After the SARS outbreak of 2003 had died out, there were two lab-escapes in Beijing.
WHO: The outbreak .. began in April (2004)..when two graduate students working at a laboratory at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing, where experiments using the live SARS coronavirus were conducted in February and March, became infected with the virus.
According to published papers with Beijing labs, Dwyer was in a Beijing lab, working on SARS, around that time.
NIH Article: Associated Press reported (that) the authorities did not know yet whether any foreigners had been carrying out medical research in the facility and had since left the country.
17 years later, we still don’t know. But Dwyer was thereabouts. He published one SARS paper with Chinese researchers in Dec 2003, then another in July 2004.
W. Ian Lipkin (co-author of the infamous Proximal Origin paper) was right in the thick of it. He published a paper in Feb 2004 with the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Beijing. Was this part of the research with live SARS viruses referred to by the NIH article?
The original Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing changed its name after the lab-escape - it was China's CDC’s top lab, but it's not clear what the name was changed to - or whether our intrepid scientists were directly involved.
Following the lab-leaks, two separate ones within a month, there was a WHO investigation. Sound familiar?
Bob Dietz, WHO spokesman: We have a team of two or three international experts that's arriving in a day or two. They are going to go into the labs with Ministry of Health people and find out what happened here.
We've been told we'll have full access, be able to test all the surfaces, interview people who worked there, and look at documentation to find out what was being done.
For comparison, that’s the same song-sheet Dominic and other ‘investigators’ sang from recently about the Covid WHO/CCP investigation:
Dwyer: I think the access, my understanding is it's going to be very good. Obviously the Chinese have done a vast amount of work in trying to understand what happened so it's a matter of reviewing what they have done so far.
Dietz (2004): We're not releasing the names of the experts yet, but once you see the names you'll recognize them. They will be international experts from the relevant disciplines.
Did they ever release the names? I can’t find them. The one WHO article i found reffed the WHO report, as did another article, but when you click on the links all you get is a message saying WHO has “revamped” their website.
Unsurprisingly, the investigation turned out to be useless.
WHO Dr Angela Merianos: The investigation conducted to date has yet to identify a single source of infection or single procedural error at the institute. Consequently the route or routes of transmission are not known at this time.
WHO: It also remained unclear how two researchers at the institute became infected since they were not even working with the SARS virus. All those who became infected in the latest outbreak were people working at the institute and people who came into contact with them.
It’s easy to blame two graduate students, but they were ‘not even working with the SARS virus’. Tragically, the mother of one of the students became infected and died after she was visited by her daughter in Anhui.
So how did they become infected? Logic tells you that it goes higher up the chain - to people who were working with the virus.
Do either Dominic or Lipkin have information on this chain of infection or the dead-end WHO investigation? We don’t know. We only know they were in Beijing around that time working on SARS.
At the very least, given their proximal origin to the 2004 outbreak, it’s plain deceitful that they were leading the charge on denying Covid could have escaped from a lab - knowing full-well how easily it happened before.
(Also makes you wonder - was the original SARS outbreak of 2003 a lab accident?)
, Wednesday, June 23, 2021, 09:06 (1248 days ago)