NOSTR BURNER KEY
This temporary Nostr key will be deleted after this post is posted
--------
After many repeated bans and over 10 years of experience on reddit, I tried making another new account with the username PlsDontNuke to give it the best I could. This was the first original submission I posted on the /u/PlsDontNuke account. I can't recover all of my online material that's been censored over the years, but I'm trying to restore some of it and start keeping it more secure in the future as the internet censorship situation has gotten so dire.
This post was created almost 2 years into the COVID pandemic, in response to someone in the /r/collapse megathread who belittled conspiracy theories about the virus leaking from a Wuhan lab. My post was intended to curate some clues about these conspiracies, to show that speculation on this topic isn't entirely unfounded or fringe. I did not include any of my own speculation, only copying and pasting from existing articles.
Original archive.org backup: https://archive.org/details/PlsDontNuke
---------
2021-07-11 Compilation of links related to Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus leak by /u/PlsDontNuke (Holbrook Stark)
Rehosted and updated with archive links
---------
statnews.com, January 2020
DNA sleuths read the coronavirus genome, tracing its origins and looking for dangerous mutations
> Unfortunately, genetic analysis can’t identify what animal species the coronavirus jumped from into humans. But an analysis by a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, posted to the preprint server bioRxiv, determined that the genome of this coronavirus (the seventh known to infect humans) is 96% identical to that of a bat coronavirus, suggesting that species is the original source.
---------
disabled-world.com, February 2020
https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/emergency/advisories/wuhan-updates.php
URL excluded from the Wayback Machine
> A Chinese scholar (Wu Xiaohua, with a Ph.D. in biological related fields according to his WeChat profile), recently challenged Wuhan's P4 lab to explain how the proteins of the novel coronavirus seem to have been precisely engineered to enable the virus to bind onto human cells. He also disclosed unethical and unprofessional practices he previously observed in China's bioresearch labs.
> A P4 lab handles level 4 biosafety pathogens, the highest level and most dangerous, which have high fatality rates and no known treatments, such as, the ebola and SARS viruses. When it opened in 2017, U.S. scientists expressed concerns that, considering China's opaque administrative structure, if one of those killer viruses "escaped" from the lab, it could cause a doomsday disaster...
> According to Wuhan-based Yangtze Daily, Shi Zhengli, Deputy Director of Wuhan's P4 Lab, publicized a statement on Feb. 2 saying: "I pledge with my life that the 2019 novel coronavirus has nothing to do with our lab. This virus is a punishment imposed on mankind from nature, to condemn mankind's uncivilized way of living. Those of you who believe rumors or so-called scientific analysis by unqualified researchers, I advise you to shut your damn mouths!"
-----------
Quartz, February 2020
Why a Chinese virology lab is unable to quell the coronavirus conspiracy theories around it
https://qz.com/1805422/wuhan-virology-lab-unable-to-quell-china-coronavirus-conspiracies/
> At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a subsidiary of the state-owned research institute the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), scientists carry out virus research at a lab with the highest level of biological containment available on the mainland. Its construction was approved in 2003, during China’s last deadly coronavirus outbreak, SARS, and completed five years ago, according to Nature journal. The lab came under spotlight in late January, after Chinese scientists said the virus could have a connection to bats via an intermediary, such as some form of game sold at a seafood market in Wuhan. As the lab has researchers who study bat-related viruses, it became a target of online suspicion that coalesced into theories that the virus could have escaped from the lab, or be a bio-weapon gone wrong
> Theories suggesting the new virus was purpose-built or the work of scientists have been emphatically rejected by scientists globally, including 27 prominent public health scientists from outside China who issued a statement on Wednesday published by medical journal The Lancet. “Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent…and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” it said.
> The institute first rejected speculation that the first patient to be infected with the virus was a graduate student who studied at the lab, saying on Sunday (Feb. 16) the student is in good health. Yesterday (Feb. 19), it issued a strong worded statement (link in Chinese), saying the rumors about it have “hurt the feelings of its frontline researchers hugely” and “severely interfered” with its task to study viruses. “We have nothing to hide,” the letter read.
> Nonetheless, internet users don’t appear to be convinced by the assurances from the lab. “What is the truth? The collapse of trustworthiness of media and government is not only sad for the two parties, but also for us citizens,” said a user on Weibo commenting on the rumors. “Some might think the so-called rumors are just a prophecy ahead of our times,” said another.
> Some “rumors” from the early days of the epidemic after all turned out not to be far from reality. Li Wenliang, a doctor, had told others about a cluster of cases of viral pneumonia before the outbreak had been made public, but was summoned by Wuhan police for “spreading rumors.” He later became infected himself, and his death turned him into a vivid symbol of the costs of the government’s opacity—prompting an outpouring of anger and grief, and rare public demands for freedom of speech and transparency from the government.
> What now can be done to contain theories of a rogue lab? Probably not a whole lot, says Kajimoto.
> “When the authorities and experts have the history of not being transparent, whatever they say could sound as if they are trying to hide something,” said the assistant professor. “In this case, publicly denying the link between the lab and coronavirus could even be construed as ‘evidence’ by people who believe in this conspiracy because denial is the ‘sign’ that the truth is hidden.”
-------
nih.gov, March 2020:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230927095505/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
> It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.
--------
NBC News, May 2020
Did the coronavirus really escape from a Chinese lab? Here's what we know - Experts say animal-to-human transmission is far more likely, but some circumstantial evidence suggests it's possible it was accidentally released by a lab.
> NBC News reported last week that the White House has tasked the intelligence community with investigating that and other questions about the origin of the virus, the extent to which China covered it up and whether the World Health Organization was complicit in the cover-up. Some critics have raised the concern that the White House is pushing the intelligence agencies to validate a conclusion that helps it politically, by distracting attention from the question of whether it acted soon enough. China and the WHO deny that they were less than forthcoming, and China says the virus couldn't have come from one of its labs.
> Two labs in Wuhan were studying coronaviruses, experts told NBC News: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shorthanded as the Wuhan CDC. Researchers from both facilities collected the virus samples from bats in caves. The goal of the research was to learn more about a family of viruses that had already been proven lethal to humans in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
> Less is known about the Wuhan CDC, which is a short distance from the Wuhan wet market where officials first said the virus emerged. Much attention has been focused on the WIV, which has a Biosafety Level 4 section where scientists work on the most dangerous pathogens. It should be noted, however, that coronaviruses aren't deemed dangerous enough to require BSL-4 safety procedures. They are in a BSL-3 category, requiring less rigorous procedures.
> In the accidental release scenario, a worker at one of the labs could have become infected and transmitted the virus to others. Those who suspect such a lab release point to the following:
> * A Jan. 24 study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that three of the first four cases — including the first known case — didn't provide a documented link to the Wuhan wet market.
* The bats that carry the family of coronaviruses linked to the new strain aren't found within 100 miles of Wuhan — but they were studied in both labs.
* Photos and videos have emerged of researchers at both labs collecting samples from bats without wearing protective gear, which experts say poses a risk of human infection.
* A U.S. State Department expert who visited the WIV in 2018 wrote in a cable reported by The Washington Post: "During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [U.S. diplomats] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."
* According to Senate Intelligence Committee member Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the Chinese military posted its top epidemiologist to the WIV in January.
* The Shanghai laboratory where researchers published the world's first genome sequence of the coronavirus was shut down Jan. 12, according to The South China Morning Post.
* According to U.S. intelligence assessments, including one published by the Department of Homeland Security and reviewed by NBC News, the Chinese government initially covered up the severity of the outbreak.
* Government officials threatened doctors who warned their colleagues about the virus, weren't candid about human-to-human transmission and still haven't provided virus samples to researchers.
> Despite all that, most scientists and researchers believe natural animal-to-human transmission is the most likely scenario.
-------
Washington Examiner, May 2020
Majority of US spy agencies believe the coronavirus escaped from Wuhan lab
> The *Daily Caller* cited a senior intelligence official earlier Saturday who stated the majority view among U.S. spy agencies is that COVID-19 is **natural** and that it was **accidentally** leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
-------
sambentleygraphics.weebly.com[?], January 2021
The Search for SARS-CoV-2s Origin Must Continue
https://sambentleygraphics.weebly.com/blog/the-search-for-sars-cov-2s-origin-must-continue
> One of the reasons scientists would want to promote the zoonotic theory is because their livelihoods and careers are at stake. If it turns out that SARS-CoV-2 is an escaped lab creation, the logical conclusion would be that we need to severely restrict or stop gain-of-function research on pathogens altogether.
> As the name implies, gain-of-function research is aimed at creating more virulent strains of pathogens by giving them new functionalities. The justification for this hazardous work is that viruses mutate naturally, and we need to be prepared for the kinds of mutations that might arise.
> The problem with this is that we've not been prepared for any of the lethal pandemics that have arisen, despite investing hundreds of millions of dollars into this kind of research. Apparently, it hasn't given us the head start it's supposed to give us, so why continue?
> Even more disturbingly, there's evidence that this research has caused a number of lethal outbreaks through the years. Many believe it's only a matter of time before scientists cook up something truly horrific — something that would never have arisen in nature — that might threaten humanity's survival were it to get out.
> One technique that allows scientists to make a pathogen more virulent is called "serial passaging." By passing the virus through a series of cells from different animals, the virus progressively adapts to the new host cell, just as it would in nature (although there's no guarantee that such transmission and adaptation would actually occur in nature). As described by Baker:
> > "Take, for instance, this paper from 1995: 'High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis Viruses Suggest That Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging Viruses' … written by Dr. Ralph Baric and his bench scientist, Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina.
> > Baric … described in this early paper how his lab was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster kidney) cell cultures.
> > They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells.
> > At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn't do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum.
> > But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters …
> > A few years later, in a further round of 'interspecies transfer' experimentation, Baric's scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells.
> > Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They'd found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their 'infectious construct' replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.16
> > Not only that, but they'd figured out how to perform their assembly seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric called this the 'no-see'm method,' and he asserted that it had 'broad and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.'"
> In 2006, Baric and Yount were granted a patent for this "no-see'm method" of cloning the deadly human SARS virus, which had been responsible for the SARS outbreak four years earlier. Interestingly, Baric started collaborating with another coronavirus expert in 2015 — a female scientist named Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
----------
New York Post, May 2021:
The theory that COVID-19 escaped from a lab may not be so far-fetched
https://nypost.com/2021/05/09/theory-that-covid-escaped-from-a-lab-may-not-be-far-fetched/
> Virologists have a significant stake in the origin issue because they have for years enhanced the danger of natural viruses in their laboratories.
> Their rationale is that they could get ahead of nature by discovering the few tweaks that will let an animal virus infect humans. This knowledge, they argued, would help predict and prevent pandemics.
> So if in fact one of these souped-up viruses is the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, virologists everywhere, not just in China, will have a lot of explaining to do. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” MIT Technology Review editor Antonio Regalado said in March 2020.
> As it happens, virologists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China were doing exactly these kinds of experiments. The program was headed by Dr. Zheng-li Shi, known as Bat Lady in China because of her intense interest in bat viruses. Dr. Shi had gathered many coronaviruses, the type to which SARS2 belongs, from caves in Yunnan in southern China. Her research focused on the spike proteins which stud the surface of the virus and latch on to its target cells.
> She tested her viruses out not on real people but on cultures of human cells and on humanized mice — mice that have been genetically engineered to carry in the cells of their airways the human protein that’s the target of SARS-type viruses.
> “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.
> “It is also clear,” Dr. Ebright said, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”
----------
newstatesman.com, May 2021
Did Covid-19 escape from a Wuhan lab? Here’s what we know -
What was once dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory is now being taken more seriously.
> Until very recently, you’d have had the distinct impression that anyone entertaining the “lab-based origin” theory of the Covid-19 virus either had a screw loose or was advancing a Trumpist, anti-China political agenda. Proponents of the idea were ridiculed in the press, and some had their social media accounts removed for spreading misinformation.
> Not so any more. Having argued strongly against the idea early in 2020, President Biden's chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has stated that he’s now “not convinced” that the virus has a natural origin, and that more research is required. Mainstream media sources are now regularly running stories that imply that the virus might not be the result of a natural process of evolution.
> It’s tempting to try to crush unorthodox beliefs with sure-sounding statements, like those of the experts early in the pandemic. But the repeated failures of expertise during Covid suggest that it’s better – more scientific, and with less chance for backfire – if authorities hold their beliefs lightly.
> At present the evidence suggests to me that Sars-CoV-2 has a purely natural origin, but I’m not sure about that – and today’s unwarranted certainty is tomorrow’s misinformation. As Nietzsche might have said if he’d been around in 2021: whoever fights misinformation should see to it that in the process he does not spread misinformation himself.
---------
HuffPost, June 2021
Jon Stewart Blames Wuhan Lab For Coronavirus: Scientists Will ‘Kill Us All’ - Former “Daily Show” host doesn’t believe the coronavirus pandemic began naturally.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_60c835ace4b07e543bbd50fe
> Stewart also warned against dismissing it as a conspiracy theory, saying scientists “don’t know when to stop.”
> “Can I say this about scientists?” he said later in the segment. “I love them and they do such good work but they are going to kill us all.”
> Stewart pointed to another example: the atomic bomb.
> “If you cut the atom this way, it can power the world with electricity, and if you cut it that way, it can blow everything up,” he said. “Guess which one we tried first? That’s just who we are.”
-----------
Business Insider, June 2021
The Washington Post corrected an article that described COVID-19 emerging from a Wuhan lab as a 'conspiracy theory' and 'debunked'
-------
Website for an Indianapolis TV news channel, June 2021
Johns Hopkins doctor: COVID-19 escaped from Wuhan lab
https://www.wishtv.com/news/coronavirus/johns-hopkins-doctor-covid-19-escaped-from-wuhan-lab/
> But one of the nation’s most influential doctors, Dr. Marty Makary at Johns Hopkins, was the first to publicly voice in the news media in April 2020 that COVID-19 was unintentionally released by an infected lab worker at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. He says the lab worker became infected as a result of U.S.-funded gain of function research — research designed to enhance the potential transmissibility and infectiousness of a virus. The lab worker — who Makary calls patient zero — became sick enough to be hospitalized in November 2019.
> “It was very clear to me early on that there was an infected lab worker who went to the local hospital,” he said.” First of all, if you go on Google map … they are about 5 miles apart. That’s pretty much 90% of the evidence you need right there when you’re talking about the source of a pandemic. It’s one of the few places manipulating bat coronaviruses. We should have never been funding that research. We should never have been doing it in the first place.”
------
Bloomberg, June 2021
The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out
-------
Bloomberg Opinion blogger, June 2021
If Covid Did Escape From a Wuhan Lab, Brace Yourself -
The world’s anger will be terrible to behold.
-------
Financial Review, July 2021
The danger in believing the virus escaped from a lab
> An international group of 21 leading virologists has warned that the conviction that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan could make the world more vulnerable to another pandemic.
> This would happen because there would be less emphasis on investigating an animal origin and therefore on preventing the same thing happening again.
-------
newsbusters.org, July 2021
Flashback: Politico Harshly Derided Wuhan Lab Leak Theory as Like a 'Dystopian Movie Plot'
> On Friday, Politico published an article, "POLITICO-Harvard poll: Most Americans believe Covid leaked from lab," which revealed the results of a poll showing that a majority of both Republicans and Democrats now view the COVID-19 virus as having leaked from the Wuhan lab rather than it spreading naturally from a bat. The subtitle of the story, "Opinion on the lab leak scenario, once seen as a fringe theory, has shifted dramatically" is interesting because Politico itself was at the forefront of the many media outlets branding the lab leak scenario as "fringe."
--------
https://freebitco.in/?r=1600054
This is a referral link for a sketchy Bitcoin casino/bank with free Bitcoin gambling, including free Bitcoins you can gamble with and withdraw if you win enough. They removed the dogecoin version because dogecoin was too hype. I don't recommend putting any money in here. Thanks for reading.