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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
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's Facebook data, in 2014... https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2018/04/10/tom-cotton-john-bolton-and-cambridge-analytica
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
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's initial pick to replace Pompeo as head of the CIA. But Cotton has a bigger ambition: to be president. And he's been continually backed by Bannon publicly over China...
9/ What'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's propensity to cover up mistakes, and lax observation of commonly agreed standards - I've reported on the latter many times...
11/ In circles where people are "close to but not inside" security and intelligence, there'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.
