Svetski Rat K(orona)

Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program


China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.

The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.

It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is now the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.

As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern.

It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated.

Its major themes include the “deadly denial of human-to-human transmission”, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and “bleaching of wildlife market stalls”, along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.

Key figures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology team, who feature in the government dossier, were either trained or employed in the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they conducted foundational research on deadly pathogens in live bats, including SARS, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

This partnership continues to this day, according to the website of the Wuhan ­Institute of Virology, despite concerns the research is too risky.

Politicians in the Morrison government are speaking out about the national security and biosecurity concerns of this relationship as the controversial research into bat-related viruses now comes into sharp focus amid the investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK.

Spoiler:

UNLIKELY CLAIMS VIRUS CREATED IN LAB

Scientific consensus is that the virus came from a wetmarket. But the US’s top spy agency confirmed on the record for the first time yesterday that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident at a Wuhan laboratory.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acting director Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in a laboratory.

“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” he said.

“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to US national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Despite Mr Grenell’s statement and scientific consensus that the virus was not created in a laboratory, based on its genome sequence the governments’ research paper obtained by The Telegraph notes a study that claims it was created.

South China University of Technology researchers published a study on February 6 that concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazards laboratories”.

“The paper is soon withdrawn because it ‘was not supported by direct proofs’, according to author Botao Xiano,” the dossier noted, continuing to point out that: ‘“No scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings’, scholar Yanzhong Huang wrote on March 5.”

The Saturday Telegraph does not claim that the South China University of Technology study is credible, only that it has been included in this government research paper produced as part of the case against China.

CHINA’S COVER-UP OF EARLY SAMPLES

The paper obtained by The Saturday Telegraph speaks about “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and points to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”.

It paints a picture of how the Chinese government deliberately covered up the coronavirus by silencing doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.

The US, along with other countries, has repeatedly ­demanded a live virus sample from the first batch of coronavirus cases. This is understood to have not been forthcoming despite its vital importance in developing a vaccine while potentially providing an indication of where the virus originated.

THE LAB WORKER WHO DISAPPEARED

Out of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who have reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticising the response of Chinese authorities, no case is more intriguing and worrying than that of Huang Yan Ling.

A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the South China Morning Post reported rumours swirling on Chinese social media that she was the first to be diagnosed with the disease and was ­“patient zero”.

Then came her reported disappearance, with her biography and image deleted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.

On February 16 the institute denied she was ­patient zero and said she was alive and well, but there has been no proof of life since then, fanning speculation.

DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE

On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.”

On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected.

It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease.

Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”

A tweet from the Global Times on January 2 states: “Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumours about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS.” This had the intended effect of silencing other doctors who may have been inclined to speak out.

So the truth about the outbreak in China has remained shrouded in secrecy, with President Xi Jinping aggressively rejecting global calls for an inquiry.

The dossier is damning of China’s constant denials about the outbreak.

“Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,” it states.

“The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”

The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-­imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” In the paper, the Western governments are pushing back at what they call an “assault on international transparency”.

“As EU diplomats prepare a report on the pandemic, PRC successfully presses Brussels to strike language on PRC disinformation,” it states.

“As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.”

Chair of Australia’s Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security Andrew Hastie said after the cover-up and disinformation campaign from China, the world needed transparency and an inquiry.

“So many Australians have been damaged by the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Chinese government, and if we truly are as close as Beijing suggests we are then we need answers about how this all started,” he said.

Spoiler:

Mór Thököly wrote:There is no current evidence to suggest that coronavirus leaked from a Chinese research laboratory, intelligence sources have told the Guardian, contradicting recent White House claims that there is growing proof this is how the pandemic began.
The sources also insisted that a “15-page dossier” highlighted by the Australian Daily Telegraph which accused China of a deadly cover up was not culled from intelligence from the Five Eyes network, an alliance between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
British and other Five Eyes agencies do believe that Beijing has not necessarily been open about how coronavirus initially spread in Wuhan at the turn of the year. But they are nervous about getting involved in an escalating international situation.


Grdn

https://t.co/F78UW4ii8X Fauci on "it's from a Chinese lab" pic.twitter.com/raoOKOpenN

— Chris Puttick (@putt1ck) May 5, 2020

US Navy sails warship into Barents Sea for the first time in three decades



(CNN)The US Navy sailed three destroyers into the Barents Sea off Russia's Arctic coast Monday, the first time Navy ships have operated in the area since the mid-1980s, the height of the Cold War.


The purpose of the operation was "to assert freedom of navigation and demonstrate seamless integration among allies," US Naval Forces Europe said in a statement.
The three destroyers -- USS Donald Cook, USS Porter and USS Roosevelt -- were joined by a UK Royal Navy frigate, HMS Kent.


The Barents Sea is part of the Arctic Ocean and borders northern Norway and Russia. The Russian port of Murmansk, which hosts the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet, sits on the sea.
The US Navy said it had notified Moscow of the upcoming operation on Friday "to avoid misperceptions, reduce risk, and prevent inadvertent escalation."
US officials have consistently said that Russia has boosted its military presence in the Arctic in recent years.


"Russia has gradually strengthened its presence by creating new Arctic units, refurbishing old airfields and infrastructure in the Arctic, and establishing new military bases along its Arctic coastline," a Pentagon report on the Arctic said last year.


"There is also a concerted effort to establish a network of air defense and coastal missile systems, early warning radars, rescue centers, and a variety of sensors," the report added.


Late last month NATO jets intercepted Russian military aircraft in the area on two occasions.
Last Tuesday "a Russian Airborne Early Warning aircraft as well as two Russian Tu-22 long range bombers with fighter escorts approached NATO airspace off the coast of Norway and were intercepted by Norwegian fighter jets," NATO said in a statement late last month.


The following day Norwegian F-16 and F-35 fighters once again intercepted Russian aircraft, this time two maritime patrol planes, after they approached "NATO airspace close to Norway," according to NATO.


The UK's Royal Air Force also launched Typhoon fighter aircraft to meet and escort the Russian planes as they tracked south toward the North Sea.
The US and Russian militaries often find themselves operating in close proximity in and around Europe.



Last month the US military accused Russian jets of twice endangering the crew of a US Navy surveillance plane flying in international airspace in the eastern Mediterranean after the Russian aircraft performed what the Navy called "unsafe and unprofessional" intercepts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pushes-eu-to-back-inquiry-into-chinas-handling-of-coronavirus-11588712954?mod=hp_lead_pos3

U.S. Pushes EU to Back Inquiry Into China’s Handling of Coronavirus


The Trump administration is pressing the European Union to support an international inquiry into China’s handling of the new coronavirus, including the origins of the pandemic, as Brussels seeks to avoid taking sides in an increasingly bitter battle between Beijing and Washington over responsibility for the crisis.

The U.S. is seeking an international probe into whether Beijing mishandled the contagion in its early stages, resulting in a global pandemic that has killed 250,000 and crippled the global economy.

Calls by Australian government officials starting in mid-April for an independent inquiry quickly devolved into a testy back-and-forth. Chinese ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye in a local interview accused Canberra of teaming up with Washington to attack China.

Wary of alienating either China or the U.S., the EU initially proposed an international inquiry to look into “lessons learnt from the international health response to Covid-19” to help improve future pandemic responses. The EU proposal was an early draft of a resolution it wants adopted at the World Health Organization’s decision-making body later this month.

That proposal, however, fell short of demands by the U.S. to examine the origins of the contagion—a focus Beijing has denounced as Washington’s attempt to deflect responsibility for its own handling of the outbreak. The EU proposal seeks to avoid pinning blame for the pandemic on any single country and would come only when the immediate crisis has passed.

The pressure from Washington for a robust international inquiry into China’s management of the pandemic leaves the EU in what has become an increasingly familiar bind for the bloc, seeking a middle way between two rival global powers.

“In my opinion, we need to look independently at what happened, standing aside from the battlefield between China and the United States, who blame each other for the events in a bid that has only exacerbated their rivalry,” EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell said in a French newspaper interview last weekend.

The World Health Assembly, the WHO’s general assembly, determines its policies and is the forum for members to call for it to take action in a specific area. In recent days, with the assembly convening soon, intensive negotiations have emerged over the text of the EU proposal, with WHO members pitching in suggestions and changes.

On Tuesday, an EU spokeswoman said “a thorough understanding of the epidemiology of the coronavirus pandemic is essential” for authorities to make “informed decisions.” People familiar with the negotiations say some of these concerns are reflected in the current text. China hasn’t yet responded to the new language.

A spokesman for China’s mission to the EU said Beijing was aware of the European initiative but had no further comment.

A State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that “we count on our Allies and partners joining the United States to ask the hard questions that are needed of China, as well as the WHO, in order to prevent such an unchecked outbreak in the future.”

The European resolution follows rising criticism by the U.S. and other governments of the slow reaction of China’s ruling Communist Party in the early days of the outbreak, when the virus might have been contained. Senior White House officials have suggested, without providing evidence, that the virus may have originated in a Chinese lab.

Beijing has responded by rejecting calls for an investigation and casting its own doubts on the virus’s origin, suggesting without evidence that the U.S. military introduced it to China.

The WHO’s representative in China, Dr. Gauden Galea, told Sky News that China was conducting its own investigations into the origin of the outbreak but hadn’t yet invited the WHO to participate.

EU officials have previously said they would support the idea of an independent probe but said it shouldn’t detract from coordinating global efforts to stem the virus, which has infected more than 3.6 million people world-wide.

However, speaking to local media on Monday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said “the whole world wants the exact origin of the virus to be clarified.”

A better world can emerge after coronavirus. Or a much worse one
Timothy Garton Ash

Most Europeans support a universal basic income, yet young people doubt democracy’s capacity to deliver change

Wed 6 May 2020 12.17 BSTLast modified on Wed 6 May 2020 17.04 BST

The coronavirus crisis seems to be encouraging belief in radical change. An astonishing 71% of Europeans are now in favour of introducing a universal basic income, according to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford university and published today. In Britain, the figure is 68%. Less encouraging, at least to anyone who believes in liberal democracy, is another startling finding in the survey: no less than 53% of young Europeans place more confidence in authoritarian states than in democracies to tackle the climate crisis. The poll was conducted by eupinions in March, as most of Europe was locking down against the virus, but the questions had been formulated earlier. It would be fascinating now to ask Europeans which political system they think has proved better at combating a pandemic, as the United States and China, the world’s leading democracy and the world’s leading dictatorship, spray viral accusations at each other.

Those two contrasting but equally striking survey results show how high the stakes will be as we emerge from the immediate medical emergency, and face the subsequent economic pandemic and its political fallout. What kind of historical moment will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world? It could lead us to the best of times. It could lead us to the worst of times.

The proposal for a universal basic income was until recently often dismissed as far-out and utopian. But during the anti-pandemic lockdowns, many developed countries have introduced something close to it. Spain’s economy minister has said that its “minimum vital income” could become a permanent instrument in the country’s system. Hardly a day passes now when I do not read another article suggesting that universal basic income, or some variant of it, is an idea whose time has come.

This would be one ingredient of a possible future in which we managed to turn one of the greatest crises of the postwar world into one of its greatest opportunities. We can address the soaring inequality, both economic and cultural, which has been eroding the foundations even of established liberal democracies like Britain and the US. Having learned to work in different ways, more from home and with less unnecessary travel, we turn this into a new life-work model.

After turning out on our balconies and rooftops, all across Europe, to applaud the doctors, nurses, social care and other essential workers, we do not forget them once the medical danger has passed. Not only do they get a better deal socially and economically – the postwar slogan “homes fit for heroes” comes to mind – but there is also what Polish populists slyly call a “redistribution of respect”. And in making that necessary redistribution, we also deprive the nationalist populists of their electoral appeal.

At the same time, we recognise that a planet stalked by genuinely global threats, such as this virus and climate change, requires more international cooperation, not less. And the EU, which earlier this week convened an international meeting to raise funds for fighting Covid-19, becomes a prime mover of global collective action.

That’s the dream. But then there’s the nightmare. This may be a postwar moment, but what if it turns out to be more like the years after the first world war than the post-1945 liberal and social democratic reconstruction. The nationalist impulses we see in Donald Trump and Xi Jinping become even more pronounced. With beggar-my-neighbour policies, the post-coronavirus recession descends into a great depression. Inequality soars, rather than being diminished, both within our societies and between different countries.

In Europe, wealthy northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands simply don’t show the necessary degree of solidarity with the battered economies of south European eurozone members. Instead, they use the EU’s crisis-justified suspension of limits on state aid to pump public funds into their key industries, and the gulf between northern and southern Eurozone states grows wider. In a couple of years’ time, a populist like Matteo Salvini, or someone even worse (yes, it’s possible), gains power in an Italy where public debt is now about 160% of GDP and blames all the country’s woes on a lack of north European solidarity.

Meanwhile, in the eastern half of the continent, Hungary remains a dictatorship, with Viktor Orbán’s temporary emergency powers mysteriously becoming permanent. Poland, where the governing party is currently, grotesquely, insisting on carrying out a presidential election entirely by postal ballot that cannot possibly be free and fair, follows down the Hungarian path. The EU, no longer a community of democracies, and torn along both its north-south and east-west axes, gradually weakens and disintegrates. Left to their own devices, its member states fail to provide adequate job prospects, social security and an ecologically sustainable future for their younger citizens. And so, as already shockingly foreshadowed in our poll, they turn to authoritarian solutions. Europe looks ever less to the US, ever more to China.

Come 2030 we probably won’t have either this hell or that heaven, just some version of our usual human purgatory. But which variant we come closer to is entirely up to us: to Americans and Chinese, Russians, Indians and Brazilians, of course, but in Europe, it’s mainly up to us Europeans – including the post-Brexit British of course, who are still Europeans, whether they like it or not.

That’s why, on the website that presents our survey results, we’ve also set up a self-interview facility for anyone with 10 minutes to spare to tell us your best and worst European moments, and your hopes for Europe in 2030. Thus far, the fall of the Berlin Wall has been the most widely mentioned formative moment and Brexit the top-scoring worst moment. But maybe this coronavirus moment will overtake them both. Come and tell us on europeanmoments.com.

[size=34]Analysis of cellphone location data in high-security area of Wuhan virology lab that studied coronavirus in bats indicates it shutdown in October after a 'hazardous event'[/size]

Wuhan airport drill for passenger with a new type of coronavirus last SEPTEMBER, French athletes falling sick in the city in OCTOBER and a warning by Bat Woman expert A YEAR ago... so when did Covid first erupt in China?

China found a 'novel type of coronavirus' in Wuhan last year September already
French athletes  competing at the the World Military Games were ill with the flu
China stopped outside experts from investigating the new strain last January 
A paper published in March last year warned about the danger of eating bats

By IAN BIRRELL FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:51 BST, 9 May 2020 | UPDATED: 22:55 BST, 9 May 2020


On the afternoon of September 18 last year, the customs office at Wuhan Tianhe airport received an emergency message that a passenger on an incoming flight was unwell and distressed with breathing difficulties.

Staff at the glistening modern airport rushed into emergency mode, donning protective masks as managers unleashed their action plans.

Soon afterwards, ‘the Wuhan First Aid Centre reported that the transfer case had been clinically diagnosed as a novel type of coronavirus’, according to a journalist from a state media agency.

This was, the agency reported, a drill to test responses in advance of the World Military Games, which were being held the following month with 10,000 competitors due in the fast-growing city in central China. Officials passed with flying colours.

Yet what a strange coincidence they picked that particular exercise, given what was soon to unfold in Wuhan as birthplace of a global pandemic. As one person later asked on social media: ‘Why did they choose a new coronavirus to drill?’

Now this question has become all the more pertinent with last week’s revelation that French athletes think they caught Covid-19 while competing in those games.

Several fell ill with bad flu-like symptoms during the event, which took place over nine days from October 18. ‘A lot of athletes at the World Military Games were very ill,’ said Elodie Clouvel, a world champion modern pentathlete.

This followed the revelation that a fishmonger treated in a Paris hospital for suspected pneumonia on December 27 had been confirmed as a victim of the new virus. He was baffled since he had not travelled abroad.

This is very significant. China notified the disease to the World Health Organisation four days after the Frenchman was in hospital and did not put Wuhan into lockdown for a further 24 days.

One study found this virus spreads so fast that if officials had acted three weeks sooner, they would have reduced cases by 95 per cent. Even one week faster could have cut numbers by two-thirds.

Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, is a transport hub. Over three crucial months from December, there were 7,530 flights between there and other parts of China, carrying more than one million passengers – and ten direct flights to the UK.

Yet even in January, Chinese leaders prevented expert outside teams from investigating the virus, silenced doctors trying to warn citizens and refused to admit there was human transmission until January 20.

Little wonder that as the world death toll soars, families are devastated and economies shattered, there are growing calls for an international inquiry into the origins of this pandemic, despite the brazen defiance of Beijing’s Communist Party chiefs.


So what do we now know about the origins of the virus outbreak? Certainly as that exercise at the airport proved, these are not unpredictable events.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that last year, Shi Zhengli – a world-renowned expert on coronaviruses, known as Bat Woman for her cave expeditions to collect samples from the nocturnal mammals – warned explicitly about the dangers.

In a paper published with three colleagues in March 2019, she admitted it was ‘highly likely’ there would be a coronavirus outbreak originating from bats ‘and there is an increased probability this will occur in China’.

Zhengli, who helped prove the link to bats through consumption of civet cats in the 2002 SARS epidemic, said: ‘Chinese food culture maintains that live slaughtered animals are more nutritious, and this belief may enhance viral transmission.

‘It is generally believed bat-borne coronaviruses will re-emerge to cause the next disease outbreak. In this regard, China is a likely hotspot.’ She was, of course, correct. But China’s politicians did nothing to close down their hideous markets selling animals grabbed from the wild – until on January 1 they suddenly shut the one in Wuhan they blamed for this latest eruption of disease.

A stream of expert papers has pinpointed the virus to the market. One typical study by leading Chinese scientists insisted the cluster of mysterious pneumonia-like symptoms began emerging on December 21.

‘All current evidence points to wild animals sold illegally in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market,’ it said. Many experts around the world agree with this analysis. Even last week, a paper in Nature by Chinese scientists pointed to the possibility of pangolin (a scaly mammal) as ‘intermediate host’ of SARS- CoV-2, which causes the disease. They said, rightly, that failure to control the illegal wildlife trade threatened public health.

Yet the market link remains unproven. There are valid questions over whether the coronavirus might have inadvertently leaked from two laboratories in the city – one near to the market, the other China’s first with top-level bio-security status.

President Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, said they have seen evidence that the virus came from one of the laboratories. Reports suggest several US intelligence agencies suspect the same but lack a ‘smoking gun’.

The Mail on Sunday has exposed poor security, including a picture of a sub-standard seal on a refrigerated vault holding lethal viruses, and an admission from the head of Wuhan Institute of Virology’s bio-safety team of deficient safety procedures.

An academic paper in February by Botao Xiao, a bioscience professor at South China University of Technology, and Lei Xiao, a researcher based in Wuhan, concluded ‘the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan’.

The document – entitled The Possible Origins Of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus – was published on a site used by scientists to share research. It called for tighter security in high-risk laboratories but was mysteriously withdrawn after two days.

This explosive paper – seen by The Mail on Sunday – said 605 bats were kept in the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, which is about 500 yards from the market.

It described how bats attacked, bled and urinated on one researcher, forcing him into quarantine on two occasions. ‘It is plausible that the virus leaked,’ it said.

Some in the media have dismissed such suggestions by conflating them with online conspiracy theories about man-made diseases and bio-weapons – presumably driven by loathing of Trump rather than sympathy for China’s totalitarian regime. Yet we need to establish the truth if remotely possible.

‘It would be incredibly useful to know where the new coronavirus came from so we can prevent this happening again,’ said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University.

So how much can we decipher on the details and timing of this outbreak by sifting through academic research papers, media reports and social-media posts? Let us start with a fascinating report in the respected South China Morning Post, based on data said to come from the Beijing government that traced the virus to November 17. It did not rule out the possibility of earlier cases.

The report pinpointed a 55-year-old from Hubei as the first known case. Yet the authorities, it said, could not pinpoint who was Patient Zero from the nine initial cases –four men and five women, aged between 39 and 79.

There were then one to five new cases each day – and on December 27, a hospital doctor called Zhang Jixian confirmed they were dealing with a new coronavirus.

This conflicts with an influential study published in January by Chinese researchers in The Lancet, which claimed the ‘symptom onset date’ of the first identified patient was December 1.

This study also found that 27 out of their sample of 41 patients admitted to hospital in the early stages ‘had been exposed to the market’.

Wu Wenjuan, one of the authors and a senior doctor at Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, which specialises in infectious diseases, told the BBC Chinese service that their first patient was an elderly man suffering from dementia.

‘He lived four or five buses from the seafood market – and because he was sick, he basically didn’t go out,’ she said, adding that three more people developed symptoms in the following days, although only one had ‘exposure’ to the market.

Her words tie in to a graphic in the study that shows one case on December 1, three on December 10 and then none until December 15. Only one of the initial four cases was linked to the market – but then all of the next ten.

Wuhan’s government claimed that the first confirmed case fell sick on December 8, a man who recovered from the illness. It said that he denied going to the animal market.

Yet that Lancet study also contains another intriguing nugget. The first fatal case is identified as a man linked to the market. Five days after ‘illness onset’, his wife – ‘a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market’ – also turned up before doctors with pneumonia and was hospitalised in an isolation ward.

Wu Wenjuan also told the Wall Street Journal that their earliest cases included a 49-year-old trader at the market who fell ill on December 12.

Seven days later, his father-in-law – who had not been exposed to the market – caught the illness. Then doctors and nurses started falling ill by December 25, which was revealed by reports in state media.

These cases all clearly imply human-to-human transmission several weeks before it was publicly admitted by Beijing. This crucial information was finally confirmed to the world just four days before that important paper was published in The Lancet.

Five days earlier, Li Qun, head of China’s public health emergency centre, even told state television that ‘after careful screening and prudent judgment, we have reached the latest understanding that risk of human-to-human transmission is low’.

Yet another paper in the New England Journal Of Medicine confirmed that Chinese doctors saw evidence of human transmission ‘among close contacts since the middle of December 2019’.

And a team from Wuhan Centre for Disease Control published a paper in Nature Microbiology last month that mentioned swabs being taken ‘from patients in Wuhan with influenza-like illness from October 6, 2019, to January 21, 2020’.

The beginning of October is earlier than any other experts have indicated signs of this virus. These researchers found nine out of their 640 swabs tested positive – but then concluded that this suggested ‘community transmission’ in early January this year.

One blogger also spotted a tantalising fact: in July last year, China’s National Health Commission issued an edict on protection against infectious diseases that urged all localities to strengthen their monitoring of ‘flu-like cases, unexplained pneumonia’.

The bulletin – unsupported by relevant data and absent from a similar earlier notice – added that after any outbreak, there must be quick ‘epidemiological investigations, laboratory tests, and implementing measures such as disinfection and treatment of epidemic areas to prevent spread’. Clearly that failed to happen.

In their defence, China’s authorities were confronting a new virus. Yet their country had already seen two previous ‘zoonotic’ (animal-to-human) coronaviruses emerge within its borders this century, inflicting less lethal pandemics on our planet.

Significantly, Lianchao Han, a Chinese dissident and former foreign office official, says: ‘The lack of bioethics and their money-driven race to find vaccines for viruses make Chinese scientists very reckless in handling the most dangerous virus.

‘Their repeated refusal to let international experts investigate the origin of the virus makes it very suspicious the regime is hiding something.’

Many mysteries still swirl around this saga.

Last weekend, claims that ‘Bat Woman’ Shi had defected with a stash of secret documents were denied in Chinese media.


Chinese ‘netizens’ [millions of web users] have queried if Huang Yanling, a student at Wuhan Institute of Virology, might have been Patient Zero after becoming infected in the laboratory.


This was denied, with officials saying she had moved to another part of China.

So many questions; so few answers. Yet as the global death toll passes 275,000, one thing seems certain: the culpability of China’s authorities in covering up the new disease that erupted with such terrible force from somewhere in Wuhan last year.

Bombshell 'Five Eyes' Western intelligence dossier claims China lied about coronavirus

China lied about the human-to-human transmission of coronavirus, made whistleblowers disappear and refused to help nations develop a vaccine, a leaked intelligence dossier reveals.

The 15-page document drawn up by the Five Eyes security alliance brands Beijing's secrecy over the pandemic an 'assault on international transparency' and points to cover-up tactics deployed by the regime.

It claims that the Chinese government silenced its most vocal critics and scrubbed any online scepticism about its handling of the health emergency from the internet.

China has roundly come under fire for suppressing the scale of its early outbreak which did not afford other nations time to react before the disease hit their shores.

Five Eyes - the pooling of intelligence by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - laid bare its scathing assessment of the Xi Jinping administration in a memo obtained by the Australian Saturday Telegraph.

The smoking gun file claims to have found evidence the virus spawned in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, close to the wet market China says it came from and unearths 'risky' research on bat-related diseases stretching back years.

It describes how Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease.

China's alleged actions involved 'destroying' laboratory samples, bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of 'silent carriers' of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries.

The secrecy has fanned a clamour in Five Eyes nations for Western governments to come down hard on Beijing when the pandemic eventually passes.

Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline that 'at the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China'. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8303979/When-did-China-know-coronavirus.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline&__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true

Sotir wrote:Не знам да ли разумеш да се вирус по свету највише раширио из Италије, и то онда кад је свима већ требало да буде јасно шта је вирус и како се треба борити са њим. А затим је највише узео маха у САД, неколико недеља после Италије.