From the Brownstone Institute

By  Robert Kogon 

So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicized press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.

As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.

Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.

Other notables include Chen Xinwen, the then-director of the WIV. Chen is the small, somewhat buck-toothed man in the lower right-hand corner. He was a member of TRR60. The young woman with the long hair next to Shi Zhengli appears to be the current Director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi. The former President of the Robert Koch Institute, Reinhard Burger, is also in the picture. He is the white-haired man with the blue shirt near the centre of the group.

Given the WIV’s famed practice of gain-of-function research, it is worth noting that this get-together took place precisely during the American moratorium on such research. It is also worth noting that Christian Drosten himself, as touched upon in my ‘The Greatest Story‘, has coordinated a German research project on the MERS coronavirus involving gain-of-function experiments. Indeed, that ‘RAPID’ project got underway just two years after the Berlin get-together and likewise while the American moratorium still remained in place.

So, did Wei Cai have anything to do with the German-Chinese virology network? Well, yes, from her publications, we know that she did. Thus, she is a co-author with Michael Roggendorf of this 2013 paper on PCR detection of Hepatitis and HIV infections. Roggendorf is none other than the founder of the German-Chinese partnership. He is the white-haired man with the red bowtie next to RKI president Burger in the above photo. The former Chair of the Department of Virology at Essen University Hospital, he would cede his position as German Co-Director of TRR60 to his colleague Dittmer in 2013. Essen University Hospital is the lead German institution in the German-Chinese virology partnership.

Roggendorf can be seen below receiving the “Chime Bell” award from the Governor of Hubei Province in 2016 in honor of his contributions to the German-Chinese partnership. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province.

In early 2020, Wei Cai would then appear as co-author with Christian Drosten on a paper about the famous first cluster of Covid-19 cases in Germany. As discussed in my series of articles here, here, and here, it was precisely this cluster that first raised the spectre of ‘asymptomatic spread’ of Covid-19, even though – contrary to what was claimed by Drosten and other German authors in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine – Patient Zero was not in fact asymptomatic and none of the members of the cluster appear to have been particularly ill.

As touched upon in my previous article, Wei Cai would then go on to complete a PhD in Medicine at Drosten’s Charité University Hospital in Berlin, although under the direction of her supervisor in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the RKI, Walter Haas. Per her Linked-In page (hat-tip: FrauHodl), she completed a first degree in medicine at the Hubei University of Chinese Medicine in Wuhan in 2000 before going to Germany to do a master’s in public health in Bremen.

It should be noted that Wei Cai is an epidemiologist, not a virologist. Hence, she would not have been involved in the sort of laboratory experimentation on viruses that was being conducted under the aegis of TRR60 in Wuhan.

Nonetheless, the questions remain. Why was the very existence of the RKI’s staff member from Wuhan redacted in the original official release of the “RKI Files?” Why were the minutes in question, now unredacted and revealing her existence, hidden in the ostensible leak, as if the leakers were somehow sensitive to the Government’s concerns? And why, finally, do German – unlike American – links to Wuhan appear to be off-limits for German media, both traditional and new? Why the omertà?

Republished from The Daily Sceptic

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

Federal agencies and scientists suspecting that Covid-19 began with a laboratory leak in China were effectively boxed out of a key presidential briefing and report assessing the possible origins of a pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The FBI was the only intelligence agency that was moderately confident in the lab leak theory, but the agency was not invited to a key August 2021 briefing with President Joe Biden in which other intelligence officials shared their consensus view that the virus more likely jumped from animals to humans,  according to the WSJ. Likewise, three scientists working for the Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) found that Covid-19 was the product of risky research work — contradicting the position of the Defense Intelligence Agency, NCMI’s parent agency — but their findings did not make it into the report Biden received.

Most of the events covered in the WSJ’s reporting occurred during a “90-day sprint” in which federal defense and intelligence agencies worked quickly to assess the origins of Covid-19 in response to a May 2021 order from Biden. The WSJ also reported that Biden began to show clear signs of mental decline as early as the spring of 2021, and that advisers and staff were known to tightly control access to him and the information he consumed.

Jason Bannan, then a senior scientist for the FBI who had focused on the pandemic for more than a year, was prepared to be invited to the White House for the key Biden briefing in August 2021, but to his surprise, he was not summoned, according to the WSJ.

“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan told the WSJ. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told the WSJ that it was not standard procedure for representatives of individual agencies to be invited to presidential briefings and that dissenting opinions about the origins of the pandemic were fairly represented in the final report. The ODNI and the National Intelligence Council “complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity” throughout their work on Covid-19, a ODNI spokeswoman told the WSJ.

Moreover, the three NCMI scientists — John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien — analyzed the virus in 2021 and found that the part of its “spike protein” allowing it to penetrate human cells was built with methods developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a Chinese research paper published in 2008, according to the WSJ. The scientists believed their findings suggested that Chinese scientists were doing “gain of function” research with the virus to find out if it could infect humans, and they began working with other officials, including Bannan’s partner at the FBI.

However, by July 2021 — about one month before top officials briefed Biden on the intelligence community’s findings — a more senior NCMI official instructed the three scientists to stop sharing their work with the FBI, according to the WSJ. The three scientists were reportedly told that the FBI was “off the reservation” when it came to Covid-19 origins, and some of their proposed edits to the report headed to Biden were not implemented.

The three NCMI scientists also wrote an unclassified paper in May 2020 that contested the natural origins theory, but they were not permitted to distribute it beyond NCMI, according to the WSJ. That assessment eventually leaked three years later and made it into the hands of Republican Ohio Rep. Brad Wenstrup, who led the Congressional subcommittee investigating the pandemic’s origins.

Meanwhile, State Department official and former World Health Organization (WHO) consultant Adrienne Keen was pushing others to not fully discount an early 2021 WHO report conducted with Chinese scientists that found the natural origins theory to be the most likely, according to the WSJ. The U.S. intelligence community generally dismissed the WHO assessment because of their view that Chinese officials and scientists likely constrained the investigation.

Shortly after the “90-day sprint” kicked off, Keen moved to the National Intelligence Council to be its director for global health security, according to the WSJ. The National Intelligence Council held significant sway in organizing the report on the intelligence community’s views about Covid-19 origins.

In the process of putting the report together, the National Intelligence Council worked up a chart showing how Covid-19 compares to past instances of diseases jumping to humans from animals, with examples like Ebola and Nipah, according to the WSJ. The FBI’s experts argued that the comparison was inapt because the other examples on the chart were far less contagious than Covid-19, but National Intelligence Council officials included the chart in the final version of the report anyway.

The FBI’s experts also butted heads with Keen and the National Intelligence Council over the geographic area where the pandemic started, according to the WSJ.

FBI experts argued that Covid-19 cases would be seen in a larger swath of China if the natural origin theory were true given that the species of bat thought to originally host the virus was not indigenous to Wuhan or anywhere close to the city, according to the WSJ. Keen rebutted that the geographic area of Covid-19’s origin was not known, and that the lack of cases in the large and highly-populated area between Wuhan and the bat’s habitat was irrelevant.

The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.