Free Republic

In 2018 — nearly two years before the start of the global coronavirus pandemic — U.S. officials in China sent warnings to Washington expressing safety concerns over a Wuhan facility's research into coronaviruses in horseshoe bats, adding weight to the theory that the novel virus originated in a lab and not at a Wuhan wet market. The news broke in a report Wednesday by Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, who said that he obtained access to the first of two diplomatic cables sent from State Department officials who had visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in January and March...

A Chinese state-run newspaper issued a warning to Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he shared reporting on the U.S. Department of Energy’s “low confidence” assessment that the global Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory. CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reported Tuesday morning on the warning from the social media pages of the Global Times, the English-language subsidiary of the CCP-controlled People’s Daily. The Global Times warned Musk that he could be “breaking the pot of China” after the Tesla and Twitter CEO responded to tweets that asserted that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan research laboratory. The saying is akin...

AbstractOne cannot spend >5 min on social media at the moment without finding a link to some conspiracy theory or other regarding the origin of SARS-CoV2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. From the virus being deliberately released as a bioweapon to pharmaceutical companies blocking the trials of natural remedies to boost their dangerous drugs and vaccines, the Internet is rife with far-fetched rumors. And predictably, now that the first immunization trials have started, the antivaccine lobby has latched on to most of them. In the last week, the trailer for a new “bombshell documentary” Plandemic has been doing...

(Breitbart) – Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) grilled Dr. Anthony Fauci during a hearing on the Chinese coronavirus Tuesday over his prior claim that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has never funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Paul’s presentation triggered President Biden’s chief medical adviser, who refused to retract his May 11 statement and instead snapped at the Kentucky senator, brazenly telling Paul, “you do not know what you are talking about.” “Dr. Fauci, as you are aware it is a crime to lie to Congress,” Paul began during the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor &...

As Long As Dr. Fauci Is A God There will be no return to normal for as long as Anthony Fauci's word reigns supreme. There's too large a population that now just wants the government to tell them exactly what to do.>White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci traded barbs with South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem on CBS Sunday, speaking one after the other on the flagship political program over whether aggressive endless lockdowns serve the public’s best interest.Fauci first responded to Noem, who celebrated her state’s triumphant success protecting the vulnerable while its economy remained open,...

Long before the coronavirus made international headlines, China’s Communist Party, which rules the country with unchallenged authority, had an image problem. Image has always been a key element of Beijing’s plan to rise to global greatness. It has worked assiduously to carve a reputation as an unstoppable power wading well into the midst of world affairs. Today, however, that carefully crafted image is badly tattered. It’s worse than it was just one year ago when nations that eagerly participated in China’s Belt and Road Initiative began to realize that Chinese “aid” was a two-edged sword. No one has done more...

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Jan 26 (Reuters) - The ability of the new coronavirus to spread is strengthening and infections could continue to rise, China's National Health Commission said on Sunday, with more than 2,000 people in China infected and 56 killed by the disease. Health authorities around the world are racing to prevent a pandemic after a handful of cases of infection were reported outside China, including in Thailand, Australia, the United States and France. The mayor of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, said he expected another 1,000 new patients in the city, which was stepping up construction of special hospitals....

Link above to he latest situation report from WHO. Note, “confirmed cases” is a subset of those who get infected. Not everyone runs to the doc for a case of the sniffles. Based on populations and transmission rates the infected population is estimated around 4000. Confirmed cases near 600 with about 4% of those being fatal.

The new virus is not the same as SARS, but similar to it and also to other coronaviruses found in bats. (Reuters) Saudi Arabia said five more people have died of a deadly new virus from the same family as SARS, and two other people were in intensive care. The seven cases were discovered in al-Ahsa governorate in the Eastern Province, the Saudi news agency SPA quoted the Saudi Health Ministry as saying in a statement late on Wednesday.

A Saudi man died in March from the virus.

The novel coronavirus (NCoV) is from the same family of viruses as those...