Will The Coronavirus Wipe Out The New World Order?

Free trade suddenly seems like a dangerous fantasy, as nations start putting their own people first.

by  PATRICK BUCHANAN

Dr. Brian Monahan, attending physician of Congress, told a closed-door meeting of Senate staffers this week that 70 million to 150 million Americans—a third of the nation—could contract the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified that the mortality rate for COVID-19 will likely run near 1 percent.

Translation: between 750,000 and 1.1 million Americans may die of this disease before it runs its course. The latter figure is equal to all the U.S. dead in World War II and on both sides in the Civil War.

Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that 70 percent of Germany’s population—58 million people—could contract the coronavirus. If she is right, and Fauci’s mortality rate holds for her country, that could mean more than half a million dead Germans.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis called Merkel’s remark “unhelpful” and said it could cause panic. But Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch seemed to support Merkel, saying between 40 percent and 70 percent of the world’s population could become infected.

Again, if Fauci’s 1 percent mortality rate and Lipsitch’s estimate prove on target, between 3 billion and 5 billion people on earth will be infected, and 30 million to 50 million will die, a death toll greater than that of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

There is, however, some contradictory news.

China, with 81,000 cases, has noted a deceleration in new cases and South Korea appears to be gradually containing the spread of the virus.

Yet Italy, with its large elderly population, may be a harbinger of what is to come in the West.

As of Thursday, Italy had reported 12,000 cases and 827 deaths, a mortality rate of nearly 7 percent. This suggests that the unreported and undetected infections in Italy are far more numerous.

In the U.S., the death toll at this writing is 40, a tiny fraction of the annual toll of the tens of thousands who die of the flu.

But the problem is this: COVID-19 has not nearly run its course in the United States, while the reaction in society and the economy approaches what we might expect from a boiling national disaster.

The stock market has plunged further and faster than it did in the Great Crash of 1929. Trillions of dollars in wealth have vanished. If Senator Bernie Sanders does not like “millionaires and billionaires,” he should be pleased. There are fewer of them today than there were when he won the New Hampshire primary.

What does the future hold?

It may one day be said that the coronavirus delivered the death blow to the New World Order, to a half-century of globalization, and to the era of interdependence of the world’s great nations.

Tourism, air travel, vacation cruises, international gatherings, and festivals are already shutting down. Travel bans between countries and continents are being imposed. Conventions, concerts, and sporting events are being canceled. Will the Tokyo Olympics go forward? If they do, will all the anticipated visitors from abroad come to Japan to enjoy the games?

Trump has issued a one-month travel ban on Europe.

As for the “open borders” crowd, do Democrats still believe that breaking into our country should no longer be a crime, and that immigrants arriving illegally should be given free health care, a proposition to which all the Democratic debaters raised their hands?

The ideological roots of our free trade era can be traced to the mid-19th century, when its great evangelist, Richard Cobden, rose at Free Trade Hall in Manchester on January 15, 1846, and rhapsodized: “I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”

In the pre-Trump era, Republicans held hands with liberal Democrats in embracing NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and most favored nation trade privileges for China.

In retrospect, was it wise to have relied on China to produce essential parts for the supply chains of goods vital to our national security? Does it appear wise to have moved the production of pharmaceuticals and lifesaving drugs for heart disease, strokes, and diabetes to China? Does it appear wise to have allowed China to develop a virtual monopoly on rare earth minerals crucial to the development of weapons for our defense?

In this coronavirus pandemic, people now seem to be looking for authoritative leaders and nations seem to be looking out for their own peoples first. Would Merkel today invite a million Syrian refugees into Germany no matter the conditions under which they were living?

Is not the case now conclusive that we made a historic mistake when we outsourced our economic independence to rely for vital necessities upon nations that have never had America’s best interests at heart?

Which rings truer today? We are all part of mankind, all citizens of the world. Or that it’s time to put America and Americans first!

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/will-the-coronavirus-wi...

 

Conspiracy theories have been widely disseminated online as the COVID-2019 pandemic continues it's race across the world, with over 5,300 people dead from the contagious disease and 140,000 currently infected.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University - a for-profit evangelical Christian educational facility - claims that North Korea and China plotted the COVID-19 outbreak in a bid to target POTUS.

"You remember the North Korean leader promised us a Christmas present for America? Back in December [...] Could it be they got together with China and this is that present? I don’t know. But it really is something strange going on", Falwell told Fox News.

Falwell alleged earlier that US-based media was doctoring coverage of COVID-2019 to create the impression of it being Trump's fault.

In December 2019, North Korean leadership promised a "Christmas gift" - reportedly indicating a long-range missile launch - to the US unless the Trump administration reopened the stalled denuclearization talks. However, no action has been reported from Pyongyang.

North Korea - the nation that borders two coronavirus hotbeds, China and South Korea - has completely shut its land checkpoints and isolated foreigners as a means of attempting to prevent the dangerous viral pandemic from spreading. In early February, Pyongyang reportedly sent aid to Beijing to help in fight against the highly-contagious coronavirus outbreak.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202003131078561948-christian-liberty-universi...

 

Jerry... Start flagellating yourself in the name of god and you shall be saved...

 

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Controversies[edit]

In orienteering China's teams originally captured a gold and a silver medal in women as well as a silver in men, but were all disqualified by the International Orienteering Federation after it was found out that they had been given access to secretly marked paths and received external assistance thus gaining major unfair advantage over other competitors.[25] A common protest was also held by the competitors from Russia, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Poland and Austria accusing the Chinese team for gaining major unfair advantage in the competition.[26]

After the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak, conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being the CIA's creation to keep China down were all over the Chinese internet,[27]according to The Economist. Some articles on popular sites in Chinese have accused American athletes participating in the Wuhan Military World Games to have deployed the virus. They claim the inattentive attitude and disproportionately below average results of American athletes in the game indicate they might have been in for other purposes and they might actually be bio-warfare operatives, and that their place of residence during their stay in Wuhan was also close to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known cluster of cases occurred.[28][29]

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

 

...

Indeed, any mention of the fact that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in Wuhan, or that Wuhan is a city in China, is enough to cause homo globalus to hurl accusations of racism. It is unacceptable for a virus to have originated in a particular place, the globalist appears to believe.

Demonstrably, the Wuhan coronavirus came from Wuhan. The only people disputing that are those whose heads will roll when this plain scientific fact is confirmed (namely, the communist dictator of China and his minions), as well as those who don’t like homo globalus for various other very good reasons. That includes certain people in Russia and Iran whom homo globalus has gleefully impoverished and humiliated and then mocked for their having dared to complain about it.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pandemic-through-the-ey...

 

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United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned China not to spread “outlandish rumors” about the Covid-19 virus and accused China of trying to shift the blame for the pandemic onto the US.

In a phone call with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi, Pompeo relayed “strong US objections” to China’s recent suggestion that the virus could have been brought into the country by the US military.

Pompeo stressed to Jiechi that "this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumors," a State Department spokesperson said.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lijian Zhao said last week that it might have been the US army "who brought the epidemic to Wuhan" and called on the US to be transparent about its "Patient Zero." Speculation soon mounted that the US delegation at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October was the source.

Zhao was not the only international figure to point the finger at Washington, however. The head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards last week suggesting Covid-19 could be the "product of a biological attack by America which initially spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world” — though there is no proof for either of those theories on the origins of the rapidly-spreading coronavirus.

On the call, Jiechi told Pompeo that US attempts to smear China's efforts would "not succeed."

China last week accused Pompo of "slandering" the country by repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as the "Wuhan virus" — a practice Beijing said was "despicable" and stigmatized the country.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/483269-pompeo-china-covid19-rumors/

 

 

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From an imbecilic Rod Dreher:

Trump Is Right: It’s China’s Fault.

I get why people are bothered by the president calling it the “Chinese virus.” It is impossible in our language to discern between Chinese ethnicity and Chinese nationality. A Chinese-American reader e-mailed me last week:

blah blah blah

...

However, what many Americans don’t understand is that the People’s Republic of China has been running a coordinated propaganda campaign, through its ministers and its ambassadors, to blame the United States for the virus. The New York Times has a great short documentary detailing how they’ve done it. Whatever you think about Trump, I strongly encourage you to take three minutes and watch this excellent work...

 

Why bother with idiocy? 

 

Actually, we don't know... Read from top. It's an interesting MAJOR coincidence that the virus started in a large Chinese city where Worldwide Military Games HAD JUST BEEN STAGED... The virus did not start in Beijing or Shanghai, or in country areas where they feed on Pangolins and bats. So nothing is clear cut. It could have been a virus that escaped from the said city MILITARY BIO-LABS, who knows... at this stage let's blame the bats and the pangolins BUT...

 

 

controversial cartoon

Is Russia using the coronavirus pandemic as a chance to incite unrest in the West by spreading fake news and misinformation? EU observers of Russian media say that's what it looks like.

 

The Russian news outfit Sputnik claims "very smart biologists and pharmacists" in Latvia invented the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Other sources close to the Kremlin say it was made in the British military's Porton Down facilities.

Russia observers from the European Commission have so far analyzed 80 different reports containing false or misleading information about coronavirus published by official Russian state media sites as well as platforms and authors with close ties to the Kremlin. But does that activity constitute a deliberate campaign, or is it just part of the ongoing propaganda war between Russia and the West?

'Confusion' is the message

Excerpts of those reports, which can be seen on the website EU vs. Disinfo under the title, "The Kremlin and Disinformation About Coronavirus," are at times astonishing. The authors note that it is easy to get the impression that the reports are entirely contradictory. For instance, the Oriental Review, an e-journal with ties to the Kremlin, wrote: "When the panic is over, COVID-19 will have killed less people than a normal flu." The article argues that current fears about the new coronavirus are racially-fueled.

Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist and a very public supporter of the Orthodox Church, claimed exactly the opposite at Geopolitica, another Russian e-journal. Dugin said when the virus finishes its "victory march across the planet" it will have destroyed the existing world order. In his moral and religious castigation of Western lifestyles he often draws on symbols such as vengeful ancient gods or biblical plagues.

But is there some sort of plan behind all these contradictory claims? EU observers suspect the aim of the campaign is to confuse European citizens by, "sowing disunity and mistrust." Peter Stano, lead spokesman for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the EU, explains: "We have seen an increase in the amount of misinformation originating outside the EU. Some has been Russian, spread by Russian providers and pro-Kremlin sources." Stano says Russia isn't the only source of foreign misinformation, before adding that wherever such misinformation is coming from, "it threatens people's lives."

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/is-russia-running-a-coronavirus-disinformation-cam...

 

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At this stage, it is unimportant to figure out where the virus originated... We have to isolate, practice social distancing, pray to the scrooges in the temples, hoard a few products and hope for the best.

 

While the world is combatting COVID-19, a real pandemic, it seems the European Union is worried about a fake virus – the omnipotent, omnipresent, all-encompassing “Russian disinformation.”

News of a brand-new EU report, still-secret yet seamlessly leaked to the likes of Reuters and the Daily Mail, made over a hundred headlines throughout Europe in the last few days. 

The report is said to be produced by the European External Action Service, and although the EEAS – probably abiding by social distancing guidelines – didn’t feel like sharing the paper with RT, anecdotal evidence suggests that our channel is an essential part of it. At the very least, no major news media coverage of the report has resisted the urge to write about RT. This is what they dug up:

The Daily Express accused Russian media of murderous plotting and objected to vital factual reporting on social behavior during a pandemic: “Russia plots to boost coronavirus death toll in Europe with fake news […] A recent report from Kremlin-backed Russia Today showed Britons ignoring the shutdown while visiting the Spanish seaside resort of Benidorm.” 

The Financial Times found the true menace in ‘advancing apocalypse’ – RT’s popularity: “RT Spanish — an outlet of the Russian state-backed news agency formerly known as Russia Today — registered more than 6.8m shares across Facebook, Twitter and Reddit for coronavirus content between January 1 and March 12, the analysis says. That made it the 12th most popular source among a basket of domains surveyed, ahead of some big western media outlets.” 

Reuters, the most reserved of the bunch, ventured into tone policing: “Russia too is clearly stepping up its own efforts to shape the international narrative. […] The most-read story on Russia Today this weekend featured the dramatic scaling back of the upcoming U.S.-led “Defender 2020” NATO military drills in Europe, mocking the United States for being unwilling to risk infection to demonstrate its commitment to the continent.” 

And The Independent reaffirmed establishment paranoia writing: “EU accuses Russia of looking to destabilise west with coronavirus disinformation campaign. The European analysis suggests Kremlin-funded media like RT have consciously pushed “apocalyptic stories.” […] It quotes “fake news” created by Russia in Italy, the western epicentre of the crisis, which reported health systems elsewhere would be unable to cope – and people left to die.” 

I will get to Italy in a moment, but bear in mind that the Independent’s report came just four days after fellow British paper the Guardian ran the following headline: “Coronavirus may force UK doctors to decide who they’ll save. A lack of resources could mean that younger, healthier patients are prioritised, while others are left to die.” 

The cognitive dissonance is giving me whiplash. 

To sum up: mainstream media ran hundreds of news articles about the threat of Russian disinformation, placed RT front and center, yet failed to provide a single example of a “fake news” story, an error, inaccuracy or said ‘disinformation.’ No shred of evidence, however miniscule, has been offered to link RT to any such activities in any article – because there is none. Now you tell me who is really in the disinfo business. 

There are, of course, cases of misinformation, disinformation and old-fashioned erroneous reporting on the coronavirus pandemic. American magazine Foreign Policy for example, debunked three such stories back in January – all sourced from American and Canadian media. 

This phenomenon is, unfortunately, not atypical in the face of any new, fast-growing, barely understood threat and leaves no part of the world, nor media of any country, immune. 

So, why RT, why Russia? Russia didn’t birth hand sanitizer memes, although we now share them with just as much delight as our American and German brethren while we fastidiously stock up on buckwheat. Russia did not invent the UK’s herd immunity proposals, nor reports about Italian hospitals so strained for resources they had to prioritize patients by age and likelihood of recovery.

What we can glean from the EEAS paper, leaks, and subsequent press headlines is their combined core premise: that Russia is deliberately engaging in an ephemeral “disinformation” campaign to make Europe look bad, undermine the public trust, and terminally lead to the failure of the ‘European project’. 

Let’s leave aside the absurd paranoia from which one’s poor mind must be suffering in order to divine this Evil Russian Grand Plan, and consider this: if the aforementioned stories, however damaging to the European image, are based on reality, how is any of that Russia’s fault? By framing responsible, factual reporting and any insufficient genuflection before Brussels as a foreign disinformation campaign, the EEAS and the mainstream media are acting like their biggest problem is the PR, not the pandemic.

To understand the cause of this rather troubling dissonance it is important to understand who, or what, is behind the incendiary report. The EEAS, which spawned East Stratcom Task Force that in turn spawned the spurious EUvsDisinfo, has clearly relied on the work of these divisions. As the Daily Mail put it: “information analysed by the Mail were collated by EUvsDisinfo, a project of the European External Action Service (EEAS), which is funded by the European Union”.

In its own words, “EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service's East StratCom Task Force.”

EUvsDisinfo started out with a stated goal of tracking, combatting and correcting – you guessed it – disinformation, which by their definition was any fact or opinion that undermined the EU talking points. In their view, any dissent from the “it’s always sunny in Brussels” narrative posed an existential threat to the EU project – especially if it’s coming from Russia.

Its reputation suffered a major blow a couple of years ago, when it labeled as “fake news” three separate reports on Ukraine by independent Dutch media. The reports were unimpeachably factual and objective, and dealt with issues of corruption, LGBTQ rights and far-right extremism in Ukraine. Except according to EUvsDisinfo, any acknowledgement of such problems in an EU-aspiring country amounts to Kremlin Disinformation, and the reports were giddily slapped with a “fake news” label. 

The Dutch media, with support of their government, sued – and won. Since then EUvsDisinfo recalibrated, to only track “Russian disinformation” by obsessively watching mostly domestic Russian talk shows and meticulously logging into their spreadsheet any time someone isn’t being deferential enough to the EU. 

EUvsDisinfo is purely a political ‘thought police’ with no pretense of balance or even common sense, masquerading as an impartial observer. In their view, all EU problems are simultaneously the result of Kremlin disinfo and are Kremlin disinfo. The rigor of their analysis is akin to going into LA’s Chinatown, finding two men with coronavirus, one of whom has died, and declaring that Covid-19 only affects Asian males on the US West Coast and has a mortality rate of 50 percent. Myopic, willfully blind, broadly ignorant. 

Final fun fact: RT entries, however dubious, amount to a paltry 2 percent of the total in EUvsDisInfo’s extensive database. Yet, the TaskForce’s talking heads and press releases never fail to mention our channel as their raison d'être and the main menace to civilization when lobbying for the next round of financing. These guys know good PR. 

Whatever the forecasts, the coronavirus pandemic is already too real a challenge for the world to chase a phantom one. And for the first time in ages, from South Korea to Russia to Italy to the US, we are together in laughing at toilet paper memes, crying about sick loved ones and worrying about short-term social isolation and long-term economic impact. This is the time to embrace truly global understanding, cooperation and support. Instead, the EEAS’s efforts to sow discord between peoples and nations are not just shameful, but dangerous. 

 

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/483553-eu-spin-coronavirus-disinformation-russian/

 

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Every four years, at the start of a new administration, American intelligence agencies put out “Global Trends,” a weighty assessment of where the world seems headed over the next two decades. In 2008, for example, the report warned about the potential emergence of a pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/opinion/global-trends-intelligence-report.html

 

If that paragraph, the first in a long line of gloomy predictions, does not rattle your cage, you're not paying attention... Now why would a pandemic "originate in East Asia" and not say in Europe or the USA? Or Africa, the best potential for an ebola style of Pandemic? You should know that this comment "In 2008, for example, the report warned about the potential emergence of a pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world." is loaded to the rafters, not so much with a RANDOM possibility but with a quite precise targeted prediction. Such predictions do not happen by accident. What did the spooks' report know and did the spooks "engender" something to "make the pandemic happen? Read from top...

 

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FROM RON UNZ

 

As most are surely aware, for more than two years I have been pointing to the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak that devastated our own country and the world was very likely the result of an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Under my analysis, the million American deaths and massive social disruption we have suffered would constitute the most disastrous blowback of any military operation in the history of the world, and if it became widely accepted, the domestic political consequences would be monumental.

My suggestion of a central American role in the creation of this global epidemic has been excluded not only from the mainstream media but from virtually all of the alternative media as well, presumably because the possibility is simply too horrific to contemplate. However, this situation may now be starting to change.

Last month, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencescarried an opinion article authored by prominent Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs and a medical colleague suggesting an American role in the creation of the virus and arguing for an independent inquiry into that possibility.

Their paper also presented some of the very considerable evidence that the virus had been artificially engineered in a laboratory, providing a comparison chart noting the striking difference in structure between Covid and all of its closest natural relatives. Indeed, the former seems to have the sort of human-insert sequence that American researchers had been exploring in their scientific papers.

 

Sachs and his co-author also emphasized that the Eco-Health Alliance, heavily funded by our Department of Defense, had been very active in organizing the collection of SARS-like bat-viruses from China, exactly the sort of viruses that probably would have constituted the precursor stock to a genetically-engineered Covid virus.

These sorts of implications are hardly surprising to those who have been following my own writings of the last couple of years, but they obviously have vastly greater impact when made by top mainstream scholars writing in one of America’s most influential academic journals. Although the two authors are careful to avoid touching upon the central thesis of my own articles, their analysis is entirely consistent with that framework.

• A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
  Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs • PNAS • May 19, 2022 • 2,800 Words

 

So far, this potentially important paper seems to have received relatively little media coverage, but it may have already contributed to some renewed interest in my own work.

In February I had presented my ideas at length in several video interviews, including Kevin Barrett’s Truth Jihad, Geopolitics & Empire, and Red Ice TV, totaling nearly four hours of discussion. During the last ten days or so, these videos have attracted a great deal of new interest, adding another 60,000 total views, and are now rapidly approaching the half-million mark. Shortly after my interview with Kevin Barrett, he told me he hoped that the viewership might eventually break 100,000, a possibility I considered wildly optimistic at the time, but that video is now actually at the verge of reaching 200,000 views. If these trends continue, at some point media outlets may finally be forced to recognize the likely reality of what befell America and the rest of the world a couple of years ago.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/announcement/an-independent-inquiry-into-the-american-origins-of-covid/

 

 

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One should ask the question as to why the Pentagon saw the need to finance NO LESS THAN 46 "peaceful" biolabs in Ukraine... Some have been found by the Russians as well as the links between all these biolabs. 

The rigmarole and the vaccination programs around Covid-19 do not seem to make it one of the regular natural pandemic. Was patient zero an American?....

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.......................

 

 

The course of human history may sometimes be shifted by a single spark if it happens to ignite a barrel of ideological gunpowder. With perfect timing for our Fourth of July holiday, an enormous explosion of public attention has suddenly engulfed the origins of the Covid outbreak, renewing the discussion of the causes of the global epidemic that has taken more than a million American lives and disrupted the entire world.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the high-ranking academic who had chaired the Lancetcommission on Covid, and a couple of weeks ago he made public statements seeming to suggest the virus had been produced by America. On July 1st I republished a brief item from RT highlighting these, and the following day a short clip of his remarks went super-viral, retweeted more than 9,000 times and producing over 800,000 views of the video, totals that have been rising minute by minute. At very long last, our Western media outlets may finally be forced to confront the issue that they have so carefully avoided for more than two years.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/runz/9000-retweets-and-800000-video-views/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/38483

 

 

I don't know if you have noticed, but the urgency to curb the number of "death by Covid" seems to have slipped under the carpet of the war on Putin.... Putin's little intervention in Ukraine has so far killed far less innocent people that the US has done in Venezuela through sanctions, or the US little wars…... Funny this.

 

 

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FROM SCIENCE

 

Understanding how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in 2019 is critical to preventing zoonotic outbreaks before they become the next pandemic. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, was identified as a likely source of cases in early reports but later this conclusion became controversial. We show the earliest known COVID-19 cases from December 2019, including those without reported direct links, were geographically centered on this market. We report that live SARS-CoV-2 susceptible mammals were sold at the market in late 2019 and, within the market, SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were spatially associated with vendors selling live mammals. While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

On 31 December 2019, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan, Hubei province (1–4), a city of approximately 11 million people. Of the initial 41 people hospitalized with unknown pneumonia by 2 January 2020, 27 (66%) had direct exposure to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market (hereafter, “Huanan market”) (2, 5, 6). These first cases were confirmed to be infected with a novel coronavirus, subsequently named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and were suffering from a disease later named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The initial diagnoses of COVID-19 were made in several hospitals independently between 18 and 29 December 2019 (5). These early reports were free from ascertainment bias as they were based on signs and symptoms before the Huanan market was identified as a shared risk factor (5). A subsequent systematic review of all cases notified to China’s National Notifiable Disease Reporting System by hospitals in Wuhan as part of the joint WHO-Chinese “WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part” (hereafter, “WHO mission report”) (7) showed that 55 of 168 of the earliest known COVID-19 cases were associated with this market. However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there.

Sustained live mammal sales during 2019 occurred at the Huanan and three other markets in Wuhan, including wild and farmed wild-life (8). Several of these species are known to be experimentally susceptible to SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs), such as SARS-CoV (hereafter, “SARS-CoV-1”) and SARS-CoV-2 (9–11). During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, animals sold at the Huanan market were hypothesized to be the source of the unexplained pneumonia cases (12–19) (data S1), consistent with the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 from 2002-2004 (20), as well as other viral zoonoses (21–23). This led to the decision to close and sanitize the Huanan market on 1 January 2020, with environmental samples also being collected from vendors’ stalls (7, 12, 24) (data S1).

Determining the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic at a neighborhood- rather than city-level could help resolve if SARS-CoV-2 had a zoonotic origin, similar to SARS-CoV-1 (20). In this study, we obtained data from a range of sources to test the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic began at the Huanan market. Despite limited testing of live wildlife sold at the market, collectively, our results provide evidence that the Huanan market was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest that SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged from the live wildlife trade in China. However, events upstream of the market, as well as exact circumstances at the market, remain obscure, highlighting the need for further studies to understand and lower the risk of future pandemics.

Results

 

Early cases lived near to and centered on the Huanan market

The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report (figs. S1 to S8).

While early COVID-19 cases occurred across Wuhan, the majority clustered in central Wuhan near the west bank of the Yangtze River, with a high density of cases near to, and surrounding, the Huanan market (Fig. 1A). We used a kernel density estimate (KDE) to reconstruct an underlying probability density function from which the home locations for each case were drawn (25). Using all 155 December 2019 cases, the location of the Huanan market lies within the highest density contour that contains 1% of the probability mass (Fig. 1B). For a KDE estimated using the 120 cases with no known linkage to the market, the market remains within the highest density 1% contour (Fig. 1C). The clustering of COVID-19 cases in December around the Huanan market (Fig. 1, B and C, insets) contrasts with the pattern of widely dispersed cases across Wuhan by early January through mid-February 2020 (Fig. 1, D and E), which we mapped using location data from individuals using a COVID-19 assistance app on Sina Weibo (26). Weibo-based data analyses show that, unlike early COVID-19 cases, by January and February many of the sick who sought help resided in highly populated areas of the city, and particularly in areas with a high density of older people (Fig. 1E and figs. S9 and S10).

 

READ MORE:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

 

GusNote: THE MAPS SHOWN INDICATE THAT THERE ARE INFECTIONS RELATED TO THE WUHAN MARKETS AND SOME THAT ARE NOT: READ FROM TOP.....

 

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