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Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Conspiracy Theories & Claims

Is that the general view in Australia?
Especially the bit about demanding reparations from China and scrapping the WHO, as it is in China's pocket.

Not just Australia. There are calls in France too (this article entitled China Must Pay is from ex Charlie Hebdo journalist Jean Patrick Grumberg) to demand reparations from the Chinese regime for inflicting the virus on the world.

https://www.dreuz.info/2020/03/15/goldnadeltv-coronavirus-la-chine-doit-payer/
 
Conman at work, notice that he had a white van.

Police are warning people to be vigilant after a suspected conman tried to get a homeowner to hand over their dog for coronavirus quarantine.

The man went to a house in Marton, Middlesbrough, and told the victim their dog needed to be taken away. When questioned, the man walked away and drove off in a white van. Cleveland Police has renewed warnings about fraud. The RSPCA has said there is "no evidence" pets can become ill from coronavirus.

The male suspect is described as being a tanned with an unknown accent and black hair. He was wearing a grey padded coat and dark trousers.

"We are warning members of the public to be vigilant," a force spokeswoman said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tees-51987632
 
Is that the general view in Australia?
Especially the bit about demanding reparations from China and scrapping the WHO, as it is in China's pocket.
It isn't that dumb a position. Off to the Hague. It would certainly justify harsh economic measures if they lose the case and fail to cough up (so to speak).
 
If China stops trading with the countries who 'get stroppy' then those countries will rapidly join the collapsing economy club.

I think a lot of people don't realise how important China is.
 
The number of US Senators accused of insider trading now stands at four.

Four US senators are under scrutiny over claims they used insider knowledge about the impending coronavirus crisis to sell shares before prices plummeted.

Republicans Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler face calls to quit after selling millions in stocks last month. James Inhofe, a Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, also reportedly sold holdings at the time. It is illegal for Congress members to trade based on non-public information gathered during their official duties.

All four senators deny any impropriety.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51976484
 
The number of US Senators accused of insider trading now stands at four.

Four US senators are under scrutiny over claims they used insider knowledge about the impending coronavirus crisis to sell shares before prices plummeted.

Republicans Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler face calls to quit after selling millions in stocks last month. James Inhofe, a Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, also reportedly sold holdings at the time. It is illegal for Congress members to trade based on non-public information gathered during their official duties.

All four senators deny any impropriety.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51976484
Yes this will be interesting as it unfolds. Feinstein was I think Mayor when I lived in SF and I have always regarded her highly - I would like to hear the whole story before descending on her. One person (wife of the head of the NYSE) said indignantly that she had no idea what the managers did with her investment portfolio. But at least they might all be guilty of negligence. They have a higher level of duty.
 
But we all know what the australians think of china.

they hate them

they even eat off of Melamine.
 
Back in October, The Guardian was calling for a boycott of some Chinese brands, but that was because they were produced by slaves in their notorious labour camps.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...oycott-any-company-doing-business-in-xinjiang

I don't know how effective that call for action was but, if evidence of deliberate culpability by the Chinese regime in inflicting the virus on humanity emerged, then I can see that boycott spreading.
 
Is that the general view in Australia?
Especially the bit about demanding reparations from China and scrapping the WHO, as it is in China's pocket.
Sydney and Melbourne have some areas that look like a posh Chinese resorts and don't intergrated with the Australian culture unlike the Lebanese who are half in half with Australian identity live in concrete soulless West Sydney parts.
 
But a lot of plagues are said to originate in China

Country has long had very dense population which helps breed them.
 
Does this qualify as a conspiracy...

Judging that it's arguable either way, I shall post it here for now.

This is one significant article and a must-read.

How early signs of the coronavirus were spotted, spread and throttled in China

Source: The Straits Times
Date: 28 February, 2020

(CAIXIN GLOBAL) - The new coronavirus that has claimed nearly 3,000 lives and spread to more than 50 countries was sequenced in Chinese labs - and found to be similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) - weeks before officials publicly identified it as the cause of a mysterious viral pneumonia cluster in Wuhan, a Caixin investigation has found.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/e...us-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-in-china
 
Forgive me if this has already been posted here; please remove if it has. (I would have preferred to simply put it in the main COVID-19 thread – since I am not reading this one – but fear it will be removed from there, so I'm putting it here.)

Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by harvard2thebighouse


An accessible and comprehensive YouTube summary of the report below by a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School is available here. And you can read our takedown of Nature magazine’s recent article claiming COVID-19 definitely wasn’t from a lab here.
This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in mid February the Chinese Ministry of Science sent out a directive to all its labs emphasizing the important of carefully handling bio-infectious agents and alluding to slack oversight and past lapses, even mentioning coronaviruses specifically.
Mistakes may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for Johns Hopkins’ Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well. This is unlikely to be a plot twist in one of the novels Tom Clancy wrote after he started mailing it in.
Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which had already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
UPDATE 2/14, 3:02am EST: A probable smoking pre-print has been released, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China:
“In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
In a predictable turn, that article has been removed and both researchers have since deleted their profiles off of the ResearchGate site completely. Furthering the appearance of a cover-up, back on January 2nd, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s director sent out a memo forbidding discussion of an “unknown pneumonia in Wuhan” after ordering the destruction of all related lab materials a day earlier, making it abundantly clear that the Chinese government knew about this outbreak long before they took any steps to contain it, or made any public announcement.
These propaganda efforts have been bolstered by possible collusion from American scientists, some of which is detailed below – but also most notably by one Peter Daszak, who had been publishing papers on coronaviruses alongside the primary Chinese person-of-interest, Zhengli Shi, for years. Perhaps most notably, Daszak is listed as a co-author in the paper first documenting the isolation of a coronavirus from a bat that targets the ACE2 receptor – just like COVID-19 – research done in Wuhan’s virology lab and supervised by Zhengli Shi, and led by a second suspect Chinese researcher who you’ll meet below. At best, Daszak is perhaps acting as an unwitting agent of the Chinese government, but regardless holds an enormous conflict-of-interest. And if nothing else, it is wildly irresponsible to speak-out against the possibility that the virus got out of a lab when a natural origin has not been conclusively demonstrated. Daszak’s statement in The Lancet is either incompetence, or is meant to be a smokescreen for the wanton hubris and greed that have fueled the gain-of-function research detailed below: As one possible related project which may have overlapped with this one, coronaviruses have been seen as a viable vector for an HIV vaccine for years – a project with hundreds of millions of dollars dangling over it.
And unfortunately Daszak is far from alone, there are countless “journalists” mindlessly regurgitating statements from the Chinese government and the WHO with no effort to fact-check whatsoever, as well as “scientists” whose real job is running PR for pharmaceutical and research companies who have spent weeks serving China by making extraordinarily misleading and overconfident statements to the public about the origins and capabilities of this virus. And it should be noted that in 2018, the esteemed scientific journal Nature – which has published numerous articles speciously claiming this virus is definitely natural – was revealed to have buckled to censorship demands from the Chinese government, killing over 1,000 articles to placate their Chinese partners.
Many involved in this dissimulation are effectively acting as agents of a foreign government, and they have left most Americans entirely unprepared for the tragedy that’s beginning to occur in our nursing homes and hospitals. If the idea that just maybe this thing came from a lab had been part of the national dialogue from the start – wouldn’t everyone have been much more cautious and open to social distancing and other limitations once the need arose?
And so being an offshoot of this sort of vaccine program, possibly as a Red Team designed to build defenses and therapeutics against, is just one possible gain-of-function pursuit that would fit some of the unusual genomic and logistical picture below. Whether or not it was the exact target of the Wuhan lab’s genomic tinkering – the reality is millions of dollars of funding from multiple world governments have poured into this research, funding that’s dangled over these scientists as they’ve chased it like Icarus, this time not just risking their own lives – but hundreds of millions of others as well.
Subsequently, we are calling for an immediate end to dual-use gain-of-function research.

More at Origins of COVID-19
 
China owns Nature magazine’s ass – Debunking “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” claiming COVID-19 definitely wasn’t from a lab

Posted on March 19, 2020 by harvard2thebighouse


Maybe you shouldn’t blindly believe everything you read? Even if the source has a pretty solid reputation?
Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence. China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.
And while the mainstream corporate media mindless regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic – sites like ZeroHedge, that have been at the forefront of keeping the lines of investigation open, have been banished from Twitter and marginalized.
Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.
Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.​
  • As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS. That process would leave a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. However the addition of artificial generations produced by this process of passing through ferrets in the lab would create a lot of genetic distance from any possible relatives – precisely what is seen in COVID-19: it forms its own clade and appears very distant from all other bat coronaviruses. So this is lazy research, they’re either unaware of the Bird Flu study or are willfully ignoring it.

Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.​
  • This seems like pretty intentional dissimulation. It’s “likely” that other viruses with this cleavage site will be found? What? How likely? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 million? Is it likely that if my aunt grew balls she’d become my uncle? Is it “likely” that a natural intermediate animal vector will be found? Well… likely or not, until it happens it seems incredibly disingenuous to state that “likely” means a damn thing here.

The functional consequence of the polybasic cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and it will be important to determine its impact on transmissibility and pathogenesis in animal models. Experiments with SARS-CoV have shown that insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion without affecting viral entry14.​
  • This doesn’t seem to address the virus’s provenance at all, but just as an aside it seems like a lot of the viruses with furin cleavage sites engage in ADE, which COVID-19 appears to be doing from a clinical perspective: neurological damage, the second infection is worse, and areas like Wuhan with extended infections have much higher CFRs as infections overlap.

The acquisition of polybasic cleavage sites by HA has also been observed after repeated passage in cell culture or through animals17.​
  • Exactly. Passage through a series of ferret hosts in a lab would have given COVID-19 this distinct cleavage site.

It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11.​
  • Yes, again we aren’t arguing that this thing was built nucleotide-by-nucleotide as the perfect bespoke bio-weapon. This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through ferrets in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.

Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19
  • This is an utterly vacuous statement. Probably doesn’t mean a damn thing in science. “Okay folks, we probably won’t get an earthquake anytime soon, so no reason to prepare for one or try and detect one coming!” Seriously?

Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.​
  • As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t matter how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.
Full article here: Debunking claims COVID-19 not from a lab
 
Prof. Francis Boyle discusses the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China and the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4) from which he believes the infectious disease escaped. He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with gain of function properties, which is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it. The Wuhan BSL-4 lab is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.

Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, College of Law. Professor Boyle is the man who drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President George Bush.

(note: video posted Jan. 30th)

Francis Boyle: Wuhan Coronavirus is an Offensive Biological Warfare Weapon
 
Sydney and Melbourne have some areas that look like a posh Chinese resorts and don't intergrated with the Australian culture unlike the Lebanese who are half in half with Australian identity live in concrete soulless West Sydney parts.

I think we're getting off topic now.

Immigrant communities are not part of any coronavirus conspiracy theory I have heard.
 
Just noticed a news item that Elon Musk is keeping his Tesla factories going and downplaying the whole Corona virus scenario. Since he's one of the few people with the tech to flee the planet, has the "Alternative 3" conspiracy, resurfaced yet? That's that the rich and powerful are about to abandon everyone else and evacute in the clandestinely-built fleet of space ships to a secret colony on Mars. (Ben Elton's "Stark" has a similar plot). If it hasn't re-surfaced already, it's only a matter of time...
 
Sorry about that.

It's not a problem at all (especially not as you are a new-ish arrival), but the topics you raise have a history of bringing far more heat than light to debates on this board.
 
Just noticed a news item that Elon Musk is keeping his Tesla factories going and downplaying the whole Corona virus scenario. Since he's one of the few people with the tech to flee the planet, has the "Alternative 3" conspiracy, resurfaced yet? That's that the rich and powerful are about to abandon everyone else and evacute in the clandestinely-built fleet of space ships to a secret colony on Mars. (Ben Elton's "Stark" has a similar plot). If it hasn't re-surfaced already, it's only a matter of time...

Trible2,

NO ONE has the technology to flee the planet for more than a few weeks, and those that do are astronauts.

Surely you don't subscribe to the idea that the 'Illuminati' are about to flee the place. There is nowhere for them to flee to.

'Stark' is just a story. Nothing more.
 
Trible2,

NO ONE has the technology to flee the planet for more than a few weeks, and those that do are astronauts.

Surely you don't subscribe to the idea that the 'Illuminati' are about to flee the place. There is nowhere for them to flee to.

'Stark' is just a story. Nothing more.

Has the concept of "joke" fled the planet?
 
Has the concept of "joke" fled the planet?

The thing about jokes is the way that you tell them.

And a lot of people do actually believe that there are manned US bases on the Moon. Seriously.
 
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