An investigative analysis takes apart a hackneyed piece of propaganda authored by an international alt-right clique with links to the Pentagon.
by Raul Diego
Part 6 - Wuhan’s best friends
The passing mention of one of the central figures and research labs in the entire Covid narrative reveals a reluctance to pry further into the WIV and its close connections to American health, scientific and intelligence circles, including direct funding from Fauci’s NIAID, as mentioned in the introduction of this series. These links, however, extend far beyond a few research contracts and tie back into the actual laboratory work done on bat-borne coronaviruses over decades in collaboration with agencies like NIH, DARPA, and USAID. Shi Zhengl, a.k.a ¨Bat Woman¨, herself was a protagonist in both the initial discovery of the virus and the first to offer up her laboratory (and her government, by inference,) as its source when she publicly admitted early on to the possibility of the pathogen escaping the WIV lab by accident.
More significantly, virtually all of the coronavirus research conducted at the WIV is tied to USAID and EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that partnered with the U.S. agency to collect tens of thousands of coronavirus samples from sites in Southeast Asia through a program called PREDICT. As the moniker implies, the 10-year program ending in 2019 was part of an initiative to develop early warning methods to detect viral pathogens – a project that followed closely in the footsteps of a similar program created by Michael Callahan at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called PROPHECY. Callahan was also intimately involved in the coronavirus research in Southeast Asia at the same time.
A recent Washington Post editorial revealed that the WIV holds the most important bat coronavirus database in China, with 22,000 virus samples including over 100 unpublished sequences. EcoHealth Alliance, both via PREDICT and working directly with the WIV helped gather most of the pathogens contained in the coronavirus database. According to information supplied by DRASTIC, an independent team of researchers and scientists, that has been studying the WIV database, EcoHealth Alliance took part in the vast majority of the coronavirus samples collected for the laboratory, and its president, Peter Daszak, has participated in numerous U.S.-funded bat coronavirus studies together with WIV.
Daszak’s role in the emerging narrative vis-a-vis China and the pandemic is problematic, to say the least, given the fact that he is part of the WHO’s Covid-19 origin investigation team, which began its work in China on February 6 and also chairs the Lancet’s Covid-19 origins Task Force.
None of these salient conflicts of interest are mentioned by the authors of the letter in their disingenuous invectives against the CCP, as it would severely weaken their case. After all, how would they explain the fact that American institutions not only played a leading role in the collection of 10,000 bat coronaviruses via PREDICT but also funded much of the research including GoF studies by Fauci’s NIAID? Answering these questions can only shed uncomfortable light on the extensive ties between the WIV and the highest reaches of the Western scientific establishment.
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