China must find out the origin of COVID-19, or else its controversial experiments with viruses could trigger a new pandemic, warns the author of the sensational new book What Really Happened in Wuhan.
Australian journalist Sharri Markson claims that her 18-month investigation into the “laboratory leak” hypothesis of the coronavirus left her in no doubt that the virus entered the environment from a biomedical institution.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which specializes in dealing with dangerous coronaviruses, is a high-security laboratory at the center of an alleged cover-up over the origins of the COVID pandemic, according to the Daily Mail.
Sharri Markson is calling for either the closure of the so-called “functionality enhancement” study of the virus, or subjecting Chinese laboratories to more scrutiny to avoid future pandemics.
Risky experiments involve creating viruses to make them more infectious or deadly, in the hopes of developing treatments and vaccines to stay ahead of outbreaks.
Sharri Markson’s book What Really Happened in Wuhan presents the case for the laboratory leak theory. It includes testimonies from senior security officials and senior diplomats, including the former head of MI6 and the former head of US national intelligence. They say the evidence allegedly points “exclusively” to the spread of COVID from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the pathogen showing all the signs of being “gone astray.”
Governments around the world are taking the “laboratory leak” theory more and more seriously after it was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory in the early stages of a pandemic.
Recent revelations about the type of research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s attempt to censor important information about the virus’s origins have raised suspicions.
In promoting her book, Sharri Markson told Sun Online, “This is so important because it not only took 4.7 million lives, but it also took away the life we knew it. People have lost their jobs, businesses have closed, children are not going to school, our whole life has been turned upside down. To prevent another pandemic, we absolutely need to know how it started. And the fact is that in laboratories in China, dangerous biological research has been carried out that do not meet the same standards as in Australian, British and American laboratories, and where there is no supervision. “
Enhancing the function of viruses includes modifications to improve their performance, such as making the virus more deadly or more transmissible. According to the author of the investigation, the project may have been implemented, despite the fact that it did not receive funding from the United States. Markson also directed a documentary, which premiered in Australia last week, in which she talks to a number of senior officials.
David Asher, a former COVID investigator at the US Department of State, said he feared the virus was a result of bioweapon experiments: “I was concerned that the Chinese were doing research and, as we later learned, under completely uncontrollable circumstances; it almost certainly had to do with biological warfare ambitions in the future. What if they had an incident that they never wanted anyone to know about because it was a weapon and this weapon was fired by mistake. “
In another video, a whistleblower claimed the virus was intentionally created and spread in October 2019 at the Wuhan War Games, two months before China notified the World Health Organization of the virus.
Beijing’s critics argue that the Chinese communist authorities have blocked efforts to independently investigate how the virus first spread to humans at its epicenter in Wuhan.
Mike Pompeo, a former US secretary of state under President Trump, claims that intelligence on the origins of COVID indicates the Wuhan lab turned out to be a “hub.”
Referring to Markson in the documentary, Pompeo said: “There is overwhelming – albeit circumstantial – evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a central point in this case. Remember also that at this time [конец 2019 года] there were 14 American diplomats in Wuhan who observed what was happening on the ground. I hope that one day we will be able to obtain this information more widely, but (…) the cumulative evidence (…) points exclusively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “
Former US President Donald Trump told Sharri Markson that he is “95 percent” confident that COVID has appeared at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and believes that this was the result of “gross incompetence” and not deliberate action.
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, spoke in a documentary about his research into the origins of the pandemic. He said COVID had all the signs that they “took a natural virus and fiddled with it.”
Since China alerted the world to the mysterious virus circulating in Wuhan in December 2019, there has been a debate about its true source. Beijing has repeatedly insisted that the virus naturally entered the human body from bats, with many scientists agreeing that COVID is most likely of natural origin.
But John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, asserts in the documentary: “If it really wasn’t anyone’s fault, if it really was some kind of natural virus, because someone ate a bat from the market, then China would not would do what he did. The Chinese Communist Party would not shut down Wuhan, they would not silence the journalists and doctors, and they would not make some of them disappear. “
Sharri Markson’s book and documentary also includes allegations by a Chinese defector that he tried to warn US senior officials of the deadly new virus in Wuhan in November 2019 – five months before the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic. Wei Jingsheng says he expressed concern about the development of the situation to high-ranking officials in the Trump administration, but later his warnings were ignored. A longtime democracy campaigner who served in prison for “counter-revolutionary activities” said he took this approach in November 2019, when rumors of a “new SARS virus” began to circulate on WeChat and other Chinese social networks.
“I felt they weren’t as concerned as I was, so I tried my best to provide more details and information,” he said in the Sky News Australia documentary. “They may not believe that the country’s government will do something like this (covering up the virus), so I kept repeating myself trying to convince them.”
According to the Daily Mail, the Chinese authorities tried to censor discussion of the virus in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan – even as countless corpses began to flood city hospitals. Field reports said any social media links about the new SARS virus or the “outbreak” were censored, and medical personnel trying to speak out and warn the world were detained and forced to sign false confessions.
Wei Jingsheng, who emigrated to the United States several years ago, revealed that he knew about the situation through insiders from the Beijing Communist Party, who shared their concerns about the situation and described the central government’s cover-up of danger. But despite a looming health crisis that will prove devastating to the United States and the rest of the globe, his message has not been taken seriously, the defector argues.
Meanwhile, it became known last week that scientists from Wuhan were planning to change the coronaviruses and launch them into caves where bats live, 21 months before the start of the pandemic. Leaked documents show that Dr. Peter Dashak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, has offered to work with a team of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct the study. Experts wanted to genetically improve coronaviruses and spread them to bats in Yunnan – about 2,000 km southwest of Wuhan – in the hope that this would stop the spread of new viruses from bats to humans.
The proposals set out plans to release the bat coronavirus with “new chimeric spike proteins” found on the COVID virus as part of a vaccination plan against the virus.
The researchers asked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for $ 14.2 million to fund the project. But the proposal was rejected due to concerns that it could endanger local communities.
The documents released by a group of scientists investigating the causes of the pandemic will heighten growing suspicions that the coronavirus may have accidentally leaked out of a high-level biosafety laboratory in Wuhan.
The EcoHealth Alliance submitted proposals in March 2018, which were subsequently rejected by the US agency. This organization is led by British scientist Dr. Peter Dashak, who denied the theory of laboratory leaks in the medical journal Lancet at the beginning of the pandemic.
Dr. Dashak was originally part of a team assembled by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the virus, but turned down the role after it was revealed that he had connections to a laboratory in Wuhan.
The aforementioned proposals – the so-called DEFUSE project – were unveiled by Drastic, a group of international scientists studying the origins of the pandemic, to whom details of the plans were given from informants. Scientists said the documents were authentic, but it was impossible to confirm this.
Drastic says the documents show the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology “have been trying to conduct an advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity study of bat coronavirus that clearly qualifies as functional enhancement.”
“Peter Dashak and EcoHealth Alliance have proposed injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanized and injured mice,” Drastic said. The goal of the project was to determine the risk of contracting coronavirus and develop methods to prevent outbreaks.
The US agency DARPA refused to fund the work because it was “clear that the proposed DEFUSE project, led by Peter Dashak, could endanger local communities.” Dr. Dashak and his team did not take into account the increased functionality, regulatory requirements, and ethical, legal and social issues, the agency said.
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