Thread by @forrestmaready

Where did the COVID-19 coronavirus come from?

A lot of speculation about the origins of this outbreak. If you're curious, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. In fact, it's happened many times. And just like now, no one wants to admit the truth... (thread)

New York City, 1916. At this moment in history, the paralysis of polio was largely unknown by most. It had begun to appear more frequently since the late 1890s, but was still rare. Just before the sweltering summer of 1916, residents of Brooklyn began to notice something wrong...

Mothers began to take their infants—mostly boys—to local nursing stations, their bodies limp, unable to move. More and more began to show up, and by June the 7th, it was clear something horrible was happening.

The outbreak spread beyond Brooklyn and into Manhattan. New York had never seen the polio infection spread like this before. But there was something else troubling about the epidemic—it could kill its victims more quickly than they'd ever seen.

Paralysis would start in their lower legs, as it typically did, but would ascend their spinal column, eventually paralyzing the muscles which allowed them to breathe. With iron lungs, or what we now would call "ventilators," years away, many died.

By the time the outbreak subsided, over 2,000 New Yorkers—mostly children—had died. Surrounding areas brought the total to over 6,000. It was unlike anything they had ever seen.

Almost 1500 children were killed by polio in New York City that summer, something which would never be repeated. Ever.

The 1916 polio epidemic quarantines and travel restrictions were extremely severe but seemed to do nothing to stop its spread.

The fact that 1,500 children died of polio in New York City in one summer is an astonishing number. Nothing ever came close to that number again. In 1952, otherwise the worst year of polio and in a much more populous America, just over 3,000 people died in the entire country.

What could have caused such a HUGE spike in polio deaths in New York City that summer in 1916? A spike which would never appear again?

This is where the coronavirus story begins to sound very familiar.

The outbreak appeared to have begun in Brooklyn. Just across the East River, not more than a mile or two away, some very interesting research was going on.

It was at the Rockefeller Institute. They were studying polio. And they were trying to make it more dangerous.

On purpose.

Why would a prestigious research facility in the middle of New York City in 1916 purposefully try to make the poliovirus MORE dangerous?

The same reason researchers in China MAY have been doing it.

(Hint: It wasn't to make a bioweapon).

Many people don't know this, but the poliovirus is not very good at paralyzing. In fact, humans lived peacefully with poliovirus infections for thousands of years without problems.

Children could swim in feces-laced swimming holes & their parents never worried about paralysis.

Something drastic happened in the 1890s which made poliovirus infections more dangerous. I talk about this incredible story in "The Moth in the Iron Lung."
amazon.com/Moth-Iron-Lung…

When researchers first realized that the poliovirus was—under certain conditions—capable of paralysis, naturally they wanted to understand it better.

There was a problem: they could not get it to reliably cause paralysis.

Obviously, they were not studying it in humans, but were using monkeys instead. The scientists could inject what they thought was poliovirus directly into a monkey's skull or spinal cord & would often get nothing.

Each monkey could only be used once in this way. Very expensive.

After time, scientists were able to perfect paralyzing monkeys in this way. But this was an obviously unnatural route of infection. Children were becoming paralyzed without anything being injected directly into their spinal cord.

Now came the danger part.

In 1916, researchers at Rockefeller—just a mile away from the outbreak epicenter, were purposefully trying to make the poliovirus strain more virulent. They WANTED it more powerful. They WANTED it to be able to paralyze more easily so they wouldn't waste so many monkeys.

It is a remarkable coincidence that the ONE place on the entire planet that was purposefully making the poliovirus MORE dangerous just happened to be a mile or so from the epicenter of the worst polio outbreak ever recorded.

Sound familiar?

Here is a hard to find report from Rockefeller's Simon Flexner on the 1916 polio outbreak if you're curious. It is horrifying and fascinating at the same time.

It's large—over 65Mb:
g4059egwo45g982h9g8h.s3.amazonaws.com/1916Epidemic_N…

Purposefully making viruses more "dangerous" is practiced all the time. There's even a term for it—gain-of-function research, or GOFR.

It is what makes studying viruses so dangerous. They're difficult to study to begin with, but by making them more deadly, it gets "easier."

Laboratories which study deadly viruses like COVID-19 have all kinds of safety measures in place. Ideally, even a scientist with malicious intent could not purposefully release the Frankenstein viruses they created. Ideally, they will always remain in the lab.

Ideally.

The origin of coronavirus is interesting because there was another country which was practicing GOFR research—purposefully making COVID-19 more dangerous—before the Wuhan lab ever got a hold of it.

That country was the United States.

In 2014 and 2015, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill were manipulating coronaviruses to try and understand SARS better.

Here is a lengthy and fascinating article about what happened:
web.archive.org/web/2020042201…

While we currently don't know whether China purposefully released this virus as a bioweapon, the research at UNC Chapel Hill may have eventually been conducted in concert with scientists at (or from) the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
web.archive.org/web/2020041800…

In fact, there may have been other scientists from other countries involved in manipulating the coronavirus. Regardless, it would appear that —either through malicious intent or inadvertently—a manipulated coronavirus strain escaped the lab in Wuhan.

So who do we blame?