• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • ABOUT CHINA
    • NEWS
    • TESTIMONIES
    • OP-EDS
    • FEATURED
    • GLOSSARY
    • CHINA PERSECUTION MAP
  • FROM THE WORLD
    • NEWS
    • OP-EDS
    • FEATURED
    • TESTIMONIES
  • INTERVIEWS
  • DOCUMENTS AND TRANSLATIONS
    • DOCUMENTS
    • THE TAI JI MEN CASE
    • TRANSLATIONS
  • EVENTS
  • ABOUT
  • EDITORIAL BOARD
  • TOPICS

Bitter Winter

A magazine on religious liberty and human rights

three friends of winter
Home / China / Op-eds China

The CCP Virus: Bats, Pangolins—or the Communist Party?

03/23/2020Marco Respinti |

Scientists still debate the origin of the coronavirus, but the key point should not be missed: the lies and delays of the Chinese Communist Party prevented the world from containing the epidemic.

by Marco Respinti

A pangolin. The animal is now accused of having spread the virus.
A pangolin. The animal is now accused of having spread the virus (credits).

On March 17, Bitter Winter reported the strange story of a paper written by two Chinese researchers, Dr. Botao Xiao from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, and Dr. Lei Xiao, from Wuhan University of Science and Technology, published on the international scholarly database Research Gate, from which it disappeared a few days after having been uploaded. As mentioned in that article, we are not scientists and have no way of assessing the reliability of the research. However, Dr. Botao Xiao is a senior scientist, with more than a dozen papers published in international scholarly publications, and the researchers cannot be suspected of creating anti-Chinese propaganda, since they work for a public university in China.

The two Xiaos claimed that COVID-19 comes indeed from bats but, since there are no wild bats carrying that kind of virus in or around Wuhan, it is more likely that these bats came from one or two Wuhan laboratories, whose activities are shrouded in secrecy.

On March 17, the well-known scientific magazine Nature published an article on the virus, authored by Dr. Kristian G. Andersen, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, Dr. Edward C. Holmes, and Dr. Robert F. Garry. They claimed that “it is improbable” that the virus “emerged through laboratory manipulation,” and it is more likely that it came to humans either through bats or through a different animal, a mammal known as pangolin.

International media, perhaps not without a Chinese input, were quick to advertise the article as “debunking” the “fake news” about a laboratory origin of the virus. Certainly, it did debunk the Chinese fake news about an origin of the virus in American laboratories. The Nature article, on the other hand, was likely written before the Xiaos uploaded their paper on ResearchGate, and does not really contradict it. The Xiaos did not claim that the virus was created on purpose in a Chinese laboratory, but suggested the possibility that the bats that spread it originally came from one of two laboratories operating in the Wuhan area.

On March 20, Alexandre Hassanin, professor at the Institute of Systematics, Evolution and Biodiversity of the Sorbonne University in Paris, observed that the virus causing COVID-19 may be “the result of a recombination between two different viruses, one close to RaTG13 and the other closer to the pangolin virus. In other words, it is a chimera between two pre-existing viruses”, whereas RaTG13 is a betacoronavirus, i.e., one of four genres (alpha, beta, delta, gamma) of coronaviruses which descend (like the alphacoronavirus) from the bat gene pool. Betacoronaviruses, Hassanin said, “have been discovered, mainly in bats, but also in humans. For example, RaTG13, isolated from a bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis collected in China’s Yunan Province, has recently been described as very very similar” to the present coronavirus, “with genome sequences identical to 96%.” This is exactly what the Xiaos reported: “Two descriptions of the virus published on Nature this week indicated that the genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis.” The Xiaos pointed at two Nature papers, one published by a pool of Chinese colleagues on February 3 and another by another set of Chinese colleagues on the same date.

Nature is of course publishing several papers on the subject, updating researches as new data become available, because this is how science proceeds: empirically, by trial and error. The two key points on which the scientists’ attention focuses are (1) the way of the recombination of two different viruses and (2) the intermediate host which passed the infection to human beings. The recombination mechanism of the two viruses (transmitted respectively by bats’ and pangolins), according to Dr. Hassanin, “had already been described in coronaviruses…. It is important to know that recombination results in a new virus potentially capable of infecting a new host species. For recombination to occur, the two divergent viruses must have infected the same organism simultaneously.” So the question, in Dr. Hassanin’s word, is: “in which organism did this recombination occur? (a bat, a pangolin or another species?) And above all, under which conditions did this recombination take place?”. We don’t know. As Drs. Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao wrote, “[t]here was possible natural recombination or intermediate host of the coronavirus, yet little proof has been reported.”

There is another sentence in Dr. Hassanin’s article worth highlighting: the virus we have to deal with now is “a chimera between two pre-existing viruses.” I am not a virologist nor a medical doctor. I am just a journalist, trying to connect dots and stopping where dots stop. In genetics, a chimera is a single organism composed of cells with more than one distinct DNA. It draws its name from the legendary monster of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman mythologies. It is also curious to remember that in the 2000 movie Mission: Impossible 2 it is the name of a mysterious deadly virus able to destroy everything which fortunately the good guys finally destroy. The Xiaos’ vanished paper used the same expression, it is “a chimeric virus.”

The Nature article suggest that the chimera is the fruit a natural combination. The Xiaos stated that this is possible, but perhaps not likely considering the situation in Wuhan. The question remains: what exactly are the activities of the two laboratories in Wuhan mentioned in the Xiao and Xiao paper? Did the CCP deliberately hide crucial facts on the origin of the virus? Chinese propaganda tried to present the CCP as the solution to the virus emergency, while it was in fact the root cause of the problem, with its cover-ups and delays. As columnist Josh Rogin suggested in a Washington Post article on the disease, we should all call it, rather than the “Chinese virus,” the “CCP virus.” As Rogin wrote, “That’s more accurate and offends only those who deserve it.”

Tagged With: Chinese Communist Party, Covid-19

Marco Respinti
Marco Respinti

Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), essayist, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books and chapter in books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan), he is also a founding member as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for European Renewal (a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands). A member of the Advisory Council of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief, in December 2022, the Universal Peace Federation bestowed on him, among others, the title of Ambassador of Peace. From February 2018 to December 2022, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He serves as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.

Related articles

  • COVID-19 Origins: 43 Top Security Experts Slam Media for Censoring the Laboratory Hypothesis

    COVID-19 Origins: 43 Top Security Experts Slam Media for Censoring the Laboratory Hypothesis

  • Zero COVID: Chinese Propaganda Tries to Rewrite History

    Zero COVID: Chinese Propaganda Tries to Rewrite History

  • Wang Zang and Wang Li: Marry a Poet and Go to Jail

    Wang Zang and Wang Li: Marry a Poet and Go to Jail

  • “White Is Also a Color”: CCP Blames Protests on American Conspiracy

    “White Is Also a Color”: CCP Blames Protests on American Conspiracy

Keep Reading

  • New Rules on Celebrity Endorsement; It’s the Ideology, Stupid
    New Rules on Celebrity Endorsement; It’s the Ideology, Stupid

    International media have emphasized restrictions on controversial celebrities and fraud. But the regulation also deals with the ideological content of the endorsements.

  • Xiao Liang: Artist Arrested for Painting Portrait of Sitong Bridge Protester
    Xiao Liang: Artist Arrested for Painting Portrait of Sitong Bridge Protester

    Peng Lifa, who hung banners with anti-Xi-Jinping slogans on a bridge in Beijing, is in jail but remains the man the CCP is most afraid of.

  • No Room for Denial: Timothy Grose Documents Atrocities in Xinjiang from CCP’s Own Sources
    No Room for Denial: Timothy Grose Documents Atrocities in Xinjiang from CCP’s Own Sources

    Official  denials fly in the face of social media proof to the contrary from the Communist Party faithful.

  • No Sex Please, We’re Chinese: Crackdown on the Oldest Student Sexology Association in China
    No Sex Please, We’re Chinese: Crackdown on the Oldest Student Sexology Association in China

    The Undergraduate Sexology Association of Central China Normal University in Wuhan was told the CCP suspects “foreign infiltrations” when sex is studied.

Primary Sidebar

Support Bitter Winter

Learn More

Follow us

Newsletter

Most Read

  • Pro-Chinese Propaganda by The World Muslim Communities Council: Uyghurs Strike Back by Gulfiye Y
  • Zhanargul Zhumatai: “Help Me, I Just Want to Leave China” by Ruth Ingram
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 1. The Aesthetic Mind by Massimo Introvigne
  • Stricter Rules on Private Tutoring Protect Ideology Rather than Parents by Wang Zhipeng
  • Japan Religious Donations Law. 4. The Return of Brainwashing by Massimo Introvigne
  • Hong Kong: Christian Scholar Peng Manyuan Released but Not Rehabilitated by Gladys Kwok
  • The Weaponization of the CCP’s “Zero COVID” Against Tibet by Marco Respinti
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 3. Art as Communication by Massimo Introvigne
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 4. Art and Illustration by Massimo Introvigne
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 5. Professionals vs. Amateurs by Massimo Introvigne

CHINA PERSECUTION MAP -SEARCH NEWS BY REGION

clickable geographical map of china, with regions

Footer

Instant Exclusive News
Instant Exclusive News

EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor-in-Chief

MASSIMO INTROVIGNE

Director-in-Charge

MARCO RESPINTI

ADDRESS

CESNUR

Via Confienza 19,

10121 Turin, Italy,

Phone: 39-011-541950

E-MAIL

We welcome submission of unpublished contributions, news, and photographs. Each submission implies the authorization for us to edit and publish texts and photographs. We reserve the right to decide which submissions are suitable for publication. Please, write to INFO@BITTERWINTER.ORG Thank you.

Newsletter

Follow us

LINKS

orlir-logo hrwf-logo cesnur-logo

Copyright © 2023 · Bitter Winter · PRIVACY POLICY· COOKIE POLICY