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Why did Cummings edit his own blog on 14/4/20 to make it look like he had warned about the danger of a coronavirus escaping from a Chinese lab last year? 1/ The date of the change is one day before Fox News took the “Chinese Lab” story mainstream... https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-china-compete-us-sources">https://www.foxnews.com/politics/...
2/ The "Chinese lab" theory takes two forms: a) the loon-theory that the virus is a bio-weapon and was deliberately released; b) that it is a natural virus that accidentally escaped from an unsafe lab - what Cummings had warned about (in a more general way) in March 2019…
3/ The Republican senator who first went public with the Chinese lab accusations is Tom Cotton. Tom Cotton was one of the first users of Cambridge Analytica& #39;s Facebook data, in 2014... https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2018/04/10/tom-cotton-john-bolton-and-cambridge-analytica">https://arktimes.com/arkansas-...
4/ Cotton has been banging on about the Lab theory since February, but on 15 April - one day after Cummings alters his blog - both CNN and Fox run stories quoting US govt officials saying the theory is right...
5/ And on 18 April Trump repeats the claim, and on 21 April Cotton writes a WSJ op-ed outlining the claim in detail... https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratories-in-wuhan-11587486996">https://www.wsj.com/articles/...
6/ So for the Bannon-Cotton-Cummings international network, 14-21 April is "Chinese Lab theory week". But the UK government has repeatedly said it "does not recognise the claims" that the virus came from the Wuhan Lab...
7/ But by 30 April Trump is claiming there is a high degree of confidence in the Lab theory. Why does it matter? Because the Lab theory is central to the strategy of the new China-hawk faction of the GOP, let by Cotton...
8/ Cotton was Trump& #39;s initial pick to replace Pompeo as head of the CIA. But Cotton has a bigger ambition: to be president. And he& #39;s been continually backed by Bannon publicly over China...
9/ What& #39;s the payload of this surreptitious change, to fit the agenda of an ultra-right US presidential hopeful? If the most senior adviser in Downing St believes the Wuhan lab theory, we need to know about it?
10/ Bio-security standards are a real issue; so is China& #39;s propensity to cover up mistakes, and lax observation of commonly agreed standards - I& #39;ve reported on the latter many times...
11/ In circles where people are "close to but not inside" security and intelligence, there& #39;s a tendency for theories to "swirl". This one clearly swirled from Cotton, via Fox, to find an echo in Cummings blog....
12/ We have to keep open all scientific lines of inquiry over how the virus spread to humans. If the Lab theory stands up, inserting it retrospectively into a 2019 blog looks really cool... esp if you are looking for a job with the next GOP presidential candidate...
13/ Either way: next presser "Mr Cummings do you, or the British government, believe Sars-Covid-2 came from the Wuhan lab?" would be a legitimate question.
