356 replies to this topic

[Daniel Cooper]

Plenty of infections in Spain. Europe got hit hard and hit early. A lot of noise about China, but the infection rate was extremely low, as it was throughout SE Asia. Blaming China appears purely political. 

 

But everything I have seen is that the early contact tracing in those European countries went back to Wuhan, not Italy.

 

There are plenty of political forces in this world that would love to shift the blame to somewhere else besides China. For one, it is certain that the scientific establishment in the US that has strong ties to WIV would love nothing more than a plausible story that doesn't include Wuhan.

 

If the epicenter was Italy - then show us the early cases in the US and Europe that trace back to Italy instead of Wuhan.
 

[Turnbuckle]

But everything I have seen is that the early contact tracing in those European countries went back to Wuhan, not Italy.

 

 

 

 

The first documented cases in the US may have been connected with China, but the US was only looking at travelers from China at the time. And while the virus seems to have spread during Wuhan Fashion Week, it's not clear which way it went. Italy to China or China to Italy. The discovery of viruses in blood samples in Italy before Fashion Week suggest it was Italy, and the wide geographic area they came from suggests it was already epidemic.

 

Italy’s first two cases of COVID-19 disease were recorded on January 30, 2020, when two tourists from China tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Rome. The first laboratory-confirmed Italian COVID-19 case was identified in Lombardy on February 20, 2020, in a 38-year-old man who had no history of possible contacts with positive cases in Italy or abroad. . .

 

To test the hypothesis of early circulation of the virus in Italy, we investigated the frequency, timing, and geographic distribution of SARS-CoV-2 exposure in a series of 959 asymptomatic individuals, using proprietary SARS-CoV-2 binding and neutralizing antibodies on the plasma samples repository. . .

 

The first positive sample (IgM-positive) was recorded on September 3 in the Veneto region, followed by a case in Emilia Romagna (September 4), a case in Liguria (September 5), two cases in Lombardy (Milano Province; September 9), and one in Lazio (Roma; September 11). By the end of September, 13 of the 23 (56.5%) positive samples were recorded in Lombardy, three in Veneto, two in Piedmont, and one each in Emilia Romagna, Liguria, Lazio, Campania, and Friuli. A similar time distribution was observed when considering Lombardy alone.

https://journals.sag...300891620974755

 

 

Possibly just a coincidence, but Veneto and Liguria are two regions in Italy that Wikipedia gives with a tradition of eating bats: In 1959 it was reported that "in some places [of Italy], for example in Liguria and Veneto regions, the bats are or were used as food." Six years before the outbreak, Italian researchers found the bats of Northern Italy to be loaded with covid viruses.

 

CoV RNA was detected in seven of 69 faecal samples (10.1%) and in nine of 126 carcasses (7.2%), belonging to four bat species. Most of the CoV-positive samples were detected from Kuhl’s pipistrelle, which was the predominantly sampled bat species in this study. CoVs were also detected from Savi’s pipistrelle (one), common noctule (one), lesser horseshoe bat (four), and Pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus spp.) (one).

 

 

Edited by Turnbuckle, 19 July 2022 - 01:33 PM.

[Daniel Cooper]

The first documented cases in the US may have been connected with China, but the US was only looking at travelers from China at the time. And while the virus seems to have spread during Wuhan Fashion Week, it's not clear which way it went. Italy to China or China to Italy. The discovery of viruses in blood samples in Italy before Fashion Week suggest it was Italy, and the wide geographic area they came from suggests it was already epidemic.
 
 
Possibly just a coincidence, but Veneto and Liguria are two regions in Italy that Wikipedia gives with a tradition of eating bats: [/size]In 1959 it was reported that "in some places [of Italy], for example in Liguria and Veneto regions, the bats are or were used as food." Six years before the outbreak, Italian researchers found the bats of Northern Italy to be loaded with covid viruses.

 
That's not the way contact tracing works.
 
You get patients with an infectious disease, then you ask them where they've been and who they've been around recently. They contact traced people with covid, not people who had come from China.
 
The other explanation for early cases in Italy is that China either did not know when the pandemic started, or they knew but tried to cover it up. Once covid became a thing, a number of countries started looking back at blood samples and sewage samples and found covid earlier than expected. Italy wasn't the only one. 
 
The most genetically similar wild viruses to covid-19 were found in Laos. That article from September 2021 argues that this is evidence for a natural origin of the virus. However, we have subsequently learned that WIV collected specimens from caves in Laos in the revelations by Nicholas Wade. 

[Turnbuckle]

 
That's not the way contact tracing works.
 
You get patients with an infectious disease, then you ask them where they've been and who they've been around recently. They contact traced people with covid, not people who had come from China.
 

 

 

That's the way it works. Plenty of similar symptoms were around, but this guy drew special attention due to his travel history.

 

Given the patient’s travel history, the local and state health departments were immediately notified.

https://www.nejm.org...6/NEJMoa2001191

 

 

So you find what you expected to find due to that bias. Retrospective studies are then needed, and even then it is very difficult to pinpoint the source.

[Daniel Cooper]

What you're suggesting is that during the initial months of the pandemic nobody noticed that a lot of infections were coming from Italy because "they were only looking at China".

 

That seems unlikely to me, but we'll just have to disagree.

 

 

[Mind]

Maybe there is some anecdotal evidence that people ate bats in northern Italy way back in 1959, but that is extremely weak evidence to build a case for the SARS-CoV2 virus to have arisen naturally in Italy.

[Turnbuckle]

Maybe there is some anecdotal evidence that people ate bats in northern Italy way back in 1959, but that is extremely weak evidence to build a case for the SARS-CoV2 virus to have arisen naturally in Italy.

 

 

When you find covid antibodies in blood samples dating back to early September of 2019, that can't be considered weak evidence. If you can't explain that, then you must accept the strong possibility that Italy was the source. Clearly most of the Western world wants it to be China for political reasons. Even here, and I find that sad.

[Daniel Cooper]

 Did Coronavirus Come from Italy? No, But China Loves the Idea

 

 

 

However, Giovanni Apolone, the scientific director of the National Cancer Institute and a co-author of the study, asserted that the study’s data wasn’t trying to alter the timeline of the virus.

 

“These findings simply document that the epidemic in China was not detected in time,” he said during a news conference in Milan on Thursday.

 

 

In another research conducted in May, a genetic study out of England suggested that the novel coronavirus was circulating around the world as early as October.

 

So you're sad that everyone doesn't rally to support your "off the beaten path" theory? Really?

 

 

[Daniel Cooper]

If I'm not mistaken, this is the study that the "Out of Italy" theory hangs it's hat on:
 
Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy

 

The authors of this study believe that sars-cov-2 was circulating months earlier in China than the early December date that the Chinese government has given. They don't believe covid started in Italy.

 

It is simply the case that whenever a pandemic appears to have started, subsequent investigation usually proves that it started months and sometimes years before it was thought to start. In fact, if anyone is bored and cares to look you will find a prediction that I made early on that the virus would have been circulating in humans at least months before the early December date which was the then official timeline. The reasons for this are quite simple - you never catch patient zero. You might catch the 100th or the 1000ths person infected, but never the first one. And why would you? This is a virus that mainly hits older people and has fairly unremarkable lower respiratory symptoms in most cases. So some older people are going to be coming into your hospital with a respiratory infection and some of them are going to die. But, older people are always coming in with respiratory infections and some of them always die. It will take a while before you perceive that people are dying at unusually high rates. Even if there is nothing nefarious going on with the Chinese, their first case in early December was never their real first case. It was simply the first case that they recognized.

 

For some history on pandemics look into the 1918 flu.  Post pandemic studies for the last 100 years have pushed back the start date - some to as early as 1915.

[Turnbuckle]

 They don't believe covid started in Italy.

 

 

 

They have not come to a conclusion, and that is appropriate. Compare that to people here. They are not interested in evidence. Only blame.

[Daniel Cooper]

They have not come to a conclusion, and that is appropriate. Compare that to people here. They are not interested in evidence. Only blame.

 

 

Quote: 

 

However, Giovanni Apolone, the scientific director of the National Cancer Institute and a co-author of the study, asserted that the study’s data wasn’t trying to alter the timeline of the virus.

 

“These findings simply document that the epidemic in China was not detected in time,” he said during a news conference in Milan on Thursday.

 

Emphasis mine.

 

 

[Daniel Cooper]

BTW - this guy says covid-19 was in Spain in March 2019. So why are we picking on Italy?
 
The Origins of Covid-19 — Not Wuhan, Where?

 

In fact, this guy basically proves that no matter where the virus originated, it damned sure wasn't China.

 

BTW - When will China make samples from their sewage system throughout 2019 available for analysis? Or blood and lung tissue in the months before?

 

Surely if we were to make a conclusion that covid originated in Italy based on those sorts of samples we'd want to see similar samples from Wuhan from the same time period, right?

 

 

Edited by Daniel Cooper, 19 July 2022 - 09:00 PM.

[Turnbuckle]

The following paper shows genetic evidence that different strains sourced from China and Europe, with the most virulent and earlier strains coming from Europe--

 

The twin-beginnings of COVID-19 in Asia and Europe-one prevails quickly

As emphasized above, the beginning of the epidemics is at PL1. In theory, once the virus evolves into its epidemic form in PL0, it can spread simultaneously to multiple PL1s [23]. This study shows that Asia and Europe could both have PL1s within its boundary (designated by the red and blue colors in Fig. ​Fig.4).4). However, only the PL1 that first reports the impending epidemic is identified as such and all other PL1s would be recognized as PL2. This is the caveat against the single-beginning view as the first one is perceived as the only one.

 

For COVID-19, the single-beginning view has been widely accepted but has never been tested. In this study, we provide the evidence from sequence evolution to reject this view. In brief, the full DG1111 haplotype emerged in Europe at about the same time as (or even earlier than) the arrival of Asian strains in Europe. Crucially, the Asian strains arriving in Europe must be of the DG0000 type because even partial haplotypes (such as DG1011) were not seen in China in the early samples.

https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC9046579/

 

 

 

[Daniel Cooper]

That paper in no way refutes an "Out of China" origin where the virus started in China and had been in circulation in Europe and in China for months (since October at least) before the first clinical case was publicly diagnosed in China and announced to the world at the end of December 2019.

 

What is does refute is that the virus could have escaped from China in the December timeframe as the European strains would have not had sufficient time to form those mutations that quickly. But we know that the first cases in China were not in December. The first clinical case is never the first actual case. You're lucky if it's only the one thousandth case. Or maybe the ten thousandth case.

 

You're making a logical error and it's of a category type.  You are comparing China's first publicly announced clinical case in a Wuhan hospital of covid-19 with retrospective studies in Europe of wastewater and blood and tissue samples from months earlier.  Those are not the same type of evidence. For us to make that comparison, we'd need similar wastewater, blood and tissue samples from China - Wuhan specifically. But China has chosen not to make those sorts of samples available to the world.

 

One might ask one's self - why not?

 

 

 

 

Edited by Daniel Cooper, 19 July 2022 - 09:39 PM.

[Mind]

Another writer picking up on the data COVID in Italy. It was spreading long before "patient zero" was announced in 2020.

 

We had another discussion, perhaps in another thread, which highlighted mounds of evidence that COVID-19 was circulating around the globe way before Wuhan. 

 

Maybe it came from Wuhan and was engineered. I think there is plenty of solid evidence for this to be the case.

 

However, I am open to other theories as well. There are plenty of opposing vested interests trying to place blame.

 

What all of us should be asking is why was COVID-19 not-a-problem while spreading across multiple countries for months before the "hysteria". I know the stock answer is that "it mutated and became worse". I don't buy it.

 

What I saw is a coordinated world-wide effort to instill fear in the populace and force them to abide by pandemic policies that failed miserably. There was a policy of hatred and rage directed at anyone who asked questions like Turnbuckle has asked...."wait a minute, this was circulating all around the globe months before you said it was"

[Mind]

There is a secret committee that is supposed to review gain-of-function research. Apparently no one knows who they are or has a record of their meetings, according to Rand Paul.

 

UTMB admits that it might have broken the law by allowing their gain-of-function research partners to destroy all records of such research. Why in the world would you ever get into a research agreement and allow the counterparty the option to destroy all research documents and data?

[Mind]

The head of the Lancet's investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV2 thinks it was the result of U.S. led gain-of-function research. 

[Turnbuckle]

 

 

You're making a logical error and it's of a category type.  You are comparing China's first publicly announced clinical case in a Wuhan hospital of covid-19 with retrospective studies in Europe of wastewater and blood and tissue samples from months earlier.  

 

 

The first positive case of covid antibodies in China was found retrospectively. The first positive cases of covid antibodies in Italy were also found retrospectively, with the Italian cases dating to months before China.

Edited by Turnbuckle, 13 August 2022 - 03:02 PM.

[Mind]

Here is a good read about the origins of the virus and the subsequent battle to even discuss the topic. A small cabal of leading U.S. health bureaucrats have been the main actors in suppressing the lab-leak theory.

 

 

 

In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment, the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the US government, was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know that on February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

 

 

 

“It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab … which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses” — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. If this were a coincidence, he adds, it would be a “huge” one.

 

 

 

 Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your typical tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public health agency, and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have played a role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

 

[Dorian Grey]

Here's a TrialSite News whistleblower deep dive into the nuts & bolts of EcoHealth Alliance, from none other than the former Vice President of the organization.  

 

 

This guy was VP in 2014/2015, & left the organization due to increasing concern about how it was being run, particularly under Daszak, who apparently was skirting safety regulations.  

 

43 minutes is a tall glass of water, but I found this telling of the inside story of Daszak & EcoHealth in the years leading up to the pandemic quite enlightening.  

[Mind]

Add this to the growing mountains of evidence that SARS-CoV2 was created in a lab.

 

The zoonotic origin theory continues to be supported almost exclusively by the people who are suspected of making it (Ecohelath/Google, Daszak, Fauci, etc.)

[Mind]

The Bi-partisan committee of the U.S. Senate investigating the origins of the SARS-CoV2 virus found that the vast majority of the evidence points toward the lab origin theory.

 

Remember when everyone who suspected a lab-leak theory was ridiculed - called nut-job conspiracy theorists? Remember when mainstream news fact-checkers and social media tried to ban everyone from talking about it?

 

Just think about how much more quickly we could have taken action with appropriate measures if the researchers were up front about the leak. We could have more quickly known how the virus was going to spread and what type of reactions would be found in humans.

[Mind]

One research paper claims less than 1 in a 100 million chance that SARS-CoV2 was of natural origin.

[Mind]

I am still fairly certain that SARS-CoV2 arose through a lab leak based upon multiple lines of solid evidence,

 

However,

 

This is different than saying that the lab leak was in December of 2019 in Wuhan China.

 

There is now a tremendous amount of evidence that this virus was circulating around the globe throughout 2019. Cancer patients Italy had SARS-CoV2 antibodies in October of 2019, which means they had contracted it prior to October of 2019. Sewage samples in Spain should evidence that is was in Spain in March of 2019.

 

It looks increasingly likely to me (whether planned or not), that the "pandemic" was mostly a western media creation. The virus was everywhere way before December of 2019 - yet the world was fine. The awful U.S. national media then led an unwarranted panic in early 2020 which led to a lot more death and destruction than what would have otherwise happened.

[joesixpack]

I am still fairly certain that SARS-CoV2 arose through a lab leak based upon multiple lines of solid evidence,

 

However,

 

This is different than saying that the lab leak was in December of 2019 in Wuhan China.

 

There is now a tremendous amount of evidence that this virus was circulating around the globe throughout 2019. Cancer patients Italy had SARS-CoV2 antibodies in October of 2019, which means they had contracted it prior to October of 2019. Sewage samples in Spain should evidence that is was in Spain in March of 2019.

 

It looks increasingly likely to me (whether planned or not), that the "pandemic" was mostly a western media creation. The virus was everywhere way before December of 2019 - yet the world was fine. The awful U.S. national media then led an unwarranted panic in early 2020 which led to a lot more death and destruction than what would have otherwise happened.

Well sure, there was an open air meat market which did not sell bats that carry the virus, they claim that is the source must be the source.

 

Obviously, the bio weapons lab two blocks away, doing research on the same bats that carry SARS 2 virus was not the source.

[Dorian Grey]

Dr John falls on his sword. 

 

 

Apologizes for defending the early natural origin narrative so vigorously.  

 

Love his "what were they thinking" analysis of the Nature paper.  

[Daniel Cooper]

The first positive case of covid antibodies in China was found retrospectively. The first positive cases of covid antibodies in Italy were also found retrospectively, with the Italian cases dating to months before China.

 

I just realized I never replied to this response.

 

The problem is that you're looking at two different kinds of samples - Retrospective analysis of sewage samples in Italy versus retrospective blood samples for people that showed up to the hospital in China.

 

Surely you can appreciate that the scope of these two sample sets is vastly different. Sampling sewage casts an extremely wide net. Testing blood samples is a far more narrow net, keeping mind that most of the blood samples they looked at were from patients that had non-respiratory symptoms.

 

China could clear this up in an instant - simply make sewage samples from Wuhan and surrounding provinces for all of calendar year 2019 available to outside researchers. But they have chosen not to do this.

[Dorian Grey]

Here's yer deepest dive yet into lab leak.  Redacted emails are now un-redacted, and Chris Martenson goes over them in excruciating detail.  Over an hour long, so make some coffee. 

 

 

Cheers!  

[Mind]

Recall this video of Peter Daszak describing exactly how to manipulate coronaviruses and how easy it was - IN 2016! Now in court testimony, Dr. Fauci claims he barely knew about the people doing gain-of-function research. Dr. Fauci is a liar. He should be prosecuted.

 

More evidence from un-redacted emails, that Fauci, Collins, and Farrar, were collaborating behind the scenes to crush any discussion of a lab-leak. After they did this, they led viscous attacks on anyone who claimed it was a lab leak. They should all be investigated for this.

 

[Mind]

A good review of all the evidence that shows the virus was spreading around the world way before December of 2019.