The Forward
April 29, 2020
By: Batya Ungar-Sargon

https://forward.com/opinion/445132/enraged-at-deblasios-bigotry-against-jews-hes-not-the-only-one-blaming/

On Tuesday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared war on New York’s Jewish community. The very same mayor who went to the gym the day after closing New York City’s schools, restaurants, and bars and who took a stroll in Prospect Park on Saturday, as news was breaking that 28 New York City schoolteachers had died from the virus, has ventured out yet again into a crowd. This time, he went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a large number of Satmar Hasidim had gathered. The mayor went to personally “ensure the crowd was dispersed,” the mayor explained in a tweet.

And then, he took things one step further: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed,” the Mayor tweeted. “I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

The tweets would have been outrageous coming from any elected official. Certainly, the city has the right to police people breaking its stay-at-home ordinances. Protecting first responders and flattening the curve are absolute values in the public interest. But the mayor painted a whole community with the brush of its offenders – portraying the entire “Jewish community” as diseased malefactors requiring police intervention to stop the spread of the virus.It was grossly anti-Semitic, casting New York City’s 1 million Jews with the brush of a few hundred. And it was doubly offensive given the mayor’s failure to protect Orthodox Jews last year as they suffered daily physical attacks on the streets of New York City. Unsurprisingly, de Blasio had no opprobrium for the thousands of New Yorkers who, like himself, were tempted by the weekend’s warm weather to enjoy the city’s parks. Couple all that with the fact that Satmar Headquarters is claiming that the mayor’s office initially approved the funeral and coordinated it with the NYPD, and you have a truly shameful debacle.

The mayor is being roundly denounced, and rightfully so. But de Blasio’s ugly sentiments do not stand alone. From the beginning of the outbreak, Orthodox Jews have been uniquely cast by the media as the villainous spreaders of the coronavirus, despite there being little evidence to substantiate that claim. Indeed, while being beaten up on the streets of New York for a year, Orthodox Jews couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to them. Now that they can be cast as villains rather than victims, the media can’t seem to get enough of them.

(Excerpted. More at link above)

Source: Washington post

By: Josh Rogin
14 April 2020


Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

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Note, there is a big difference from "created in a lab" vs. "escaped from a lab".

The current thinking of the British government is this "escaped from a lab", for reasons independent of this article. To summarize the British thinking, the bat vector of CV19 is a wood bat not native to the area. The closest habitat is 800 miles away. Wet markets are essentially really gross farmers' markets -- where local people sell local flora and fauna, generally as a part time gig/hobby. It is possible that a wood bat entered into the chain of commerce and ended up there, but that's not the normal course of operation.