News organizations have latched onto Biden’s latest marching orders to the U.S. intelligence community to hustle up and, in the next 3 months, come to a conclusion on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic:

“I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days. As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”

Biden said that in March he had asked his national security advisor Jake Sullivan to report on what is known about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus at the heart of the pandemic.

The intelligence community has narrowed the field to two theories on the virus’s origin: a natural transfer from an animal host to humans or a laboratory accident. The majority of the community believes we lack “sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”

Of the 17 agencies within the intelligence community, two sided with the natural origins theory, and one with the lab release theory, but none with high confidence:

“…while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter — each with low or moderate confidence…”

So, what can we expect after Biden’s 90-day deadline?

WHO done it…

Back in January of this year, the World Health Organization sent an international team of virologists, epidemiologists, and other health scientists to Wuhan and surrounding areas to determine the origins of the virus. Half of the team were Chinese.

The team concluded that the most likely origin included an intermediate host, followed by direct transmission from the original host (called a spillover). Much less likely was a viral origin from food products, and that an origin from a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely.”

Although the WHO report was very detailed, it was criticized in a couple of ways.

First, despite the comprehensive details in the WHO report, the study did not find or publish anything new. It contained all the known information about the virus and the COVID-19 disease put into one shiny package.

Second, despite pointing to an intermediate animal between the original bat host and the eventual human host, the WHO team did not find that hypothesized intermediate despite researchers testing “tens of thousands of wildlife and livestock samples.”

Third, the WHO team did not include anyone with a biosafety background to thoroughly investigate a possible laboratory origin. This led to the high-profile dissention of the WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who insisted on more work to investigate the lab leak hypothesis. Furthermore, 17 scientists signed a letter published in the journal Science calling for further investigation into the SARS-CoV-2 origins, including both lab leak and natural hypotheses.

The NYT reported that the scientists who signed the letter did not see a case for a lab leak:

Yet Dr. Iwasaki stressed that she did not see a clear case for a lab leak. “I’m completely open-minded about the possibilities,” she said. “There’s so little evidence for either of these things, that it’s almost like a tossup.”

For this to change significantly, we will need significant cooperation from the Chinese about what happened in key labs in Wuhan and ongoing investigations and sampling in various regions throughout China.

This ambiguous tossup between competing hypotheses will not likely change in 3 months.

Will China release any information…

No.

Biden’s 90-day prod to his intelligence agencies comes about partly from China’s refusal to take part in the second phase of the WHO’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

At the height of U.S. power and dominance in the global world order during and after World War II, no country in the world dictated terms to the U.S. This was especially true after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even now, as the U.S. undergoes an inevitable and slow decline in power, no country in the world has ever sent inspectors into the U.S to inspect government facilities, companies, people, or animals, and in any way dictated terms to U.S. interests.

China is currently the #2 world power just behind the U.S. by many metrics such as GDP (and even exceeds the U.S. depending on the measures). The U.S. and China as economic peers are far ahead of the #3 economic power (either Japan or India depending on the measure).

Yet China is still considered by many as a developing country and is often treated as such. And by some measures such as per capita income or wealth, China is indeed ranked far below the U.S.

China is clearly insulted by demands that foreign investigators have unfettered access to Chinese labs, people, and countryside to interview, sample, and test at will to determine the cause the pandemic. Many around the world blame China.

To get a sense of China’s feeling of outrage and inequity, read this comment by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian:

“If the US side really wants a completely transparent investigation, they should invite the WHO experts to launch an investigation in the US.”

China’s intransigence is also not likely to change in 3 months.

Will we find out what happened in the Wuhan Institute of Virology…

No.

The Chinese will not suddenly see cooperating with the U.S. and the rest of the world as beneficial.

The Chinese government has a long-standing policy of secrecy and is almost genetically programmed to obstruct open and cooperative global projects, especially on its soil.

Also, the US demonstrated the petulant, xenophobic, and racist instincts of a virulent American minority by their treatment of China from 2016 to 2020, and especially during the pandemic. That is now bearing fruit in China’s complete refusal to cooperate.

China is digging in its heels and being equally petulant, denying the lab leak hypothesis while also failing to gain confidence with the global community. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said:

“Some people in the United States completely ignore facts and science.”

Zhao’s comment was true for the Trump administration, but clearly not for Biden’s. But just as important, China is not providing the facts and science that would help exonerate them or help understand their role in the pandemic.

Nonetheless, Biden has kept pressure on the Chinese from the beginning to be open and transparent about the origins of the SARS virus and any information they have.

That will not happen, and our blindness to the happenings within the Wuhan Institute of Virology won’t change in 3 months.

Will the virus tell us anything about its origins…

Maybe.

All the biological information, specifically the genomic information contained in the RNA within the virus, is most consistent with a natural origin.

First, the genetic code itself, the proteins, and all the features of the proteins are consistent with a naturally evolved virus. In other words, evolution easily and parsimoniously explains every feature of the virus. No need to invoke little green men or wicked scientists in the making of the virus.

Second, there are no proteins, segments of proteins, or features of the genetic code that even hint at an artificial origin. For example, some COVID conspiracy theories point to the polybasic or furin cleavage site and the sequence coding as possible human tampering signs. That is incorrect. There are no hidden messages in the viral genome other than biological secrets.

Third, the basic genetics of the virus and its nearest viral cousins make it very unlikely to have been the product of an engineered human virus. Let’s dig into this last point because it is a little subtle.

The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is the bat virus known as RaTG13. These two viruses are 96.2% identical across their whole genomes. However, the bat RaTG13’s spike or S protein binds poorly to human ACE2, while SARS-CoV-2 binds very well, explaining the latter’s effectiveness as a human pathogen.

Someone interested in engineering a highly effective human virus would have started with a known human pathogen such as the original SARS, now known as SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1. The RaTG13 virus, SARS-CoV-2’s closest cousin, would not have shown up on anyone’s radar as a promising virus to make into a human pathogen.

A pangolin coronavirus (Pangolin-CoV) contains a spike or S protein which is more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than to RaTG13. Within the S protein, 5 amino acids are critical to effective binding to human ACE2 protein. Pangolin-CoV’s S protein keeps those 5 critical amino acids in common with SARS-CoV-2 and has only one non-critical amino acid that is different. RaTG13, on the other hand, has an S protein which is very different from SARS-CoV-2, with 17 amino acid differences, including 4 out of the 5 amino acids critical for ACE2 binding.

The chart below illustrates the similarities and differences in the spike protein amino acid sequences among almost two dozen viruses. Each letter represents an amino acid, with the full sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus along the top line. Each additional virus listed along the left side has a sequence compared to SARS-CoV-2 (called Beta-CoV/Wuhan-Hu-1). If the additional virus’s amino acid is identical to SARS-CoV-2, that is indicated with a dot. If the amino acid is different, the different amino acid’s abbreviation letter is shown.

This is one of the reasons that the pangolin was at one point thought to be the intermediate host between bat and human.

However, as Kristian Andersen points out in his important paper about the origins of COVID-19, the interaction of SARS-CoV-2 with ACE2 is not ideal. Therefore Pangolin-CoV’s S protein, though it happens to bind well to ACE2, is not predicted to be a good binding protein for the human receptor.

No scientist would have picked RatG13 as a base virus and substituted Pangolin-CoV’s S protein and thought that would be a good place to start developing a highly infectious human virus.

Sure, someone could conceivably have taken the RaTG13 bat virus with no ability to infect humans, and substituted a pangolin-CoV’s S protein, and made SARS-CoV-2. But no scientist would have picked those two viruses to merge in just that way as a promising track to create something worth their efforts.

Biology is crazy complicated. The genetic code is not as simple as four letters would have you believe. Many look at the letters of the genetic code and come up with imaginary patterns convinced of alien abduction, or virus-laden comets infecting an early Earth, or that a polybasic cleavage site with human codons was inserted into a benign virus to make a human super-virus.

There is an endless line of people submitting papers claiming to debunk Einstein, or claiming to have built a perpetual motion machine or cold fusion reactor, or having proven that China built and released the SARS virus. They are not stupid people standing in that imaginary line. They are generally educated, just enough to be dangerous. And they are very wrong.

None of these things will change considerably in the next 3 months.

High-tech spooks…

The NYT speculated that the Biden push will activate the intelligence community to use “an extraordinary amount of computer power to the question of whether the virus accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory.” According to the Times article, the computing power may be used on a database of unanalyzed “Chinese communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the disease outbreak around the city of Wuhan.”

However, the NYT cautioned that even this amped up silicon-assisted inquiry by the intelligence community is unlikely to turn up anything:

“Current and former intelligence officials say they strongly doubt anyone will find an email or a text message or a document that shows evidence of a lab accident.”

An excellent example of the limits of this intelligence work, even with international cooperation, is infection intelligence that the WSJ made a big splash about earlier in the week. The NYT said:

“One allied nation passed on information that three workers in the Wuhan virological laboratory were hospitalized with serious flulike symptoms in the autumn of 2019. The information about the sickened workers is considered important, but officials cautioned that it did not constitute evidence that they caught the virus at the laboratory — they may have brought it there.”

Again, it is unlikely that a few additional months of high-tech spookery will rustle up conclusive evidence that eluded previous work.

Right back where we are…

In conclusion, the probability is that 90 days from Biden’s statement, we will be back where we are now. That means the biological data is completely consistent with natural origins. The data needed to more confidently rule out a laboratory origin and require Chinese cooperation will be missing. That is because the Chinese will not cooperate and will effectively nullify any international efforts to penetrate their sources of information.

Thank you for reading and please doshare! Also, if you liked this, you might like the following:

Debunking Nicholas Wade’s Origin of COVID Conspiracy Theory

The post Predictions For Biden’s Covid Origin China Probe appeared first on Medika Life.

In his analysis, Dr. Quay concludes that it is beyond a reasonable doubt the virus came from a laboratory accident, a so-called “laboratory-acquired infection”, in Wuhan, China.

Dr. Steven C. Quay, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-scientist and CEO of Atossa Therapeutics and has been asked to brief the elected members and staff of the United States Congress on his work on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual meeting will take place from 2:00 to 3:30 pm EDT, Monday, May 24, 2021.

Dr. Quay will speak about his research on the origin of the pandemic, which he published in January 2021 and which is available here. In this analysis, he concludes that it is beyond a reasonable doubt the virus came from a laboratory accident, a so-called “laboratory-acquired infection”, in Wuhan, China.

The briefing will also include a discussion by David Asher, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, about his work at the U.S. State Department looking into the origins of COVID-19 and the role of the Chinese government. According to Dr. Quay;

“While it would be a positive step for China to be open and transparent with records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that were not shared with the WHO Committee during their field work in China earlier this year, there already exists more than enough data and evidence to conclude with high certainty that the COVID pandemic did not arise from a natural zoonosis,”

“The purpose of this briefing is to supply relevant congressional staff and members with the facts that are not in dispute with respect to the pandemic, to show how these facts are different from any prior zoonosis, to show these facts are completely consistent with a lab-leak, and finally, to document the genetic signatures that are consistent with ‘gain-of-function’ laboratory manipulation.”

Who is Steven Quay, M.D., Ph.D.?

According to his press release, Dr. Steven Quay has 360+ published contributions to medicine and has been cited over 10,000 times, placing him in the top 1% of scientists worldwide. He holds 87 US patents and has invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals which have helped over 80 million people.

He is the author of a book on surviving the pandemic, “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus”. He has seen his fair share of controversy during the pandemic. His book, published in June of 2020 was removed from Kindle by Amazon, hours after its launch. His outspoken views on treatments for Covid-19 have often conflicted with the official narrative.

For instance, in his book, he offers the following advice for dealing with Covid-19, and it’s not difficult to see why the book was removed by Amazon.

• One 2-minute step you can take every time you come home to kill coronavirus before it enters your lungs
• A quick, free home test for COVID-19 that is as good as the FDA-approved nasal swab
• The one exercise you won’t learn in the gym that can save your life
• How NOT to die of COVID-19 (Make your lungs younger)
• What to do if you have early-stage COVID-19 so that you can stay out of the hospital
• The #1 most effective way to prevent the spread of coronavirus as we reopen society (Hint: it’s the one thing the CDC said was “NOT effective” when coronavirus hit the U.S.)
• Why a vaccine won’t be the solution, and what YOU can do to protect yourself, now and in the future
• What to eat and drink (and what to avoid), so you can prevent and beat this coronavirus
• The best supplements I have found from clinical trial research for immune health during this pandemic
• The coronavirus’ “Diabolic Trait” and how it helped the virus spread so fast
• An easy DIY step that takes your face mask from a viral barrier to a virus killer, giving you over 100-times the protection of an untreated mask
• The one blood test to ask for if you are hospitalized that can keep you off a ventilator
• Three steps to take to thrive during the next epidemic
• Learn about gain-of-function research and why we must ban it to prevent future pandemics

He has made the following statement on why he feels it is so important to address the issue of origin.

“For over a year there has been a reticence to consider a lab-leak as the source of this pandemic despite the fact that most of the evidence I will present has been in the public domain all this time. It is clear to me that only a grassroots effort directed to the federal government will bring the urgency to help uncover the cause of the pandemic and set the stage to put in place the safeguards to prevent the next. You can help in this fight by inviting your Representative and Senators to this briefing on the leading COVID origin hypothesis, the possibility of a laboratory-acquired infection at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

“We owe it to the three million people who have died to get to the bottom of this.”

If you would like to make your congressional representatives aware of the briefing, please use this link: Briefing Invitation

The post Dr. Steven Quay to Brief U.S. Congress On Origin of the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Medika Life.

Not everyone was out celebrating though. A handful of Asian epidemiologists had identified a potential viral pandemic in the making and their attention was firmly focused on China. As new year’s day unfolded, frantic emails were being exchanged between Taiwanese epidemiologists based in Asia, the WHO, and their colleagues in the West, describing worrying pneumonia of unknown origin that was rapidly getting out of hand in a city in China. Human to human transmission was strongly suspected and these experts recognized the danger signals. Many harbored well-founded concerns of an impending disaster and decided to yell, “Houston, we have a problem”. 

Houston, or in this instance the World Health Organization (WHO) dragged their feet. We may never know the real chain of events that unfolded in the WHO offices between the receipt of those first Taiwanese emails sounding the alarm in early January and the initial acknowledgment and warning they issued in late January, directed at the global community. Whatever the politics, it was too little, too late.

The biggest threat that was to emerge over December 2019 and January 2020 wasn’t Wuhan itself or the virus. Wuhan is a transportation hub of China, a densely populated city with a population of more than 14 million in 2019. Enter the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (IATA: WUH, ICAO), a large airport on the outskirts of Wuhan. Tianhe is an international airport and serves the area of Hubei, China. Most importantly, this airport serves non-stop passenger flights to 103 destinations in 8 countries and 92 domestic flights inside China.

Had the coronavirus outbreak occurred elsewhere, not in close proximity to an international airport, we wouldn’t, in all likelihood, be having this discussion right now. Mankind would have dodged another viral bullet. Or would we?

Having this international airport located at the center of a potential pandemic outbreak with confirmed cases of human to human transmission shouldn’t just have sounded a warning bell, it should have set off every siren the medical world possessed.

Instead, the world was offered a watered-down warning, written in typical medical parlance, language we call medi-speak, that avoids any specifics and remains as vague as possible to allow for wiggle room. The WHO, who was called on seriously, in a way their services had never been called on before, failed miserably to fulfill their basic mandate to humanity. They failed to warn us and they failed to protect us. 

Vague, non-specific, and indecisive warnings and advisories were issued. In the early weeks of January 2020, as the world tried to figure out what the WHO was actually saying, the coronavirus quietly and unobtrusively did what viruses do best. It continued to spread, making its way to almost every corner of the globe, carried invisibly across borders by its hosts. Us.

Wuhan earns its place in pandemic history. or does it?

Wuhan had just cemented its place in pandemic history and rumors quickly began circulating online that sought to explain the origins of the virus in various ways. Experts and virologists initially pointed to the wet markets in Wuhan, specifically the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as the most likely source of infection. It didn’t take long for the wheels to come off this theory, as only environmental contamination was found at the market. Horseshoe bats breathed a cumulative sigh of relief and then the blame game kicked off, big time.

China blamed America for introducing the virus to Wuhan during the October 2019 World Military Games. Americans responded by developing a promoting their own crazed theories, the favored one suggesting that the new novel coronavirus was in actual fact a Chinese manufactured pathogen, created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab in China relatively close (25 to 35 kilometers [15 to 22 miles]) to the Wuhan live-animal market at the epicenter of China’s outbreak. The only common thread shared by all the theories, crazed or otherwise, that emerged as the coronavirus continued to spread in early 2020 was this one single and apparently immutable fact. Wuhan was ground zero.

While we were all at odds to decide exactly how it had happened, we were all certain of one fact,. Wuhan was the source of SARS-CoV2. 

But was it?

Research begins to paint another picture

On the 13th of January, 2020, South Cina Morning Post confirmed Thailand had recorded the first case of coronavirus outside of China, a Chinese individual, not attached to the Huanan Seafood market. The woman, 61, was identified as a Chinese tourist from the city in central Hubei province. She received treatment in a hospital in Nonthaburi near Bangkok, where she was first admitted on January 8. This appeared to be the first known publicly recorded case of the virus escaping China’s borders. Many followed in short succession.

Data, in the first year of the pandemic, was dealt with in real-time as scientists battled to combat the virus. Almost without exception, data were drawn from patients infected with the coronavirus, post-January 2020. We had no reason or driving motivation to examine cases that predated this or to even consider the quesion. We were overwhelmed with too much real-time information flowing from pandemic hotspots across the globe to bother with 2019.

Scientists and researchers are, however, by nature, inquisitive creatures and it was only a question of time before people started to ask questions. One of these was a simple, but controversial one. What if the coronavirus had been around for a lot longer than we originally surmised? To confirm the presence of the virus in the population you need serological samples taken from a broad swathe of people, Samples that you can easily test for markers associated with the coronavirus. 

Italy and France were in possession of just such samples and exhibited sufficient scientific curiosity to pursue the question.

Was the Genie already out of the bottle?

By January of 2020, according to emerging data, the coronavirus had already made its way around the globe. Now, research in the West indicates confirmed infections in Europe that predate the Wuhan outbreak by months. Patients in Italy and France had contracted the virus as early as September, October, and November of 2019. France provides an interesting perspective on this, with blood samples taken from pneumonia patients in December of 2020. One of the cases was identified as being Covid. The particulars of this case and the timing are of interest.

Paris, France

The Paris-based hospital collected samples from 24 patients (over December 2019 and January 2020) presenting with pneumonia. to detect influenza using PCR tests, the same genetic screening process used to detect the presence of the novel coronavirus in patients infected at the time the sample is collected. One was identified as being Covid positive. 

The patient, a man, had been admitted on the 27th of November and had not traveled to China. The man’s wife worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin and although the man had infected both his children, the wife remained asymptomatic. Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, where the patient was hospitalized was quoted at the time in an interview.

“Of the 24, we had one who was positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27. Each sample was retested several times to ensure there were no errors.”

It may be easy to dismiss this article and the hospital’s findings as an anomaly perhaps attributable to cross-contamination of samples. It happens as we’re far from perfect. The desire to pinpoint China as the source of the epidemic has also been overwhelming and any evidence to the contrary tends to be dismissed out of hand. 

An article published in The French magazine, The Connexion, highlights the findings of another French study. National health research body Inserm said:

 “The first identified cases of COVID-19 were detected on December 8, 2019, in Wuhan, China; and the first documented case in Europe was reported retrospectively in France… on December 27”.

But, it added, new research “suggests early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe” going back to at least November 2019 in France, and even earlier in Italy. You can read the paper which highlights later retesting from the CONSTANCE cohort here. It validates findings that suggest infections of coronavirus in France as early as November of 2019. According to the original article;

In the study, scientists analysed 9,144 blood samples taken from a pool of 200,000 male and female adult participants, living in all regions of mainland France. The samples had been collected between November 4, 2019, and March 16, 2020. They were first analysed using a rapid Elisa test to detect Covid-19 antibodies and the virus was found in 353 participants.

To discount false positives, a second highly specific test was then done on these samples. This showed 13 of the samples taken between November 5, 2019 and January 30, 2020 came back “SN positive” meaning the Covid-19 virus had been detected.

Professor Fabrice Carrat, director of the study, told Le Monde:

“These results suggest that as early as November and December of 2019, the rate of contamination among people in France was already around one case per 1,000 people. We seem to have found cases sporadically, all over the country.”

What really caught our eye though was a newer article that examined blood samples taken from a cancer cohort in late 2019 in Italy.

Italy sees France and raises the stakes

Entitled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy,” the paper was published in November of 2020. You can read the entire paper by following the link. We’ll provide a basic overview below.

First, a little context. The first laboratory-confirmed Italian COVID-19 case was identified in Lombardy on February 20, 2020, in a 38-year-old man who had no history of possible contacts with positive cases in Italy or abroad. Within a few days, additional cases of COVID-19 and critically ill patients were recorded in the surrounding area. Soon several cases were identified in other Italian regions, mostly in the northern area. Lockdowns were first applied in 2 critical areas of Lombardy and Veneto and were rapidly enforced regionally and nationwide starting on March 8.

Italy’s first two known cases of COVID-19 disease were recorded on January 30, 2020, when two tourists from China tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Rome.

On the basis of the first case identification, it was hypothesized that the virus had been circulating in Italy since January 2020. However, the rapid spread, the large number of patients requiring hospital admission and treatment in intensive care units, as well as the duration of the pandemic suggest that the arrival of the virus and its circulation in Italy in a less symptomatic form could be anticipated by several months.

What the authors of the paper needed was a serological sample to test from earlier in 2019. They were in luck. Their eventual cohort was a population enrolled from September 2019 to March 2020 through the SMILE trial (Screening and Multiple Intervention on Lung Epidemics; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03654105), a prospective lung cancer screening study using low-dose computed tomography and blood biomarkers. They had their samples and set about testing them. What they found verified their suspicions.

The first surge of positive cases was identified in September–October 2019, a full three months before the Wuhan cluster. Evaluation of anti–SARS-CoV-2 functional NAbs identified positive samples in CPE-based microneutralization tests already collected in October 2019. Given the temporal delay between infection and antibody synthesis, these results indicate that the virus circulated in Italy well before the detection of the declared index patient in February 2020. In addition, most of the first antibody-positive individuals lived in regions where the pandemic started.

Reviving an old conspiracy

It’s time to wheel out one of the rumor mill’s favorite conspiracies, the World Military Games. We’re left with little choice at this point as the confirmed presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in Europe in September of 2019 casts serious doubt on Wuhan being the center of origin. As insufficient data exists at this stage, hopefully, a situation that will be remedied in the coming months as we attempt to track down the real ground zero for the virus, we are going to make a few reasonably safe assumptions.

1. Italy and France were not the only countries infected with the novel coronavirus in late 2019. Logic dictates that if it was present in two large and well-traveled European populations, that it had already spread globally as early as September or October of 2019.
2. Testing has only been performed retroactively on samples collected from September of 2020. It is very likely that the presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in our populations may predate this period by months,escaping detection as it gradually evolved to develop its current strains.
3. Wuhan, was almost certainly not the point of origin, merely the first population to develop an infectious cluster of the mutated virus, establishing a pattern soon to be repeated across the globe.

All of which brings us back to the question of the World Military Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games. Almost every country was in attendance at the event hosted in Wuhan in October of 2019. Stretching from the 18th to the 27th of October, it was the largest military sports event ever to be held in China, with nearly 10,000 athletes from over 100 countries competing in 27 sports.

Many of the athletes complained of Covid like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan, among them French athlete Élodie Clouvel, who speculated that an illness she and her fellow athlete, Valentin Belaud experienced, may have been COVID-19. Around 230,000 volunteers were recruited for the event and with so many potential global carriers of the virus assembled together, this event may very well have served as the catalyst for the subsequent outbreak seen in Wuhan in December of 2019.

Given what we know and with the promise of emerging data from research currently underway, every single nation on the planet is a suspect. Any could potentially have served as the source of origin for the SARS-CoV2 virus. We will have absolutely no way of determining this until further research is done. We do however know enough now to be able to safely say that Wuhan is looking less and less likely by the day. Its population of 14 million merely served as the first large petri dish for the virus’s more ambitious plans.

Keep in mind that one of the major sources of the outbreak of the Great Flu was a military encampment in the US. Poor hygiene in the camp and proximity to animals, in particular waterfowl and swine, had been suggested as the possible catalyst for animal-to-human transition in the 1918 pandemic. 

The longer we continue to allow massive encampments of impoverished, homeless seas of humanity to persist globally, we encourage the opportunity for new viral crossover events. Refugee and migrant camps aren’t merely an afront to a civilized world, they may also spell our end. These camp cities house hundreds of thousands of people in squalid conditions with no sanitation or freshwater. It is a recipe for future disasters.

So where does that leave us?

Aah, the million-dollar question. This new data is potentially far more worrying than any version of scaremongering the world could dream up over Wuhan. What it tells us is this.

We have no defense mechanisms that can function effectively against new, highly infectious, emergent viral strains and we may never develop any. These data tell us that new viral strains can move about freely in our populations, undetected for extended periods, offering the virus the time and opportunity needed to hone its attack. To mutate. Our responses will always be too little, too late. It is the nature of the combatant we are engaged with.

Viruses predate man and they will most certainly outlive us. In our self-induced technological arrogance, we assume mastery of everything we survey. The actual truth is far removed from this fictional view of our reality. We are as much a part of nature as any other organism on the planet and our species poses a very real threat to the ecosystem we inhabit. Nature has a way of ensuring balance and we lose sight of this at our own peril.

While you digest that you may consider issuing an apology to your Chinese friends. They are merely victims of an unpleasant pandemic, affected in exactly the same way we’ve all been.

The post Wuhan Was Not the Source of the Coronavirus, According to Research appeared first on Medika Life.