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What do tariffs on Australian wine have to do with global democracy? For the Joe Biden administration, they represent an emerging challenge as China’s far-reaching economic coercion can threaten civil society and democratic values. 

China has relied upon economic measures in a nearly year-long dispute with Australia, but the core of the issue between the two countries is not economic but political—it is whether China can leverage its economic heft to impose its will upon, and receive the full deference of, a democracy. 

As strengthening democracy at home and abroad is a central aspect of its foreign policy plans, the Biden administration should heed the warning from Australia. 

With growing economic reach, China is strengthening the coercive tools at its disposal and working to perfect their use against democracies. 

China’s focus on the activities of civil society is perhaps tacit recognition of the essential role it played in the exposure of and response to China’s interference campaign. 

The scandal that kicked off the affair—the discovery that Australian senator Sam Dastyari had Chinese donors pay his bills—was first reported by the media. 

And it was through the dogged effort of journalists like John Garnaut and Alex Joske that the full extent of the campaign became clear. 

Think tanks then advanced press coverage and media reporting in influential reports that shifted the policy debate. 

Eventually, free and open discussion across society produced overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation that took an aggressive stance on foreign interference. 

Hu Xijin described as ‘’This is the legendary DF41 ICBM. But it is not a tale. Today it is displayed at Tiananmen Square I touched one about four years ago in the production plant. No need to fear it. Just respect it and respect China that owns it’’.

''The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting''

Xi salami-sliced his way into a deeply forward position during the Obama Administration and in 2020 snaffled up Hong Kong, marched 400 kilometers into Indian Territory and the Straw Man Narendra Modi has not even uttered a word and Xi might even decide to roll over Taiwan during this Interregnum.

Data from #Covid19 worldwide as of February 16: + 347,724 cases in 24 hours, i.e. 109,505,390 in total + 10,772 deaths in 24 hours, i.e. 2,419,425 in total

In China there is a popular joke about the southern city of Guangzhou (Canton). A visiting space alien, curious to learn about Chinese customs, tours its various provinces. 

Arriving in Guangzhou the alien asks the locals what their interests are. The Cantonese oblige their guest by putting the alien in a soup pot and eating it. This joke hinges on the Cantonese fondness for cooking with unusual species, many obtained from far away.

This feature of Canton’s cuisine was implicated in the original SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) pandemic of 2002-04, which began in Guangzhou. 

It is thought that the virus arrived there with palm civets imported for speciality dishes (Wang et al., 2005).

But this culinary connection also marks a defining difference between the first SARS coronavirus pandemic and the current one. 

The COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic began in Wuhan, but Wuhan was considered a comparatively unlikely location for a natural (zoonotic) coronavirus spillover (Yu et al., 2019). 

It has no cultural or geographic or climatic predisposing factors.

For example, being fairly far north, bats are not abundant in Wuhan and Hubei province has few bat coronaviruses compared to hotspots like Yunnan and Guangdong (Yu et al., 2019). 

Unlike Canton, Wuhan is not famous for exotic fare. Nor is Wuhan near animal smuggling and trading origins (Li et al. 2019). 

It was for this reason that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the WIV), which is the prime suspect in the various lab leak theories, mostly had to travel thousands of kilometres to find bats with coronaviruses (Yu et al., 2019). 

Furthermore, when WIV researchers needed to study a Chinese population that was not routinely exposed to bat coronaviruses (as a control group), they chose Wuhan residents (Wang et al. 2018; Li et al. 2019).

It is consequently a mystery, if SARS-CoV-2 does have a zoonotic origin, why COVID-19 should have emerged where it did. 

As Zheng-li Shi, head of coronavirus research at the WIV told Scientific American, in March 2020: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China”.

What is the probability of a natural zoonotic coronavirus outbreak starting in Wuhan?

It is possible, and potentially helpful, to put numbers on Zheng-li Shi’s surprise. 

Numbers can more precisely show the incongruity of an outbreak occurring in Wuhan. 

But before using them it is important to specify the assumptions required so that these numbers can be treated with appropriate caution.

Such a calculation requires that we set aside momentarily all the varied, potentially important, but hard-to-quantify-and-mostly-unknown local factors, like those mentioned above, that may make certain locations or populations less or more likely to originate a pandemic. (For a broader discussion of these factors see e.g. Graham et al., 2013)

Given these proviso’s, and knowing that (1) bats and other animals which harbour coronaviruses are found practically all over the world, and (2) that the population of Wuhan is 11 million, and that (3) the global population is 7 billion, 

we can calculate the likelihood of Wuhan being the epicentre of a natural zoonotic coronavirus pandemic: The chance of a person from Wuhan being patient zero is approximately 630-1.

Therefore, if we were Zheng-li Shi, we would have “never expected” a natural zoonotic outbreak in Wuhan either. 

Imagine her surprise, and that of her colleagues when, in December 2019, they learned of a local coronavirus outbreak. 

They (and other researchers) travel all over the world, and not just China, looking for coronaviruses yet a pandemic breaks out in Wuhan, under their very noses. 

It truly is, very, very, unlikely that a natural zoonotic pandemic would start in Wuhan. Yet no commentator on the outbreak seems to have properly acknowledged the true scale of this improbability.

The second coincidence is an evolutionary coincidence

But there is, in fact, a second coincidence regarding the origin of the COVID19 pandemic. 

This coincidence has seemingly been entirely disregarded; but it too points strongly to a lab origin. The underlying logic is quite simple and it has to do with the evolution of coronaviruses.

Zheng-li Shi’s laboratory at the WIV is a world centre of coronavirus research. This has been mentioned often and is widely known. 

In particular, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-leading site for bat coronavirus collection (and the virus came from a bat). 

But what has not been foregrounded is that, even within the coronaviruses, Zheng-li Shi’s laboratory had, of the 28 relevant coronavirus species, singled out just one of them as their special focus. 

And it is a member of this species (called the “SARS-related coronaviruses“) that broke out in Wuhan in 2019.

This, then, is a further curious coincidence: for a pandemic coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to emerge in Wuhan and be a member of the species most studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The logic of coronavirus pandemics

A fuller appreciation of this coincidence requires visualising coronavirus evolution and understanding the research agenda at the WIV.

Of this phylogenetic tree, only the Alpha (pink) and Beta (green) coronaviruses will be considered here. 

This is because the Gamma (yellow) and Delta (blue) coronaviruses are few, not known to infect humans, and therefore questionably relevant.

Figure 3 shows all of the six human coronaviruses identified prior to this pandemic. They are (from the top of the figure): HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, MERS, SARS, HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1. 

The six are each indicated in Figure 3 by green arrows, except for SARS, which is represented by a black arrow.

It emerged from the same species as the original SARS, hence its name. As noted above, this particular species is known to taxonomists as the “SARS-related coronaviruses” after its then most famous member (Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, 2020).

Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists and WHO will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19. 

It is remarkable that the Propaganda is still being propagated more than a year later. 

There is no natural Pathway for the Evolution of COVID19.

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

 “There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”

According to Daszak, the mine sample had been stored in Wuhan for six years. Its scientists “went back to that sample in 2020, in early January or maybe even at the end of last year, I don’t know. They tried to get full genome sequencing, which is important to find out the whole diversity of the viral genome.”

However, after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said. “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.”

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Conclusions

I still have not found an adequate explanation because this wave expired entirely without Pharmaceutical intervention 

A coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa was linked to a 16-fold increase in cases in neighboring Zambia within a month, showing it has the ability to spread more swiftly and efficiently than the original strain.

The South Africa mutation, known by scientists as B.1.351, was first detected in Zambia in December. 

The daily average of new cases rose from 44 in the first 10 days of that month to 700 in the first 10 days of January, according to a report Wednesday from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The pace of acceleration for the B.1.351 mutation and other variants is why public-health officials worldwide are urging continuing mitigation strategies, even as many places are seeing lower case rates than any time since March.

The South Africa mutation was first detected in that country in October. It has since been reported throughout much of the African continent and in at least 24 countries outside of Africa, including the U.S. 

As of Tuesday, B.1.351 has been found in 19 U.S. cases, spanning 10 states.

U.S. health officials have pledged to boost genomic surveillance to detect variants, as most routine tests for Covid-19 do not identify specific mutations. 

The two vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. work against the variants identified so far, scientists have said, but may be less potent.

Merkel pronounced “You cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation...the limits of Populism are being laid bare.”

Ibn Khaldun explained the intrinsic relationship between political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period in his book Muqaddimah 

Historically, such pandemics had the capacity to overtake “the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration” and, in the process, challenged their “power and curtailed their [rulers’] influence...” 

Rulers who are only concerned with the well-being of their “inner circle and their parties” are an incurable “disease”. 

States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”