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FBI Chief Confirms Covid-19 Originated From Lab Incident In Wuhan

By LokMarg 1st March 2023

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday (local time) confirmed that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China.

“FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China,” tweeted the FBI.
This development comes after new intelligence had prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the novel coronavirus pandemic, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan… I will just make the observation that the Chinese government… has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing,” said FBI chief.

The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by the Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, have been pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.

The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, reported WSJ.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department’s insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.

The novel coronavirus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the US 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.

The emergence of the pandemic heightened tensions between the US and China, which US officials alleged was withholding information about the outbreak. It also led to a spirited and at times partisan debate in the US about its origin.

China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.

The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.

However, the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and US officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s origin.

Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002.

They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines. (ANI)

China Censors Reference To Protest Code Words, Demonstration Hotspots Like Xinjiang

By LokMarg 28th November 2022

Chinese censors are scrambling to scrub references to protest code words and demonstration hotspots like Xinjiang.

Chinese internet users and government censors are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game to control the narrative around the country’s anti- “zero COVID” protests, reported Al Jazeera.
By Monday, Chinese social media appeared to have scrubbed searches for protest hotspots like “Xinjiang” and “Beijing”, while posts with oblique phrases like “I saw it” – a reference to an internet user having seen a recently deleted post – were also censored.

“As the fissure widens between the lie and the truth, even what cannot be said or seen becomes immensely symbolic,” David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, told Al Jazeera.

“It can punch right through the veneer. And this is what we’ve seen over the past few days. The words, ‘I saw it, marking the void in the wake of a deleted protest video, can become powerful. Or students protesting on campus can hold up blank sheets of paper and they speak volumes.”

Many posts documenting the protests have already jumped China’s Great Firewall with the help of virtual private networks (VPNs) and have been shared on popular Western platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, which are officially banned in China.

“Beijing appears to be using the same tactics of censoring Chinese social media based on keywords – however, the amount of information that is getting out past the Great Firewall is definitely noteworthy,” Stevie Zhang, the associate editor of First Draft News, a non-profit dedicated to combating online misinformation, told Al Jazeera.

Zhang said internet users were evading censors by taking screenshots of posts before they were deleted and then sharing them with each other or posting them on Western social media. In some cases, posts have made it full circle back to China via Twitter screenshots.

Other users have taken to using seemingly unrelated and uncensored phrases to express their feelings, Zhang said, using “repetitions of ‘good’, or ‘well done’, or ‘win’ as a sort of sarcastic or passive-aggressive way of highlighting the inability for Chinese people to voice any form of criticism.”

The use of euphemisms is a common tactic of Chinese netizens to evade government censors, with abbreviations and homonyms often standing in for banned words. During China’s “Me Too” movement in 2018, many internet users posted under the hashtag “rice bunny” – which when said aloud in Mandarin Chinese sounds like “me too” – after the original hashtag was banned, reported Al Jazeera.

This time, China’s censors have also taken note of how much information is circulating on Western platforms such as Twitter.

Protests began in Urumqi, the capital of the far-western Xinjiang region, on Friday following the deaths of 10 people in an apartment block fire before spreading over the weekend to major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chengdu.

Meanwhile, China’s western Xinjiang region eased some COVID-19 restrictions in its capital Urumqi on Monday, after a deadly fire in the city blamed on virus controls sparked protests across the country.

People in the city of four million, some of whom have been confined to their homes for weeks on end, can travel around on buses to run errands within their home districts starting Tuesday, officials said at a press conference Monday, reported Arab News.

The protests in Urumqi erupted after footage posted on social media showed fire trucks spraying water from too far away to reach the apartment building, with internet users claiming authorities could not get closer due to pandemic barricades and cars that had been abandoned by people who had been quarantined.

Videos and photographs of the protests quickly circulated on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, where they received tens of thousands of views before being deleted by government censors, reported Al Jazeera.

The acts of defiance shared online included scenes of people tearing down barricades, calling for the resignation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and holding up blank white pieces of paper as a symbol of protest.

China’s COVID protests come as the country is grappling with its most cases yet, promoting a new wave of lockdowns and restrictions on freedom of movement in big cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou. Health authorities reported 40,347 new infections for Sunday, a fifth straight daily record.

Residents of Urumqi, where the recent protests began, have lived under harsh restrictions since August 10, in what is believed to be China’s longest continuous lockdown.

In late March and early April, a five-day “circuit breaker” lockdown in Shanghai was extended to two months, prompting food shortages and rare displays of public discontent.

China is the last country in the world sticking to a “zero-COVID” policy aimed at stamping out flare-ups of the virus at almost any cost. The strategy, which relies on lockdowns, border controls, and mass testing, has kept cases and deaths low compared with elsewhere but inflicted serious economic and social costs. (ANI)

Despite Global Concerns, Pak, China Working On Deadly Virus

By LokMarg 6th November 2022

While COVID-19 and its new variants still plague the world, Pakistan and China are continuing with bioweapons research in a secret facility near Rawalpindi.

The infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology and Pakistan Army-run, Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), has set up a highly-advanced scientific infrastructure to research deadly pathogens in Pakistan. The location of the facility remains a tightly guarded secret, reported Geo-Politik.
According to various global media reports, China is creating Covid-like pathogens in Pakistan that have the potential of causing virus contamination on a scale far higher than Covid.

The mystery deepened further in 2020 when Pakistan first denied such reports. The Foreign Office of Pakistan stated that “there is nothing secret about the Bio-Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of Pakistan referred to in the report, reported Geo-Politik.

Pakistan has been sharing information about the facility with the States Parties to the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BTWC) in its submission of Confidence Building Measures,” the FO said.

It added that the facility was meant for diagnostic and protective system improvement by Research and Development on emerging health threats, surveillance, and disease outbreak investigation.

The laboratory in question is a “Biosafety Level 4” facility (BSL-4) where the most dangerous and infective agents are tested and developed. The DSTO is located in Chaklala cantonment, Rawalpindi, and is headed by a two-star General, reported Geo-Politik.

Experts say that BSL-4 labs are used to study infectious agents and toxins that can cause life-threatening diseases for which there is no vaccine or therapy available.

Those in the intelligence and scientific community, watching the developments, warn that by using Pakistan, China had outsourced a highly contagious network of laboratories where antigens a hundred times more infectious than the present Covid could be created or `dropped in,’ reported Geo-Politik.

According to bioweapons experts, the joint collaboration between Pakistan’s lab, managed by the army, and a series of laboratories and institutions run by PLA, was not for scientific experiments but to weaponize pathogens.

The secret project carries the title: Collaboration for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Studies on Biological Control of Vector Transmitting Diseases. (ANI)