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China has been taking advantage of a 'data void' in order to flood social media platforms with Chinese-backed conspiracy theories regarding the origins of Covid-19, which in turn affects algorithmic results from popular search engines such as Google and Bing, according to the Washington Post, citing a Tuesday report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).The Chinese posts have almost exclusively focused on a theory that Covid-19 was created in a lab at Fort Detrick, home to the US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) - which will ring a bell for anyone who read The Hot Zone,...

18 months before the pandemic, scientists in Wuhan, China submitted a proposal to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research...

According to new leaked grant proposal documents, scientists in Wuhan were planning to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into Chinese bats to inoculate them against disease that could transfer to humans. The new documents show that just 18 months prior to the first coronavirus cases, researchers submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China, The Telegraph reports. They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically altered to infect humans more easily, and requested a whopping $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to complete the work.

When Major League Baseball hosted its "Field of Dreams" game in Iowa in August, it was a celebration of small-town America. But less than 100 miles away, a small town is worrying that its local economy, that's centered around baseball, is getting shut out. Kris Van Cleave traveled to Caledonia, Minnesota, where a factory partially owned by MLB is closing up shop and shipping jobs overseas. (Video at the link)

Pups of the greater sac-winged bat develop their vocal skills by babbling in a similar way to human babies — a discovery that could help researchers to explore the underlying neuroscience of how mammals learn to communicate with one another. “Even though there are millions of years of different evolutionary pathways between bats and humans, it’s astonishing to see such a similar vocal practice behaviour leading to the same result — acquiring a large vocal repertoire,” says Ahana Fernandez, an animal behavioural ecologist at the Berlin Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the study, which was published on...

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday defended the US giving hundreds of thousands of dollars for research at a Wuhan lab studying whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans — saying that it would have been “negligent” not to do so. “It was a… proposal that was peer-reviewed and given a very high rating for the importance of why it should be done,” Fauci told CNN anchor Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “[The proposal was] to be able to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population because everyone in the world...

Nearly 3 million people tuned in to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on the evening of June 2, a number equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the country. Among the things those viewers heard from Carlson that night was a staggering accusation of duplicity if not illegality on the part of the country’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci. Carlson accused Fauci of lying under oath, of lying during a news conference and of being somehow implicated in criminal activity based on the contents of a number of emails released publicly under a Freedom of Information Act request. Those emails...

The researchers say that their discoveries in southwestern China show just how many coronaviruses are there in bats and how many have the potential to spread to people. In a report published in the journal Cell, the Chinese researchers from Shandong University said, "In total, we assembled 24 novel coronavirus genomes from different bat species, including four SARS-CoV-2 like coronaviruses." The origin of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has remained a mystery even after over 1.5 years the first case of infection was reported in the Wuhan city of China. Now, scientists and countries calling for further investigations to figure out...

The Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats in cages, new footage from inside the facility has revealed, disproving denials from World Health Organisation investigators who claimed the suggestion was a “conspiracy”. An official Chinese Academy of Sciences video to mark the launch of the new biosafety level 4 laboratory in May 2017 speaks about the security precautions that are in place if “an accident” occurs and reveals there had been “intense clashes” with the French Government during the construction of the laboratory. Video: https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6258639874001

The Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats in cages, new footage from inside the facility has revealed, disproving denials from World Health Organisation investigators who claimed the suggestion was a “conspiracy”. An official Chinese Academy of Sciences video to mark the launch of the new biosafety level 4 laboratory in May 2017 speaks about the security precautions that are in place if “an accident” occurs and reveals there had been “intense clashes” with the French Government during the construction of the laboratory. The video shows bats being held in a cage at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, along with...

Fox News host Steve Hilton on Sunday claimed Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about the origins of the coronavirus and called for him to be prosecuted, part of a pattern of conservative attacks on the nation's top infectious diseases expert. During a segment on his show The Next Revolution, Hilton showed a video purportedly from a conference in 2012, where Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), described the controversial process known as "gain-of-function" research. Hilton claimed the words Fauci used to describe "gain-of-function" research in 2012 were exactly the words used in a...

t was all part of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) biowarfare plan against the United States. The design of COVID-19 was based on a number of bioweapon features, in particular, highly contagious, low lethality, and a high rate of asymptomatic transmission. Another important feature of a PLA bioweapon, not mentioned on that list, is disguising its origin. That is, the capability of avoiding responsibility for a biowarfare attack by designing a virus that could be blamed on a natural outbreak. Changjun Wang, a high ranking officer in the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command headquartered in Nanjing, was responsible for the isolation...

Trees and wildflowers blossom during all four seasons in Kunming, which is known as The City of Eternal Spring because of its year-round mild temperatures. However, it is also home to something much less natural: a laboratory where scientists have been creating monkey embryos with a mutated gene so that, when born, they will age unusually fast. Such experiments are done to study human diseases such as autism, cancer, Alzheimer's and muscular dystrophy.

The United States gave over $800,000 to the top-level laboratory in China from which some believe the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus escaped, according to newly released documents. Internal emails from officials with the National Institutes of Health and an office inside the agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), show they discussed in 2020 a question from Republican members of Congress regarding how much the agencies sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The National Institute of Health provided more than $800,000 to Wuhan lab over 6 year period ------ In a Senate hearing late last month, top doctor Anthony Fauci told lawmakers the U.S. granted $600,000 in funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over a five-year period, but documents provided by the Department of Health and Human Services Friday show the actual number was a third higher. Reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Judicial Watch, found that between 2014 and 2019 $826,277 was provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the directive...

Dr. Anthony Fauci gave a wide-ranging interview that was published late Thursday that mainly focused on the origins of the coronavirus, and he was asked if he believed his own National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases could have any responsibility for the global pandemic. "Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance?" he asked, according to the Financial Times. The paper did not post the precise question asked to Fauci, but the top disease doctor has been facing increased criticism by Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul over...

The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China was dismissed as a “conspiracy” by National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in April of last year, newly released emails show. The email from Collins to current White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and others is part of a tranche of more than 3,200 pages of emails obtained by Buzzfeed News and published Tuesday. On April 15, 2020, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported that US officials were increasingly confident that the virus “likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory … not as a bioweapon but...

A hint of crazy things to come may be playing out in the Arizona desert — and it involves a giant species of cactus. Saguaros, which can live for centuries and grow to nearly 80 feet, have erupted in spring blooms that are spreading far beyond the norm. It’s almost as if the plants are breaking out in a rash of blooms. This is happening in the Sonoran Desert and experts suspect it may be an example of how the warming environment is impacting even the oldest of plants.A rare phenomenon is unfolding in Arizona: Saguaros cacti, which live centuries,...

It was just last year that PolitiFact labeled Fox News host Tucker Carlson a “pants on fire” kind of liar for his report that the COVID-19 virus wasn’t just a naturally occurring virus, but one that was actually created in a lab in Wuhan. It wasn’t just a wild claim either. Carlson brought on virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan from the University of Hong Kong who said she could actually produce scientific evidence for the claim.Yet, the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact weren’t just dismissive, they seemed to get a bit defensive.“The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous,” wrote Daniel Funke in September. “We...

The cave entrance. (Chris Grooms) You may not give a pile of bat poop gathered over 4,300 years a second look – but to a group of scientists, it's provided an intriguing insight into how bat diets and therefore climate conditions have shifted over thousands of years. Taller than the average man (2 meters or 6-and-a-half feet), the pile of poop (also known as guano) records history in clear layers, much like sediments under a lake. By analyzing the layers back through time, the scientists have been able to figure out changes in the diets of the bats that have...