But there might be another reason behind the quiet—this 11 day period was when authorities in Wuhan City and Hubei Province held their most important annual political meetings. Over 2,000 “representatives of the people” gathered to discuss the “amazing achievements of 2019” and how 2020 will be “a tremendous and promising year.”

The virus? It was barely mentioned.

In an interview with Hong Kong media Initium, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Zhou Xueguang said that he was not surprised by the Wuhan government’s response. He explained that downplaying negative incidents, especially during major political events, is the Chinese government’s coping mechanism.

He said, “Only that the consequence of following their playbook was so disastrous this time, and that is something the officials didn’t expect.”

Meanwhile, the reality of the situation was getting worse.

According to an SOS post on Chinese social media site Weibo, a person’s dad was confirmed to have viral pneumonia. But the Xiehe Hospital in Wuhan refused to admit the father due to a shortage of hospital beds.

Another netizen posted that his entire family was infected. They went to the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan and saw that “there were so many patients that some had to lie on the floor of the corridor.” His father was also sent home to self-quarantine because there weren’t enough hospital beds.

The post was later deleted. So were all other posts in the user’s account.

That’s the week Wuhan authorities didn’t report a single confirmed or suspected case.

Spread Encouraged

Everything seemed to be under control. On Jan. 17, Wuhan’s tourism bureau even issued over 200,000 free tourism tickets. It was an effort to entice people to visit the city, so they could experience the “Chinese style and warm sentiments of Wuhan.”

Not only was the Chinese regime cracking down on the negative “rumors,” they were also working hard to prevent information from making its way out of mainland China.

On Jan. 14, a group of Hong Kong journalists accompanied Hong Kong experts who were invited to conduct research on the virus outbreak. The reporters were later detained by Chinese police, who photographed their reporter IDs and asked them to delete all footage taken inside hospitals.

From Jan. 12 to 16, an estimated over 3 million passengers left Wuhan by train, to visit other cities in China.

On Jan. 18, Baibuting, a populous district in Wuhan, held an annual banquet to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday.

But three days before, staff from the neighborhood committee who were concerned about the outbreak asked if they could cancel the banquet. But district officials denied the request.

Over 40,000 families eventually joined the banquet. 

If you’re a resident of Wuhan, and you’ve followed the government’s directive to not “believe or spread conspiracy theories,” here’s what you’d know about the coronavirus: First, there is zero infection among medical staff; Second, there is no evidence that the disease is contagious; And third, the outbreak is preventable and controllable.

But on Jan. 20, for the first time ever, a Chinese expert said there was actually human to human transmission of the virus. The number of infected people exploded. Three days later, the entire city of Wuhan was put under lockdown. Over 50 million people were impacted.

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4.6.22 – Epoch Times

“Memo Reveals State Department Assessed in Early 2020 That Lab Leak Was Most Likely Origin of COVID-19”

By Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke

EXCERPTS FROM THIS ARTICLE:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/memo-reveals-state-department-assessed-in-early-2020-lab-leak-was-most-likely-origin-of-covid-19_4387879.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-04-07&utm_medium=email&est=%2FSlGh12m6dvAAlpGRClAhfrwtZQVcKdvyAlJ%2FqnCQWdyAqQWUw38%2F9DtYCBT

A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.

That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of information that wasn’t known publicly at the time it was written.

Although a lab leak is now widely accepted as a likely origin for the virus, when the memo was written, a concerted effort was underway to discredit that possibility…

According to the newly released memo, the State Department knew as of April 2020 that the central issue surrounded an obsession with collecting and testing a massive amount of virus-carrying bats on the part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s Wuhan-located Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The State Department noted that lab testing of the earliest-known patient at the Wuhan Central Hospital in December 2019 determined that the virus was a “Bat SARS-like Coronavirus.” At the time this patient was tested, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hadn’t disclosed that there was any problem at all.

When they finally acknowledged an outbreak, they initially blamed it on pneumonia. It was only at the end of January that the CCP finally started admitting that COVID-19 was caused by a new virus that was transmitted between humans.

By that time, the virus had already been seeded across the globe and any chance at suppression had been lost. It was during this same period that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was made aware of the virus’s likely origin, having been told by a group of scientists whom he was funding that there was a high probability that the virus was engineered.

Although it’s been known since June 2021 that Fauci and the NIH covered up his knowledge of the virus’s origin…

Two Labs

The memo, titled “An Analysis of Circumstantial Evidence for Wuhan Labs as the Source of the Coronavirus,” comprises five pages and is written in military BLUF style, meaning “bottom line up front.”

The memo begins by stating that one of two Wuhan labs is the likely source of the COVID outbreak. The two labs identified by the state department are the Wuhan CDC’s lab located in downtown Wuhan and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli was known to have conducted dangerous gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses.

The State Department’s focus on the Wuhan CDC lab as a possible source is particularly significant as that facility is located only a few hundred feet from the Huanan Seafood Market where an already infected customer may have caused a superspreader event in December 2019.

Notably, the World Health Organization’s lead investigator of the virus’s origin, Peter Ben Embarek, privately told a Danish TV crew that he suspected that the Wuhan CDC lab was the origin of the pandemic. Embarek, who promoted a natural origin for the virus in his public report, privately noted that the CDC lab had mysteriously moved to its new downtown location in early December and that such a move may have increased the chances of a lab leak or accidental spillage.

The other lab identified by the State Department as the likely source of the pandemic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been the main focus of attention over the past two years.

The State Department memo noted that the Wuhan Institute, by far the most logical place to investigate the virus origin, had been completely sealed off from outside inquiry by the CCP. The memo also noted that a gag order regarding both Wuhan labs had been issued on Jan 1, 2020, and a major general from the People’s Liberation Army had assumed control over the Wuhan Institute of Virology since early January of 2020.

The State Department memo emphatically stated that “All other proposed theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent inquiry to Wuhan CDC and Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

It bears repeating that the memo was written in April 2020.

That’s because the State Department’s decoy argument mirrors the actions taken by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) head Dr. Francis Collins who–at the same time this memo was written–were actively suppressing and censoring any public discussion of the lab leak scenario. When Fox News ran a story in April 2020 suggesting that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab, Collins immediately contacted Fauci to explore ways the two men could “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”

Collins had previously told Fauci and his group of scientists that “science and international harmony” could be harmed if the lab leak theory took hold.

Collins’s directive led Fauci’s group to publish two papers that categorically dismissed the lab leak theory, one in the medical journal the Lancet and the other in the scientific journal Nature. Those two papers would become the cornerstone of combined efforts from Fauci’s scientists, the media, Big Tech, and the U.S. government to suppress any discussion of a lab leak, while simultaneously promoting the natural origin theory.

…Regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the State Department memo noted that the director of the lab, Shi Zhengli, had conducted gain-of-function engineering of bat viruses to make them more easily transmittable to humans. As we now know, the defining feature of the COVID-19 virus, its furin cleavage site, is what makes the virus particularly transmissible in humans. While no furin cleavage site has ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS coronaviruses, Shi was part of a 2018 research proposal that aimed to insert exactly such a feature into coronaviruses.

The State Department’s memo also highlights the poor safety standards at the Wuhan Institute, a fact that could easily lead to an unintentional leak of the deadly virus to the outside population. Interestingly, the memo also questions the disappearance of lab worker Huang Yanling, whose bio, profile, and picture were scrubbed from the institute’s website shortly after the outbreak. To this day, Huang’s whereabouts and well-being remain unknown.

Lastly, the memo takes a detailed look at a Chinese medical professional whose online name is Wu Xiaohua. Wu claimed that Shi Zhengli was playing God by creating coronaviruses with the specific aim of making them more transmissible in humans. Wu also claimed that Shi used intermediate animals in her lab and that her lab’s management of deadly viruses was appallingly poor and negligent.

The State Department memo found Wu’s claims to be credible and that assessment holds up well, given the information that has been made public in the intervening two years. We now know Shi had an active plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat viruses, we know that she used humanized mice to test how her virus creations would affect humans, and we know that her lab was repeatedly cited for its poor safety record.

…Had the memo been made public nearly two years ago when it was written, the course of events would have been very different. Knowing that the virus came out of a lab would have refocused public attention and the search for remedies could have been more focused.

There also would have been more concerted efforts to prevent future leaks. Rather than misdirecting the public toward a natural origin, Fauci and the NIH would have been exposed for their role in funding the work at the Wuhan Institute.

Most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party would have been subjected to greater international pressure for its role in suppressing any advance information regarding the outbreak. The memo might also have had an impact on the 2020 presidential election, as voters tended to see Donald Trump as far more capable than Joe Biden in taking on the CCP…