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The Bioscience Resource Project provides scientific and intellectual resources for a healthy future. It publishes Independent Science News, a media service devoted to food and agriculture, and their impacts on health and the environment. It also offers resources for scientists and educators and internships and training for students. Through its innovative scientific journalism and original biosafety review articles, the project provides unique and revealing perspectives on issues that are fundamental to the survival of people and the planet. The project does not accept advertising or corporate funding and is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization. It is completely dependent on individual donations.We invite you to join the Project as a contributor or a donor.
Bioscience Resource Project News and Views
The Great Raccoon Dog Mystery by Jonathan Latham
Published on Thursday, 29th June, 2023, by Independent Science News: The Great Raccoon Dog Mystery by Jonathan Latham, PhD
Synopsis by Jonathan Latham: This April and May I set off on a European tour of virology conferences that are, once more being held in person. I had important questions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID19 pandemic that could only be asked live and in person. I also planned to find out more about the latest research, assess the future of the origin controversy, and test the opinions of ordinary virologists about the origin itself. Is there, indeed, a scientific consensus? It would be a tour of the COVID origin front line. I returned with a rich haul of insights and answers. But what I didn’t expect was that merely my questions would set off a chain of events and revelations that saw me spied on, stolen from, and censored, by the scientific organisers of the third and final conference. This reaction helped validate the case that there is a fatal flaw in the Huanan Market Theory and a campaign to cover it up by scientists previously not known to be involved.
Read the entire article at:
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/the-great-raccoon-dog-mystery/
Children from Gamete-like Cells: Dishing up a Eugenic Future
Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?
Published on Tuesday, October 25th, 2022 by Independent Science News: “Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?” written by Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham, PhD
Synopsis: The Ebola outbreak of 2014 was a disaster for West Africa. Over 11,000 lives were lost amidst intense negative social and economic consequences. The 2014 outbreak of Zaire Ebola (as the species is known) is today commonly cited as a bona fide example of a natural zoonosis that began in the country of Guinea. However, the 2014 outbreak was puzzling on multiple levels. The greatest of these puzzles is that all previous Zaire Ebola virus outbreaks occurred in the Congo basin, which is thousands of miles away. Additionally, to this day and despite extensive sampling, no animal source of Zaire Ebola virus in West Africa has ever been identified. At the same time, in Sierra-Leone, not far from the border with Guinea, is the town of Kenema which hosts a US-funded virus research facility. The research focus of this lab, which is run by the US-based Viral Haemorrhagic Fever Consortium, are the viral haemorrhagic fevers of which Ebola is one.
We now disclose the results of our scientific investigation into the origin of that outbreak. What we have uncovered are fundamental logical and scientific weaknesses in the orthodox outbreak story and, as well, strong evidence that supports an origin in Sierra Leone. First, we show that the orthodox story of patient zero–the Guinean child who played with bats is simply speculation and unsupported by clinical or documentary evidence. Second, the epidemiological links from this child to the first confirmed cases, which were months later, are also highly speculative. Thirdly, we have reanalysed the phylogeny of the Ebola genomes published during the outbreak and find no support for an origin in Guinea. Rather, phylogenetics strongly supports assertions made at the time by MSF (Doctors without Borders) that, though identified first, the Guinea outbreak actually spread from Sierra-Leone. In line with this supposition, we lay out the compelling phylogenetic evidence that the Sierra Leone outbreak began well before its official date of first detection. Lastly, our investigation revealed a cover-up. Although there are clear and obvious inconsistencies between the phylogenetic evidence and the orthodox narrative of a Guinean origin, western researchers, many of them from the lab in Kenema, or closely connected to it, chose to overlook these weaknesses to promote a false and misleading Guinean origin story.
The authors are Sam Husseini – an independent journalist and Jonathan Latham – a virologist.
Read the full article at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/did-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-of-2014-have-a-lab-origin/
Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory
Published Monday, May 23rd, 2022 by Independent Science News: Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory, written by Jonathan Latham, PhD.
Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research
Published Thursday, April 21st, 2022 in Independent Science News: Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD.
Synopsis: On Feb 25th this year, George Gao, head of China’s CDC, published a scientific preprint co-authored with 38 other Chinese virologists (Gao et al., 2022). Using previously unpublished evidence, this preprint concluded that the Huanan market in Wuhan played no role at all in the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019. These authors then implied that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was not even in China. Within hours, two other preprints appeared. The authors of these included many prominent Western virologists but none from China (Worobey et al., 2022 and Pekar et al., 2022). The two ‘Western’ preprints assessed the Huanan market evidence (though without including the new Gao et al. data) and concluded the exact opposite–that the COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019 with multiple zoonotic spillovers at the market in Wuhan. This latter interpretation was widely covered by the Western media as discrediting the lab leak possibility.
Neither of these viewpoints is an objective scientific analysis of the relevant data, however. Rather, they reflect an emerging scientific struggle. It is between Western-affiliated scientists on one side and their Chinese counterparts on the other. Each side is trying to twist the COVID-19 origin story to fit their local political needs, which are really those of their respective government funders and other backers. What the combatant camps did not anticipate, however, was the appearance of an innovative and much superior methodology for the genetic dissection of COVID-19 origins, along with researchers willing to use it. Consequently, the data manipulations and stratagems of both sides–the Gao establishment in China and the Western virologists ginning up a market zoonosis–are being revealed for what they are.
Read full article at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/delete-deny-and-destroy-chinese-and-western-strategies-to-erase-covids-origin-are-being-exposed-by-independent-research/