Pt 2: Logic & Reason

Daszak - The Guardian

Determining the origins and emergence of a pandemic is as messy and complex as studying a plane crash.

Just as an air crash investigator pieces together fragments at a crash site, pinpointing the origins of a new virus is painstakingly difficult  (not so difficult as you're making out Pete - we’ll look at that later) ...and time-consuming (= public money-consuming; to pay for the time consuming) ... and requires logic and reason. (tautology, but agreed).

So using logic and reason, if the plane crashed in Wuhan - wouldn’t you investigate the site of the crash in Wuhan?  Look for the black box?  In this case: WIV’s internationally accessible database on which new viruses are meant to be logged?

As first reported by DRASTIC, that database has been offline since Sep 12 2019, with at least 100 unpublished sequences of bat betacoronaviruses as well as unpublished experimental data from RaTG13 and BtCoV/4991, collected from the Yunan mine event in the spring of 2012.

What’s the logic and reason behind holding an investigation and not looking at that?

According to you, it will exonerate WIV & vindicate your open and transparent advocacy of China.   So why not investigate it?

I know that (origin investigation requires logic and reason) because this is exactly what our organisation, EcoHealth Alliance, does. We work around the world to identify the origins of pandemics, map them and analyse them, and use these results to predict where the next pandemic will likely emerge.

We then target these “hotspots” for enhanced surveillance, capacity-building and risk-reduction programmes to prevent diseases emerging.

Rewind to 2017 BC, EcoAlliance produced their heatmap - lets see how they went with their enhanced surveillance, capacity-building and risk-reduction programmes to prevent diseases emerging.

 

Pic a

Heat maps of predicted relative risk distribution of zoonotic EID (Emerging Infectious Diseases) events. Pic a shows the predicted distribution of new events being observed (weighted model output with current reporting effort)

Most likely areas of new zoonotic crossover events, according to EHA were Europe, the US and Japan. China barely registers.

Here’s a close up of Asia:

We’ve got three hotspots in China - Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Wuhan was not on the radar.  It should have been.  Given WIV was/is housing more than 16 000 bat viruses, it should be coloured blazing red.

Daszak's research partner, Shi Zheng-li (Bat Lady) commented when first told of the outbreak:

I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.

Shi had pegged Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan to be China’s hotspots for a bat to human crossover event.  Her first thoughts were:  Could they have come from our lab?

The bottom-line is:

None of EcoHealth’s scientists (with all their millions in funding) predicted an outbreak in Wuhan. So either their research has been a waste of money - or - there’s another explanation for why it happened in Wuhan - it came from the lab.

The fact that Daszak is still insisting that WIV be excluded from any investigation only serves to heighten suspicion.