Free Republic

The founder of Microsoft has warned of bioterrorist attacks and has urged world leaders to use "germ games" to prepare for them. Bill Gates said governments must get ready for future pandemics and smallpox terror attacks by investing billions in research and development. Mr Gates suggested "germ games" could be used to practise how to respond to such events. He also called for the formation of a new billion-dollar World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Task Force. "It'll take probably about a billion a year for a pandemic Task Force at the WHO level, which is doing the surveillance and actually...

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. 'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised...

TOKYO -- Purchases of PCR tests in China's Hubei Province surged months before the first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report from researchers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. About 67.4 million yuan ($10.5 million at current rates) was spent on PCR tests in Hubei during 2019, nearly double the 2018 total, with the upswing starting in May. The report, released by a research team that includes former intelligence officers, is based on records from a website aggregating information on bids for public sector procurement contracts. The report casts further doubt on China's...