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I’ve seen a lot of this material before but never in such detail and concentration. This lengthy article walks though the behind the scenes machinations which led to the creation and publication of a scientific paper designed to dismiss the lab leak theory. That paper was then cited by Dr. Fauci and others as proof that COVID-19 had a natural origin (but Fauci didn’t reveal he had helped organize the effort to write the paper). What we’ve known for some time is that the academics who were recruited for this task had significant doubts about it. Again, you’ve probably seen...

The discovery of a new wild coronavirus that has the same freak mutation as Covid-19 is being hailed by some scientists as proof Sars-CoV-2 was not made in a lab. Researchers in China have found another bat coronavirus that possesses a furin cleavage site — the part that made Covid-19 so good at infecting people. The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19's origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments. Since then, studies have shown that wild coronaviruses can acquire the structure naturally — but the newly-discovered virus...

Chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci speculated that China likely got rid of an intermediary host that carried the COVID-19 virus between bats and humans when officials cleaned out the live animal market where the virus is theorized to have first caused an infection in humans. "It was very likely in a host- what the Chinese did, I don't have firsthand knowledge of that, but the people who were reporting it, who investigated what they did is they cleaned out the markets as soon as it turned out that it was clear that there were clusters coming from the...

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.

For more than five years, wildlife conservationists in the US have been clamoring for the government to provide Endangered Species Act protections to pangolins, a group of imperiled ant-eating mammals that are widely, and often illicitly, trafficked for their scales and meat. The Trump administration, however, has refused to act and that refusal has suddenly taken on grave new implications. Earlier this year, scientists in China identified pangolins, along with bats, as one of the possible animal hosts involved in the transmission of the deadly coronavirus from wildlife to humans. How did coronavirus start and where did it come from?...

The Arkansas Republican cited a study published by the Lancet that showed of the original 40 cases in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, 14 people who contracted the virus never set foot in the Wuhan wildlife market where Chinese authorities have claimed the virus originated. "As one epidemiologist said, 'That virus went into the seafood market before it came out of the seafood market.' We still don't know where it originated," Cotton said. "I would note that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus."...

The coronavirus is similar to two viruses that circulate in bats, but it might have skipped through another species before infecting humans. Suspicion has fallen on the pangolin, an endangered, highly trafficked creature that looks like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo. Its scales are prized in traditional Chinese medicine, although they’re made of keratin, just like fingernails. In recent days some researchers have noted that a coronavirus previously identified in pangolins is more closely related to the novel coronavirus than any virus identified so far. It’s not clear whether any bats or pangolins, live or dead, were...

Thailand saves pangolins bound for China restaurants Nov. 10, 2007 BANGKOK (AFP) - Thai Customs officers said Saturday they have rescued more than 100 pangolins and arrested three men attempting to smuggle the endangered animals to China, where they were destined for the cooking pot. Customs officers Friday intercepted three pick-up trucks of pangolins, or scaly anteaters, which were to be smuggled across Laos to southwest China. The pangolins, worth an estimated one million baht (29,400 dollars), were trapped in the Indonesian jungle and smuggled via Malaysia and southern Thailand. "We investigated and found out that those pangolins are from...