of any leak. The institute was proposed in 2004, following the SARS outbreak on 2003, and was actually the brainchild of French President Jacques Chirac, who wanted to both get a foothold into the Chinese market, and some of the intellectual property rights from any collaborative research. So he offered private French funding and expertise to the Communist Chinese Government for a collaborative research and development program to be created in China.
Well it doesn't take an Einstein, to realise that this idea was fraught with dangers, and that the technology and expertise transfer was likely going to be solely a one way affair from West to East. Chirac was even warned by his own secret services (the General Directorate for External Security), that the deal was bad for France, with a high chance of the technology being misused for bio-weapon research, and possibly highly dangerous for the world as well, as China had a very poor record on Bio-Security (as well as public health matters - see numerous food scandals in China such as the baby milk scandal), with a high risk of a leak of dangerous products from the facility.
But President Chirac ignored these warnings and went ahead with the deal ... almost immediately it was obvious that all the French Intelligence Services warnings about technology transfer were valid, but nevertheless the scheme carried on, but when the Institute opened in 2015, the French were simply removed from any control or access to the establishment. The Institut Meieux, the French company that had funded its development, pulled out of the project, with its Owner Alain Merieux stating "I am giving up the co-chairmanship of the P4 laboratory, a Chinese tool. It belongs to them, even if it was developed with technical assistance from France".
This was no surprise, and was in line with China's general lack of transparency and international control on most of its laboratories and research facilities, which in the main were highly secretive and subject to military controls.
A French news paper report (Le Figaro) included a statement from an unnamed source, stated that these P4 (high level bio-security laboratories) are "like a nuclear reprocessing plant. It's a bacteriological atomic bomb. The viruses that are tested are extremely dangerous" ... the source added that security protocols such as "diving suits, decontamination airlocks etc must be followed to the letter".
By the time the institute became fully operational in January 2018, it was operating with the same secretiveness as all other Chinese establishments. Then in late 2019 coronavirus was suddenly found in the population of Wuhan (and deliberately ignored by local health and communist political authorities, who tried to suppress the news), and then very, very, swiftly, spread round the globe.
Coincidence? Maybe, or maybe not ... certainly there's lot of denials by Chinese officials such as Wang Yanyi, the director of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, who stated on state TV, that although they had been working on three strains of bat coronavirus, they were not related to the strain that was causing the current pandemic.
But we have a very old adage in the West .... "There's no smoke without fire". So the jury is still out.
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| Chinese Coronavirus Vaccine Developed ..... |
..... which its 'friends' will also benefit from (meaning not us, the US or Western countries, but rather countries in Africa and its nearby neighbours in South East Asia, such as Papua New Guinea where Chinese Firms are mining its resources), we have to consider what this means.
Firstly, does it mean that the Chinese have once again played fast and loose with testing conventions, and are releasing a health product that will later prove to have been inadequately tested and have harmful side effects? Its a possibility, as like the Russian vaccine, its development and testing would be deemed insufficient or remarkably fast in normal times.
Or perhaps are all the tales that Covid-19 was in fact deliberately engineered and released (whether accidentally or deliberately), from a SARS research facility in Wuhan true? After all whilst many researchers consider that the zoonotic pathogen is just a natural development, others think that it had arrived remarkably well suited for human infection. An attribute which many consider would have been freakishly unlikely, if it is a natural developing virus in animals. However, if it is humanly engineered, then this possibility would also give the developers a head start in vaccine creation and production as well.
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| What French Expertise Buys You In Wuhan ..... |
I ask, because there is a little reported story concerning the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which would have been the likely source of any leak. The institute was proposed in 2004, following the SARS outbreak on 2003, and was actually the brainchild of French President Jacques Chirac, who wanted to both get a foothold into the Chinese market, and some of the intellectual property rights from any collaborative research. So he offered private French funding and expertise to the Communist Chinese Government for a collaborative research and development program to be created in China.
Well it doesn't take an Einstein, to realise that this idea was fraught with dangers, and that the technology and expertise transfer was likely going to be solely a one way affair from West to East. Chirac was even warned by his own secret services (the General Directorate for External Security), that the deal was bad for France, with a high chance of the technology being misused for bio-weapon research, and possibly highly dangerous for the world as well, as China had a very poor record on Bio-Security (as well as public health matters - see numerous food scandals in China such as the baby milk scandal), with a high risk of a leak of dangerous products from the facility.
But President Chirac ignored these warnings and went ahead with the deal ... almost immediately it was obvious that all the French Intelligence Services warnings about technology transfer were valid, but nevertheless the scheme carried on, but when the Institute opened in 2015, the French were simply removed from any control or access to the establishment. The Institut Meieux, the French company that had funded its development, pulled out of the project, with its Owner Alain Merieux stating "I am giving up the co-chairmanship of the P4 laboratory, a Chinese tool. It belongs to them, even if it was developed with technical assistance from France".
This was no surprise, and was in line with China's general lack of transparency and international control on most of its laboratories and research facilities, which in the main were highly secretive and subject to military controls.
A French news paper report (Le Figaro) included a statement from an unnamed source, stated that these P4 (high level bio-security laboratories) are "like a nuclear reprocessing plant. It's a bacteriological atomic bomb. The viruses that are tested are extremely dangerous" ... the source added that security protocols such as "diving suits, decontamination airlocks etc must be followed to the letter".
By the time the institute became fully operational in January 2018, it was operating with the same secretiveness as all other Chinese establishments. Then in late 2019 coronavirus was suddenly found in the population of Wuhan (and deliberately ignored by local health and communist political authorities, who tried to suppress the news), and then very, very, swiftly, spread round the globe.
Coincidence? Maybe, or maybe not ... certainly there's lot of denials by Chinese officials such as Wang Yanyi, the director of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, who stated on state TV, that although they had been working on three strains of bat coronavirus, they were not related to the strain that was causing the current pandemic.
But we have a very old adage in the West .... "There's no smoke without fire". So the jury is still out.
The Wuhan lab-leak theory is now being taken seriously and denied just as strenuously as ever by the Chinese. But lets be honest and admit its the Covid-19 source theory that makes most sense.
ReplyDeleteThe Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been studying coronaviruses in bats for over a decade whereas the alternative idea, that a bat bit an animal in the wet food market, and it then passed to humans requires a lot of bad luck. The Chinese are pushing the story that the coronavirus may have have entered their country in frozen meat shipments from another country in South-East Asia, or maybe (if they can't find a fall guy), from another part of China ... but not Wuhan .. definitely not the virology institute in Wuhan!
US intelligence agencies via the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have said that:
ReplyDelete1. An animal-to-human transmission or
2. A lab leak
are both plausible hypotheses for how Covid-19 spread, but that there was not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion. As expected China has criticised the report for "politicising this issue".
Four of the US intelligence agencies apparently assessed with "low confidence" that it had originated with an infected animal or a related virus. While one intelligence agency said it had "moderate confidence" that the first human infection most likely was the result of a laboratory accident, probably involving experimentation or animal handling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is probably as close to the truth as we will ever get as the Chinese Communist Party are, according to the report "continuing to hinder the global investigation and to resist sharing information."