Did China Conceal Covid's Origin?

For the record. One more time.

This post is free. I urge you to keep a copy and forward it to interested friends.

In the beginning

Though the origin of Covid remains an open question, our media unanimously insist that Beijing concealed its origin in China. Even Nature, the pre-eminent (and heavily politicized ) journal of science, persists with this narrative, as this article’s date shows:

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In reality, Beijing not only reported its existence promptly, but opened its laboratories and hospitals to an international team of scientific investigators. Subsequently, many scientific papers have showed that the virus was in Italy and the United States long before it reached China.

In March 2020, Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (of which the CDC is one department), opined that the Coronavirus “might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak”. Weeks later, a British-German team led by Cambridge University’s evolutionary virologist Peter Forster, supported Dr. Collins’ hypothesis by publishing a phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and reconstructing its early evolutionary paths in humans.

By analyzing the first 160 complete virus genomes to be sequenced from human patients, collected from across the world between 24 December 2019–4 March 2020, Professor Peter Forster’s team mapped the early spread of the virus through viral lineages created by its mutations. Their data revealed three variants, A, B, and C. Versions of Type A, ‘the original human virus genome’ were not predominant in Wuhan, they said, but mutated versions of ‘A’ were found in the USA and Australia, while Wuhan’s major virus type, ‘B’, was prevalent in patients across East Asia.

Europe?

On November 11, 2020, an Italian paper provided dated evidence that Covid-19 was circulating in Europe no later than September, 2019, which supports the popular idea that the infections came from Italy’s military athletes who may have carried the virus to Wuhan.

The diagram in Table 1, below, illustrates the temporal variation in positive samples from September 2019 to February 2020. Notably, two peaks of positivity for anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD antibodies were visible: the first one started at the end of September, reaching 18% and 17% of IgM-positive cases in the second and third weeks of October, respectively. A second occurred in February 2020, with a peak of over 30% of IgM-positive cases in the second week. Out of this cluster of 16 positive samples, 11 (68.7%) originated in Lombardy:

The Italian team found that four cases from the first week of October were positive for antibodies neutralizing the virus, meaning they became infected in September. Said co-author Giovanni Apolone, “People with no symptoms not only were positive after the serological tests but had also antibodies able to kill the virus. It means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for long and with a low rate of lethality not because it is disappearing, but only to surge again”. Retrospective analyses of Spanish and French sewage also suggest that the virus was present in Europe in late 2019.

USA?

A CDC team tested archived samples of 7,389 routine blood donations collected in nine states by the American Red Cross between December 13, 2019–January 17, 2020. They analyzed them for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. In Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020, the team of twenty-three CDC scientists wrote:

Of the 7,389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor binding domain/Ace2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all nine states.

They summarized their findings in a spreadsheet excerpted below. I have multiplied their percentages by the US population to produce the number of infected individuals and interpolated them into the highlighted rows:

If Covid’s doubling interval is 2.68 days, then the CDC’s figures suggest that the first US case occurred in early October, 2019. This matches hundreds of reports of Covid symptoms on both coasts and the fact that the world’s first Covid death occurred in Kansas, on Jan. 9, 2020. NPR’s headline, Coronavirus Was In US Weeks Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Says was deliberately misleading, while The New York Times simply ignored the CDC’s findings.

Australian scientists subsequently estimated that US infections were six times the reported rate. MIT researchers’ said it was eight times higher. Instead of 10 daily cases in February, for example, there were 80, which explains why 27% of East Coasters had the virus by early summer and why the US epidemic was uncontained–when just 3.9% of Wuhan residents were infected.

China?

In 2013, after the SARS outbreak, China established an elaborate, nationwide coronavirus monitoring network and began sequencing the genomes of all new SARS-like cases. The CCDC retroactively sequenced all foreign ones, making it unlikely that the virus established itself there much before November 1–which is supported by the fact that the first Chinese case, a ten-year-old boy misdiagnosed with measles, dates to December 1, 2019. China has practiced vector tracing and local lockdowns for over a thousand years, which is why the Black Death and similar plagues that decimated the West. The chart, below, supports that hypothesis that infection arrived late and was suppressed early.

Suspicious silences

At the loud insistence of the US and the EU, China hosted a WHO investigatory Covid team in early 2020. When the WHO then announced its intention to repeat the process in other countries, the United States passed legislation forbidding an investigation, and suppressed all mention of the search for Patient Zero–standard operating procedure for all epidemic investigations.

Though symptoms and CAT scans from so-called ‘vaping deaths1’ during the Summer of 2019 are identical to those in Covid deaths, the CDC refused to share lavage samples with foreign pulmonology teams, an unheard-of breach of professional practice.

Analyst Larry Romanoff suggests more sinister origins: “The incredibly rapid spread of COVID-19 should have aroused enormous suspicions around the world, because natural pandemics don’t act in this fashion without a lot of help. SARS-Cov-1 touched only 24 countries in 8 months while SARS-Cov-2 hit 196 countries in 1 month, and not one of those countries has ever found a patient zero. Why didn’t that set off the alarm bells?”.