[continued from previous message]

That danger was widely discussed at the time the UNC-WIV study came out in November 2015. It was discussed in China too, where the WIV posted a few paragraphs on it in December 2015 under the headline “Will SARS come back?”

Once again, it would not necessarily be evidence of reprehensible activity if the Chinese had a sample of the virus material generated for the 2015 study at their BSL-4 lab, and it was released accidentally. It would probably be negligent, but it wouldn�
��t have to be evidence of fell intent.

That said, there are an awful lot of coincidences piling up. There’s another
one that takes us on a detour into Usual-Suspect Land.

The French Connection

Research the history of the Wuhan BSL-4 and WuXi, and you run immediately into the French biotech firm Mérieux, which operates as the Institut Mérieux, the parent holding company, through a group of subsidiaries like bioMérieux and Mérieux Dé
veloppement. It’s a family company in operation since 1897, and currently headed by 82-year-old patriarch Alain Mérieux.
Alain Mérieux gives an interview at an industry conference in 2015. YouTube video

The subsidiary bioMérieux was able to act with gratifying swiftness in the current coronavirus crisis to come out on 11 March with the announcement of a diagnostic test for COVID-19. The test is promoted as delivering results in 45
minutes.

The firm also mentioned proudly that it is working with the U.S. Department of Defense to field a fully-automated pneumonia panel test “based on BIOFIRE FILM ARRAY technology.” Mérieux in fact has a history of working with DOD through the Pentagon�
�s Critical Reagents Program.

So it should probably come as no surprise that Mérieux basically built the Wuhan BSL-4 for China, a contribution the Chinese have recognized in multiple ways. Most recently, Alain Mérieux received the Chinese Reform Friendship Award from Xi Jinping in
2018, partly in recognition of these particulars:

Alain Mérieux also served as Co-President of the Franco-Chinese Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases, alongside the Minister of Health, Professor Chen Zhu. In this role, Mr. Mérieux was instrumental in creating the high-security P4 Laboratory
that opened in Wuhan in 2014.

In light of these details, it must be even less surprising that Mérieux is a donor to the Clinton Foundation, and a participant in Clinton Global Initiative
projects. Mérieux joined the Clinton Foundation effort in Haiti with an emphasis on improving
the detection and treatment of tuberculosis, and participates in the HIV/AIDS initiative, with a Mérieux research partner, Dr. Jean-William Pape, being awarded the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2010 for his AIDS research in Haiti.

Interestingly, in 2016, Mérieux and WuXi invested jointly in Twist Bioscience,
a San Francisco company that specializes in synthetic DNA. Synthesizing virus DNA for research purposes is a fast-growing field, so this, too, should come as
no surprise,
just as it isn’t surprising Twist Bioscience stepped quickly to the plate in the coronavirus crisis offering its wares for immediate shipment (SKU numbers conveniently included on the brochure-style listing page). (If you noticed at the Technology
Review article that the UNC researcher cited is the same lead researcher from the 2015 UNC-WIV study, congratulations on being awake.)
Image: YouTube screen grab via Clinton Global Initiative

And yet again, none of this is nefarious, per se. But there are reasons to take a step back and contemplate that it’s remarkable that it isn’t remarkable. What kind of world do we live in, where bats carry nasty viruses that may sometimes become
infectious and deadly to humans, and humans do research that cultivates viruses
to potentially be especially infectious and deadly to humans, and when a virus erupts from bats that is unusually infectious and under some conditions alarmingly deadly to
humans, we assume away the human research line of effort, and invest our indignation in the more passive theory that the bats done it?

I would suggest that that world exists in our heads, and it is ours to choose how short a shrift we give to the human-intervention possibility. No circumstances dictate, a priori, one assumption or the other.

Thoughtful observers have offered reasons to at least give a second look to what China may have been doing over the last few years. This is by no means a comprehensive list; it’s just a few things I’ve come across since the coronavirus crisis ramped
up.

Globe-hopping with viruses

One is the peculiar propensity of Chinese scientists to travel to and from North America with containers of virus material in their luggage. Considering the extreme bio-hazard potentially posed by such materials, even one incident ought to really, well,
frost our cookies. But there’s been more than one. (See here as well.)
U.S. Customs officer at work. USCBP image

In Canada, meanwhile, a 2018 investigation at a Level-4 lab resulted in the removal of two Chinese researchers over an unelaborated “policy issue,” apparently related to the viruses the scientists dealt with (which included coronaviruses as well as
Ebola).

At a time when a virus has propagated to the globe out of China, and Chinese authorities spent weeks demonstrably lying about it, and to this day refuse to deal transparently and in good faith even with their own people, it’s hardly paranoid to recall
these incidents with special concern.

Nor is it overanalyzing the situation to consider them, as we assess the meaning of the other circumstances evident from the record.

Exploiting a crisis

In Australia, a Chinese company that in 2015 (that year again) bought a hospital group representing 8,000 beds is threatening to close all its doors across the country, unless the government provides a sufficient amount of financial assistance.

Australians basically see this as extortion. Granting that it’s a tough proposition for hospitals right now, which are bleeding money while elective and non-urgent procedures are postponed, it’s very informative that the Chinese owner doesn’t see
any value in cultivating goodwill with local patrons. The basic posture of hospitals toward the public is to seek a reputation for reassurance and care – and the Chinese owner in this case appears to be simply abandoning that most ordinary of models.

It seems like a lot to throw away. Unless it reflects an unpleasant reality of
disengagement.

Perhaps it does. Asia Times author Richard Javad Heydarian outlines the ways in which China has been taking advantage of the virus crisis to make assertive moves in the South China Sea, moves that include military drills and ostentatious, well-
advertised offshore drilling for natural gas, in a disputed area of the waterway. Other nations are putting such priorities on hold; China, with some of the greatest domestic devastation from the virus, is not.

And there’s this, which needs no analysis.

CPC has brought an economic boom and led the Chinese people completely out of poverty. It has now successfully controlled the epidemic. We respect the US political system, but when the US govt's work against COVID-19 is poor, don't they fell
embarrassed criticizing the CPC?

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) April 4, 2020

We are justified in wondering if this is all merely about reacting to a crisis.
American Thinker’s William L. Gensert is dubious, essentially asking what China would be doing differently if she were laying the groundwork for one.

He doesn’t lay out a timeline. Reviewing macro trends and more recent events, such as the ejection of U.S. reporters from China, he concludes that we’re seeing signs like the ones before 9/11 in 2001. Given the convergence of conditions, some of
them possibly orchestrated by China, Beijing’s opportunity to wage a war against the United States falls in the window between now and when the American
recovery starts.

I would agree with Gensert that it can’t really wait until after the recovery
begins. Beijing will have burned too many bridges by then, and the window for effectiveness out on a limb, with a jittery region resenting China’s every move, will have
passed.

Indeed, what China does pretty much has to be about delaying or preventing America’s recovery.

The question is really how real the signs are that China has been preparing for
this moment. We can parse away Chinese culpability, if we want to, in the features of the coronavirus story – at least for the moment. We can turn a deaf ear to
possibilities that require more evidence, and assume them onto the ash heap of analysis.

But take a look at this discussion posted by Chinese dissident (and self-exiled
billionaire) Guo Wengui about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Biosafety
Level-4 Lab. The provenance appears to be from a source directly familiar with
the
organization of the lab (i.e., @DTinLAC). Notice how almost everyone connected to the BSL-4 lab (called the “P4” lab in Chinese descriptions) is someone we’ve met here already: senior members of the CCP, the multifarious Mérieux empire, the
players involved in the take-private buyout of WuXi Pharmatech and its AppTec subsidiary in 2015.

I’m not sure what role China played in propagating the COVID-19 coronavirus in the last four or five months. But I have no doubt that taking WuXi private in 2015 was about preparing China, from some standpoint (offensive, defensive, or both), to wage
biological warfare at a time of the CCP’s choosing in the non-distant future.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)