"[F]rom..first reports of..outbreak in Wuhan, it took..a nanosecond..to consider..link to..Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in..world, in Galveston, TX, and Chapel Hill, NC, were doing similar research..It’s not a dozen cities..It’s three"
"'If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology,' an unnamed longtime agency official told the magazine. 'Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.'"
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"In 1953 the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick established a program to study the use of arthropods...for spreading anti-personnel BW [bioweapons] agents."
"The advantages of arthropods as BW carriers are these: they inject the agent directly into the body, so that a mask is no protection to a soldier, and they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous."
"'When people in Iran chant 'Neither Gaza nor Lebanon,' they are...rejecting the theocratic system in Iran entirely. In other words, the current crisis isn’t just about bread and jobs, it’s about who decides what Iran stands for."
"The phrase “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran” first gained prominence during the 2009 Green Movement, when hundreds of thousands of people protested a disputed presidential election in Iran."
"It has since appeared in successive major demonstrations, from the 2017-18 economic protests to the 2019 fuel price uprising. It was also prominent during the 2022 'Women, Life, Freedom' movement, sparked by the death of an Iranian-Kurdish woman...following her detention by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a 'proper' hijab."
Catalonia lab was experimenting with African swine fever virus when the first infected boar was found nearby english.elpais.com/international/…
"The laboratory under scrutiny over an alleged leak of the African swine fever virus in the province of Barcelona...had planned at least two experiments with the pathogen on the same days that the first infected wild boar was found just a few hundred meters from the facility"
"The first carcass of an infected wild boar was found on November 28, just a few hundred meters from the CReSA facility, which has been criticized for lacking double fencing and which was undergoing construction work since September 15"
"The Wuhan lab…that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses…and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed…it has done the same…risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses"
"If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear…exercise and accidentally obliterated millions…, you would not expect to find…the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later…they…carried out the very same…exercise...with...fewer safeguards."
"Would you?"
"The Wuhan laboratory that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses at inadequate biosafety levels and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed that it has done the same kind of risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses at low biosafety levels."
"[T]he creation of the HKUJ4r-HZAU-2020-MERS(S) chimera may violate Article I of the Biological Weapons
Convention. This is because it is hard to see protective or peaceful purposes arising from its development, a stipulate of Article I."
"NIAID grant R01AI110964, awarded to Dr Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, funded the creation of pBAC-CMV and, with USAID PREDICT, sampling of isolate 152762 and generation of its RdRp sequence, thereby contributing directly to dangerous Gain of Function work."
"The handling of highly dangerous viruses is once again at the forefront of the biosecurity debate. In Spain, an investigation is currently underway to determine whether the outbreak of African swine fever could have originated in a laboratory. Separately, researchers in China recently reported the reappearance of a bird virus long thought to be extinct – a finding that is sparking discussion among virologists."
"Last week, the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture...launched an investigation to determine whether the virus might have escaped from a laboratory. The CReSA laboratory is a particular focus of the investigation. Genetic analyses...show that the virus does not resemble the variants currently circulating in other European countries, but rather a strain discovered in Georgia in 2007 and used in laboratories"
"Virologist Simon Wain-Hobson...points out that just a few weeks before the incident in November, nine scientists from the nearby IRTA-CReSA facility had published an experiment in which 20 pigs were inoculated with high doses of the very Georgia 2007 virus that is genetically similar to the pathogen found in wild boar."