Why Was Wuhan Lab Locked Down When Outbreak Began?
Sat 11:54 am +01:00, 30 May 2020by Dr. Joseph Mercola Fact Checked
May 30, 2020
Story at-a-glance
Fueling suspicions that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab is an analysis of commercial telemetry (i.e., cellphone) data showing a significant and unusual reduction in device activity in and around the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s National Biosafety Laboratory during October 2019
Between October 14 and October 19, there was no device activity in the area around the laboratory at all, and between October 7 and October 24, there was no activity within the facility itself
While not concrete proof of a biohazard leak, the absence of cellphone traffic in and around the laboratory in October 2019 suggests the lab may have been shut down for a period, and the roads around it blocked off
A crucial piece of the lab release hypothesis that is missing from media reports and scientific opinion is a clear description of the experiments being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Researchers have engineered chimeric viruses where the gene for the cell entry protein (S protein receptor-binding domain) from one virus is replaced by that of another virus
GAs reported in “Bioweapon Labs Must Be Shut Down and Scientists Prosecuted,” there’s mounting evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 may have been leaked (whether inadvertently or not) from the biosafety level (BSL) 4 laboratory in Wuhan, China.
I’ve also interviewed bioweapons expert Francis Boyle and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits, both of whom have cited evidence that strongly points toward SARS-CoV-2 being an escaped laboratory creation.
Why Was Wuhan Lab Shut Down?
Fueling suspicions that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the lab in Wuhan — and that it began far earlier than admitted — is an analysis3 of commercial telemetry (i.e., cellphone) data showing a significant and unusual reduction in device activity in and around the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) National Biosafety Laboratory during October 2019.
According to the open source telemetry report,7 “Beginning on October 11, there was a substantial decrease in activity,” and “the last time a device is active prior to October 11 is October 6.”
Between October 14 and October 19, there was no device activity in the area around the laboratory at all. “During this time, it is believed that roadblocks were put in place to prevent traffic from coming near the facility,” the report states. What’s more, between October 7 and October 24, there was no activity within the facility itself.
While not concrete proof of a biohazard leak, the absence of cellphone traffic in and around the laboratory in October 2019 suggests the lab may have been shut down for a period, and the roads around it blocked off. The question is why?
Amid accusations that the World Health Organization helped suppress information about the pandemic on behalf of China, a review of its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic will be conducted,8 although it is still unclear which body will conduct the review and when. Many are also asking just how independent such a review will or can be.
What Kinds of Experiments Were Done at Wuhan Lab?
A crucial piece of the lab release hypothesis that is missing from media reports and scientific opinion is a clear description of the experiments being conducted at the WIV. WIV researchers have engineered chimeric viruses where the gene for the cell entry protein (S protein receptor-binding domain) from one virus is replaced by that of another virus.
In a May 16, 2020, article,9 Fabio Carisio, founder and editor-in-chief of the Italian Christian news site, GospaNews, reviewed, in chronological order, experiments involving chimeric superviruses conducted at WIV and the governments that funded them.
As described in one 2017 study published in PLOS Pathogens,10 “Cell entry studies demonstrated that three newly identified SARSr-CoVs with different S protein sequences are all able to use human ACE2 as the receptor, further exhibiting the close relationship between strains in this cave and SARS-CoV.”
The goal of these experiments has been to identify what determines a virus’ ability to enter into a human cell. The extension of these experiments is to infect living animals with these chimeric viruses to evaluate the factors that determine disease symptoms and spread.
One of the authors of that 2017 PLOS Pathogens study was Dr. Shi Zheng-Li, director of WIV, also known as the “bat woman,” as she’s been China’s leading researcher of bat coronaviruses.11 Zheng-Li and WIV have had a long-standing collaboration with Peter Daszak, Ph.D., and the EcoHealth Alliance Inc. in New York City, which Daszak is also the president of.12
EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S. pandemic prevention group. Daszak is also chairman of the Forum on Microbial Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine,13 a private nonprofit that advises government on scientific matters and is funded by Congress, federal agencies and philanthropic organizations.
Daszak is currently leading a project to continue these potentially dangerous animal experiments,15 and it’s worth noting that he has also been one of the most prominent and vocal critics of the lab release hypothesis.
On a side note, 60 Minutes recently reported16 the White House Administration cut Daszak’s funding in late April 2020 — funding that, according to Daszak, had been instrumental during Gilead’s development of the antiviral drug Remdesivir,17 which is now being promoted as a treatment for COVID-19.
Remdesivir’s development was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci is also a board member18 of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).
GPMB is an organization that claims to be an independent monitoring and accountability body but is in fact part and parcel of the World Health Organization and The World Bank, and receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.19 You can learn more about these sordid connections, and why they matter, in “Global Health Mafia Protection Racket.”
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Another Paper Questions Natural Evolution Theory
As mentioned, a number of experts have weighed in on the science of SARS-CoV-2’s origin by analyzing its genetic code. Perhaps two of the clearest expositions on this have been published by Chris Martenson,20 Ph.D., and Yuri Deigin.21 Another paper prepublished May 2, 2020, ahead of peer-review, points out:22
“In a side-by-side comparison of evolutionary dynamics between the 2019/2020 SARS-CoV-2 and the 2003 SARS-CoV, we were surprised to find that SARS-CoV-2 resembles SARS-CoV in the late phase of the 2003 epidemic after SARS-CoV had developed several advantageous adaptations for human transmission.
Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected.
The sudden appearance of a highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 presents a major cause for concern that should motivate stronger international efforts to identify the source and prevent near future re- emergence. Any existing pools of SARS-CoV-2 progenitors would be particularly dangerous if similarly well adapted for human transmission …
Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely.”
Anonymous Scientist Accuses Zheng-Li of Scientific Fraud
Getting back to Zheng-Li, she increasingly appears to be a key figure in the discussion as to whether SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin or not. January 23, 2020, she published a paper23 in the journal Nature, titled “A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated with a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin,” in which she compared the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to other coronaviruses and delineated its evolutionary path.
According to Zheng-Li and her co-authors, SARS-CoV-2 “is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus” called RaTG13. They further claim they could find “no evidence for recombination events was detected in the genome of 2019-nCoV.”24 The disturbing thing about this bat coronavirus, RaTG13, is that it appears to have the ability to infect humans.
These findings are now being rebuked by an anonymous — possibly Chinese — researcher who has published25 an alternative theory in a blog called Nerd Has Power and refers to him or herself as “A nobody scientist.”26
The blog post in question has been discussed by GM Watch,27 Australian science writer Joanne Nova28 and Steven Mosher,29 president of the Population Research Institute (a nonprofit research group that exposes human rights abuses and the myth of overpopulation30), who noted that:
“Because he published his raw data, I and others have been able to check and verify his work.” Mosher goes on to present “a summary of one of the blogger’s critiques, in the hope of making the blogger’s general line of argument accessible to the layman.”
The unnamed blogger writes, in part:31
“As stated in the paper, RaTG13 was discovered from Yunnan province, China, in 2013. According to credible sources, Shi has admitted to several individuals in the field that she does not have a physical copy of this RaTG13 virus.
Her lab allegedly collected some bat feces in 2013 and analyzed these samples for possible presence of coronaviruses based on genetic evidence. To put it into plainer words, she has no physical proof for the existence of this RaTG13 virus. She only has its sequence information, which is nothing but a string of letters alternating between A, T, G, and C.
Can the sequence of such a virus be fabricated? It cannot be any easier. It takes a person less than a day to TYPE such a sequence (less than 30,000 letters) in a word file. And it would be a thousand times easier if you already have a template that is about 96% identical to the one you are trying to create.
Once the typing is finished, one can upload the sequence onto the public database. Contrary to general conception, such database does not really have a way to validate the authenticity or correctness of the uploaded sequence.
It relies completely upon the scientists themselves — upon their honesty and consciences. Once uploaded and released, such sequence data becomes public and can be used legitimately in scientific analysis and publications.”
Was Evidence for Natural Evolution Fabricated?
In other words, this anonymous individual claims Zheng-Li fabricated the genetic code of the RaTG13 virus, and that it doesn’t actually exist. The blogger points out that had Zheng-Li in fact discovered a bat coronavirus in 2013 capable of infecting humans, it would have been a groundbreaking discovery.
Alas, she never published such a paper. Instead, she “made her fame in the coronavirus field by publishing in Nature32 two bat coronaviruses (Rs3367 and SHC014),” the unnamed blogger writes.33 That paper, published in 2013, showed SARS was likely of bat origin, and that it uses the ACE2 receptor for cell entry.
“… she only needed to take one peek at the sequence of RaTG13’s RBD [RNA binding domain] and immediately realize: this virus closely resembles SARS in its RBD and has a clear potential of infecting humans.
If Shi’s public statement is true and she indeed intends to discover bat coronaviruses with a potential to cross-over to humans, how could she possibly overlook this extremely interesting finding of RaTG13?
If this RaTG13 was discovered SEVEN years ago in 2013, why did Shi not publish this astonishing finding earlier and yet let the ‘less-attractive’ viruses take the stage? Why did she decide to publish such a sequence only when the current outbreak took place and people started questioning the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus?
None of these makes sense. These facts only add to the suspicion — Zhengli Shi either was directly involved in the creation of this virus/bioweapon, or helped cover it up, or both. Of course, these facts also add to the claim that RaTG13 is a fake virus — it exists on Nature (the journal) but not in nature,” the anonymous blogger writes.
The blogger then goes on to dissect the genetic sequence RaTG13’s spike protein, which “reveals clear evidence of human manipulation.” (Again, Mosher offers a layman’s overview35 of the data.) Martenson36 and Deigin’s37 reviews of the viral genome also focus on the S2 spike protein, but they both focus on the spike protein found in SARS-CoV-2 (not the RaTG13 spike).
According to Martenson, the fact that SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein has a furin cleavage site is “the smoking gun” that proves it was created in a lab. I invite you to review his easy-to-follow analysis in “The Smoking Gun Proving SARS-CoV-2 Is an Engineered Virus.”
If the Nerd Has Power blogger is correct, and the bat virus RaTG13 was in fact fabricated in order to give the natural evolution theory of SARS-CoV-2 some credence, then the evidence for a man-made pandemic becomes all the more compelling. There’s also other evidence that raise serious questions about the origin of this pandemic virus.
Other Evidence of Manipulation
In an earlier blog post, dated March 15, 2020, Nerd Has Power explains the importance of the S1 and S2 spikes of a given virus.38 In that post, the blogger also details significant changes found in the S1 portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, “which dictates which host a coronavirus targets,” whereas much of the rest of the spike is very similar to the bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21. According to the blogger:39
“… the details of these differences and the way the human and the bat viruses differ from each other here in S1, in my and many other people’s eyes, practically spell out the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus — it is created by people, not by nature.”
In my opinion, the strongest pieces of evidence so far all point toward SARS-CoV-2 being a laboratory creation. How it got released, however, and why, remains to be determined.
The fact that the people responsible would want to cover it up is obvious, however, when you consider that the punishment in such an event could include life in prison for violating the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.
+ Sources and References
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/30/wuhan-bio-lab-shut-down.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20200530Z2&et_cid=DM547421&et_rid=882780996
