- Chinese scientists published paper saying the market doesn’t even sell the bats
- Wuhan Institute of Virology believed to be the ‘only plausible source’ of the virus
- Index case believed to be a female employee of the BSL-4 lab – now disappeared
- Cell phone data analysis allegedly shows the lab suddenly shut down in October
- Medical and scientific community increasingly suspicious of the Wuhan lab
- Inserted sequence of nucleotides in the RNA strand ‘could not be a mutation
- Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
By Alison Bevege For Daily Mail Australia
A respected author and China expert claims bombshell evidence suggests coronavirus must have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory – not from wildlife wet markets.
‘The argument that the coronavirus emerged from the South China Seafood market just no longer stacks up,’ Professor Clive Hamilton told Sky News on Sunday night.
Professor Hamilton said the earliest cases of COVID-19 were in people who had no contact with the Wuhan wet market, which was first blamed for the outbreak.
‘This has been demonstrated by top quality studies,’ he said.
‘So the idea that it originated in December sometime, usually late December, in this market, simply doesn’t stack up.
‘The only other plausible explanation was that it was a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
The hypothesis came from Chinese scientists themselves and was all over the internet before disappearing, Professor Hamilton said.
Internet uses all over China had even searched for the woman thought to be patient zero – who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and ‘seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet’, he said.
Scientists had previously believed the virus jumped from bats to an unidentified intermediary species before infecting humans at the Wuhan wet market where wild animals are kept in cages and slaughtered for meat.
Published: 13:10 EDT, 10 May 2020 | Updated: 13:21 EDT, 10 May 2020
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Bat soup (pictured) is a delicacy in China. It was first thought the coronavirus jumped from a bat to an unknown intermediary and then to humans at a Wuhan wet market. Scientists now doubt this is true, and the species of bat that carries the virus were not even sold at the market
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The Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) is a biosecurity level four laboratory which researched bat coronaviruses not far from the wet market. Scientists think it increasingly likely the virus leaked from here, possibly by an infected staff member
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The location of the BSL-4 laboratory as seen from the air
The wet market is located not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the only level four biosecurity laboratory lab in China.
The lab researched a range of bat coronaviruses including by engineering them, Professor Hamilton said.
‘The potential is there for this extremely lethal virus to have escaped in some way.’
CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 23,370
Victoria: 17,027
New South Wales: 3,768
Queensland: 1,091
Western Australia: 646
South Australia: 462
Tasmania: 230
Australian Capital Territory: 113
Northern Territory: 33
TOTAL CASES: 23,370
CURRENT ACTIVE CASES: 7766
DEATHS: 421
Last updated: 1am, 18 August, 2020
Professor Hamilton, a long-time critic of Beijing, said two Chinese scientists had written a highly regarded paper saying the coronavirus came from a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘There’s a very plausible hypothesis here that someone became infected in the laboratory, walked out and started infecting other people in Wuhan,’ he said.
The short paper from February 6 was written by scientists Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, both from Wuhan universities, and was called ‘The possible origins of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus’.
The paper noted the bats that carry the suspected virus live in habitat 900km from the seafood market, the bats are not eaten by Wuhan residents, and that ‘no bat was traded in the market’.
Many scientific and medical professionals are also becoming sceptical of the first Wuhan wet market explanation.
UK-based medical teacher Dr John Campbell, who provides daily evidence-based updates on the coronavirus pandemic on YouTube, said there doesn’t seem to have been an intermediary species between bats and humans after all.
‘People thought it was pangolins at first but that doesn’t seem to be bearing out,’ he said on May 1.
Dr Campbell noted it was a large coincidence that the pandemic originated so close to the Wuhan Virology Institute and said scientists may have been conducting animal research on the coronavirus and one of the lab workers may have sold some animals to the nearby Wuhan wet market.
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Professor Clive Hamilton said the only plausible explanation is that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab. The woman he believes to be ‘patient zero’ worked there – and has disappeared
US-based pathologist Chris Martenson said a suspicious sequence of nucleotides in the RNA coding of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus appear to have been inserted as they do not occur in any of the close or even distantly related viruses.
Even more suspicious, the nucleotide sequence appears right at a point in the RNA sequence called a furin cleavage site, a place where the enzyme furin can precisely cut proteins, he said.
‘None of the closest (viral) or even distant relatives have this site,’ he said in a YouTube analysis.
‘Those that do only have 40 percent of the same genome.’
Dr Martenson explained on his Peak Prosperity YouTube channel that the insert is not likely to be the result of a natural mutation as mutations usually change by one random nucleotide at a time, not the sudden appearance of a whole new sequence.
An analysis of private cellphone location data has also allegedly shown that the Wuhan Institute of Virology shut down from October 7 to October 24, and this may indicate a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between October 6 and October 11.
US spy agencies are reviewing the document.
AMBASSADOR’S ECONOMIC THREAT TO AUSTRALIA
In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Ambassador Cheng slammed Australia’s push for a global inquiry as ‘political’ and warned Chinese consumers could boycott the country.
Answering a question about whether China could boycott Australian iron ore or gas, Mr Cheng instead focused on China’s contribution to Australia’s agriculture, tourism and education sectors.
Mr Cheng said: ‘I think if the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think why we should go to such a country while it’s not so friendly to China.
‘The tourists may have second thoughts. Maybe the parents of the students would also think whether this place, which they find is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to.
‘So it’s up to the public, the people to decide. And also, maybe the ordinary people will think why they should drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef.’
China has been accused of covering up the severity of the pandemic after it started, costing the world vital weeks of preparation time.
China’s President Xi Jinping knew about the coronavirus on the 7th of January yet China only shut down the epicentre of the outbreak, Hubei province, on the 23rd of January, after five million people had left to travel through China and the world, spreading the virus.
Australia has called for the World Health Organization (WHO) to support an independent review into how the coronavirus started and spread, and has been lobbying world leaders.
This has angered China which is conducting its own investigation through the Chinese Communist Party, which it says should be enough.
China hit back through its diplomats, with a perceived threat to cut off trade.
Professor Hamilton, who wrote a book last year about growing Chinese political control of Australia called Silent Invasion: How China is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, said the truth matters.
‘Prevention of a similar catastrophe depends on it,’ he wrote in The Age newspaper on May 9.
‘Beijing does not want the truth to be known, going so far as to delete from a European Union opinion piece words noting that the outbreak originated in China.’
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A private analysis of cellphone data is said to show the Wuhan Institute of Virology shut down in October, possibly for a ‘hazardous incident’. Spy agencies are now reviewing the document
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Chinese Ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye was perceived to have threatened to cut off Australian exports to China as the Middle Kingdom voiced its displeasure over Australia’s requests for an independent international investigation
Worryingly, Professor Hamilton said Chinese scientists with military ties had now infiltrated Australia’s largest universities.
‘Australian universities have been doing a lot of covering up, they’ve very embarrassed about this and won’t own up to it,’ he said.
Professor Hamilton said some of the research scientists had military rank in the People’s Liberation Army and were welcomed by Australian universities even after their connections to the PLA or PLA-linked universities in China were pointed out.
Australia’s coronavirus tally rose by 12 to 6,939 cases nationwide on Sunday.
Worldwide confirmed cases soared past 4.1 million with 280,564 dead, 2,388,352 sick and 1,445,980 recovered, according to the Worldometers website which tracks coronavirus statistics.
The US continued to have the largest number of cases at 1,347,318 with 80,040 dead from the disease which has been recently found to cause a clotting disorder in the blood.
Bombshell ‘Five Eyes’ Western intelligence dossier claims China lied about coronavirus
China lied about the human-to-human transmission of coronavirus, made whistleblowers disappear and refused to help nations develop a vaccine, a leaked intelligence dossier reveals.
The 15-page document drawn up by the Five Eyes security alliance brands Beijing’s secrecy over the pandemic an ‘assault on international transparency’ and points to cover-up tactics deployed by the regime.
It claims that the Chinese government silenced its most vocal critics and scrubbed any online scepticism about its handling of the health emergency from the internet.
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A staff member is picture carrying out nucleic acid testing work at a novel coronavirus detection lab in Wuhan on February 22
China has roundly come under fire for suppressing the scale of its early outbreak which did not afford other nations time to react before the disease hit their shores.
Five Eyes – the pooling of intelligence by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – laid bare its scathing assessment of the Xi Jinping administration in a memo obtained by the Australian Saturday Telegraph.
The smoking gun file claims to have found evidence the virus spawned in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, close to the wet market China says it came from and unearths ‘risky’ research on bat-related diseases stretching back years.
It describes how Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease.
China’s alleged actions involved ‘destroying’ laboratory samples, bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of ‘silent carriers’ of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries.
The secrecy has fanned a clamour in Five Eyes nations for Western governments to come down hard on Beijing when the pandemic eventually passes.
Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline that ‘at the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China’.