THE FOCUS: OUR EDITORIAL
The Virus from Nowhere
The Left and China Are Busy Burying the Origin of Coronavirus
1/27/2021: The year of 2020 revealed that there are essentially two groups of people in the world: those who supported Trump or hated him. Along with that, almost every critical issue was viewed through that prism. Trump became an embodiment of a certain ideology. Ironically, Trump himself is not deeply and historically ideological, but more pragmatic and intuitive, two aspects that guided his governing principles: America First and China’s ambition to dominate the world must be scrutinized and hence their conducts must be challenged.
It is through this prism we can see the world reactions on COVID-19. Because Trump is a political figure, arguably still the most prominent political figure in this decade, COVID-19 also becomes a political issue, including the question on the origin of the virus. Undoubtedly, money is a major part of COVID-19 existence, persistence, and containment. But the two are intertwined.
Where Was the Virus Coming from?
So, where did the virus come from? A short answer is, it depends on what Trump says. Perhaps there is nobody in the world that is more adamantly convinced than Trump that the coronavirus was made in China which explains why he persistently calls it “China virus”.
Predictably, because Trump is the front-man in announcing it as “China virus”, the rest of the left cabal, from academics, media, politicians, Big Tech, and global bureaucrat elites, hastily find a different name or at least denounce it. Joe Biden has already issued an executive order banning the term “China virus”. CNN said Trump’s term “China virus” is malicious.
If the truth meter exists and given the left’s pattern of behavior in the last four years that covered up anything good that Trump said, it will show that Trump is closer to the truth than not.
Objectively, Trump is not wrong. The coronavirus outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, China. Up to this point there should be no ambiguity unless there is something concrete that shows otherwise, that the outbreak might have happened first elsewhere. We can then call it “Wuhan virus”, or because Wuhan is in China, “China virus”.
This is not to be confused with COVID-19. The latter is the new name of the disease. It is an abbreviation where ‘CO’ stands for ‘corona,’ ‘VI’ for ‘virus,’ and ‘D’ for disease and 19 for the year it was first detected.
A long answer for the origin of the virus will be complicated as it is related to an intertwine of money, politics, and power. Of course, China has them all. Had the first outbreak occurred in Madagascar, the question on the origin of the virus would have been over months ago.
But few in the left cabal will dare to challenge China. This single article in the Guardian, a far-left publication based in the United Kingdom, suffices to show how the left, particularly the media and the academicians, will never tell anything conclusive except when it comes to China’s defense or hurts conservatives. The title is “Origin story: what do we know now about where coronavirus came from?”, but after reading the article we are left without knowing the origin of the virus, except it is not from a China lab.
Not all the left media people are blind to potential truth, that is the buried truth that must be given a chance to surface. New York Magazine, perhaps the first of the corporate media to acknowledge that the COVID-19 virus may have originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The writer at the Magazine, Nicholson Baker, gives a fascinating report that looks at many different aspects of the potential origins of the virus. It centers on two possible theories. One is bats and another is lab. Both are in Wuhan. Because the two are close in proximity, in which the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not far from the Wuhan market where they are selling exotic animals for consumption, including bats, the two theories are not mutually exclusive.
But the idea that the market was the source of the virus fades with evidence. Baker wrote:
In November or December of 2019, the novel coronavirus began to spread. Chinese scientists initially named it “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus,” but soon that idea went away. The market, closed and decontaminated by Chinese officials on January 1, 2020, was an amplifying hub, not the source of the outbreak, according to several studies by Chinese scientists. Forty-five percent of the earliest SARS-2 patients had no link with the market.
Some scientists believe the virus is not completely natural. As it is reported by Nicholson Baker:
“All possibilities should be on the table, including a lab leak,” a scientist from the NIH, Philip Murphy, a chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology.
“There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia,
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan ***screamed*** lab release.” Ebright said.
The following from Baker's piece is worth reading as it sheds light on something that many curious people have wondered months ago.
If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute.... There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen. The Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”
For about a year, China has refused to grant the WHO experts access to Wuhan to do the investigation of the origin of the virus. Finally, after pressure from the US and EU, the Chinese government let a team of experts from the WHO landed in Wuhan on January 14 to try to trace the origin of the virus. But the highly-anticipated visit is now being met with international skepticism because of how long the Chinese government waited to give access to the WHO.
In November, David Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the urgent need to unravel the origins of COVID-19. “If SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.”
“A more complete understanding of the origins of COVID-19 clearly serves the interests of every person in every country on this planet,” wrote Relman.
That ought to be. But what ought to be is different from what will happen. Despite the presence of the experts in Wuhan now to investigate a definitive explanation of COVID's jump from wild animal to humans or whether it is conclusively from lab, let alone whether it was an accident or deliberate plan, may be months, if not years, away, or even never.
But the experts are not only human with some emotional and psychological pressures to reveal the truth, but also coming from institutions that have various vested interests. In order to get to the bottom of the virus origin, “Conflicts of interest by researchers and administrators will need to be addressed,” wrote Relman. In other words, to reach the truth, the investigation must be transparent, international, and, as much as possible, unpolitical.
Call me sceptics, but I just don’t see it coming. The stake is gigantically enormous. As reported by Nicholson Baker:
Hold that human fallibility in your mind. And then consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident,” Chan told me in July of last year. There was also, she added, a reasonable chance that the disease had evolved naturally — both were scientific possibilities. “I don’t know if we will ever find a smoking gun, especially if it was a lab accident. The stakes are so high now. It would be terrifying to be blamed for millions of cases of COVID-19 and possibly up to a million deaths by year end, if the pandemic continues to grow out of control. The Chinese government has also restricted their own scholars and scientists from looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. At this rate, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may just be buried by the passage of time.”
Already, Michael Ryan, the executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said during a press conference last week that it’s “too early” to say that the coronavirus originated in China.
Coronavirus and US Election
The two are not mutually exclusive. It was COVID-19 that served as the only ground to a huge increase in mail-in voting in the 2020 election that had potentially opened the floodgates for massive voter fraud. The mail-in votes for the presidential election jumped by more than 120%, from 33 million in 2016 to 73,4 million in 2020.
For instance, Governor Gavin Newsom of California issued an executive order on May 8, 2020 that required each county’s elections officials to send vote-by-mail ballots for the November 3, 2020 General Election to all registered voters. The order cites “Recognizing the threat COVID-19 continues to pose to public health” as the reason for the mail-in voting to more than 22 million registered voters in California in 2020, whether the voters requested it or not.
It is not surprising that the proportion of mail-in votes in California in 2020 almost doubled than in 2016. In the 2016 election, there were 8.44 million mail-in votes or 57.8% of total votes. In 2020, 15,4 million of votes, or 86.7% of total votes were cast through mail in California.
Despite the refusal of the courts to hear and examine the voter fraud cases, the decision by the state legislatures as well as the Congress to ignore the massive evidence, and the cover up by the media and the Big Tech, massive voter fraud did occur. When a robber who just committed his act didn’t get caught, it does not mean robbery didn’t occur.
Unfortunately, Trump was on it again. And China too, given the fact that Trump was essentially the only global leader that dared to challenge China’s quest for much stronger global influence. Just like the origin of the coronavirus, whose outbreak originated from Wuhan, but we may never know how it came out to the open world, we will likely never know for certain the true extent of the voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The Left along with their media and Big Tech propaganda machines will bury anything about it. They fight like hell against any attempt to audit the votes and the voting machines. Too much conflict of interests, from money, power, and ideology.
They will also bury the true origin of the coronavirus.
Sadly, in both cases, common and well-meaning people are the victims as they will have to suffer the consequences of the cover up.
Readings
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The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
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The Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in Wuhan, China
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Archived: WHO Timeline - COVID-19
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INSANE: Joe Biden Signs Executive Order Banning the Term “China Virus”
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China Finally Lets WHO Into Wuhan to Probe COVID-19 Origins
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Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Threaten Election Legitimacy?
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