The latest thing to go is a series of photographs, all of which have been memory-holed, that show scientists at various WIV laboratories working on experiments without proper safety equipment. All references to visits by diplomats from the United States who later sounded the alarm about the school's work involving bats have also been scrubbed.
This latest wave of censorship comes after President Donald Trump announced that intelligence he has been shown gives him a "high degree of confidence" that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic originated at the WIV. British Cabinet Ministers had likewise announced similar findings roughly a month prior to this, backing Trump's later claims.
"There are clearly questions that need to be answered about the origin and spread of the virus," stated a spokesman for Boris Johnson, a British Member of Parliament (MP).
One of the pictures that was removed from the WIV website depicted school staff members entering a cave to take swabs from bats carrying various coronaviruses. None of these staff members were wearing proper protective equipment in the photo, suggesting that they may have contracted the virus from these tainted bats.
The WIV also removed a reference on its website to Rick Switzer, a science and technology expert from the U.S. embassy in Beijing who visited the institute back in March 2018. Switzer had warned the State Department not long after his visit that he observed serious problems with the handling of bats and other related experiments.
"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they [the diplomats] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," reads one of the cables that Switzer sent, warning of serious safety failures at the facility.
One refrigerator at WIV holdings 1,500 coronavirus strains had a "broken seal"
Back in April, British media reported on a photo, also now scrubbed from the WIV website, that showed a broken seal on one of the lab's refrigerators. This refrigerator was reportedly holding some 1,500 different coronavirus strains, any or all of which could have escaped because of this.
It remains unclear if this is the same photo that was shown to President Trump when he indicated at a recent press conference that he had, in fact, seen "evidence" to convince him that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) probably escaped from a WIV lab.
"I can't tell you that," Trump responded when pressed about the issue. "I'm not allowed to tell you that."
Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing various three-letter spy agencies in the federal government, issued its own statement indicating that "the intelligence community will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."
Interestingly, the WIV itself admits that the work conducted there is risky. Alongside a website photo of staff members standing next to a communist flag, the institute has published a description of what goes on there indicating that "highly pathogenic microorganisms" are handled there, adding that "once the test tube for storing viruses is opened in the laboratory, it is like opening the Pandora's Box."
"These viruses come and go without a trace," a senior British security source added. "There are various protective measures, but the experimental personnel still need to operate carefully to avoid danger due to operational errors."
This same official added that the U.K., the U.S., and several other countries are all conducting investigations "looking at all possibilities" as to where the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) originated based on this evidence.
U.S. government funded coronavirus experiments on bats captured in Yunnan, located 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
Part of this investigation will have to look into the many U.S. connections to the WIV, which, as we've reported, include multiple prestigious universities and research institutions, not to mention agencies within our own federal government.
One specific piece of information that deserves greater attention is the $3.7 million granted to the WIV by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct experiments on bat coronaviruses. Bats captured more than 1,000 miles away from Wuhan in an area of China known as Yunnan were taken back to WIV labs where they potentially mixed with other coronaviruses to become chimeras, and where one of these chimeras may have later escaped in the form of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
This is still speculative, of course, but sequencing of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) genome has already determined that it did, in fact, come from bats living in the caves where WIV scientists had entered unprotected to collect samples. This alone is highly suggestive that the WIV is directly responsible for the release of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) into the general public.
President Trump has since ended all NIH funding to the WIV, even as the CCP insists that all of these suspicious links between the WIV and the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) are merely coincidental, calling them "baseless conspiracy theories."
But this can hardly be the case when video evidence has since surfaced showing China's own government workers admitting on camera that the work being done with coronavirus bats is risky and has the great potential to unleash a pandemic.
"We can easily get contact with the feces of bats which contaminate everything," says Tian Junhua, a researcher who works at the nearby Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, about what he has witnessed as far as bat samples being collected from area caves.
"So it is highly risky here," he adds. "I feel the fear. The fear of infections."
You can watch the full video featuring Tian and others at this link.
You can also keep up with the latest news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) by visiting Pandemic.news.
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