The latest word from our "intelligence" agencies.

Last I had checked, we had 16 Intelligence Agencies, with one office to oversee them. Apparently, we are now up to 18. At any rate, we have so many agencies, and their conclusions (maybe I should say 'inconclusions') combine to leave inconclusive answers. Feature or Bug? See for yourself:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58361211

The US intelligence community has been unable to determine the origins of Covid-19, and is split on whether it leaked from a lab or developed in nature, according to a new report.

The report issued by the office that oversees the nation's 18 spy agencies did conclusively determine that it was not developed as a biological weapon.

Experts warn that time is running out to gather evidence of its beginnings.

China's foreign minister has dismissed the report as "anti-science".

The report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the intelligence community remains divided on Covid's most likely origin.

"All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident."

Well, at least we are assured that it wasn't developed as a biological agent...

China meanwhile has been stoking baseless claims that virus originated from Fort Detrick, a military installation in the US.

Ruh Roh.

What do you think (and why)?

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thanatokephaloides's picture

What do you think (and why)?

I think that this whole line about the "origin" of COVID-19 is nothing else but a "Red Herring", a propaganda device to detract the attention of the masses away from the piss-poor handling of the current SARS endemic by every developed nation on Earth. And while developed nations call each other names, real human beings continue to suffer and die.

Listen up, people: It never mattered where COVID-19 came from. What matters is that it's here now, almost certainly to stay. All that matters is what humanity does about it now!

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Bisbonian's picture

@thanatokephaloides ...and IF the origins of CV-19 were in a lab, and IF an honest investigation were to prove it, and IF the creators, funders, and beneficiaries of the program were to be prosecuted, a la Nuremburg, we might actually chip away at "war and more war".

If the instigators manage to bury the evidence, then it just emboldens them further.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

CB's picture

@Bisbonian
to repeat it within the next 5 years should 'they' don't accomplish the enduring fear response desired.

Who is this 'they' you ask? I would suggest it is the group that has had prior discussions and planning for a "epidemic of global proportions". They had both the means and the finances to accomplish this.

As that old adage stated: "Never let a good crisis go to waste."

"As we move from rescue to recovery we have a unique, but rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path. It is an opportunity we've never had before I may never have again."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWPAzO6suSg]

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Bisbonian's picture

@CB That's what I had in mind. They're already talking about the next one.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

snoopydawg's picture

@CB

start an epidemic. The article I posted talks about just that. It was just that people weren’t scared enough to go along with it. Lots of people are not scared enough to go along with this one either.

Seriously it’s a great article.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

mimi's picture

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lotlizard's picture

of a Stuxnet-type secret joint project somewhere along the line.

What’s hardly a secret is that the Axis of Chaos — the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia — has already been waging war on Iran for a long time now, using any handy covert or clandestine channel.

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is more likely to be the truth than what remains uncertain.

The truth is always inconvenient for those who manipulate public opinion for fun, profit and world domination.

A rare moment of agency honesty shared in the White House forty years ago, and still apparently the primary metric of success for all 16 18 of our clandestine “intelligence” agencies:

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, CIA Director (first staff meeting, 1981)

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

by the US government? About 113 in the US alone. This is from 2007.

And why again?

In sum, the costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward today under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents. What's more, where once the use of germ warfare was an isolated happenstance -- such as when an English general in 1767 gave smallpox-laced blankets to the Indians that decimated their tribes -- research in this grim area today suggests it has been elevated to an instrument of national policy. And this program, involving some of the world's deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH's own rules. Why?

https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/over-100-us-labs-secretly-carrying...

.

And then there are the laboratory's in other countries (more recent)...

.

https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/pentagon-biological-weapons-program-...

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Dawn's Meta's picture

@QMS I will stop. But....

Late 1997 onwards, I came down suddenly with a body-wide pain syndrome, coupled with eventually severe allergies, all new to me, previously healthy and strong.

Somewhere along the line after a Fibromyalgia/ME/Chronic fatigue diagnosis an out-of-state doctor diagnosed Borreliosis (Lyme) and other co-infections. After several years of many types of anti biotics and other anti microbials, Mr. Meta and I drifted slowly towards natural therapies and focused on inflammation.

We have come to believe that like Epstien Barr, Herpes, Shingles and many other persistent microbes, L. Borreliosis may be in most of us dormant when our immune systems are not overwhelmed by toxins and other new chemicals that tip our bodies into a cascade of illness.

Dr. Bruce Patterson has confirmed that there may be a unifying inflammation thesis which he is currently applying to Long Haul COVID and post vaccine inflammation. He has developed tests and with others like the FLCCC has recommended a recovery protocol. He working with patients and having great success.

[video:https://youtu.be/JwjJs5ZHKJI]

What does this have to do with the lab leak theory? Lots.

We had dismissed a lab leak for Bb (Borrelia burgdorferi) from Fort Detrick because almost simultaneously the Lyme, Connecticut infections emerged while quietly on the West Coast a sub species (?) was showing up and infecting people broadly across the West with a lot less fanfare and much more resistance in the physician groups.

We could not figure out how this could occur if the vectors were rodents and arachnids of different species. So we carried on, and greatly improved our health through work on inflammation and diet.

Now comes an interview about a book written about bio weapons research carried on at not only Fort Detrick but other US and foreign labs on using ticks, mosquitos and other insects to carry infections into populations the US was fighting or interested in potential conflict with.

Kris Newby, author of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons

Escape of infected birds, insects, and pathogens apparently are not uncommon.

Then there’s a very small handful of academic researchers who had a monopoly on all the grants. There’s 12 guys and they’re not in the same university. They don’t have an org chart, but there is an invisible org chart there. You can see the connections, if you start looking at who publishes with whom and then I realized how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant system could be rigged, because there are these, like, 30-person grant review groups. And usually of these 30 grant review groups, two people do the detailed reviews of the grants. They can’t be at the same university as the person filing for the grant. But if you have this invisible organization, you can put your sentries on that and they can blackball your competition and only give you the grants. And same with journal reviews. I did a huge spreadsheet of the 60 high impact medical journals that would publish things about Lyme disease. And this cartel actually had sentries on those article review committees, on all of them, except for two, which is Science and Nature, who have staff reviewers. So it was an invisible cabal.

One of my doctors was a highly respected doctor back East who published papers regularly. Mr. Meta was hired as research assistant and worked on BMJ articles. He got into a verbal fist fight with one of the prominent doctor/researchers when he questioned simple math problems in the statistics. The doctor's reaction went directly to ad homs. It was truly a learning experience. How to get a good paper written an accepted; how to get a bogus paper removed. Sigh.

Then another thing happened. Another indie filmmaker went to talk to the discoverer of Lyme disease, Willy Burgdorfer, and he told him in this interview that he thought the outbreak of tick-borne diseases in Lyme, Connecticut was due to a biological weapons experiment gone wrong. He wouldn’t give any details, but you could tell from the video interview that — I thought he was telling the truth.

Using FOIA, interviewing Willy Burgdorfer not long before he died, and other people who were looking for the truth of what was going on, Kris Newby was able to piece together what had been happening.

The thing that was new that the book brought out was the extent of the tick-borne weapons program. And also that we actually dropped infected ticks on Cuba and that we released hundreds of thousands of Lone Star ticks and other ticks in coastal Virginia, made them radioactive so that we could track them over months and years to see how far they would spread if we were to drop them on the Soviet Union.

We went to many physicians' conferences during this time, looking at the latest information on the way Bb works in humans and other living creatures. At one of the conferences we met the producer of the beautiful film "Under Our Skin" which Kris Newby was working on.

Kris has really put the final answer out there for us to internalize and move on from.

The odd coincidence of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and groups working on origins, causes of the disease states, treatments and solutions has made this all too familiar to us.

I no longer doubt that the US could have and would have unleashed or accidentally released a miserable illness on the planet.

I would like to add something which was at the end of a thread in an essay by Tall Bald and Ugly: Try This On

A doctor wrote an essay.
At first I did not like the doctor writing, but as I read carefully through his statement, the questions and possibilities he poses are what should be asked by all of us.

Dr. Kendrick - UK

Embedded within the essay is another excellent link which leads to the European death rates plotted against the normal expected rates for Europe as a whole and for member states with a few exceptions. It is interactive and goes back to late 2016.

Total European Death Rates

I do wonder whether income levels have anything to do with the difference in outcomes. As CB has pointed out, the differences between England and Northern Ireland could be attributed to age cohorts.

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A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.

Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.

Pluto's Republic's picture

@Dawn's Meta

You may find Dilyana Gaytandzhieva's blog, which focuses largely on US bio-labs abroad, unregulated. The insects are a big deal.

https://dilyana.bg

http://dilyana.bg/the-pentagon-bio-weapons/

http://dilyana.bg/project-g-2101-pentagon-biolab-discovered-mers-and-sar...

https://dilyana.bg/tag/biolaboratories/

I recognize many of your notes in my own research.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Lookout's picture

...it is a handy reason to start a war or excuse our aggression. (despite US funding for the research). Tit for tat ensues with all this.

China has suggested Sars-CoV-2 was developed at Ft Detrick

Conspiracy theory linking the origin of coronavirus to the US was reignited after a Chinese government official claimed that the virus was developed in an Army biolab based at Fort Detrick. Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, made the startling revelation in response to the US state department claims of having new evidence that proves Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
...Hua said: "I'd like to stress that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States, and respond to the concerns from the international community with real actions."

https://www.ibtimes.sg/was-coronavirus-developed-fort-detrick-military-l...

War and more war. What an insane system.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Azazello's picture

Bio labs are like oil pipelines, they always leak.
I'm going with lab-leak as the most likely.
The "intelligence community" can't decide which origin theory they want us to believe.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

Bisbonian's picture

@Azazello "lab leak" of something engineered...

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

It was a bioweapon.

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ggersh's picture

a feature and not a (bug) here in the good ol us of a

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gmo-mosquitoes-released-in-f...

‘Dark Moment in History’ as GMO Mosquitoes Released in Florida

Environmentalists said the release of up to a billion GMO mosquitoes over a two-year period is about maximizing profits for biotech giant Oxitec, not about the pressing need to address mosquito-borne diseases.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

earthling1's picture

turn it 180° and you will find the truth.
They are habitual liars.
Their most favorite M.O. is "plausible deniability".
Question: How many "plausible deniabilities" does it take to expose a monsterously evil cabal?

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

the Covid19 virus was a naturally occuring phenomenon, our sick deep state doesn't want anyone looking at its biological weapons research, especially if it's happening overseas, especially if it's happening in countries they tell us are our mortal enemies.

Biological weapons research is illegal under U.S. law as well as under international law. When Bruce Ivins was named the anthrax terrorist, it was revealed that over 400 private contractors had access to the anthrax strain used in the attack. All of those contractors, except Ivins, who was a researcher at Fort Detrick, were somehow eliminated from the investigation.

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enhydra lutris's picture

in one of Saddam Hussein's mobile bio-weapons labs (aka mobile anthrax labs) that was abandoned once we invaded Iraq. It was then accidentally released during one of centcom's frequent firefights with "Iranian backed militias" along the Iran/Syria border and accidentally spread both by US spooks and assorted foreign war correspondents.

This could, of course, be snark. If I suddenly die in a mysterious accident, or by novichok, you will know the answer.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

CB's picture

@enhydra lutris
were secretly shipped to Syria where the US military has been actively searching for them to this very day. They are going to remain until they have accounted for each and every vial. The American soldiers have been issued the following intelligence report so they know what to look for.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@CB

missed a couple from day one, which are the one's MEK retrieved and used to create Covid-19.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

Per the illustrious all-knowing dni at ( https://www.dni.gov/index.php/what-we-do/members-of-the-ic )

The U.S. Intelligence Community is composed of the following 18 organizations:

Two independent agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);
Nine Department of Defense elements—the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and intelligence elements of the five DoD services; the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.
Seven elements of other departments and agencies—the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis and U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of National Security Intelligence; the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis

Air Force Intelligence
Army Intelligence
Central Intelligence Agency
Coast Guard Intelligence
Defense Intelligence Agency
Department of Energy
Department of Homeland Security
Department of State
Department of the Treasury
Drug Enforcement Administration
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Marine Corps Intelligence
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
National Security Agency
Navy Intelligence
Space Force Intelligence

that'll tell you all that you need to know

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

@enhydra lutris

to the lab release theory while Treasury is certain only that the functional currency of China is NOT the US dollar. That will be all.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

But my belief is that the origin of the virus was zoonotic (new word I learned). That is, it jumped from some animal to a human. The link below is a discussion among virologists about the intel report, a commentary from Nature on the search for the origin, and a technical overview of what we know, which all points to an animal origin.

Here is the youtube podcast discussing the papers mentioned above:

Articles:

The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review

Origins of SARS-CoV-2: window is closing for key scientific studies

My first real introduction to the origin was by Brent Weinstein who has come out as claiming a lab origin, even denying there is evidence of an animal origin. He claims censorship of the discussion. He offers no proof himself.

So I went and read and listened to experts in the area, and learned more about viruses and the immune system and vaccines. And my conclusion is that the origin was animal. One of the things to note is that China had to cull millions of pigs because of an infection. Pigs are a huge source of protein for the Chinese. So what do people do instead? They go to "wet markets" where there are large selection of wild animals to get their protein. I have heard that that particular market for meat is $60 billion strong. And the first early cases were not too far from the wet markets.

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CB's picture

@MrWebster

Wet markets in China

In China, wet markets are traditional markets that sell fresh meat, produce, and other perishable goods. They are the most prevalent food outlet in urban regions of China but have faced increasing competition from supermarkets....
...
Modernization

Since the 1990s, large cities across China have moved traditional outdoor wet markets to modern indoor facilities. In 1999, all roadside markets in Hangzhou were banned and moved indoors. By 2014, all wet markets in Nanjing were moved indoors.
...
Wildlife markets

The trade of wildlife is not common in China, particularly in large cities,[8] and most wet markets in China do not contain live or wild animals besides fish held in tanks. In the early 1980s, small-scale wildlife farming began under the Chinese economic reform. It began to expand nationwide with government support in the 1990s, but was largely concentrated in the southeastern provinces.

Some poorly-regulated Chinese wet markets provided outlets for the wildlife trade industry that was estimated by the Chinese Academy of Engineering to employ roughly 14 million people and to be worth more than $73 billion in 2016, of which $59 billion was for fur rather than for food or medicinal purposes.
...

China has yet to have a swine flu pandemic unlike the US and EU. It is believed the swine flu originated in the US.

Swine influenza
Swine influenza is an infection caused by any one of several types of swine influenza viruses. Swine influenza virus (SIV) or swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) is any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs.[2] As of 2009, the known SIV strains include influenza C and the subtypes of influenza A known as H1N1, H1N2, H2N1, H3N1, H3N2, and H2N3.
...
H1N1 virus pandemic history
A 2008 study discussed the evolutionary origin of the flu strain of swine origin (S-OIV)

According to this study, the phylogenetic origin of the flu virus that caused the 2009 pandemics can be traced before 1918. Around 1918, the ancestral virus, of avian origin, crossed the species boundaries and infected humans as human H1N1. The same phenomenon took place soon after in America, where the human virus infected pigs; it led to the emergence of the H1N1 swine strain, which later became known as swine flu. Genetic coding of H1N1 shows it is a combination of segments of four influenza viruses forming a novel strain:

North American Swine (30.6%) – pig origin
North American Avian (34.4%) – bird origin
Human influenza strain (17.5%)
Euroasian swine (17.5%) – Pig origin
...

China has a similar consumption of pork per capita as Europe.

Which Country Eats the Most Pork?

While Americans are in love with beef in all its delicious forms, pork is the most popular meat in the world. When put into a percentage of shares consumed per country, pork is the leader at 40.4%. Chicken comes in second at 32.4%, followed by beef at 21.8%. The following per capita consumption of pork (in pounds) by country might surprise you:

Per Capita Consumption of Pork in Pounds

Serbia – 115 lbs.
Montenegro – 102.9 lbs.
European Union – 88.9 lbs.
China – 88.1 lbs.
Taiwan – 87.1 lbs.
South Korea – 82.9 lbs.
Belarus – 78.5 lbs.
United States – 64.4 lbs.
Vietnam – 62 lbs.
Bahamas – 60.1 lbs.

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@CB Not sure of your point. Are you saying the things I am calling a wet market did not exist in Wuhan (and thus not a source for the virus). Or that they have been changed by the government. From the article below wild and processed animals were sold in various parts of Wuhun, but were then shut down.

This from Nature published June 7, 2021.

Animal sales from Wuhan wet markets immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract
Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. While we caution against the misattribution of COVID-19’s origins, the wild animals on sale in Wuhan suffered poor welfare and hygiene conditions and we detail a range of other zoonotic infections they can potentially vector. Nevertheless, in a precautionary response to COVID-19, China’s Ministries temporarily banned all wildlife trade on 26th Jan 2020 until the COVID-19 pandemic concludes, and permanently banned eating and trading terrestrial wild (non-livestock) animals for food on 24th Feb 2020. These interventions, intended to protect human health, redress previous trading and enforcement inconsistencies, and will have collateral benefits for global biodiversity conservation and animal welfare.

More:

Materials and methods
Serendipitously, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, over the period May 2017–Nov 2019, we were conducting unrelated routine monthly surveys of all 17 wet market shops selling live wild animals for food and pets across Wuhan City

Results
Animal sales from Wuhan’s markets
Across all 17 shops, vendors reported total sales of 36,295 individuals, belonging to 38 terrestrial wild animal species, averaging 1170.81 individuals per month (Standard deviation (SD) = 445.01, n = 31; Table 1). Including species sold by weight inflated this total to 47,381 individuals. Notably, no pangolin or bat species were among these animals for sale.

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CB's picture

@MrWebster

One of the things to note is that China had to cull millions of pigs because of an infection. Pigs are a huge source of protein for the Chinese. So what do people do instead? They go to "wet markets" where there are large selection of wild animals to get their protein.

The sale of exotic wild animals are an insignificant source of meat for the Chinese. Just like it is for Americans who eat bear, alligator, squirrel, armadillos, muskrat and even snake. I was trying to show that the wet markets are not what you are making them out to be. BTW, the report you supplied showed that the majority of these animals were actually sold illegally.

Wuhan has a population of 8.5 million and Hubei has 58 million so the number shown in Table 1 would be minuscule supply of meat for that number of people.

Animal sales from Wuhan wet markets immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic
...
Thirteen of these 17 stores clearly posted the necessary permits from Wuhan Forestry Bureau allowing them to sell legitimate wild animal species (e.g., Siamese Crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis), Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), Common Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) and Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis)) for food; four shops had no such permit. Species names were given in Chinese only, with no clear taxonomic binomial designation. None of the 17 shops posted an origin certificate or quarantine certificate, so all wildlife trade was fundamentally illegal. Notably, vendors freely disclosed a variety of protected species on sale illegally in their shops, therefore they would not benefit from specifically concealing pangolin trade or the trade in any particular species, and so we are confident this list is complete (Table 1).

Pork was never scarce or too costly to force the Chinese to eat wild meat. Because pork holds such an important of the Chinese protein diet, their government has a Strategic Pork Reserve to protect supply and prices.

Yes, China Has a Strategic Pork Reserve

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, we became accustomed to face-masked shoppers, social distancing and one-way aisles at the grocery store. But most shocking was the scene at the supermarket meat case.

Some meat processing plants closed or reduced capacity as workers contracted the virus. Disruptions to the supply chain resulted in shortages and price increases for beef and pork products. Purchase limits on meat and other items were reminiscent of wartime food rationing.
...
The average Chinese person eats roughly 20 more pounds of pork per year than their American counterpart, with China producing over four times more pork than the U.S., or close to half of the world’s supply. Although the size of China’s strategic pork reserve is a tightly held state secret, Beijing calls upon these reserves when supplies run low.

Since August 2018, African swine fever, a highly contagious and deadly virus affecting pigs, has decimated China’s hog population. Millions of pigs, totalling more than 40% of China’s herd, have been killed by the virus or culled in an attempt to contain its spread. To control skyrocketing pork prices, China has tapped into its reserves.

When supplies run high, and prices get too low, the reserve is bolstered by increasing government demand. When supply is low, and prices get high, pork is released or auctioned into the market.

In the wake of African swine fever, this strategic pork reserve is one tool helping stabilize the market and ensure sufficient supply for consumers.
...

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@CB If I understand you correctly, you are saying because of the pig reserves, people did not go to wet markets? Some researchers think it highly likely people did seek out alternative meat sources because of increased prices on pork in specific areas which included Wuhan.

A Guardian article has a little more on it.

Deadly pig disease could have led to Covid spillover to humans, analysis suggests African swine fever led to mass cull of pigs in China and may have increased human-virus contact as people turned to other meat

The dramatic drop in pork supply, after restrictions on movement of pigs and culling led to price rises, escalated demand for alternative sources of meat to be transported nationwide. These sources included wild animals, thus greatly increasing opportunities for human-coronavirus contact, a team of researchers from China and the UK have suggested in a yet to be peer-reviewed analysis.

From the cited study in the Guardian article.

How One Pandemic Led To Another: Asfv, the Disruption Contributing To Sars-Cov-2 Emergence in Wuhan

Severe fluctuations in the pork market prior to December 2019, may have increased the transmission of zoonotic pathogens, including severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronaviruses, from wildlife to humans, wildlife to livestock and non-local animals to local animals. The major production and consumption regions for pork are geographically separated in China. The dramatic shortage of pork following restrictions of pig movement and culling resulted in price increases, leading to alternative sources of meat and unusual animal and meat movements nationwide often involving wildlife and thus greatly increased opportunities for human-Sarbecovirus contacts. Pork prices were particularly high in southern provinces (Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei), where wildlife is farmed on different scales and more frequently consumed. Shandong experienced the biggest losses in pork production (~1.7 million metric tons), which is also the largest mink farming province. Hence, human exposure to SARS-CoV-2 from wildlife or infected animals are more likely to have taken place in 2019, when China was experiencing the worst effects of the ASFV pandemic.

Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

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CB's picture

@MrWebster

If I understand you correctly, you are saying because of the pig reserves, people did not go to wet markets?

No. People in China still go to 'wet markets'. It's traditional. Just like the Chinese fish market in New York City.

The supermarket style as in the US is still not that common in China.

The one in downtown Yuhan was closed for about a month for cleaning. The only other ones that were closed were the 17 that sold "exotic" meats. There are around 450 markets in Wuhan. It's the size of New York City.

The Guardian is a anti-China propaganda mouthpiece for the UK government.

The following is not proof of anything. It even admits that. It's just a hit-piece.

"a team of researchers from China and the UK have suggested in a yet to be peer-reviewed analysis."

The newly published analysis, which implicates ASF as a driver of the spillover of Sars-CoV-2 into humans, presented a probable explanation of what occurred, said Robertson, noting that ASF could have caused a shortage of roughly 40-60% of China’s total pig population, causing massive disruption to the country’s meat industry.

“And so that potentially explains why there’s no direct connection [to the market in previous research], why we’re finding it hard to find the connection,” he said. “Because with that kind of a spillover, you would go to the market and you would expect to find infected animals still – and that’s not happened. And so, there is a puzzle, there’s a sort of a missing link.”

At the moment, the idea that a shortage of pork drove the spillover of Sars-CoV-2 into humans was only a hypothesis, he added. “We’re showing disruption … imagine a wall, it’s just a brick in that wall of evidence. It’s something that we think should be considered in the understanding of what unfolded.

China managed to source hogs from all over the world and kept the price increase to about 40%.

At Smithfield Foods' slaughterhouse, China brings home U.S. bacon
November 5, 2019

SMITHFIELD, Virginia (Reuters) - Smithfield Foods’ slaughterhouse in Virginia used to carve up pork for American sandwiches and holiday dinners. But workers now box up pig carcasses to ship to China, according to employees, local officials and industry sources.

The transformation at the Smithfield, Virginia, plant shows how the global meat industry is adapting to profit from African swine fever, a fatal pig disease that has killed millions of hogs in China and turned the world’s top pork consumer into a major meat importer.
...

I would think there is more substance to the US being the one responsible for the swine virus in China than China being the source of the Covid virus.

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Bisbonian's picture

@CB I knew it.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

CB's picture

@Bisbonian
you can't have any pudding.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXc0h8mTosE]

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CB's picture

@MrWebster
it was Dr Peter Daszak, president of NGO EcoHealth Alliance, who had originally promulgated this theory. You may want to google him.

A good discussion on the origins of Covid-19 is the following report:

The Flying Pangolin

This paper has not been written by a microbiologist or virologist but by a scholar with a background in security politics, military strategy, and history in an attempt to understand the present crisis, which demands knowledge in several disciplines. We know that the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) with its disease COVID-19 is very contagious. Many people have died from it, but there is a disagreement about its mortality rate, the measures used, the vaccines, and about the reliability of the figures for several countries. What we know, however, is that this pandemic totally has dominated the media coverage in the West. In Part 1, I will discuss what COVID-19 is, whether it is a result of just a natural process or not, and I will discuss US policy and thinking about biological warfare. In Part 2, I will discuss the spread of the virus, its likely origin, pandemic simulations, and possible explanations.
...

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snoopydawg's picture

@MrWebster

and the virus was then transferred to Wuhan to be studied, but it is not only found in bats. Many zoos have been vaccinating their big cats and it is also found in other animals and that is why some scientists are saying that even with vaccines corona viruses will not go away. The cold is from that family of viruses and how long have people been working on finding a vaccine for the common cold?

But as Linda said there was different type of virus that hit Iran early and hard. I think Pluto has also mentioned this, but forgive me if I am wrong.

Pluto...little help please.

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Granma's picture

Animals to humans.
There were some reports in international press in mid 2020 that the virus had been found in wastewater in both Italy and Spain, wastewater from early fall 2019. I have looked for follow up on that, but found none. I think it possible the virus was around in Europe before those early identified cases in Wuhan. I can't help wondering if follow up investigation regarding that was deliberately squelched.

I do get why people are so skeptical about it occurring naturally. How can we not be suspicious? But multiple scientists/researchers who specialize in viruses have studied the Covid genome extensively and are as sure as scientists ever are of anything that it occurred via a jump from animals to humans.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Granma

some years before it ‘broke' out in humans. The virus was sent to Wuhan for study and I guess Fauci and his friends were naughty and did gain of function research on it after Obama outlawed it here at home.
But still there isn’t enough talk about that lung disorder/infection around Virginia IIRC that sickened mostly teenagers and was blamed on vaping with contaminated vape. That went away after Covid was discovered.

Here’s an interesting article on vaccines and where we might be heading.

If you peer deeper, you’ll generally find this: The vaccinated remain substantially protected against serious illness or death, but the unvaccinated are entering the hospital and dying at very high rates indeed, as if to compensate. Thus Israel has maintained the same case fatality rate of around 0.7%, before and after mass vaccination. If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now, but they are not. In heavily vaccinated countries, Delta is raging with a rare fury among the unvaccinated, but in lesser-vaccinated countries it is doing nothing unusual. This means that the efficacy statistics are broadly unreliable. The exact reasons don’t really matter: Either the vaccines have the power to change the whole picture, or they don’t.

None of this should surprise us. Vaccines against coronaviruses have been used in animals for decades, and none of them work very well. Generally they begin to fail after a few months. Despite their technical sophistication, our mRNA and vector vaccines against SARS-2 are no different. They had some success when they were first rolled out, but if anything that probably made things worse

https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/vaccine-failure-and-the-way-out?utm_sou...

Countries that haven’t received any vaccines are not seeing Covid rampaging through their countries so take that any way you want. We are seeing more breakthrough infections and some deaths. 3,000 break throughs and 49 deaths here in Utah, but still no breakdowns of age and comorbidities that would be nice to know. And the CDC stopped testing infections in vaccinated people unless they went to the hospital.

One big thing that’s not being discussed is that many hospitals were closed during the epidemic, lots of nurses and doctors were laid off and so were the numbers of ICUs which is driving the overcrowding of hospitals and the staff being fried from working so many case loads. Nurses in California have been complaining about that for a decade or more. Add in the censorship of people and treatments that work and it’s no wonder there is so much unbeliefs around this whole rotten thing.

Plus the rich have added $5.5 trillion to their wallets. Oh yeah one more thing. This is an excellent article on the recent history of flu epidemics. Starting with how the PCR tests were known to give false results. I worked in the hospital when the pertussis epidemic was announced and everyone who worked with patients had to get vaccinated against it. However it wasn’t true and most people just had a bad cold. Whoops.

This article discusses that.

https://doctors4covidethics.org/the-prevailing-corona-nonsense-narrative...

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snoopydawg's picture

@snoopydawg

More proof of that. And here’s Fauci himself talking about ADE and don’t tell me that he didn’t know that the vaccines could cause it. They’ve studied it for years and the animals never did well after being vaccinated and then exposed to the virus.

Why this horrible man is still in charge after all of his F-ups is beyond me.

FYI:

Whitewashing AIDS History

Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic.

In my book, Body Counts, A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, I recount how slow the federal government was in publicizing the use of Bactrim and other sulfa drugs to prevent PCP (the pneumonia that was then the leading killer of people with AIDS) in addition to its long-time and well-known use to treat PCP.

Did Fauci lie to congress about gain of function testing at Wuhan? Seems likely that he did. But that’s okay because it furthers the agenda.

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CB's picture

@snoopydawg
is the one at the Unz Review. SARS-Cov-1 (SARS-2002) was believed to come from a bat with a civet as an intermediate host. SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) is thought to come from a bat with a pangolin as intermediate host. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that this virus was actually engineered.

The Flying Pangolin
Andreas Canetti • June 18, 2021
...
The 2002 SARS-virus appeared first in Guangdong in Southern China. It originated supposedly from a coronavirus of a bat, Rhinolophus sinicus. It had been studied by Li Wendong & Shi Zhengli et.al (Science, October 28, 2005) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[37] A small carnivore, a palm civet (Paguma larvata), was believed to have served as intermediate host to the first human. This had allegedly been a “wild” or natural process with mutations creating SARS-CoV.[38] Alexandre Hassanin wrote in Conservation (March 18, 2020; HAL 12 May 2020) that a genome analysis of the “new coronavirus” (SARS-CoV-2) suggests that it emerged as a combination of two viruses, not just as a mutated virus.[39] The virus RaTG13 using a specific species of a Horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus affinis) as a host was, according to Zhou Peng et.al. (Nature, February 3, 2020) to 96.2 % identical to the SARS-CoV-2,40 but the spike or RBD (the “Receptor Binding Domain”) that makes the virus able to enter a human cell was different. However, the RBD of a virus from a Malaysian Pangolin (Manis javanica) was to 99 % identical to the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 is a recombination of these two viruses.[41]...
...

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zed2's picture

I suspect that if somebody had the intelligence, they would not be one who wanted to join three letter agencies. So they are, like the legislatures, intentionally shutting the people they need out.

I am just now reading a must read book to understand our current world. Mike Dvis's "Late Victorian Holocausts" Topically, its about climate variability and it contains many new revelations about the history of the last several hundred years.

It posits that the ENSO el Nino-Southern Oscillation and governmental mismanagement, mostly by tyhe UK and other European colonial powers was and has been responsible for dozens of global famines up until fairly recently.
Book Title: "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World"
At least one chapter in it is online free to read. reading this book is really essential to understanding this super important aspect of the modern world. Food insecurity and the use of food to reduce population.
No wonder things are so messed up. We've been fed a totally false view of history.

Ouch, the UK and "free market" eek-o-nomics committed more genocide than Hitler!

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zed2's picture

Both SARS and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) shed virus intp the GI tract and feces when COVID inbfected cells die. So it can be caught from feces.

This is why modern water disinfection systems are necessary and why people should not wipe their butt with their hands as they do in many undeveloped countries. (yech) Nor should they defecate in public areas usch as drainage ditches. So basically people need modern and hygienic plumbing systems now that this virus is free in the world. Of course, this is a low priority in captured nations, as Sois primary education.in poor areas (especially for poor girls) The poor don't "matter" Water must be privatized if anybody sells it in a country anywhere at all.

Here is a video that explains how our rulers in washington see it. Public anything is a theft from corporations.

Really. Thats how they see it. Proof below. They also see public jobs here as a bargaining chip, that they can hold out as bait to the belt of authoritarian bargain countries that have millions of young grads, but no jobs. They are so desperate for work they will work for almost nothing. Can our freshly graduated young people, buried in debt, match that deal?

No wonder so many are moving elsewhere.

Its easy to see how the world needs responsible governments that prioritize public health.But now that WTO rules bar the creation of any new public services they are barred by a standstill in US style "negative list" FTAs// Like the TPP they talk about in the video., also TISA, the worst of them all.. so its not only unlikely to happen. They are trying over and over again to make any government activity that improves peoples lives that competes with any corporation FTA-illegal. No matter what or who you vote for you cant win. They have decided it.

if you want the powerful US to trade with you.

Frankly the rich just dont care. They know that as jobs are traded away and automated the starving millions will look to them. Well they have some news for us. Buy or Die. Your life is are now valued by how much you spend. How much you make them rich.

They like having "reasons" to rationalize treating the poor badly.For trading millions of jobs away as they are planning., Alan Blinder, Princeton economist in his first relevant paper predicted 24% - but he left out the biggest potential area, the target of GATS, public jobs. Oops. No worries. A newer study says we could lose 50% of our jobs. We're paid too much they say. Its "like throwing trillions of dollars away on the sidewalk".

We have to be fair to the poor countries! Who can argue with that. Plus the poorest countries have the lowest wages in the world. The new New Deal will be for them.

Killing two birds at the same time it will also push wages in dozens of fielods way way down. Thats its intent. Trade is the latest excuse to destroy poor peoples lives. . Trade deals are not helping the poor. Ha. Thats the biggest lie. So called FTAs are a twisted sham that threatens to push us back into barbarism. All so corporations property wont be "devalued". By "state owned enterprises"

In the linked Video former USTR Michael Froman tells us why we cant have public healthcare explicitly at 10:27. Its because we're fighting hard against state owned enterprises of all kinds.;

Thats's not negotiable to the cult that rules us.

its unfair to their cronies to give our corporations competition thats subsidized by governments even when healthcare costs are so high its causing (voluntarily) eople to try to get out of moving ambiulances.. A Genocide thats killing millions of people. In the past many cities had public services that competed with corporate entities and received generous subsidies. Now they all have to go. These subsidies also paid for schools for poor children, gave the destitute healthcare they would otherwise have to pay huge sums for.It was a different world.

Well, we stopped that. Jan 1, 1995.

"State owned enterprises" even ones that are much beloved like the UK's NHS, the US's Social Security etc. Protecting corporations is not negotiable. If you don't like being poor, get rich! You can function as an example of what being poor does to people. its a life or death matter.

New Health care must be supplied on a commercial basis, due to GATS Article I:3 - Only pre-existing services can be kept in many 163 of WTO countries now, including the US. If we stand for anything, its that.
thanks to Bill Clinton signing us into the WTO by signing the URAA on December 8, 1995. Now financial services companies literally rule the world.

Thats what they are saying here. Buy or die. Oh, also since then its been forbidden. Lots of politician's have been lying. Hiding what they did. Here in this video at 10:27, theres proof.

State owned enterprises cant give people a better deal than any corporations they compete with. They lied, we died.We were conned plain and simple. And they are still lying to our desperate people. Help is on the way! There is no expiration date. If there was what would be the point of trade deals, people could just vote whatever they wanted. "Majoritarianism" Neoliberals have incredibly odious contempt for the common people's needs and wishes.

This is the rules based trading system. Or genocidal system.

Also they can only serve those who are forbidden by circumstances from buying the for profit (Minimal trade restrictiveness they call it) service. Say if there is literally zero chance they could afford it or were stopped by pre-existing conditions. Whatever the situation was in 1998, thats what we promised to preserve. That was a long time before the ACA, BTW. So it will likely have to go.; Profit is king. Get ready. Wonder how they will explain this? Will we have another war? Or terrorism? Please all of you, open up your eyes.

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zed2's picture

Most of the people who have died from Covid have nothing to do with the US OR China. Especially not now.

Yes, forensics are important. As we can see with the case of the WTC Building 7, which collapsed into itself just perfectly spontaneously, it seems.

Ouch.

As we can see, this is the modern world and the fact is lots of countries and even maliciously evil people can develop all sorts of lethal weapons that could kill lots of innocent uninvolved people and disrupt the businesses of the rich. Thats just the way it is. We have to do the best we can to avoid creating a world where people become so alienated that they could even conceive doing anything like that.

We need to stop being so --- aggressive to others.

Because violence is a sickness. Greed for power is a sickness. They should spend less money on their blame game and instead, try to make this a world where nobody is very very poor or very very rich to the exclusion of others. Or resign, if they cant handle it. Now.

Wait a second, isnt wealth concentrating very quickly? Yes it is its copncentrating expoentially fast.

What does that mean? It means that not so far in the future, eventuially one person will own everything and others will own nothing. If current trends continue. But lets not go too far off track.; What about now?

Shame on them for not making vaccines free and available to everybody who needs them. They are also responsible for the death of 30- million from HIV in the 1990s. when we already had drugs that cured it. They cost literally pennies to make but we let our drug companies get away with murder.

Yusef Hamied was a real hero for exposing how shameful they were. Watch the video. You wont be sorry you did.

What do you all think about this? It won a film award at Sundance a few years ago. We cant bring back 30 million people, many of them children, though, unfortunately. We muyst not repeat our mistakes. Biden are yuou planning to do that? Make all life saving medicines free .

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