So, this is touching on CT territory (as if I haven’t gone there already in several other threads). I’m going to link to this YouTube video (I can hear the groans already) by one of the channels I subscribe to, laowhy86. He’s an American who has lived in China for over a decade and who’s wife is Chinese. In the last year I believe he moved him and his family out of China and, I think, is living in Taiwan now, or maybe has come back to the US. Not sure as I don’t follow it that closely.
Since absolutely no one will watch the video, I’ll just say that it’s a connect the dots kind of thing. If you can’t read Chinese, it’s going to be hard to follow a lot of it, as a lot of the evidence he’s using is in Chinese, unsurprisingly. Basically, he’s saying that the infection originated from a lab that is really close to the wet market where this all originated from. For evidence, he shows job postings for bat researchers that were researching bats carrying coronavirus and taking samples of bats to look into this as well as human to human transmission. Further, he shows evidence that one person in particular was basically erased from the labs web site (all her bio data and picture removed), even though no one else has been. He’s positing that this was patient zero. I want to point out that this video isn’t about this being some sort of created virus (there is one part where he starts to go there, but then backs off), just that it was this lab researching this and going out to get bat samples of the virus that was the original cause, with patient zero being this woman who has since disappeared. Of course, the CCP is saying she is fine, but according to the video, Chinese netizens are searching for her with no result. The video makes the, to me and assuming it’s correct, plausible case that IF this woman wasn’t involved and is in fact alive, the CCP would be moving mountains to have her actually online and demonstrating positively that she was alive.
In any case, I found the video somewhat compelling, at least wrt who patient zero might be. I’m sure no one else will bother, but as this is IMHO I figured…what the hell. I’ll go full tin foil hat and post the thing.
Assuming the CTer in the video is correct about the lab employee’s info being deleted from the website :dubious:, there are other possible explanations - for instance, she quit to work elsewhere or was fired for some reason. Maybe she just wants her privacy now. Rest assured that if the government had her interviewed publicly, there would be more conspiracy theories about how she wasn’t the actual lab worker, that she’d been pressured to shut up about the “release” etc. etc.
As noted in this article, there is no reason to think the Chinese lab’s containment procedures are faulty, so the accidental release theory isn’t supported. And as we’ve heard elsewhere, there’s strong evidence the new virus was not deliberately engineered.
*"(According to) Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia and host of the This Week in Virology podcast, “It could be a direct infection [between bats and humans] as well.”
A preliminary scientific paper shows this is a genuinely new virus, and there’s no way it could have been engineered by humans.
In a recent podcast episode, Racaniello discussed with two other researchers a fascinating preprint paper (that’s currently under peer review, according to the authors) about the virus origin. The key finding: that SARS-CoV-2 is “not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.”…
What’s more, he noted, no known lab anywhere in the world was working on a coronavirus like this one, and its closest relative is a bat virus found in a cave in 2013 in Yunnan, China, 1,000 miles from Wuhan.“Presumably there’s a common ancestor, most likely from a bat or an intermediary animal that was contaminated by that bat,” Racaniello says."*
I’m still waiting to see the first instance of a major conspiracy being unraveled by curious amateurs on the Internet.
In my opinion the odds are overwhelming that this won’t be the one.
So is the insinuation here that a known virus found in bats, remains un-transmitted between bats and humans, until this chinese lab somehow manages to make it transmittable?
No. They were looking into the virus, got samples, and in the process one of the employees got the mutation that allowed bat the human transmission, became contagious, and died and was cremated as part of the CCPs ongoing cover up.
I agree somewhat with your conclusion. But, again, the video isn’t making a case that this was engineered. The case being made is that this was part of an ongoing study by that lab into coronavirus in bats and possible transmission vectors to humans, that one of the researchers managed to catch the virus, spread it to others, probably in that market that is near by, and then died and THAT is the cover up.
I want to point out that this isn’t a Republican/Conservative or even an American CT…this is actually a CT making it’s rounds on Chinese social media, and being shut down by the CCP when they can. So, it’s a crazy Chinese netizen CT, not a crazy American CT…if that makes any difference. I found the video compelling, as I said, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s what actually happened. I think it COULD have happened that way, however, and I found the part where people at the lab were talking about being sprayed with bat blood and urine while they were gathering samples especially compelling, as the way the woman in the video was disappeared, and also that while the CCP has said she is fine, and someone has posted as her that she is fine, there really isn’t any solid evidence she IS fine. That is unusual when the CCP is trying to stamp on something like this, as their normal mode is to trot out the person and put them on camera to show they are fine and dandy.
Another thing I found interesting were the dates, as the narrative seems to be to push the dates when things started up towards January (making the CCP less complicit of course), while there is evidence this actually started in November or maybe even earlier, and nothing was done about it until mid-January.
As I mentioned in the other thread on this exact same subject, I think “conspiracy theory” is the wrong term to use. Assume for a moment that everything you mention in the OP is true – that makes it a cover-up not a conspiracy theory, in my mind. A conspiracy theory implies some bad intent from the start – murdering Kennedy, faking a moon landing, destroying the WTC. Assuming for a moment what you said is true, this is an accidental release of a virus and a cover-up of that.
A conspiracy theory would be the Chinese government intentionally released the virus on the local population as a test, or the US released the virus in Wuhan to slow trading, or whatever.
I don’t really know how the theory can be falsified. The virus doesn’t show signs of being engineering in a lab, but to claim the virus came from a lab with faulty security protocols rather than from an animal to human transmission, I don’t know how you’d falsify that.
I guess as one point, if the virus in a lab came from an animal then the virus would’ve already been out in the wild already one would assume. Unless the Chinese somehow found the very first animal to be infected with the current SARS virus, the virus would’ve escaped in the wild within a day or two of the first animal being infected.
Basically, while the Chinese were studying SARS-CoV2 in a lab, it would’ve been out in the wild naturally because I don’t know how they would’ve been able to isolate the first animal that had it without that animal infecting anything or anyone else.
My concern is that now that the world knows how much damage an infectious pathogen can do to society, various terrorism groups are going to research how to engineer their own and release them.
Probably not, if, as asserted in the video her body was cremated. They could prove it’s completely false by simply trotting her out live on a stream. Proving she is dead is probably going to be a matter of time going by with still no positive proof until, eventually, they say she died of the virus at some later date. Won’t be definitive though, no. So, not much of a theory. I do think it’s a CCP conspiracy though to cover things up (i.e this entire cluster fuck and their actual role), though I guess that’s semantics of cover up verse conspiracy.
(Pulls up chair, begins to pop popcorn, opens adult beverage…)
XT, why does it matter whether the virus arose through human tinkering, or through zoonotic leap aided by Chinese wet market lack of sanitation? Oh, and Chinese Communist Party obfuscation of the impact the epidemic was having in China in December?
Aren’t both indicative of negligence at worst, not intentional hostile action?
It matters because I think they have been covering up and trying to shift the narrative on their entire response, and if it were the case that the video in the OP has it right, they not only covered up patient zero but destroyed potentially vital evidence that could have been used early on. It’s why finding patient zero is a thing in most investigations, because there is evidence there that is useful in combating the outbreak. It also shows just how far back the CCP was covering things up in the hopes this would all just go away and not impact them economically, or impact them socially as they tried to do a business as usual attitude in the run up to Chinese New Year, which is a huge thing in China.
Was it deliberately hostile? No…I don’t think the CCP wanted this to be what it became, don’t think they were trying to cause a world wide pandemic that would crush the world economy and leave 10’s or 100’s of thousands (or potentially millions) of people dead. They just were fuck ups fucking up…as usual for them. But it’s important to nail this stuff down, and nail THEM on this, IMHO, because some of the things they have done have really screwed with the system.
My previous post specifically dealt with the belief that the virus got out of the Chinese lab by accident, as well as the idea that humans engineered the virus which then somehow got into the general population.
Not necessarily. For example, there’s the CT stating that when they found out that vaccines cause autism, the Government/Pharma/Research Establishment/Physicians engaged in a massive coverup to convince us otherwise. The “flat earth” conspiracy theorists are convinced that we’ve been manipulated to believe the earth is a sphere (not sure what “bad intent” there would be in that, other than to make people laugh at flat earthers).
Given all the loopy coronavirus CTs and scammery surrounding the outbreak, it’d take loads of convincing evidence of the non-connect-the-dots variety to make me believe in one of them. YouTube videos need not apply.
Right, but that’s because evil Big Pharma wants to continue raking in the big vaccine dough – see? There’s the evil intent. And, as far as flat earthers go, that manipulation sounds sinister to me, although the endgame is not clear of course.
I know what you’re saying. I still think that “conspiracy theory” usually involves some evil plot, not just a cover-up to hide incompetence.
Yeah, it’s Fox. Stop the eyerolling already. JCS Chair Gen. Mark Milley states that, “I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don’t know for certain.” Presumably ‘natural’ means it arose through natural zoonotic transmission.
"others’’ and “sources” say…with “increasing confidence”…“scientists disappeared”…and this no-doubter:
"Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday afternoon, “It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that and we’ve had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don’t know for certain.”
Government unnamed sources are kind of a big deal. Fox knows the rules: you don’t accuse a nation as powerful as China of creating a virus that went on to kill nearly a 100,000 people without being prepared to stand behind the story. Further, government sources, even if unnamed, are not going to go out on a limb and lend the prestige of the United States to an accusation that a worldwide pandemic originated in a foreign lab, without part of the US government permitting it.
That the lab was or was not the origin of the virus isn’t the important thing here. It’s that serious media elements, with the tacit encouragement of the United States government, are making the accusation that it did.
I found the video compelling, as I said, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s what actually happened. I think it COULD have happened that way, however, and I found the part where people at the lab were talking about being sprayed with bat blood and urine while they were gathering samples especially compelling, as the way the woman in the video was disappeared, and also that while the CCP has said she is fine, and someone has posted as her that she is fine, there really isn’t any solid evidence she IS fine. That is unusual when the CCP is trying to stamp on something like this, as their normal mode is to trot out the person and put them on camera to show they are fine and dandy.