A Report from the Quarantine Room in China in Jan 2022
By Martin Woesler <martin@woesler.de>

If you want to go to China, which is almost Corona-free, you will be bloodied over several times: Only direct flights are allowed, these cost ten to twenty times as much and are fully booked for months. Finally I get a return ticket for January 4 from Frankfurt to Shanghai. Only those who prove shortly before departure that they have no corona in their blood or lungs receive the coveted green code on their cell phone.

Where could I get my blood drawn and analyzed within 24 hours? I asked at the Chinese Consulate, who referred me to their list of recognized laboratories. I checked the list, which only says “Medical facilities in North Rhine-Westphalia” for my state. Finally, I found what I was looking for at the MVZ Düsseldorf: $ 200 in fees, and the result would be on my cell phone within 5 hours, I was promised, but it came after 11 hours.

After being away for two years due to Corona, I am now to return to China with its No-Corona strategy, while in the United States and Europe the infection figures are exploding with the Omikron variant. In China, Tianjin goes into lockdown because of 2 Omikron cases. Continue reading →

Source: NYT (8/25/21)
Rejecting Covid Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming the U.S.
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
A new wave of disinformation follows President Biden’s order for the United States to investigate the origin of the pandemic, including the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan.
By Austin Ramzy and Amy Chang Chien

A lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Beijing is peddling groundless theories that the United States is the source of the coronavirus. Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

When a conspiracy theory started circulating in China suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from an American military lab, it had largely stayed on the fringe. Now, the ruling Communist Party has propelled the idea firmly into the mainstream.

This week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman repeatedly used an official podium to elevate unproven ideas that the coronavirus may have first leaked from a research facility in Fort Detrick, Md. A Communist Party publication, the Global Times, started an online petition in July calling for that lab to be investigated and said it gathered more than 25 million signatures.

Officials and state media have promoted a rap song by a patriotic Chinese hip-hop group that touted the same claim, with the lyrics: “How many plots came out of your labs? How many dead bodies hanging a tag?”

Beijing is peddling groundless theories that the United States may be the true source of the coronavirus, as it pushes back against efforts to investigate the pandemic’s origins in China. The disinformation campaign started last year, but Beijing has raised the volume in recent weeks, reflecting its anxiety about being blamed for the pandemic that has killed millions globally. Continue reading →

Perry Link is absolutely right here (see article below), in his guide to how to read the Communist Party’s China. He just got one detail wrong: The regime actually abandoned the wet market theory after only a few months. It was never explained why, but probably because they realized it would soon become obvious that it could not be true (virus contagion was not just at the market, and this fact could not be concealed like the many other things and science data that have been successfully concealed). Since then, the regime has focused, Putin-like, on fabricating and spreading a cascade of disinformation and distractions, such as that Covid came from foreign frozen food, that it originated in Italy, and so on and so forth — the message clearly being: “Anywhere but the lab!” –Which actually supports Perry Link’s position even more.

Even more so with the just-released Chinese film from the Wuhan lab) which shows its camera system, until now a secret, monitoring lab accidents and their handling. It also shows the bats bred at the lab … also news. And, it shows the lionizing of the brave Wuhan lab researchers going to caves and fearlessly and recklessly expose themselves to grave virus dangers. It’s like the earlier cave-researcher hero movie “Youth in the Wild” which, believe it or not, is STILL up on YouTube, showing how the researchers endanger themselves, and the rest of us. As Alina Chan has said all along, the virus route to the city of Wuhan may have been riding on such researchers. She includes this scenario in the range of lab leak/research related hypothesis  — I say, think of this possibility as a version of the recent global frog-killer fungus spreading around the world, where it turned out one major vehicle of the spread was … well-meaning but careless globetrotting frog researchers who brought the fungus on their boots! The flagrant recklessness of the Chinese researchers on display here, and in the new lab video, is comparable.

Sincerely, Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Wall Street Journal (6/14/21)
Beijing Protests a Lab Leak Too Much
By Perry Link

I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a longtime student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source.

Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned. Read upside-down, there is a sense in which the official press never lies. It cannot lie. It has to tell you what the party wants you to believe, and if you can figure out the party’s motive — which always exists — then you have a sense of the truth. Continue reading →

Source: Wall Street Journal (6/6/21)
OPINION: The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
By Steven Quay and Richard Muller

ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN KOZLOWSKI

The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.

Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.

But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses. Continue reading →

The Critical China Scholars have issued the following statement. See criticalchinascholars.org/interventions for more.

STATEMENT ON THE “LAB-LEAK” INVESTIGATION
June 2, 2021

The Critical China Scholars issue this statement to register grave concern about the politicized re-opening of the inquiry on the “lab-leak hypothesis” about COVID-19 origins. The specific political motivations underlying the inquiry, led by the Biden administration, guarantee that there can be no findings that will be useful for the kind of internationally trusted science necessary to promote global health. The only likely outcome is the further deterioration of relations between the US and the PRC, stoking already high degrees of Sinophobia and anti-Asianism in the United States and beyond. Countries such as the PRC have no good reason to believe the United States is engaged in a legitimate inquiry as every bit of information that has been released already has become inflamed and embedded into a political quagmire of antagonism and mistrust. The further poisoning of the political atmosphere means, moreover, that the scientific collaborations that have been ongoing throughout this past 18 months – those collaborations that yielded the vaccines, the sequencing, and other breakthroughs in understanding the behavior of the virus – could also be curtailed, which would be a setback for science, humanity, and our common global society.

The safety of biomedical research is a concern greatly exacerbated by the narrow pursuit of national and corporate interests; it will require a global approach that rigorously avoids privileging any country – including or especially the US. A Biden-led inquiry cannot lead to anything but the further empowering of US supremacists. Programs such as the Department of Justice’s China Initiative – which has engaged in a nationwide witch hunt for US-located Chinese and Chinese-American lab collaborations allegedly connected to the Chinese state – sow distrust and embed racist assumptions into the very core of the scientific world.

A multilateral inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 is desirable, but it can only succeed if it is carried out on a foundation of trust between China and the other powers. The measures required to establish such trust are also desirable on their own terms: cooperation to end the pandemic globally and, in place of the US’s current zero-sum orientation toward economic growth and technological development, cooperation for global sustainable development.