Dead men tell no tales.

[DiannaDark]

Dead men tell no tales.




I site the Fair Use of Information that is Copyrighted for Educational Purposes with out remuneration.



China's Bat Lady.- Shi Zhengli whose experiments and study of the virus carrying bats was sometimes funded by the United States Government.

About a year ago, Shi’s team published two comprehensive reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology. Drawing evidence from her own studies—many of which were published in top academic journals—and from others, Shi and her co-authors warned of the risk of future outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses. A fresh Report she wrote in Janurary 2020 was Destroyed by the Chinese Government.

Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan.

If that is true China and WHO simply withheld information about the Coronavirus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China did not create a new and different version of the Bat Virus COVID-19, they only lied and that is what every sane person expects of all Media and Politicians, not just those in China.

Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there


Doctor Li Wenliang and Doctor Shi Zhengli tried to get information out of China about the new deadly Coronavirus and both of them died. I guess Hilary Clinton isn't the only person in the world that knows dead men tell no tales.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51409801

It is only history.

After the Communist, stumbling, mumbling, wobbling and sometimes falling down wino, junkie, lunatic, criminal, asshole Hilary Clinton lost her fixed election, the Traitor Democrats in office in Washington, DC and our loonies in the liberal media have been the major problems in the United States.

RACING AGAINST A DEADLY PATHOGEN
On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patient samples. In the following weeks—the most intense and the most stressful time of her life—China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the first round of tests showed that samples from five of seven patients contained genetic sequences known to be present in all coronaviruses.
Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus—now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen—was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

In 2004, an international team of scientists takes blood and swab samples from bats at night in order to discover potential bat-borne pathogens. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology

The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326 published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says. The data also point to a single introduction into humans followed by sustained human-to-human transmission, researchers say.

Given that the virus seems fairly stable and that many infected individuals appear to have mild symptoms, scientists suspect the pathogen might have been around for weeks or even months before the first severe cases raised alarm. “There might have been mini outbreaks, but the virus burned out” before causing havoc, Baric says. “The Wuhan outbreak is by no means incidental.” In other words, there was an element of inevitability to it.

To many, the region’s burgeoning wildlife markets—which sell a wide range of animals such as bats, civets, pangolins, badgers and crocodiles—are perfect viral melting pots. Although humans could have caught the deadly virus from bats directly (according to several studies, including those by Shi and her colleagues), independent teams have suggested in preprint studies that pangolins may have been an intermediate host. These teams have reportedly uncovered SARS-CoV-2–like coronaviruses in these animals, which were seized in antismuggling operations in southern China.

On February 24, 2020 China announced a permanent ban on wildlife consumption and trade except for research or medicinal or display purposes—which will stamp out an industry worth $76 billion and put approximately 14 million people out of jobs, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Some welcome the initiative, whereas others, such as Daszak, worry that without efforts to change people’s traditional beliefs or provide alternative livelihoods, a blanket ban may push the business underground. This could make disease detection even more challenging. “Eating wildlife has been part of the cultural tradition in southern China” for thousands of years, Daszak says. “It won’t change overnight.”

In any case, Shi says, “wildlife trade and consumption are only part of problem.” In late 2016 pigs across four farms in Qingyuan county in Guangdong—60 miles from the site where the SARS outbreak originated—suffered from acute vomiting and diarrhea, and nearly 25,000 of the animals died. Local veterinarians could not detect any known pathogen and called Shi for help. The cause of the illness, called swine acute diarrhea syndrome (SADS), turned out to be a virus whose genomic sequence was 98 percent identical to a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in a nearby cave.

“This is a serious cause for concern,” says Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University. Pigs and humans have very similar immune systems, making it easy for viruses to cross between the two species. Moreover a team at Zhejiang University in the Chinese city of Hangzhou found the SADS virus could infect cells from many organisms in a petri dish, including rodents, chickens, nonhuman primates and humans. Given the scale of swine farming in many countries, such as China and the U.S., Gray says, looking for novel coronaviruses in pigs should be a top priority.

Although the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth one caused by bat-borne viruses in the past 26 years —the other five being Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, SARS in 2002, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014—“the animals [themselves] are not the problem,” Wang says. In fact, bats help promote biodiversity and the health of their ecosystems by eating insects and pollinating plants. “The problem arises when we get in contact with them,” he says.

Muzzling the Bat Lady and Media in China Janurary and Feburary 2020.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/672235/chi ... us-expert/

2005
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most secure lab of its kind in China.

Gao Yu, a Chinese journalist freed last week after 78 days of lockdown. Waid he spoke to Shi during his incarceration and she said her report about the Coronavirus in Januarary of 2020 was seized and destroyed by the Chinese Government. 'We learned later her institute finished gene-sequencing and related tests as early as January 2 but was muzzled.'

The Bat Lady warned, according to a leak on social media confirmed by activists and Hong Kong media, that 'inappropriate and inaccurate information'was causing 'general panic' – thought to refer to eight whistle-blowing doctors whose warnings to local citizens had led to their arrest.

Bats have been linked with seven major epidemics over the past three decades

Shi has worked alongside many of the world's top experts on infectious diseases. 'She is a superb scientist and very nice person,' said James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory, a high-security biocontainment centre in Texas.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.



https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ntist.html


The United States gave Millions of Dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that builds Biological Weapons.

WHO is studing a report that says cats can become infected with Coronavirus.

How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus.
Shi Zhengli, known as China's “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, released a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology

Coronaviruses: SARS, MERS, and COVID-19
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a family of RNA viruses that typically cause mild respiratory disease in humans. However, the 2003 emergence of the severe acute respiratory disease coronavirus (SARS-CoV) demonstrated that CoVs are also capable of causing outbreaks of severe infections in humans. A second severe CoV, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), emerged in 2012 in Saudi Arabia. More recently, a novel coronavirus was identified in Wuhan, China, in November of 2019 and was finally identified in December 2019 and named COVID-19. China and WHO misrepresentated the dangerous nature of the Virus for Months.

BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.

Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.

ADVERTISEMENT
The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
Read more from this special report:
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”
TRACING THE VIRUS AT ITS SOURCE
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.
But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.
ADVERTISEMENT
Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.
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Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.
In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.
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But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.
Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.
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Cave nectar bat (Eonycteris spelaea) from Singapore. Credit: Linfa Wang
VIRAL MELTING POTS
In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”
Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. Only one had travelled outside of Yunnan prior to sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.
Three years earlier, Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mineshaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases (two of them died). After sampling the cave for a year the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory of new viruses.
“The mineshaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who went in with her colleagues wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.
With growing human populations increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, with unprecedented changes in land use, with wildlife and livestock transported across countries and their products around the world, and with a sharp increase in both domestic and international travel, new disease outbreaks of pandemic scale are a near mathematical certainty. This had been keeping Shi and many other researchers awake at night—long before the mysterious samples landed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on that ominous evening last December.
ADVERTISEMENT
About a year ago, Shi’s team published two comprehensive reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology. Drawing evidence from her own studies—many of which were published in top academic journals—and from others, Shi and her co-authors warned of the risk of future outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses.
RACING AGAINST A DEADLY PATHOGEN
On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patient samples. In the following weeks—the most intense and the most stressful time of her life—China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the first round of tests showed that samples from five of seven patients contained genetic sequences known to be present in all coronaviruses.
Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus—now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen—was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

In 2004, an international team of scientists takes blood and swab samples from bats at night in order to discover potential bat-borne pathogens. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology
The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326 published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says. The data also point to a single introduction into humans followed by sustained human-to-human transmission, researchers say.
Given that the virus seems fairly stable and that many infected individuals appear to have mild symptoms, scientists suspect the pathogen might have been around for weeks or even months before the first severe cases raised alarm. “There might have been mini outbreaks, but the virus burned out” before causing havoc, Baric says. “The Wuhan outbreak is by no means incidental.” In other words, there was an element of inevitability to it.
To many, the region’s burgeoning wildlife markets—which sell a wide range of animals such as bats, civets, pangolins, badgers and crocodiles—are perfect viral melting pots. Although humans could have caught the deadly virus from bats directly (according to several studies, including those by Shi and her colleagues), independent teams have suggested in preprint studies that pangolins may have been an intermediate host. These teams have reportedly uncovered SARS-CoV-2–like coronaviruses in these animals, which were seized in antismuggling operations in southern China.
On February 24 the nation announced a permanent ban on wildlife consumption and trade except for research or medicinal or display purposes—which will stamp out an industry worth $76 billion and put approximately 14 million people out of jobs, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Some welcome the initiative, whereas others, such as Daszak, worry that without efforts to change people’s traditional beliefs or provide alternative livelihoods, a blanket ban may push the business underground. This could make disease detection even more challenging. “Eating wildlife has been part of the cultural tradition in southern China” for thousands of years, Daszak says. “It won’t change overnight.”
In any case, Shi says, “wildlife trade and consumption are only part of problem.” In late 2016 pigs across four farms in Qingyuan county in Guangdong—60 miles from the site where the SARS outbreak originated—suffered from acute vomiting and diarrhea, and nearly 25,000 of the animals died. Local veterinarians could not detect any known pathogen and called Shi for help. The cause of the illness, called swine acute diarrhea syndrome (SADS), turned out to be a virus whose genomic sequence was 98 percent identical to a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in a nearby cave.
“This is a serious cause for concern,” says Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University. Pigs and humans have very similar immune systems, making it easy for viruses to cross between the two species. Moreover a team at Zhejiang University in the Chinese city of Hangzhou found the SADS virus could infect cells from many organisms in a petri dish, including rodents, chickens, nonhuman primates and humans. Given the scale of swine farming in many countries, such as China and the U.S., Gray says, looking for novel coronaviruses in pigs should be a top priority.
Although the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth one caused by bat-borne viruses in the past 26 years —the other five being Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, SARS in 2002, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014—“the animals [themselves] are not the problem,” Wang says. In fact, bats help promote biodiversity and the health of their ecosystems by eating insects and pollinating plants. “The problem arises when we get in contact with them,” he says.
FENDING OFF FUTURE OUTBREAKS
More than two months into the epidemic—and seven weeks after the Chinese government imposed citywide transportation restrictions in Wuhan, a megacity of 11 million—life feels almost normal, Shi says, laughing. “Maybe we are getting used to it. The worst days are certainly over.” The institute staffers have a special pass to travel from home to their laboratory, but they cannot go anywhere else. For more than a month, they had to subsist on instant noodles during their long hours in the lab because the institute’s canteen was closed.
The researchers found that the new coronavirus enters human lung cells using a receptor called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). The scientists have since been screening for drugs that can block it. They, as well as other research groups, are also racing to develop vaccines and test promising candidates. In the long run, the team plans to develop broad-spectrum vaccines and drugs against coronaviruses deemed risky to humans. “The Wuhan outbreak is a wake-up call,” Shi says.
Many scientists say the world should move beyond merely responding to deadly pathogens when they arise. “The best way forward is prevention,” Daszak says. Because 70 percent of animal-borne emerging infectious diseases come from wild creatures, “where we should start is to find all those viruses in wildlife globally and develop better diagnostic tests,” he adds. Doing so would essentially mean rolling out what researchers such as Daszak and Shi have been doing on a much bigger scale.
Such efforts should focus on high-risk viral groups in certain mammals prone to coronavirus infections, such as bats, rodents, badgers, civets, pangolins, and nonhuman primates, Daszak says. He adds that developing countries in the tropics, where wildlife diversity is greatest, should be the front line of this battle against viruses.
In recent decades, Daszak and his colleagues analyzed approximately 500 human infectious diseases from the past century. They found that the emergence of new pathogens tended to happen in places where a dense population had been changing the landscape—by building roads and mines, cutting down forests and intensifying agriculture. “China is not the only hotspot,” he says, noting that other major emerging economies, such as India, Nigeria and Brazil, are also at great risk.
Once potential pathogens are mapped out, scientists and public health officials can regularly check for possible infections by analyzing blood and swab samples from livestock, wild animals that are farmed and traded, and high-risk human populations, such as farmers, miners, villagers who live near bats, and people who hunt or handle wildlife, Gray says. This approach, known as “One Health,”, aims to integrate the management of wildlife health, livestock health, and human health. “Only then can we catch an outbreak before it turns into an epidemic,” he says, adding that the approach could potentially save the hundreds of billions of dollars such an epidemic can cost.
Back in Wuhan, China’s bat woman has decided to retire from the front line of virus-hunting expeditions. “But the mission must go on,” says Shi, who will continue to lead research programs. “What we have uncovered is just the tip of an iceberg.” Daszak’s team has estimated that there are as many as 5,000 coronavirus strains waiting to be discovered in bats globally. Shi is planning a national project to systematically sample viruses in bat caves—with much greater scope and intensity than her team’s previous attempts.


“Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she says with a tone of brooding certainty. “We must find them before they find us.”


How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus
Shi Zhengli, known as China's “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, releases a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology
BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.

The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.

“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”


TRACING THE VIRUS AT ITS SOURCE
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.

But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.

Before SARS and the Bat Lady, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.

How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus
Shi Zhengli, known as China's “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, releases a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology
BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.

ADVERTISEMENT
The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
Read more from this special report:
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”
TRACING THE VIRUS AT ITS SOURCE
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.
But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.


Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.

In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.

But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.

Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”
Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. Only one had travelled outside of Yunnan prior to sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.

How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus
Shi Zhengli, known as China's “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, releases a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology
BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.

ADVERTISEMENT
The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
Read more from this special report:
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”
TRACING THE VIRUS AT ITS SOURCE
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.
But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.

ADVERTISEMENT

Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.
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Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.
In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.

ADVERTISEMENT
But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.
Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.


Cave nectar bat (Eonycteris spelaea) from Singapore. Credit: Linfa Wang

In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”

Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. Only one had travelled outside of Yunnan prior to sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.

Three years earlier, Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mineshaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases (two of them died). After sampling the cave for a year the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory of new viruses.

“The mineshaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who went in with her colleagues wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.
With growing human populations increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, with unprecedented changes in land use, with wildlife and livestock transported across countries and their products around the world, and with a sharp increase in both domestic and international travel, new disease outbreaks of pandemic scale are a near mathematical certainty.

This had been keeping Shi and many other researchers awake at night—long before the mysterious samples landed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on that ominous evening last December.

On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patient samples. In the following weeks—the most intense and the most stressful time of her life—China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the first round of tests showed that samples from five of seven patients contained genetic sequences known to be present in all coronaviruses.

By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus—now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen—was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326 published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says. The data also point to a single introduction into humans followed by sustained human-to-human transmission, researchers say.

Given that the virus seems fairly stable and that many infected individuals appear to have mild symptoms, scientists suspect the pathogen might have been around for weeks or even months before the first severe cases raised alarm. “There might have been mini outbreaks, but the virus burned out” before causing havoc, Baric says. “The Wuhan outbreak is by no means incidental.” In other words, there was an element of inevitability to it.

To many, the region’s burgeoning wildlife markets—which sell a wide range of animals such as bats, civets, pangolins, badgers and crocodiles—are perfect viral melting pots. Although humans could have caught the deadly virus from bats directly (according to several studies, including those by Shi and her colleagues), independent teams have suggested in preprint studies that pangolins may have been an intermediate host. These teams have reportedly uncovered SARS-CoV-2–like coronaviruses in these animals, which were seized in antismuggling operations in southern China.

[DiannaDark]

It is only the news and history, guys.



The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.
The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far
Read more from this special report:


How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus

Shi Zhengli, known as China's “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, releases a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology
BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”

While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.




The New Coronavirus Outbreak: What We Know So Far

“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”

TRACING THE VIRUS AT ITS SOURCE
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.
But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.

ADVERTISEMENT

Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.
newsletter promo
Sign up for Scientific American’s free newsletters.




Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.

In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.

But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.

There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.

Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.

The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.


Cave nectar bat (Eonycteris spelaea) from Singapore. Credit: Linfa Wang

VIRAL MELTING POTS
In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”

Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. Only one had travelled outside of Yunnan prior to sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.

Three years earlier, Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mineshaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases (two of them died). After sampling the cave for a year the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory of new viruses.

“The mineshaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who went in with her colleagues wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.

With growing human populations increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, with unprecedented changes in land use, with wildlife and livestock transported across countries and their products around the world, and with a sharp increase in both domestic and international travel, new disease outbreaks of pandemic scale are a near mathematical certainty. This had been keeping Shi and many other researchers awake at night—long before the mysterious samples landed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on that ominous evening last December.


About a year ago, Shi’s team published two comprehensive reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology. Drawing evidence from her own studies—many of which were published in top academic journals—and from others, Shi and her co-authors warned of the risk of future outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses.

[DiannaDark]

American by Birth, Southern through the Grace of the Living God.

If you follow my path, you follow the foot prints of a Warrior on the Spirit Trail.

I know my path.

My words are the truth as I see it. You don't have to see the world as I do, you can be wrong.

We know what truth we can expect from nations with Socialism and Islamic Law - none - the same as we get from our Media and Politicians.

Death before dishonor.

I would rather die then not be free.

[HeathenStar]

A couple of interesting articles...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... onavirus1/

https://www.newyorker.com/science/eleme ... oronavirus

Thanks DemiFan, I was beginning to think I was the blighted individual contemplating the biggest cover-up in recorded human history!

Hail Hawks!

[DiannaDark]

Thank you so much.

In the United States we know to only expect lies from our Media, Scientists, WHO, and our Politicians.

The Major Plagues in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the EU and now Canada and the United States.

Bad Water, Socialism, George Soros and his NGO's, and the crazy International Criminals in Washington, DC including the Democrats and our CIA, the diseases spread by bad water, the Flu, Islam, the Coronavirus and other a dozen other viruses and diseases that are compounded by bad water and horrible medical care, the horribly rich, huge industry, and the Insane Socialist Liberal Media, nasty oil production and polution, waste from huge industry and people, slums and starvation, and of course Locust and other natural horid conditions.


Islam and other religious Lunatics - Most of the countries in Middle East, Africa, the EU, and the rest of our world suffering from political instability, pervison, Terrorism, and other insanity . whether you see coup in Turkey, political division of Iraq, constant protest in Syria , Israel- Terrorist Hamas, civil war in Yemen, rise of various terrorist groups in sub saharan regions, recent Qatar crisis ,political upheavel in Egypt, the EU, the United States, Ukraine and the other nations that were the U.S.S. R , Israel. Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Canada, England, Venuseula, and the Lebanon issue, Syrian issue, Iraq Issue due to presence of Iran's Hezobollah. ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other radical Islamic Terrorist Groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, and other radical Islamic Terrorist groups through out Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the EU, the United States, and various other groups of the same type - like in the United States - the Democrat Party, the Nation of Islam, the New Black Panthers, and other Insane Non Profit Crazy Radical Islamic Terrorist Groups . all this issue shows how much political instability is in Middle East, Africa, the EU, Canada, England, and the United States is caused by crazy Muslims and their holy book and insane Sharia Law.

Q: Who are the Sunnis and who are the Shia?
A: Both are branches of Islam and the adherents of both are Muslims, all bound by the same Quran, the same five pillars of Islam - belief in one God, daily prayer, fasting, charity, and hajj, or pilgrimage. Where they mainly differ is on the question of who should have succeeded the Terrorist, Rapist, Crimiinally Insane, Prophet Muhammad, who founded Islam in 620.

Sunnis believe Muslim leaders can be elected, or picked, from those qualified for the job. Shiites believe leaders should be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. So they don’t recognize the same authority in Islam - kind of like the way Catholics and Protestants are all Christians and have the same Bible, but only Catholics recognize the authority of the pope. And like Catholics and Protestants - who hatchet murdered and burned each other at the stake and waged inquisition and war across Europe and the rest of the world for a few hundred years, both Sunnis and Shiites have their own religious holidays, customs and shrines and continue to wage Terrorism and war across the world, today and murder people they see as Witches, Homosexuals, junkies, alcoholics, girls, boys, and women who Report they have Been Raped, and people who offend their Insane Religion.

The only people Muslims hate more then Christians, Jews, and the United States are other Muslims.

1400 years of Shitlike VS Sunni proves that.

What you need to know abouit Shitlike VS Sunni - Muslims - They hate each other more than they hate us.


https://religionnews.com/2014/06/13/sun ... te-primer/



https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-maj ... are-facing

[DiannaDark]

Here is the rest story of the Corona Beer Virus Apocalypse.

The Truth is the most horrible enemy to our Media, our Social Media Sites like Facebook and Youtube, the United Nations, WHO, and our politicians in Washington, DC.



November 2019 - Italy
The Bayesian phylogenetic reconstruction showed that 2019-2020 nCoV firstly introduced in Wuhan on 25 November 2019, started epidemic transmission reaching many countries worldwide, including Europe and Italy where the two strains isolated dated back 19 January 2020, the same that the Chinese tourists arrived in Italy.



Still believe the Shit on CNN, Shit from our Senate and House in Washington, DC, Shit from the CDC, Shit from FEMA, and in our Damn Newspapers ?

The Chinese government has condemned what it called the "hasty and reckless" claim that the country was the source of the outbreak.

Meanwhile a Chinese journalist freed last week after 76 days of lockdown in Wuhan, said he spoke to Shi during his time there.

The Chinese government has been accused of seeking to cover-up the outbreak and silence whistleblowers.

But without the help from CNN and our other News Media, WHO, our politicians, and the Community Guidelines on Facebook, Youtube, and the other Social Media sites the truth would have gotten out faster.


.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32022275

In case you don't recognize the Acronyms NLM is the United States Library of Medicine and NLH is the National Institutes of Health.

PubMed.gov is a United States Government Website.

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

Why was the United States State Department warned of the Dangers at the Wuhan Virology Lab ?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

Proabably because they paid for the Bat Lady of China's studies.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -bats.html

The research involved capturing bats in a cave in Yunnan, in south-western China.

An April 2018 research paper was titled “fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin”.

The government reportedly no longer rules out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.

Screw the 10 point narative of our Government and Media or whatever Shit they are peddling today.

Surprise, it was not November 2019 or December 2019 we were warned about the Bat Viruses, it was years before.



https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s ... -outbreak/

Scientists first discovered that coronaviruses originate among bats following the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (sars) in 2003. Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist at the EcoHealth Alliance in New York who studies zoonotic viruses—those that can jump from animals to people—was part of a research team that went hunting for the source in China’s Guangdong Province, where simultaneous sars outbreaks had occurred, suggesting multiple spillovers from animals to people. At first, health officials believed palm civets, a mongoose-like species commonly eaten in parts of China, were responsible, as they were widely sold at markets connected to the sars outbreak, and tested positive for the virus. But civets bred elsewhere in Guangdong had no antibodies for the virus, indicating that the market animals were only an intermediary, highly infectious host. Epstein and others suspected that bats, which are ubiquitous in the area’s rural, agricultural hills, and were, at the time, also sold from cages at Guangdong’s wet markets, might be the coronavirus’s natural reservoir.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/eleme ... oronavirus


The researchers travelled through the countryside, setting up field labs inside limestone caverns and taking swabs from dozens of bats through the night. After months of investigation, Epstein’s team discovered four species of horseshoe bats that carried coronaviruses similar to sars, one of which carried a coronavirus that was, genetically, a more than ninety per cent match. “They were found in all of the locations where sars clusters were happening,” he said.

After years of further bat surveillance, researchers eventually found the direct coronavirus antecedent to sars, as well as hundreds of other coronaviruses circulating among some of the fourteen hundred bats species that live on six continents. Coronaviruses, and other virus families, it turns out, have been co-evolving with bats for the entire span of human civilization, and possibly much longer. As the coronavirus family grows, different strains simultaneously co-infect individual bats, turning their little bodies into virus blenders, creating new strains of every sort, some more powerful than others. This process happens without making bats sick—a phenomenon that scientists have linked to bats’ singular ability, among mammals, to fly. The feat takes a severe toll, such that their immune systems have evolved a better way to repair cell damage and to fight off viruses without provoking further inflammation. But when these viruses leap into a new species—whether a pangolin or a civet or a human—the result can be severe, sometimes deadly, sickness.

In 2013, Epstein’s main collaborator in China, Shi Zheng-Li (the Bat Lady) , sequenced a coronavirus found in bats, which, in January, she discovered shares ninety-six per cent of its genome with sars-CoV-2. The two viruses have a common ancestor that dates back thirty to fifty years, but the absence of a perfect match suggests that further mutation took place in other bat colonies, and then in an intermediate host. When forty-one severe cases of pneumonia were first announced in Wuhan, in December, many of them were connected to a wet market with a notorious wildlife section. Animals are stacked in cages—rabbits on top of civets on top of ferret-badgers. “That’s just a gravitational exchange of fecal matter and viruses,” Epstein said. Chinese authorities reported that they tested animals at the market—all of which came back negative—but they have not specified which animals they tested, information that is crucial for Epstein’s detective work. Authorities later found the virus in samples taken from the market’s tables and gutters.

You probably remember the Bat Lady, she was one of the Doctors who's information they wished to share with the world was destroyed by the Chinese Government as WHO, our Media, and China were silencing any information about the Virus trying to Leave China, and by odd coincience one of the Chinese Doctor Whistleblowers that also died without their Information reaching the International Press.


Muzzling the Bat Lady and Media in China Janurary 2020 - Shi Zheng-Li in Wuhang at the Virology Center completed a Report early in Janurary about the new Coronavirus but the Chinese Government seized it and never released it. The United States Government Financed her study with 3.7 million dollars. But the Chinese Government was busy blocking all news trying to leave China about the Coronavirus from Doctors and the Media since November, 2019 or earlier. WHO helped China block all news about the Coronavirus from leaving China. The WHO - World Health Organization, our media, and the United States Government, ignored Coronavirus for months and gave us the Corona Beer Virus Apocolypse, nothing else.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/672235/chi ... us-expert/

Other people were silenced by the Chinse Government other than Dr. Shi Zheng-Li.

Li Wenliang was among 12 dead Doctors and medics given the official honor by the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday, according to state media outlet CCTV.

"Martyr" is the highest honor the Communist Party can bestow on a citizen killed working to serve China, according to the state-run Global Times tabloid.

But they have to kill him or her or have them die of natural causes first.


China declared whistleblower Doctor Li Wenliang a 'martyr' following a local campaign to silence him for speaking out about the coronavirus.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronav ... tyr-2020-4

Just how long did WHO, our loony Politicians and Socialist Liberal Media set around on their Asses and do nothing as Coronavirus raged from China to the rest of the world as China lied about leaking the Military Grade Coronavirus from their not so secret Biological Weapons Lab and lie about how contageous and deadly it was?

4 or 5 months ?

If there was such a thing as journalism in our world today, what would it look like?

I doubt we will ever know.

The WHO - World Health Organization - China and the United States, ignoring Coronavirus for months, gave us the Corona Beer Virus Apocolypse, nothing else.

Virus Outbreak - Quarenteen and Treat in Place. Do not let victims travel around the world.

(Translated from French by Google Translate, it works much better than it did a few years ago. It really really use to suck.)

Not one Demcorat Traitor in 2020. Arrest Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Eric Holder, our CIA and FBI Bosses during the Clinton and Obama years, and every Democrat in office in Washington, DC for Treason and ship them to GITMO or hang them.


https://www.techtimes.com/articles/2482 ... tbreak.htm



If local hospitals don't have the Clean Rooms necessary to contain viruses, perhaps the best idea is to give the victims the medicine we can and send the victims home, like Tom Hanks and his wife were sent home in Australia.

Hanks said he and Wilson, both 63, were tested in Australia, where he is working on a film after they felt tired and achy with slight fevers.

Tested and sent home. - Yes, you are positive for the new Coronavirus, go home, call us later and tell us how you are doing.

Cao Bin, a doctor a Wuhan hospital, highlighted research showing that 13 of the first 41 patients diagnosed with the infection had not had any contact with the market.

“It seems clear that the seafood market is not the only origin of the virus,” he told Science magazine.


https://www.starrco.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw ... EjEALw_wcB



https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-hospit ... 1579975968




https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/ ... 01753.html

I can't imagine why Facebook, Youtube, and other Social Media Sites do not want any of my posts. Maybe for the same reasons CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Time Magazine work so hard to pick and choose the news they publish from all that is available every day.

[DiannaDark]

Break Time



We can dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l5TrAXScbE

Boom Shack a lacka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtEjGgdZhc4

Gonna make you sweat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF3rEuxTOUY

Better off alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGFoWt35qZU

What is love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bwbYMSydRM

you can leave your hat on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4_vCzSBQe8

River Dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ey3v5GzfM

Havana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkJqjDFbLik

Cheap Thrills

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRq0pkr2TWM

Taki Taki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeRZ_tdD8KM

oh na na na


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZGgHdWPK4

pon pon pon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzC4hFK5P3g

candy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoK8DaJRDaM

[DiannaDark]

Meanwhile in the United States, the Democrats' Bimbo admits she lied like our International Criminal, Traitor, Socialist, Democrat Senators and Representatives in Washington, DC.

Stormy Daniels admits lying on public statements about affair with Trump

Porn star said that 'they made it sound like I had no choice'


Finally the truth comes out about George Soros's, the EU's, our CIA's, Barack Obama's, Joe Biden's, Nancy Pelosi's, and Hilary Clinton's Steel Document's lies, our corrupt CIA and FBI and their collusion with the Democrats, foreign governments, and foreign citizens and spies, and the Democrat's Bimbo' lies.



https://www.facebook.com/arthur.roselli ... =notify_me





Finally something good from the Coronavirus - Iran, who runs the Hezbollah Terrorist Group, had their annual Hate Fest shut down by the Corona Virus Apocalypse.

Too bad the Demcorat Socialist Hate Group led by loonies like Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Alex Ocasino-Cowfart, Ratched Talib, Ill Ham Omar, and a bunch of other Criminally Insane Traitors are not stopped from spreading their Treason and Hate of the United States, our National Anthem, our laws incluting our Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, right to own guns, and Immigration Laws, Veterans, Conservatives, Christians, Jews, Blacks, and other citizens of the United States.



.https://unitedwithisrael.org/coronaviru ... hate-fest/

[DiannaDark]

Our CIA says the Coronavirus is not Man Made.

But all we know about the CIA and FBI is they lie and they were Traitors with the damn Democrats in office in Washington, DC.

Remember the stupid Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the marches, the riots, and the Terrorism, Obama's CIA and FBI protection of the International criminal Traitor Democrats with their dealings in Benghazi, Ukraine, China, Iran, and Russia, Obama's Steel Document's lies, the Meuller Witch Hunt, and finally the Kangaroo Court Inquistion of Donald Trump by the Traitors in the House of Represenatives ?

Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Criminal, Traitor Democrats go free again and throw Mickey Cohen under the bus.

Oh, not the Mickey Cohen that ran Miami and Las Vegas Mob, the Democrats and Hilary's lawyer, Mickey Cohen.


The criminal Democrats lied again and Michael Cohen goes to prison.


This is why our CIA and the Democrats hate Wikileaks.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVrWmXIyvCg

[DiannaDark]

The Bat Lady and 13 other Doctors, Microbiologists, and Scientists who tried to get the truth about the Coronavirus out of China from November of 2019 are all dead, China says from the Coronavirus.

Sounds like the Democrat Party in the United States.


Media lies, the corrupt FBI and CIA and the Traitor Democrats in China, Russia, Ukraine, colusion with Iran, the Hamas, China, the Muslim Brotherhood, and China, and Washington, DC. The Steele Document lies and the Socialist Traitor Democrats.

Geroge Soros, the crazy Socialist Democrats, the push for one world government and the lies and Treason in Ukraine.

When you get caught doing something illegal blame your politicial enemies and say they are doing it - the Clinton, Obama, and DNC MO.

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ ... in-ukraine

https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2017/ ... ler-putin/


The Clinton and Obama years, lies, lies, more lies, and Treason.

Hunter Biden in the Ukraine. He was the younger son who could never live up to the example set by his older brother, Beau, an Iraq war veteran and the attorney general of Delaware who died of brain cancer in 2015, cutting short a promising political career.

In 2014, Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. He had also been involved in a hedge fund with his uncle, James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, that went bad in the face of lawsuits involving the Bidens and a business partner.

Hunter Biden was the family millstone around Joe Biden’s neck, the kind of chronic problem relative that plagues many political families. George H.W. Bush had his son Neil; Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional- ... 6?s=1&r=10

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/43 ... uring-2016


George Soros is part of the Democrat Party in the United States and foreign nations.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... andal.html


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 785620002/


Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

Obama's Administration including the State Department and Joe Biden stopped the Investigations into George Soros, Hunter Biden, the Clinton Foundation, and other criminals in Washington, DC in Ukraine.










The key Traitors against President Donald Trump were Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hilary Clinton, the Democrats in the House and Senate in Washington, DC, the bosses in our FBI and CIA, and our Media including CNN, Time Magazine, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the News Papers controlled by 5 huge powerful industries..

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018 ... x-dossier/

https://thegreggjarrett.com/newly-decla ... narrative/

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... lary-agen/

George Soros's, Barack Obama's, Hiilary Clinton, the Traitor Democrats, the FBI, and the crooked CIA.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/po ... -russians/

https://thehill.com/policy/national-sec ... n-to-state

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... dirt-until

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-rel ... epartment/

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020 ... sion-hoax/

https://saraacarter.com/former-state-de ... rump-film/

The other Clinton Dossier - more lies.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com ... /test.html

Destroying the news like Facebook, Youtube, and Google's community standards and Net Security.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... ction.html

Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Robert Meuller, and Uranium One.

RUSSIA URANIUM INVESTIGATION: WHY OBAMA, CLINTON, MUELLER AND HOLDER ARE AT THE CENTER OF A NEW PROBE

Corruption in the FBI stopped the Uranium One investigation like the Hilary Clinton Email Investigation, and the Benghazi Investigation.

https://www.newsweek.com/how-robert-mue ... eal-688548

https://dailycaller.com/2017/12/20/the- ... ismantled/

FBI’s 37 secret pages of memos about Russia, Clintons and Uranium One

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... ranium-one

The Criminal Clinton Foundation was only a Tax Evasion Scheme and Money Laundry Scheme.

https://www.facebook.com/thomastancredo ... 313460270/


The nest of Traitors, Vipers, winos, junkies, and Criminally Insane in Washington, DC. Follow the money to the International Criminal Traitor Democrats in office and retired from Political Offices in Washington, DC.


From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing
investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
A Grand Jury had been impaneled.
Governments from around the world had donated to
the “Charity”.
Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations”
to the Clinton Foundation were declared. Now you
would think that an honest investigator would be able
to figure this out.
Look who took over this investigation in 2005:
None other than James Comey; Coincidence? Guess who
was transferred into the Internal Revenue Service to
run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS? None other
than, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner. Isn’t
that interesting?
But this is all just a series of strange
coincidences, right?
Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the
Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?
No other than the Assistant Attorney General of
the United States,
Rod Rosenstein.
Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation during this time frame?
Another coincidence (just an anomaly in
statistics and chances), but it was Robert Mueller.
What do all four casting characters have in common?
They all were briefed and/or were front-line
investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation.


Fast forward to 2009....
James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go
and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.
Hillary Clinton is running the State Department,
official government business, on her own personal
email server.
The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of
the Hillary.
Like all good public servants do, supposedly
looking out for America’s best interest, she decides
to support the decision and approve the sale of 20%
of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.
Now you would think that this is a fairly
straight up deal, except it wasn’t, America got
absolutely nothing out of it.
However, prior to the sales approval, no other
than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow, gets paid 500K for
a one hour speech; then meets with Vladimir Putin at
his home for a few hours.
Ok, no big deal right? Well, not so fast, the FBI
had a mole inside the money laundering and bribery
scheme.
Robert Mueller was the FBI Director during this
time frame? Yep, He even delivered a Uranium Sample
to Moscow in 2009.
Who was handling that case within the Justice
Department out of the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland?
None other than, Rod Rosenstein. And what
happened to the informant?
The Department of Justice placed a GAG order on
him and threatened to lock him up if he spoke out
about it.


Very soon after; the sale was approved!~145
million dollars in “donations” made their way into
the Clinton Foundation from entities directly
connected to the Uranium One deal.
Guess who was still at the Internal Revenue
Service working the Charitable Division? None other
than, - Lois Lerner.
Ok, that’s all just another series of
coincidences, nothing to see here, right?
Let’s fast forward to 2015.
Due to a series of tragic events in Benghazi and
after the 9 “investigations” the House, Senate and at
State Department, Trey Gowdy who was running the 10th
investigation as Chairman of the Select Committee on
Benghazi discovers that the Hillary ran the State
Department on an unclassified, unauthorized, outlaw
personal email server.He also discovered that none of
those emails had been turned over when she departed
her “Public Service” as Secretary of State which was
required by law. He also discovered that there was
Top Secret information contained within her
personally archived email.
Sparing you the State Departments cover up, the
nostrums they floated, the delay tactics that were
employed and the outright lies that were spewed forth
from the necks of the Kerry State Department, we
shall leave it with this…… they did everything
humanly possible to cover for Hillary.
.
Now this is amazing, guess who became FBI
Director in 2013? None other than James Comey; who
secured 17 no bid contracts for his employer
(Lockheed Martin) with the State Department and was
rewarded with a six million dollar thank you present
when he departed his employer? Amazing how all those
no-bids just went right through at State, huh?
Now he is the FBI Director in charge of the
“Clinton Email Investigation” after of course his FBI
Investigates the Lois Lerner “Matter” at the Internal
Revenue Service and he exonerates her. Nope....
couldn’t find any crimes there.


As of this writing, the Clinton Foundation, in
its 20+ years of operation of being the largest
International Charity Fraud in the history of
mankind, has never been audited by the Internal
Revenue Service.
Let us not forget that Comey's brother works for
DLA Piper, the law firm that does the Clinton
Foundation's taxes.
The person that is the common denominator to all
the crimes above and still doing her evil escape
legal maneuvers at the top of the 3 Letter USA Agencies?
Yep, that would be Hillary R. Clinton.
Now who is LISA BARSOOMIAN? Let’s learn a little
about Mrs. Lisa H. Barsoomian’s background.
Lisa H. Barsoomian, an Attorney that graduated
from Georgetown Law, is a protégé of James Comey and
Robert Mueller.
Barsoomian, with her boss R. Craig Lawrence,
represented Bill Clinton in 1998.
Lawrence also represented:
Robert Mueller three times;
James Comey five times;
Barack Obama 45 times;
Kathleen Sebelius 56 times;
Bill Clinton 40 times; and
Hillary Clinton 17 times.
Between 1998 and 2017, Barsoomian herself
represented the FBI at least five times.
You may be saying to yourself, OK, who cares? Who
cares about the work history of this Barsoomian woman?
Apparently, someone does, because someone out
there cares so much that they’ve “purged” all
Barsoomian court documents for her Clinton
representation in Hamburg vs. Clinton in 1998 and its
appeal in 1999 from the DC District and Appeals Court
dockets (?). Someone out there cares so much that
even the internet has been “purged” of all
information pertaining to Barsoomian.
Historically, this indicates that the individual
is a protected CIA operative. Additionally, Lisa
Barsoomian has specialized in opposing Freedom of
Information Act requests on behalf of the
intelligence community. Although Barsoomian has been
involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC
Office of the US Attorney, her email address is Lisa
Barsoomian@NIH.gov. The NIH stands for National
Institutes of Health. This is a tactic routinely used
by the CIA to protect an operative by using another
government organization to shield their activities.


It deals with Trump and his recent tariffs on
Chinese steel and aluminum imports, the border wall,
DACA, everything coming out of California, the
Uni-party unrelenting opposition to President Trump,
the Clapper leaks, the Comey leaks, Attorney General
Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14 month nap
with occasional forays into the marijuana
legalization mix …. and last but not least Mueller’s
never-ending investigation into collusion between the
Trump team and the Russians.
Why does Barsoomian, CIA operative, merit any
mention?
BECAUSE….
She is Assistant Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein’s WIFE!