Hunting Covid-19
In these uncertain times, many people are asking where it all began. Did Covid-19 spontaneously emerge from the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, China? Or did it escape from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology through error, or even negligence? Some even suggest that the virus was intended as a biological weapon and was released intentionally.
In a recent documentary, Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times set out to track down the origin of the “Wuhan Coronavirus.” His investigation is compelling viewing. But is it accurate? And what conclusions does it come to?
It has become common knowledge that bats carry the coronavirus. They were the source of the SARS virus and were also responsible for the MERS strain. Philipp soon points out that there were no bats sold in the Huanan market. This becomes a repeated refrain throughout the documentary, a constant reminder that the market origin is a fraud, a misdirection.
But nobody in the scientific community thinks that humans were infected directly by bats. There has always been a go-between. In the case of SARS, the virus jumped from bats to a palm civet first, and then on to humans. With MERS, a dromedary camel was the intermediary. It is believed that with Covid-19, pangolins are the most likely culprit, although this has yet to be proven. Philipp’s misdirection is an indication of what will follow.
The best conjurers are able for a little while, to convince their audience that they are magicians. The truly great ones are capable of making people believe that they can walk through walls or even make an elephant disappear. They can’t actually do those things, of course, but are so practiced at illusion, that we can’t see how they are doing it. Early on, Philipp has us looking at his left hand while the hand under the cloak is doing all the work.
Every good documentary needs an expert and Philipp has a few of those up his sleeve. The first, Dr. Sean Lin (Lin Xiaoxu) a microbiologist and former laboratory director at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, points to the absence of bats in the market. Misdirection always works best when it’s coming from an expert.
Reinforcement comes from Judy A. Mikovits Ph.D., a biochemist and molecular biologist. She also points out that there are “…no bats in the seafood market, or anywhere close.” And goes on to say, “The idea of the spread so fast through a population just the way it was said through the seafood market is highly unlikely and improbable.”
The first piece of evidence from Philipp that does support the theory that the virus did not come from the market is in one of the early scientific papers published in Lancet. The first patient was diagnosed with Covid-19 on 1st December 2019 and, according to the paper, had no epidemiological link with any of the other patients, or with the Huanan market. This is interesting. Philipp quotes Dr. Daniel Lucey, from the University of Georgetown, who concluded from the information in the paper that the man must have been infected somewhere other than the market. This is a logical conclusion, and one which can’t be investigated further at this stage as the name of that person, who subsequently died, has not been made public. Both hands are now out from under the cloak and we are paying attention because we have been given a truth.*
The same Lancet paper refers to 13 patients who had no known contact with the market. Philipp concludes that they must have caught the virus elsewhere. This sounds plausible, except that, in their case, the paper seems ambiguous, because one of the patients was the wife of someone who worked in the market. Although she might not have visited the market, she clearly had contact with someone who did. What about the other 12? The paper does not say. It was written in January when the level of transmissibility was not yet known and before we knew that asymptomatic people could be contagious. It is, therefore, possible that the 12 were infected by others who had visited the market. But Lin has no doubts. He sees it as, “.. malfeasance or somewhat intentionally cover of some important source of infection.”
In Part II of the documentary, Philipp unpicks “the mysterious gene sequence.” This he believes, or wants us to believe, is the key to proving that Covid-19 was manufactured in a laboratory. There is a lot of talk of S proteins, nucleotide similarities, and amino acid matches. This all goes over the heads of anyone who is not a virologist, and perhaps it is meant to. Lin, the expert, sums up for the laymen at the end by saying, “How to see proteins 100% identical and virus jump species and so they’re suggesting maybe the virus could degenerate with reverse-engineer process.” Mikovits agrees, saying, ”I certainly believe that the 100% amino acid similarity says it can’t possibly be a natural mutation.”
They have magically made a rabbit appear from nowhere. A careful reading of the paper suggests no such thing. But it does say, “Thus, these data suggest that bats are a possible host for the viral reservoir of [SARS-CoV-2].”
Philipp quickly moves on to the next trick to prevent us from having too much time thinking about how he pulled off the last one. He lists the measures that the Chinese government took to hide information and to control the narrative. “The once active Chinese scientific community suddenly fell into an eerie silence. What was the Chinese Communist Party trying to hide?” he asks.
Not very much it seems. The measures to control the narrative that Philipp is referring to happened on 3rd January when China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. Not a very open policy, but it seems to have had little effect on the Chinese scientific community. Most of the scientific papers Philipp used for his own documentary were released after 3rd January, and papers continue to be released until today.
In the next section, Philipp introduces us to Dr. Zhengli Shi, a Chinese virologist intimately involved with the investigation of coronaviruses in bats. Through unsubstantiated innuendo, Philipp suggests that Dr. Shi might have been carrying out her research as part of a Chinese biological weapons program and was attempting to manufacture a virus that could be used to infect humans. He produces General Robert Spalding, who seems a bit confused about Dr. Shi’s intentions and not only pulls another rabbit out of the hat, but a bunch of carnations too. “They were working on developing a coronavirus for the human host which, you know, leads you to question why you’d be creating a coronavirus that can infect humans? What would be the purpose of that research? Is it for a weapon? Is it so that you can create a vaccine that you are the sole recipient of the profits from?”
Which is it General, the rabbit or the carnations?
They both seem to miss the obvious conclusion, that the research was being carried out for exactly the opposite reason: to understand how the coronavirus sometimes makes the species jump to humans, in order to prevent it from happening in the future. There’s a lot to unpick there; enough for another article. Fortunately, Jane Qiu has written it already: How China’s “Bat Woman” Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, Scientific American 11th March 2020.
Another paper that is not mentioned in the documentary, perhaps should have been. It might have made it about forty minutes shorter. On 17th March 2020 a paper by Kristian Andersen of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA, et al., published a letter in Nature Medicine entitled: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. (SARS CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes the disease called Covid-19.) The paper came to the following conclusions:
- “Our analyses show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or purposely manipulated virus.”
- “… If genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that the SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” (Emphasis mine.)
In the conclusion, the paper goes on to say:
- “Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.”
The curtain could have come down right then. But obfuscation and misdirection need detail to complete the illusion.
Over the last twenty or so minutes Philipp and his assistants present us with an unsubstantiated diatribe against the Chinese Communist Party. It’s like the magic show has ended, but they don’t want us to notice, so they shift our attention to the real subject of the documentary, the Chinese Communist Party. And 3 minutes from the end, they reveal their motive to anyone still paying attention. Philipp says, “we at the Epoch Times refer to the Wuhan coronavirus or Covid-19 as a CCP Virus because a Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up in mishandling allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.” There is the real reason for the documentary.
Why? Why would a news organization take the trouble to produce a documentary with the sole purpose of attacking the Chinese Communist Party? Because the Epoch Times and it’s affiliate NTD (New Tang Dynasty) Television are strangers to impartiality. The Epoch Times was formed twenty years ago by a group of Chinese Americans associated with Falun Gong, an organization that is persecuted and suppressed in Communist China. The Epoch Times is not only critical of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies, but also a supporter of the Trump Administration, an administration that would dearly love to shift the blame for its mishandling of the crisis somewhere else.
We heard from experts, people who are specialists in microbiology. But their academic qualifications do not tell the whole story. Dr. Sean Lin (Lin Xiaoxu) was a former laboratory director at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, but he is also “a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre, executive director of the Global Alliance against Communist Propaganda and Disinformation, and a Falun Gong practitioner.”
That leaves Judy A Mikovits Ph.D. Mikovits has an even more interesting CV. Her background needs a biography too long for this article. In brief: in 2011, she was investigated, and then terminated from her position as Research Director of the Whittenmore Peterson Institute. Her fall from grace came as a result of alleged manipulation of data and a paper that was published — and subsequently retracted — that relied on results from contaminated samples. Things deteriorated when Mikovits was arrested and spent time in jail for removing notebooks and a laptop from the laboratory and refusing to return them. Charges were later dropped without prejudice. Instead of seeking penance, Mikovits doubled down and continued to back the discredited paper. She wrote a book, which again espoused her discredited work, and went on the lecture circuit to persuade people of the danger inherent in vaccines, a stance that is both wrong and dangerous.
During the documentary, a lot of accusations are directed at the Chinese Communist Party. Some of them are true. It is well known that despite the veneer of a free-market economy, the Chinese government tries to keep a firm grip on the narrative within the country and its policy towards dissent is well documented. The Chinese invaded and occupied Tibet and now insist that it has always been part of China. They are busy persecuting the Uyghurs, “re-educating” them in de-facto concentration camps. They have drawn a nine-dash line in the South China Sea and asserted their squatting rights in the region in defiance of treaties and of international law.
The Chinese Government has a fifty-year plan and they are not going to let dissidents, religious groups or anyone else sidetrack them. They don’t have messy elections to distract them and they are prepared to do unpleasant things to attain their goals.
However, none of that goes towards proving that Covid-19 came from a Chineses laboratory. Philipp calls his production a documentary. The definition of a documentary is “a film or television or radio program that provides a factual report on a particular subject.” There was no attempt to seek out an opposing view and a great deal of the information presented was intended to mislead. The video is little more than a thinly disguised propaganda exercise, a cheap conjuring trick designed to embarrass the Communist Chinese Government.
- *I reached out to Dr. Lucey by email to ask if there was any further information as to how the fist patient contracted the virus. He has not yet responded.
- Note: Throughout most of the article, I have used the term Covid-19 to refer to both the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease (Covid-19) as that is the term that most people are familiar with. Quotes are verbatim.
