Doing What Your Chinese Bosses Tell You To, Part Deux

(RE: Overlords)




Running interference for your bosses can be quite tiring:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is not drawing “firm conclusions” on allegations that the novel coronavirus — which has now caused devastation worldwide — came from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trudeau said Canada has been working with its Five Eyes partners — Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — on “various” pieces of intelligence regarding the COVID-19 outbreak.

But, he said it is “too early to draw firm conclusions.”

Yes, about that:

Nov. 17, 2019: The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, a 55-year-old man from Hubei province, comes about, according to government data seen the South China Morning Post revealed on March 13, 2020.

Dec. 7, 2019: The first suspected human-to-human transmission is recorded by Wuhan doctors. A patient is observed to have the virus but denies ever visiting the seafood market, reports the Hudson Institute, citing a paper by Wuhan researchers from Jan. 24, 2020.

Dec. 30, 2019: Doctor Li Wenliang sends a message to a group of fellow doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, where he worked, reports The Lancet. Meant to be a private message, he encourages them to protect themselves from infection.

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In fact, Li was one of the first people to recognise the outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan that has now spread to 25 countries, killing 1669 people and infecting more than 51 800 people as of Feb 16, 2020. Li returned to work after signing the statement and contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), apparently from a patient. His death sparked outrage in China, where citizens took to message boards to voice their gratitude for Li's dedicated front-line service and to criticise the initial response of Wuhan's security and medical officials to his warning. In the days before his death, Li said “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier I think it would have been a lot better”, in an interview with The New York Times. “There should be more openness and transparency”, he said.

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The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University. ...

The Lancet paper’s data also raise questions about the accuracy of the initial information China provided, Lucey says. At the beginning of the outbreak, the main official source of public information were notices from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. Its notices on 11 January started to refer to the 41 patients as the only confirmed cases and the count remained the same until 18 January. The notices did not state that the seafood market was the source, but they repeatedly noted that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that most cases linked to the market. Because the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission noted that diagnostic tests had confirmed these 41 cases by 10 January and officials presumably knew the case histories of each patient, “China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market,” Lucey tells ScienceInsider. (Lucey also spoke about his concerns in an interview published online yesterday by Science Speaks, a project of the Infectious Disease Society of America.)

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Chumakov said the Wuhan Laboratory team have been actively involved in the development of various coronavirus variants for more than 10 years, possibly in the name of HIV vaccine research.

“They did absolutely crazy things, in my opinion,” he told a Moscow newspaper.

“The picture of the possible creation of the current coronavirus is slowly emerging.

That's a lot of coincidence for "no firm conclusions".

Why all the melodramatic huffing over wet markets if they weren't the true source of the coronavirus? Why remove references of China from automated kiosks that were the only form of screening at major Canadian airports? Why was it claimed that the coronavirus came to Canada through the US when the first reported cases came from Wuhan? Why did China hide the severity of the outbreak and horde supplies domestically and internationally? Why did the CBC attack the Epoch Times' coverage of the coronavirus and call the publication racist?

Why, if I didn't know any better, I would suggest that the Trudeau government is covering for its Chinese bosses.

Derek Sloan has dropped his mic and strutted off the stage.