The COVID Timeline Expands

The New York Post revives a COVID origin question that had originally come up in May 2020, that COVID may have escaped from the lab earlier than previously assumed. The story from May 2020 reported,

A group of French athletes who competed in Wuhan back in October fear they may have brought the coronavirus back home — meaning that the deadly bug may have been around months earlier than first reported.

The French delegation took part in the seventh edition of the World Military Games in Wuhan from Oct. 18 to 27 last year, just 20 days before the first confirmed case of coronavirus in China, the Sun reported.

Wednesday's Post story says it wasn't just the French:

Members of Congress are calling on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into whether an international competition in Wuhan, China, involving thousands of athletes from around the world in October 2019 was the ​world’s ​first coronavirus “superspreader” event, according to a report on Wednesday. ​

More than 9,000 athletes, including a delegation of 280 athletes and staff from the US, attended the two-week-long Wuhan Military World Games, and many of them said they later fell ill with COVID-like symptoms, a Washington Post columnist reported in an op-ed.

Many of the athletes said ​Wuhan looked like a “ghost town” in October‚ two months before China reported the first case of coronavirus there.

. . . “Given unanswered questions surrounding the origins of the pandemic, information involving the health of service members who participated in the 2019 games could provide key evidence in understanding when COVID-19 first emerged,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wrote​​ to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff​, the report said.

. . . The congressman also noted that Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the coronavirus began in Wuhan in September or October 2019 and could have already been in the US by December 2019.

A web search suggests this story has been in the background, resurfacing now and then over the past year. For instance, a story in a Taiwan paper also reported in May 2020,

The RFA report pointed out that former Italian fencing Olympian Matteo Tagliariol also said that when he participated in the Military World Games, he and five roommates all got sick with symptoms often seen in COVID-19 patients and experienced a long recovery time afterward. He said his fever and difficulty breathing continued even a week after returning home.

Antibiotics did not work, and it took three weeks for him to recover. His son and partner also fell ill; then, a couple of months later, the coronavirus outbreak made the news.

The impression I've had from recent reports is that Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, was and continues to be closely involved in all gain-of-function research that EcoHealth funded at the Wuhan Institute to the tune of many millions of dollars. I've simply got to assume that Daszak's calendar and travel schedule, if nothing else, woud reveal near-constant interaction with officials at Wuhan and probably in the Chinese government between October and December 2020. '

If you ask me, the issue is not what Daszak knew, but what he told Fauci and Fauci's boss, Francis Collins, the NIH director. By January 31, we know that Kristian Andersen, a California virologist presumably out of the Fauci-Daszak-Collins loop, e-mailed Fauci that COVID looked engineered, something I would guess Fauci had known for months. The result was the February 1 conference call whose object was not so much to ask whether the virus was in fact engineered as to bring the virology establishment into the loop and keep things quiet.

While the agenda and notes of that meeting have so far been blacked out, it's not a stretch to surmise that the word was that if this gets out, all our grants are at risk. Let's keep this entre nous.

Just for starters, it looks more and more to me as though EcoHealth Alliance has a major legal problem if it covered things up between October 2019 and January 2020, as its failure to act in concert with public health authorities led to millions of deaths and many more sick and out of work.

My guess is that EcoHealth Alliance's general counsel has already been trying to explain this to the board. Sooner or later, Fauci, Daszak, and Collins are going to go down for this, though the eventual fallout will probably be much greater.