ore than three months before Covid-19 officially ‘broke out’ in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology mysteriously took its bat and rodent pathogen database offline – suddenly making over 22,000 specimens unavailable.
This is the same China that ordered virus samples destroyed after a ‘rogue lab’ published the genome for Covid-19 (48 hours after the WIV database was further altered), and deleted more than 300 studies encompassing “hundreds of pages of information”
We’re reminded of this by biologist and writer Matt Ridley, who said in a Sunday Twitter thread:
he fact sheet describing the database was not taken down but it was edited, on or before 30 December, to change the key words, and alter some terms from “wildlife” to “bat and rodent”. Why?The database remains inaccessible to the world to this day. We know it contains unpublished samples and sequences of bat viruses but we have never been told what they are. Shockingly,@peterdaszak has excused this lack of transparency, while other virologists have ignored it…There has been no call from the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences or western governments for this database to be shared with the world, even though it could be vital to understanding how this pandemic started or how the next one may start. Why not?
And as Paul Graham notes, “Perhaps it would be a useful exercise to try to pinpoint, if Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exactly which day it did so. Perhaps “reconstructing the crime” would help ascertain whether it happened.”
We aren’t going to hold our breath for any answers from the CCP.
Going even deeper down the rabbit hole… (click tweet to jump in)
Econophysics2020 