If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you?
That is roughly what I recently found out has apparently been going on in China. 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. Is accidentally killing millions not enough to give them pause?
Worse, a western scientific journal, the Journal of Virology, has blithely published the whole thing as if it was just another day at the office. There in the acknowledgments of Peng Zhou’s paper are his old pals from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli and Ben Hu, the main authors of the notorious experiments in Wuhan. You know: the ones where they swapped the spike genes between bat viruses, making brand new viruses that could infect human cells better and kill humanized mice faster.
To be fair, the latest experiments are on alpha coronaviruses, not the beta kind that caused the pandemic, and on ones that kill pigs by causing diarrhea, not people by causing pneumonia. The disease goes by the name of SADS, for “swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus.” The backstory is that starting in October 2016, an outbreak of diarrhea killed nearly 25,000 piglets on farms in the Guangdong province in China. By the spring of 2017, smart work by Peng Zhou in Wuhan had identified a coronavirus from horseshoe bats as the cause. So much is known already and documented in the 2021 book I wrote with Alina Chan: Viral.
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Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”.