Suiting up for the away team

So, we know the chicoms are experimenting with coronavirus and our solution was to try to help them from being incompetent. Today, our MSM refuse to deal with chicom incompetence and view this as merely an opportunity to ruin our economy and get Slo Joe elected to do the bidding of the chicoms. What about next time? Hell the chicom official story was that this came out of the Wuhan wet market which they have reopened. The dem response? Blame Trump. Not just rooting for the away team, but suiting up.



https://www.zerohedge.com/



US State Department Cables Warned Of Potential 'SARS-Like Pandemic' After Visiting Wuhan Lab Experimenting With Bat Coronavirus



The US State Department received two cables from US Embassy officials in 2018 warning of inadequate safety at a Wuhan, China biolab conducting 'risky studies' on bat coronaviruses, according to the Washington Post, which notes that the cables have "fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus."



A US delegation led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy's counselor of environment, science, technology and health took the unusual step of repeatedly visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) - which had become China's first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (BSL-4) in 2015. The last of the visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018, was documented on WIV's website and subsequently scrubbed (archive).

US officials were so concerned by what they saw that they warned of a potential pandemic stemming from the lab's work on bat coronaviruses.



What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. -Washington Post



"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," reads a January, 2018 cable drafted by two officials from the embassy's environment, science and health sections who met with scientists from the WIV.



Interestingly, the Chinese researchers were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, however the Chinese had requested additional help. Consequently, the cables warned that the US should give the WIV additional support because of how dangerous the research on bat coronaviruses was.



As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.



"Most importantly," the cable warns, "the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention."

Shi and other researchers have strongly denied that the new virus known as 2019-nCoV came from WIV, after her team was the first to publicly report it.



According to the report, the bat coronavirus research was aimed at preventing the next SARS-like pandemic "by anticipating how it might emerge," however according to the report "even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks."



In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.



WaPo is careful to note that 'many' have said there's no evidence that COVID-19 was engineered, and that concensus is that it came from animals, "that is not the same as saying it didn't come from a lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals," according to Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at UC Berkeley.



"The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected," he said.

Meanwhile, similar concerns remain about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention Lab - a level 2 biosecurity facility, while the Chinese government refuses to say whether either lab was involved.



Notably, the Wuhan CDC is located roughly 900 feet from the wet market which accounted for roughly half of the new COVID-19 cases late last year.