According to the US Energy Information Administration, China is tripling its capacity to make fuel out of coal, about the most carbon-intensive process anybody can imagine. spectator.co.uk/article/china-…
But for reasons that are not clear, many western environmentalists are mad keen on China, despite its gargantuan appetite for coal, and won’t hear a word against the regime. spectator.co.uk/article/china-…
the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its bat and rodent pathogen database,
with 22,000 specimens and sequences,
offline in the early hours of the morning.
Why? ...
...The explanation that Shi Zhengli gave, that there had been hacking attempts, makes no sense.
Why would there be before the pandemic?
And sharing the data with a secure source overseas to protect against it being altered would render hacking futile...
...The fact sheet describing the database was not taken down but it was edited, on or before 30 December, to change the key words, and alter some terms from "wildlife" to "bat and rodent".
1. Not a bioweapon 2. Chinese officials had no foreknowledge. 3. China 'continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries'. 4. Low confidence that probably not genetic engineering
5. Reports only one 'moderate confidence' assessment: one agency thinks it was a lab leak. FBI? 6. Four 'elements' have 'low confidence' that it was a natural exposure. 7. Three 'elements' unable to decide. 8. Emphasises the need for more information on the early cases.
This declassified assessment therefore solves nothing, adds little but reinforces the need to take both natural-origin and lab-leak theories seriously, to investigate them properly and to act as if both could happen again.
Earlier in the year the same was said about the alpha (Kent) variant, that it was more "virulent".
That was untrue.
Virulent means "harmful", not "infectious".
“The suggestion that the Indian variant is more pathogenic needs to be taken with a big dose of salt. The same was initially suggested for the Kent variant but was later shown not to be true." Prof Ian Jones.
1/ When analysing the actions of Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen and others who insisted on shutting down doubts about the lab leak origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Jan and Feb 2020, it's worth remembering that at that stage it looked likely to be a minor Chinese epidemic.
2/ Almost nobody expected that millions would die, the entire world would be convulsed and therefore that every detailed action by scientists would later come under intense scrutiny.
3/ Thus you might expect to get away with publishing the genome of a bat virus without mentioning its origin, or the fact that you are renaming it without saying so, or the fact that three people died of a mystery viral pneumonia caught at the site.