Brownstone Institute
Curious: Angela Merkel’s September 2019 Visit to Wuhan
From the Brownstone Institute
In a much-tweeted soundbite from the recent Congressional hearing on the origins of Covid-19, former CDC director Robert Redfield noted that three unusual events occurred in Wuhan in September 2019 suggesting a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
But another, in retrospect, highly curious event also occurred in Wuhan in September 2019: namely, none other than then German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to the city and, more specifically, to the Tongji Hospital on the left bank of the Yangtze River. The hospital is also known as the German-Chinese Friendship Hospital.
The below photo from Germany’s Deutsche Presse Agentur shows Chancellor Merkel being greeted by nurses at the hospital reception on September 7, 2019. (Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung.)
A 2021 House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Report, referring in greater detail to the same events as Redfield, concludes that a lab leak took place at the WIV sometime prior to September 12, when, notably, the WIV’s virus and sample database was mysteriously taken offline in the middle of the night (p. 5 and passim).
What an incredible coincidence that the German Chancellor was visiting Wuhan’s Tongji Hospital at almost precisely the time when, according to Redfield’s speculations, a potentially catastrophic event was taking place across the river at the Wuhan Institute of Virology! This was, moreover, merely three months before the first officially acknowledged cases of Covid-19 began to turn up in the city.
But the coincidence is in fact even more incredible. For when those first cases did begin to turn up in Wuhan in early December 2019, they did not in fact turn up in the vicinity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the right bank of the Yangtze, but rather in the direct vicinity of Tongji Hospital on the left bank!
The below mapping of the initial cluster of cases from Science magazine makes this clear. The black dot is the epicenter of the cluster. Cross #5 marks the location of Tongji Hospital.
And that is not all. As discussed in my earlier article on “The Other Lab in Wuhan,”although the WIV was relatively far removed from the outbreak – say around 10 kilometers from the epicenter as the crow flies — there is in fact another virus research lab in Wuhan that is located right in the area of the initial cluster.
The lab in question is the German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity – or, as its German co-director Ulf Dittmer has also called it, the “Essen-Wuhan Laboratory for Virus Research” – and the Chinese host institution of the German-Chinese Joint Lab is none other than the Tongji-Hospital-affiliated Tongji Medical College.
Per Google maps, Tongji Medical College is located around one kilometer due north of the hospital. Have another look at the above map keeping in mind the indicated scale. This would put it nearly right at the epicenter of the outbreak!
According to German and Chinese sources, however, the lab is in fact located at another hospital affiliated with Tongji Medical College: Wuhan Union Hospital. The location of Union Hospital is marked by cross #6 on the Science map: still in the cluster, but a bit further away from the epicenter.
A press release on the website of the University of Duisburg-Essen, the German co-sponsor of the lab, notes that:
The Joint Lab is fully equipped for virus research. It is a BSL2 safety laboratory with access to BSL3 conditions. German and Chinese members of the lab have access to a large sample collection form [sic.] patients of the Department of Infectious Diseases for their research.
BSL stands for “biosafety level.”
The below photo from a German article on the Essen-Wuhan collaboration shows the virologist Xin Zheng of Union Hospital, Tongji Medical School, at work in the joint lab. Per the cited source, Xin did her doctorate at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Could SARS-CoV-2 have leaked from the joint lab?
And, while we’re at it, was gain-of-function research being conducted at the lab? We do not know, but we do know that the German members of the lab will, at any rate, have been in contact with a nearby lab where it was being conducted. For the Wuhan Institute of Virology lists the University of Duisburg-Essen as one of its partner institutions.
Furthermore, in addition to its own partnership with the University of Duisburg-Essen, Tongji Medical College also has a longstanding academic exchange program with the Charité research and teaching hospital in Berlin of none other than Christian Drosten: the German virologist whose controversial and ultrasensitive PCR protocol, in effect, guaranteed that the Covid-19 outbreak would acquire the status of a “pandemic.”
As discussed in “The Other Lab in Wuhan,” Drosten appears as one of the scientists participating in the so-called “Fauci emails,” and of all the participants, he is the most vehement denier of the possibility of a lab leak.
In remarks in the German press, Drosten has admitted that he began working on his Covid-19 testing protocol before any Covid-19 cases had even officially been reported to the WHO! He says he did so based on information he had from unnamed virologist colleagues working in Wuhan. (Source: Die Berliner Zeitung.)
Speaking of which, Drosten can be seen below in the company of none other than Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the scientist whose research on bat coronaviruses is suspected of being at the origin of a Covid-19 lab leak.
The picture comes from a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” that took place in Berlin in 2015 and that was organized by Ulf Dittmer of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Dittmer, as noted above, is the co-director of the Essen-Wuhan lab, which would be founded two years later. The symposium was funded by the German Ministry of Health.
Dittmer is the bald man with the striped shirt in the full group picture of symposium participants below. (Source: University of Duisburg-Essen.) The jovial bearded man with the bowtie in the next row is none other than Thomas Mertens, the current chair of the “Standing Committee on Vaccination” of the German health authority, the Robert Koch Institute.
The Berlin symposium was held one year after the US government declared a moratorium on gain-of-function research.
As it so happens, Drosten himself has been involved in gain-of-function research, as the below screen shot from the webpage of the German RAPID project makes clear.
RAPID stands for “Risk Assessment in Prepandemic Respiratory Infectious Diseases.” Further information from the German Ministry of Education and Research expressly states that Drosten’s Charité hospital does not merely oversee, but is directly involved (beteiligt) in RAPID sub-project 2: i.e. “identification of host factors by loss-of-function and gain-of-function experiments.”
Imagine for a moment that then President Donald Trump paid a visit to Wuhan in September 2019, at the very time that a lab leak is suspected to have occurred in the city.
And imagine that, while there, he made a stop at a hospital that is affiliated with a medical school located in the very epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak that would officially occur three months later.
Imagine that this medical school, furthermore, runs a joint, BSL-3 capable, virus research lab with an American university – let’s say, for example, Ralph Baric’s University of North Carolina – and that Baric and his colleagues were themselves conducting research right in Wuhan!
And imagine that the American university in question is also a partner institution of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Baric’s University of North Carolina is not in fact) and that the local Wuhan medical school also has a partnership with, say, the NIH.
And imagine that there is even a photo of none other than Anthony Fauci of the NIH with none other than Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology at a joint “Sino-American Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Washington that was organized by Baric and funded by the US Department of Health four years before the Covid-19 outbreak. And imagine, for good measure, that, say, Rochelle Walensky was also present at the event.
Imagine, finally, that Fauci had not just (allegedly) provided funding for gain-of-function research, but was himself directly involved in it.
The above concatenation of circumstances would undoubtedly be regarded as what some members of the US intelligence community might call “slam-dunk” proof of US complicity in any lab leak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that may have occurred in Wuhan.
Why does the ample evidence of manifold German connections to and indeed involvement in virus research in Wuhan not merit at least the same degree of scrutiny, if not to say of certainty?
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
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