The World Health Organization has given the Wuhan coronavirus the name “2019-nCoV”, the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.
The virus has spread from the pestiferous epicenter Wuhan city to many countries now. There are a few facts that are disturbing to know.
1. Virology Lab in Wuhan
The current Wuhan coronavirus is linked to viruses in bats. This linkage was reported in 2017 by Professor Shi Zhengli (石正丽) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (www.whiov.ac.cn). WIV is a Key Lab of Special Pathogens under the Chinese Academy of Science.
Her team studied horseshoe bats in Yunnan Province and discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses. They found all the genes necessary to make a SARS coronavirus. (http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Research/Research_Progress/201603/t20160311_160487.html).
These new strains are more similar to the human version of SARS than previously identified bat viruses. Professor Shi’s team found that the strains can already grow in human cells and that the viruses in these bats can transfer to humans.
In January 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology set up a level four (Pathogen Level 4) biosafety lab that is capable of conducting experiments on highly pathogenic microorganisms that can cause fatal diseases. This is China’s first such labs.
It is interesting to note that also on January 2018, Chinese military mapped out two isolates of the genome of the Bat SARs-liked coronavirus and submitted them to GenBank, a genome sequence database based in the U.S., as shown below.
Is there a connection between Professor Shi’s team, the P4 lab, the Chinese military, and the current coronavirus in Wuhan?
The map below shows the locations of Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Huanan Seafood Market where patient zero appeared.
2. Higher Authorities Takeover
In a bizarre move, on 22 January 2019, Wuhan’s Municipal Health Commission issued an official notification on its website that it will no longer be reporting updates on the coronavirus in Wuhan city. This is now to be done at the provincial level.
In China’s political dynamics, this means that some higher authority is now taking over information dissemination on the Wuhan coronavirus spread, dictating what is and is not to be reported.
This is strange, as local authorities know better about the state of the Wuhan coronavirus spread than the provincial authorities, considering that Wuhan hosts the Institute of Virology, which knew about the bat-linked coronavirus two years ago.
3. China’s Serious Underreporting about Deaths from Infectious Diseases
China’s National Health Commission (www.nhc.gov.cn) published reports of the number of infections and deaths resulting from infectious diseases on a monthly basis. For the year 2015, it reported 189,485 cases of influenza-associated infections, resulting in 110 deaths. The following table is tabulated with published data from their official website.
These figures stood in stark contrast with the findings from a journal article published in The Lancet, the world’s leading independent general medical journal. The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal with an impact factor of 53.254 in 2017, ranking it second among the world’s 150 journals in General and Internal Medicine.
The article, entitled “Influenza-associated excess respiratory mortality in China, 2010–15: a population-based study” reported studies conducted by a group of medical practitioners in China, appeared in Volume 4, Issue 9, pages E473-E481 of The Lancet Public Health, dated September 1, 2019.
The article estimated influenza-associated excess respiratory mortality rates between the 2010–11 and 2014–15 seasons for 22 provinces with valid data from China. The study estimated an annual mean of 88,100 influenza-associated excess respiratory deaths occurring in China in the 5 years studied.
Contrast the 88,100 annual deaths in the article with the 110 deaths reported by China for 2015.
China’s one-party, top-down system inculcated a system of politically correct reporting versus truthful reporting. When the central government wants to impress the world about their “successful measures” to curb the spread of infectious diseases, all levels of government reporting have to produce the figures that align.
