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Covid Timeline - Towards Patient-Zero
Timeline
Virus Hotspot
Background:
EcoHealth loved making hotspot maps of where they thought a zoonotic virus spillover would occur. The one place that doesn’t appear on any of these maps is: Wuhan.
It should have been, though - with the darkest most foreboding red shading at the location of Wuhan Institute of Virology. Severe storm warning.
From 2004-2019, EcoHealth-CSIRO-UC Davis-WIV were collecting bat viruses from around the world like they were going out of style.
Many were shipped back to WIV.
Daszak’s grandiose plan was to:
catalogue the majority of coronaviruses throughout the world - for - one or two billion dollars.
Why?
Daszak: (T)o find out which of the viruses in the wild even possibly could infect people so we know where they are and we can stop them from emerging.
How about you leave well alone? Before the Anthrax biodefense funding explosion - i don’t remember being terrorized by the common cold virus
It’s a little bit like if you listen to phone calls from Afghanistan.
Oh, really?
*To find the terrorists, you have to listen to *all *the phone calls. Only when you’ve heard the phone call do you then go in and find out who these people are and *disrupt those networks.
It’s hard to know if your talking about the common cold or conspiracy theorists.
Even Andersen thought the idea was preposterous. He/Holmes/Rambaut had a 2018 paper in Nature, arguing, convincingly, that it was a silly waste of time and money. (Their alternative - real-time surveillance of human populations - is equally problematic due to ethical/privacy-rights concerns.)
Funny then that they would come to be bound together so tightly on the natural-origin offensive a year later.
Dazza’s phone call listening operations took place mainly in SE Asia (incl. Yunnan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia). Samples were shipped to WIV - amongst other places - UC Davis? - The Pasteur Institute, Cambodia. (PREDICT report - huge PDF file)
Daszak: I visited the labs (in Wuhan) frequently … over 15 years. ..(paraphrased by NPR) The team and its collaborators at WIV have collected about 15,000 samples from bats (and) .. identified …about 50 (that) fall into a category that caused COVID-19 (including) some that ..are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. (Especially when GoFed-up.)
So: a bunch of glorified bug-hunters scouring the world on the public dime to gather up all the world’s bat viruses and store them at WIV.
Where their building blocks can be reassembled through GoF/serial passaging to create a super-bug - in order to:
develop therapeutics for future control of emerging SARS-like infections
…to keep us safe.
The Event
mid-Aug-Sep 5: Patient-Zero candidate date - see Sep 12 below. Bear in mind that an accidental lab-origin involves community spread. That necessarily entails:
a period of non-awareness from the patient/people at the lab he/she worked with
the longer the better (in terms of going viral)
(unless it was deliberate - or from nature - caused by climate change)
The questions are: how long did that period of non-awareness go for?
What was the socio-evolution of that knowledge?
We have patient-zero* - we also have aware-person-zero - who infects others with this awareness. The virus ran amok, we know that, but the knowledge of how it happened was contained within the cohort layers very well.
What was the response? Were frantic efforts made to reel it in? Or was it already too late? Throw the switch to cover-up.
*Technically could be two patient zeros - with two different technicians getting infected at the same lab - same as SARS-1.
Sep 12, 2019: Drastic (PDF, p1): (T)he main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline*. *
(p2) Note: Batvirus.whiov.ac.cn (already had) a password protected section for .. viruses not yet sequenced and sequences of viruses not yet published.
Daszak: We have an ongoing collaboration, we have data that we’ve gathered over 15 years of working in China — 5 years under a previous grant from the NIH — which haven’t been published yet. (still haven’t)
Drastic: p7 There are estimated to be at least 100 unpublished sequences of bat betacoronaviruses in Batvirus.whiov.ac.cn
Why Sep 12?
- WIV explanation: Yuan Zhiming (via Demaneuf): Shi Zhengli’s team have been subjected to a large number of malicious attacks, the database is currently shared within the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Prof Shi has also faced questions about why the WIV’s online public database of viruses was suddenly taken offline.
She told the BBC that the WIV’s website and the staff’s work emails and personal emails had been attacked, and the database taken offline for security reasons.
Rating: Plausible. If US intel was aware of chatter around a GoF breakthrough with biowarfare potential, you’d be trying to hack that shit. Same way Chinese cyberwarfare experts would be trying to hack Fort Detrick’s BSL-4 lab. It’s naive to think that doesn’t go on. Would mean US intel knows more about Covid’s origin than they are letting on.
- Response to a patient-zero leak: Which, allowing for incubation/show symptoms (5) + a window for community spread/WIV-awareness (2&½), would be about Sep 5 - at the earliest. Could be longer if the person was showing mild symptoms.
Rating: Possible-to-Plausible. It’s a long lead-in Fits with the Military Games.
- Response to a GoF break-through - with bioweaponizing potential: The realization of that. What if the bio-terrorists got hold of it. We can’t publish that!
Rating: Possible-to-Plausible. Would mean very small window between discovery/realization and a lab-exit. You’d think security would be even more vigilant - it’s already BSL-4. Accidents tend to happen when complacency creeps in.
Mid-Sep: Dr. John Brownstein, the Harvard: (we) observed a dramatic increase in hospital traffic outside five major Wuhan hospitals beginning late summer and early fall 2019 . (late Aug- earlySep)
ABC: At Wuhan Tongji Medical University, the spike in car traffic was found to have occurred in mid-September 2019.
(note: the authors also conducted an analysis of Baidu searches for cough, diarrhoea, and symptoms of diarrhoea - while BBC looked at searches for fever. There’s a small increase after Aug 1 for symptoms of diarrhoea and fever (according to BBC) - but i find it less convincing than the carpark analysis. No significant search increase until Dec 1.
Sep 18: Xinhua (via VanDongen): (T)he Executive Committee of the Wuhan Customs Joint Military Games held an emergency response exercise ..at Wuhan Tianhe Airport. In the form of actual combat, the exercise simulated .. the entire process of handling a case of new coronavirus* infection found in an airport. .. The exercise included epidemiological investigation, medical investigation, and temporary quarantin*e.
Oct 7-24: A private analysis of cellphone location data .. says there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a “hazardous event” sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.
October 9, 2019 – EcoHealth Alliance ..announced today the award of a U.S. Agency for International Development grant for the One Health Workforce–Next Generation. .. to fight public health emergencies globally .. and respond to threats of zoonotic disease. It’s led by a consortium which includes the University of California, Davis; Columbia University; EcoHealth Alliance; and other public-private partners.
Oct 10: Harvard Medical School study: *On Oct. 10, 2018, there were 171 cars in the parking lot of Wuhan’s Tianyou Hospital, one of the city’s largest. A year later, satellites recorded 285 cars – a *67% increase.
Brownstein: Something was happening in October. Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic
Oct 24, 2019: Pangolin paper, authored by EHA associate, Jin-Ping Chen - later used as basis for Prox O’s pangolin claim. Submitted Sep 30, revised, then pub Oct 24: *The *Sendai *virus showed a close relationship between the Malayan pangolin and the strain isolated from humans, whereas *Coronavirus *sequences showed a *high species diversity.
Oct 18-27: Military Games held in Wuhan. Numerous athletes reported Covid-like symptoms. (not definitively Covid to my knowledge)
Jacqueline Brock, German volleyball:. After a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days. I have never felt so sick, either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19, I think it was COVID-19.*
Oct?-Nov-Dec? : Last Foreigner to Work at WIV (on Ebola), Danielle Anderson (Aussie/Duke/WIV, (2018-19) - there was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point. .. Her most recent stint ended in November 2019.
SMH: *Anderson’s work at the facility, and her funding, ended *after the pandemic emerged.
(Same article, conflicting reports. Her stint ended in Nov, but Covid emerged in Dec - so she was still there? Back in Singapore by late-Dec for a conf.)
Nov ?: WSJ (paywall): Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.
Leaked, unverified US intel report, no specific date given. Seek hospital care - don’t know about China, but Taiwan - you need to see a doctor - you go to the hospital. Clinics are not popular. So sought medical treatment? Which is still significant - if it’s true.
Knock-you-down flu is rarer than we think. I’ve had one in my life - my brother asked me the question - he thinks he’s never had one. How many you had?
Warranting further investigation/funding: Why is pivotal info about a global illness (a) classified (b) leaked to Wall Street Journal?
Assuming it’s true - it would involve hacking hospital records as well as records of employees at WIV? Or more likely having intel relationship with Taiwan - who have the skillset.
If there was that level of penetration - then for sure they were hacking WIV DB. Especially if there was chatter of a GoF bioweapon breakthrough.*
* These are potentially incompatible dates - reports of Military Games illness predates Nov WIV illness. Would mean WIV-person-zero was mild or asymptomatic. If athletes were infected via lab-exit, then it occurred in early Oct.
Nov 6, 2019: Farrar/Koopmans: *(I)t will be a challenge to persuade countries to invest in a new surveillance system .. before its general effectiveness has been *demonstrated at a country level.
Nov 13: Farrar funding lever VIZIONS has a SE Asia zoonotic alarmist paper published by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. Despite the global zoonotic disease burden, the underlying exposures that drive zoonotic disease emergence are not understood.
Nov 14: Shuangsuo Dang, Department of Infectious Diseases, Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University: During the period from Nov 17, 2019 to Dec 30, 2019 (44 days), WeChat Index spiked or increased for the keywords Feidian, SARS, coronavirus, novel coronavirus, shortness of breath, dyspnea, and diarrhea.
Baidu is the dominant Chinese Internet search engine. Baidu Index (https://index.baidu.com*), .. can show how frequent a keyword has been *queried *over a time period from a region. The keywords related to the SARS-Cov-2 disease as mentioned above were also explored through Baidu Index for *Hubei province.
Curiously, there’s no further mention of the exploration of Hubei. It would be interesting to see a comparative chart for Hubei and the whole of China.
The report is a sanctioned CCP one - so we can assume it’s not designed to bring down 100 years of Communism.
The start date, Nov 17, is - suspiciously - right where chatter is descending from a rise. Data is not available before then. Why not?
fig. Spike above begins for SARS Nov 30 here. But it depends where you start the graph.
If you started the study on Dec 4 you’d think SARS didn’t spike until Dec 30 - the date the CCP announced it.
What’s it look like if you start the survey on Nov 14? Is the cut-off start point cutting out a peak before the one shown. You can deduce it is. Are there other peaks behind that? How about if we started Sep 1?
SARS is a sensitive topic in China, but how many people need to be infected for it to go viral social-media-style? Remembering 5-days a pop for each new case in the nascent stages with an RO of 2. One case won’t do it - nor will 2 - or 3. 1000? How long do you need to go from zero to 1000 cases? My (questionable) math says 40 days. Nov 15 - 45 days = Oct 1
Nov 27: Scripps announces Shenzhen Bay Lab deal - joint China facility
Post Emergence: The Cover-up
Nov 14: Goes viral - see above
Dec 15: Ian Lipkin, WHO adviser, 16:44: I first heard about this outbreak on the 15th Dec from Lu Jia-hai* .. who runs a large One-Health program - *we *have a program with Prof Lu - it’s been *funded for about 6 months by the Chinese Government *but doesn’t really have any support in the US - and I‘d like to talk a little bit about that program - it’s called *Gideon - it’s this Global Infectious Disease Epidemiology Network …
Yeah, not now Ian - we’re compiling a timeline here - we’ll get to that later.
But you are the world-record holder for the first admitted date-of-awareness by a non-Chinese scientist/person. It wasn’t a fluke. Since 2013 Ian was saying:
Lipkin/Nature: The integration of human and animal medicine .. and the emphasis on the use of social media to promote early detection of risk together have great potential for the development of a truly global immune system.
William Karesh (2009) : Recent changes in WHO’s guidance related to the International Health Regulations will allow for information gathering without going through official channels and this could greatly help in global response time.
Lipkin was a WHO advisor . We can assume WHO knew by at least Dec 16. Unfortunately it didn’t greatly help.
Dec 26: WP: An account published Thursday in multiple Chinese news sites by an anonymous lab technician who claimed to work at a lab contracted by hospitals said that his company had received samples from Wuhan and reached a stunning conclusion ..(:) (t)he samples contained a new coronavirus with an 87 percent similarity to SARS. .. The technician’s account included extensive images of test results and contemporaneous messages sent by the technician.
Dec 27: Lab technician: Lab executives held urgent meetings to brief Wuhan health officials and hospital management.
Dec 30, 5:43pm: Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, told his fellow medical school alumni in a private chat that seven people had contracted what he believed to be SARS, and one patient was quarantined at his hospital. .. He posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding “SARS coronavirus” and extensive bacteria colonies in a patient’s airways.
BBC: Li Wenliang .. sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection.
This is hard-evidence of human-to-human transmission. WHO was still denying it over two weeks later.
Dec 30, 7pm: The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on Dec 30, 2019.
Dec 30, 7:03: Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate.
Director: Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now
Shi does. But it’s too late for the bullet train
Dec 30, evening: The health commission sent an “urgent notice” to all hospitals about the existence of “pneumonia of unclear cause”
9:02 pm: Train Z27, Shanghai to Wuhan, first available: 9h34m travel time.
Shi, on the train: I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China. Could they have come from our lab?
(Virus Hunter (frequent Batman collaborator - who is Bat Lady’s colleague-in-arms - who is Virus hunter’s protegee) knew about it by at least Dec 15 - but Bat Lady’s Bat-phone doesn’t ring until Dec 30, 7:03 pm? Not plausible.
Dec 30: Drastic (PDF p6): New version of the database factsheet was uploaded at the time Pr. Shi Zhengli was on the Shanghai to Wuhan high speed night train.
Dec 31: Chinese government started to censor .. “Unknown Wuhan Pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market” on YY, a Chinese live-streaming platform.
Dec 31: Chinese authorities alert WHO to unusual pneumonia in Wuhan.
Reuters: Chinese health authorities said they are investigating 27 cases of viral pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan, after rumors on social media suggested the outbreak could be linked to .. (SARS).
(S)even were in critical condition and 18 were in stable condition, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said on Tuesday on its Weibo social media account.
Dec 31: People’s Daily: The cause of the disease is not clear. We cannot confirm it is what’s being spread online, that it is SARS virus. Other severe pneumonia is more likely.
Dec 31: Taiwanese health experts warn WHO about human-to-human transmission. The warning is ignored. (Two weeks later WHO is still insisting there’s no evidence. When the clamour grows in Taiwan, a free country, Tedros accuses the Taiwanese of being racist.)
Jan. 1: (T)he Wuhan Public Security Bureau summoned eight people for posting and spreading “rumors” about Wuhan hospitals receiving SARS-like cases — detentions that were reported on “Xinwen Lianbo,” a newscast watched by tens of millions. ..
Wang Guangbao: The eight posters getting seized made all of us doctors feel we were at risk.
Jan 1: Xinhua: The police call on all netizens to not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors .. (but rather) jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace. (sounds just like FB)
Jan 3: Nature: Prof Zhang Yongzhen’s laboratory at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center received a sample of the pathogen on 3 January.
On the same day, the Chinese government circulated an order forbidding local authorities and labs from publishing information about the virus.
Using an Illumina sequencing machine, Prof Zhang Yongzhen (Kunming/Fudan Uni/CDC/STAsian of the Year) began sequencing
2 a.m., Jan 5: Nature: (T)eam member Chen Yan-Mei alerted Zhang that the virus was related to SARS. Later that day, Zhang notified Shanghai’s municipal health authority of the threat and uploaded the data to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a sequence repository run by the US National Institutes of Health.
(So NIH had it, was sitting on it. Why?)
Jan 5: Using an Illumina sequencing machine, Prof Zhang Yongzhen (Kunming/Fudan Uni/CDC/STAsian of the Year), at a CDC facility in Beijing, completed the sequencing of SARS-Cov-2 and shared it with his long-time collaborator Eddie Holmes (Sydney Uni/NSW Scientist of the Year). Holmes helped him work out what it meant - he was the only non-Chinese scientist granted access at this point.
January 6: WHO: There is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.
January 7: Eddie: We submitted a paper on January 7 to Nature, and they were very keen for us to release it.
January 8: Eddie: the Wall Street Journal, of all places, published an article saying it’s a novel coronavirus
Then, social media people were discussing that it’s a coronavirus and we need to know what it is. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, certainly was very vocal in that. (Jeremy - always the political perspective - sees need to get on top of the narrative)
Jan 9: Eddie: *Chinese authorities confirmed that it was a novel coronavirus. At that point, it just seemed to me quite ridiculous because everyone knew this was a coronavirus, but *we’re not saying what it is. It got to the point where I thought, We have to get this out, because it was just crazy. (This is NIH still sitting on it time)
Jan 10, 8am: Eddie: I called him very early Saturday morning my time, even earlier his time. He was on a plane. He was about to fly between Shanghai and Beijing — I can’t remember which direction he was going, but he was strapped in his seat.I said, “Zhang, we have to release the sequence.” He said, “Give me a minute to think about it,” and he said, “Okay, do it.”
Midday (Aus) Jan 10: Luckily, my good friend and colleague Andrew Rambaut, from Edinburgh, was still awake — it was about 1 AM his time. He runs this website called virological.org, which has been a very nice open-access forum. We had some frantic emails, and then we wrote some text for the release, and then I posted the sequence on that website at lunchtime on Saturday here and posted it simultaneously on Twitter. That was the open-access moment.
Zhang was not the only one or even the first one, but it turned out that we first made it open access.
Jan 11: Holmes tweets that the genome is now available at Virological.org (Rambaut’s website).
Jan 11-31: Holmes and Rambaut collaborate with Garry (Tulane), Andersen (Scripps/WuXi PharmaTech) to analyse the virus and draft Prox O whilst communicating with Farrar/Fauci/Collins.
Jan 14: WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. (!!!)
Jan. 20, morning: WP: For the first time .. Wuhan public health officials changed the wording of their daily statements to omit their previous references to “limited human-to-human transmission.”
Jan 20, pm: *Zhong Nanshan, an 83-year old and veteran of the SARS crisis who is considered a national hero, appeared on state media to announce the virus was in fact *transmissible between people.
This crucial information was suppressed for at least 21 days - during the CNY period when people travelled widely throughout the world. With full WHO complicity.
Jan 21: Xi issued “important instructions” to cadres to “put the people’s health and safety first.”
Jan 21: Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission: Anyone who puts the face of politicians before the interests of the people will be the sinner of a millennium .. They will be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity.
Wonder how many western scientists who collaborated in the cover up will end up on the pillar of shame for eternity.
Jan. 23, 2020: China imposes aggressive containment measures in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, suspending flights and trains and shutting down subways, buses and ferries in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus.
Having ensured its spread throughout the world - CCP swings Lipkin’s containment plan into action domestically.
Jan 27: Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said he was not authorized by his superiors to disclose the epidemic earlier. (Evidence the higher-ups knew)
Jan 29: Lipkin flies into Guangzhou China to see for myself what the issues were. Meets with pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan; Foreign Minister for Health Chen Zhu ( 陈竺); the Minister of Science and Technology; George Gao (China CDC) and Premier, Li Keqiang.
Jan 31: Andersen emails Fauci to say some of the features (potentially) look engineered. .. Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. (Andersen’s brackets)
Feb 1: Garry says draft of Prox O is complete. (So, overnight, Prox O authors went from looks engineered to completing a full-draft that irrefutably shows it wasn’t?)
Feb 1/(Feb 2 Aus): Pivotal teleconference organized/chaired by Farrar with Fauci, Prox O authors, Koopmans (WHO), Ferguson, Fouchier to form agreement on next steps.
Feb 2 or 3: Teleconference organized by Farrar with Tedros, (includes Fauci and Collins) to lock in a prevaricating Tedros.
It was in these two crisis meetings where the Covid Conspiracy was formulated, potentially. They went into the Feb 1 meeting thinking it was a lab-leak - came out with a co-ordinated plan to cover that up. Then Farrar/Fauci/Collins on-sold it to WHO. Which wasn’t hard.
Feb 4: Lipkin, Prox O co-author, returns from China begins media offensive ref, ref, ref, ref, ref: I started going onto the news media and sharing as much as I could. Says: (T)here is no evidence that the Wuhan virus will spread to the same extent as SARS, emphasizes that Covid is less dangerous than the flu, advises against face masks, despite knowing they were effective. (32:35)
TWIV interviewer (talking to Garry): At that time (Feb 1) there was barely any infection outside of China, right?
Garry: Yeah, that’s true.
In fact there was only one case of local transmission in the US by then.
So the window to take decisive action to stop the spread, stop all that followed, was still wide-open when the teleconference was held.
That’s where the culpability comes in.