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‘Ridiculous,’ says Chinese scientist accused of being pandemic’s patient zero
▻https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-being-pandemic-s-patient-zero

A scientist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has recently faced media allegations that he was the first person with COVID-19 and his research on coronaviruses sparked the pandemic strongly denies that he was ill in late 2019 or that his work had any link to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, a newly released U.S. report of declassified information on COVID-19’s origin, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), fails to name him or substantiate that any WIV scientists had the initial cases of COVID-19.

“The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,” Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the charges, which have been attributed to anonymous former and current U.S. Department of State officials. A WIV colleague who has also been named as one of the first COVID-19 cases denies the accusation as well.

[...] Public’s account came just before the 18 June deadline for a law enacted on 20 March that required ODNI to declassify documents about the origin of COVID-19 within 90 days. The law specifically asked for the names and other details of any sick WIV researchers before the Wuhan outbreak surfaced. The deadline passed without any response from ODNI but today it released its declassified information, hours after an initial version of this story was published. ODNI’s report does not substantiate Public or WSJ’s accounts in any major way. It says that some at WIV were ill in fall of 2019 with “symptoms consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.” But it doesn’t identify the 3 scientists and it further states, “We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19.”

[...] Yet ODNI continues to assert the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was modified by researchers is weak, challenging the many lab leak theories in which WIV scientists allegedly manipulated a precursor coronvirus to make it more dangerous. ODNI states “Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.”

[...] As for Hu, he categorically denies having anything to do with the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time,” Hu wrote. “My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative.”

Yu emailed Science that the charges are “fake news” and similarly insisted there was no basis for the allegations. “In autumn 2019, I was neither sick nor had any symptoms related to COVID-19,” Yu wrote. Zhu did not reply to email requests for comment.

Hu is an appealing suspect for lab-leak proponents because he was a lead author on a 2017 paper in PLOS Pathogens describing an experiment that created chimeric viruses by combining genes for surface proteins from bat coronaviruses that would not grow in cultures with the genome of one that did. This paper has received intense scrutiny because it was partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, lab-leak proponents insist, led to a gain of function in the cultured virus. NIH officials have strongly denied this and noted that the chimeric viruses created were not closely related to SARS-CoV-2. Hu says he never worked with live viruses in that experiment or any others done in Shi’s lab. “My work in the lab was mainly genome characterization and evolutionary analysis of viruses,” Hu wrote.

Yu, who was not a co-author of the PLOS Pathogens study, also denied being involved with live virus experiments. “I like bioinformatics and I mainly engage in gene sequencing and data analysis in the laboratory,” she wrote.

[...] The bill that led to the law to declassify ODNI documents was crafted by Senator Josh Hawley (R–MO), who in 2020 introduced a different bill, the Justice for Victims of Coronavirus Act, that would allow Americans to sue the Chinese government, which he asserted was guilty of “waging a global propaganda offensive to deflect attention away from its mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak and create unfounded accounts of the origins of the virus.” That bill died without getting to a full vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate, but Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to hold hearings focused on the lab-leak theory and whether NIH helped fund research that led to COVID-19.

The NIC Global Trends Main Report
▻https://www.dni.gov/index.php/global-trends/letter-nic-chairman
Là c’est gratuit, la traduction allemande vient de sortir pour ca. € 25,00

This version, the sixth in the series, is titled, “Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress,” and we are proud of it. It may look like a report, but it is really an invitation, an invitation to discuss, debate and inquire further about how the future could unfold. Certainly, we do not pretend to have the definitive “answer.”

Long-term thinking is critical to framing strategy. The Global Trends series pushes us to reexamine key assumptions, expectations, and uncertainties about the future. In a very messy and interconnected world, a longer perspective requires us to ask hard questions about which issues and choices will be most consequential in the decades ahead–even if they don’t necessarily generate the biggest headlines. A longer view also is essential because issues like terrorism, cyberattacks, biotechnology, and climate change invoke high stakes and will require sustained collaboration to address.

Peering into the future can be scary and surely is humbling. Events unfold in complex ways for which our brains are not naturally wired. Economic, political, social, technological, and cultural forces collide in dizzying ways, so we can be led to confuse recent, dramatic events with the more important ones. It is tempting, and usually fair, to assume people act “rationally,” but leaders, groups, mobs, and masses can behave very differently—and unexpectedly—under similar circumstances. For instance, we had known for decades how brittle most regimes in the Middle East were, yet some erupted in the Arab Spring in 2011 and others did not. Experience teaches us how much history unfolds through cycles and shifts, and still human nature commonly expects tomorrow to be pretty much like today—which is usually the safest bet on the future until it is not. I always remind myself that between Mr. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech and the demise of that empire, the Soviet Union, was only a scant decade, a relatively short time even in a human life.

Grasping the future is also complicated by the assumptions we carry around in our heads, often without quite knowing we do. I have been struck recently by the “prosperity presumption” that runs deep in most Americans but is often hardly recognized. We assume that with prosperity come all good things—people are happier, more democratic and less likely to go to war with one another. Yet, then we confront a group like ISIL, which shares none of the presumption.

Given these challenges to thinking about the future, we have engaged broadly and tried to stick to analytic basics rather than seizing any particular worldview. Two years ago, we started with exercises identifying key assumptions and uncertainties—the list of assumptions underlying US foreign policy was stunningly long, many of them half-buried. We conducted research and consulted with numerous experts in and outside the US Government to identify and test trends. We tested early themes and arguments on a blog. We visited more than 35 countries and one territory, soliciting ideas and feedback from over 2,500 people around the world from all walks of life. We developed multiple scenarios to imagine how key uncertainties might result in alternative futures. The NIC then compiled and refined the various streams into what you see here.

This edition of Global Trends revolves around a core argument about how the changing nature of power is increasing stress both within countries and between countries, and bearing on vexing transnational issues. The main section lays out the key trends, explores their implications, and offers up three scenarios to help readers imagine how different choices and developments could play out in very different ways over the next several decades. Two annexes lay out more detail. The first lays out five-year forecasts for each region of the world. The second provides more context on the key global trends in train.

The fact that the National Intelligence Council regularly publishes an unclassified assessment of the world surprises some people, but our intent is to encourage open and informed discussions about future risks and opportunities. Moreover, Global Trends is unclassified because those screens of secrets that dominate our daily work are not of much help in peering out beyond a year or two. What is a help is reaching out not just to experts and government officials but also to students, women’s groups, entrepreneurs, transparency advocates, and beyond.

Many minds and hands made this project happen. The heavy lifting was done by the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group, directed by Dr. Suzanne Fry, with her very talented team: Rich Engel, Phyllis Berry, Heather Brown, Kenneth Dyer, Daniel Flynn, Geanetta Ford, Steven Grube, Terrence Markin, Nicholas Muto, Robert Odell, Rod Schoonover, Thomas Stork, and dozens of Deputy National Intelligence Officers. We recognize as well the thoughtful, careful review by NIC editors, as well as CIA’s extremely talented graphic and web designers and production team.

Global Trends represents how the NIC is thinking about the future. It does not represent the official, coordinated view of the US Intelligence Community nor US policy. Longtime readers will note that this edition does not reference a year in the title (the previous edition was Global Trends 2030) because we think doing so conveys a false precision. For us, looking over the “long term” spans the next several decades, but we also have made room in this edition to explore the next five years to be more relevant in timeline for a new US administration.

#USA #politique #impérialisme #CIA #NSA #stratégie

Office of the Director of National Intelligence report: “Assessing Russian activities & intentions in recent US elections: the analytic process and cyber incident attribution” (declassified version)

▻https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf #DNI #USA #elections #Russia

#France, brace for impact !