True, nobody wants to think about COVID as biowarfare.
And everyone’s opinion is already set.
Here is the new report, FWIW: https://zenodo.org/record/4073131
Thanks to support from Steve Bannon (recently busted for fraud while sipping espresso on Miles Guo’s $35M yacht), and early Fox News airing of Li-Meng Yan, her two sciencey papers are not only politicized, but come hyper-politicized. As with almost anything COVID-related. Knee-jerk dismissals and endorsements all around. (BTW neither of her two, er, documents have been peer-reviewed — for those who believe that truth can only be found in peer-reviewed papers.)
Since we are all floating in the fog Opinion-Land for now, I would prefer to think, provisionally:
- Yan is a real but politically naive scientist (check out details of her story here – https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2020/10/01/made-in-china.html). It’s so typical of emigres from authoritarian regimes that they accept unquestioningly the protection and benificence of their new Imperial host.
- She made a sacrifice leaving Hong Kong (but maybe she hates her hubbie & was looking for any excuse to get out while she had a chance)
- She probably did have early access to PRC sources as far back as early January
- Her attempt to sound the alarm within the lab was blocked by her bosses for fear of retribution from PRC, now asserting full control over HK. (She’s called them out by name, Poon & Malik. Did they deny her a raise?)
- Her first report was at least tweaked, if not fully molded, to fit the PRC demonization narrative of her US funders and hosts, the anti-CCP emigre shady Miles Guo & virulently right-wing, former Navy spook, Bannon
- She didn’t really “prove” anything but made some esoteric arguments against the zoonotic hypothesis and showed how SARS2 COULD have been manipulated. But could is different from did.
- Some of her analysis may be valid
- Other parts of the paper are shoddy and probably won’t hold up
But maybe she’s a long-range CIA plant. Nothing new there – it would have been easy to “buy” her once she was working in HK. It would be a classic intel move to plant something like this to place the blame on PRC (WIV), then have experts in waiting to roll out elaborate, esoteric arguments why PRC is intentionally terrorizing the planet. Terrorizing the planet, or parts thereof, is something the CIA itself has dabbled with occasionally 🙂
(Notably, she does not explicitly call out people like Ralph Baric / UNC, Peter Daszak / Eco-Health, the US NIAID funding stream — signed by Fauci — UT Galveston BioLab level 4, among others — all of whose collaboration massively complicates the simplistic Evil CCP narrative. Maybe she would if left to her own devices – she does call out international agencies and scientists for corruption, but doesn’t name names. Also nothing on the Charlie Lieber incident, nor the TWO separate incidents of PRC researchers caught smuggling bio samples out of the US and Canada.) What a mess!
So that makes me suspicious of other aspects, and how some of her possibly on-point arguments are being leveraged for propaganda purposes.
Maybe she’s a commie-hating PRC native, and that biases her analysis. There are plenty of those around.
Maybe she’s just ambitious and has no scruples. The first paper was sloppy as hell, barely edited.
Hey everybody is free to have an opinion.
Here’s the intro from the open preprint server site Zenodo:
Two possibilities should be considered for the origin of SARS-CoV-2: natural evolution or laboratory creation. In our earlier report titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route”, we disproved the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 arising naturally through evolution and instead proved that SARS-CoV-2 must have been a product of laboratory modification. Despite this and similar efforts, the laboratory creation theory continues to be downplayed or even diminished. This is fundamentally because the natural origin theory remains supported by several novel coronaviruses published after the start of the outbreak. These viruses (the RaTG13 bat coronavirus, a series of pangolin coronaviruses, and the RmYN02 bat coronavirus) reportedly share high sequence homology with SARS-CoV-2 and have altogether constructed a seemingly plausible pathway for the natural evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Here, however, we use in-depth analyses of the available data and literature to prove that these novel animal coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their sequences have been fabricated. In addition, we also offer our insights on the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated naturally from a coronavirus that infected the Mojiang miners.
Revelation of these virus fabrications renders the natural origin theory unfounded. It also strengthens our earlier assertion that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.
The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health. As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both to the reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.
Importantly, while SARS-CoV-2 meets the criteria of a bioweapon specified by the PLA, its impact is well beyond what is conceived for a typical bioweapon. In addition, records indicate that the unleashing of this weaponized pathogen should have been intentional rather than accidental. We therefore define SARS-CoV-2 as an Unrestricted Bioweapon and the current pandemic a result of Unrestricted Biowarfare. We further suggest that investigations should be carried out on the suspected government and individuals and the responsible ones be held accountable for this brutal attack on the global community.
— Rydra Wong, Editrix
More background – see our previous posts: