Shortly after Wuhan was locked down in January 2020, it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was related to a virus that scientists had been aware of for years.
 
On Feb. 3, 2020, Dr. Shi and co-authors announced in Nature that they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose genome sequence was 96.2 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2 and was previously detected in horseshoe bats of Yunnan.
 
Suspicious internet sleuths combed through genomic databases and found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat coronavirus called 4991 retrieved from a cave implicated in an unexplained outbreak of pneumonia in 2012 among miners who collected bat guano from a mine in Yunnan. Three of the six miners died.
 
In May 2020, a former science teacher from India, with the Twitter pseudonym TheSeeker268, found a 2013 master’s thesis, as well as a 2016 Ph.D. thesis, supervised by George Fu Gao, the current director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The master’s thesis hypothesized that the miners’ illness was caused by direct transmission of a SARS-like coronavirus from a horseshoe bat. The Ph.D. thesis was more cautious but still called the outbreak “notable.” It also revealed that a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had collected bat samples from the cave. The dissertation noted that all four of the miners who were tested for SARS antibodies had them in their blood a few weeks after they became ill.
 
None of those crucial facts — the name change or the link to the previous fatal outbreak possibly from a SARS-like coronavirus — were mentioned in the original paper about RaTG13. In an interview published in March 2020, Dr. Shi said fungus was the pathogen that had sickened the miners, not a coronavirus.
 
The questions persisted.
 
Last July, Dr. Shi confirmed that RaTG13 was indeed 4991 renamed. In November 2020, her paper in Nature was finally updated, additionally acknowledging what sleuths had also uncovered: Her team genetically sequenced RaTG13 in 2018. (The possible bat coronavirus link to the miner deaths was still not acknowledged.)
 
The less than forthcoming disclosure — a virus with two names, the connection to a deadly outbreak, shifting diseases and inconsistent stories — fueled suspicions.

While a 2017 Chinese article noted the caution of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s workers and showed them hooded and some wearing N95 masks, later that year a Chinese state-TV story about Dr. Shi’s studies showed researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare hands or with exposed arms. A person on her team likened a bat bite to “being jabbed with a needle.”
 
In a 2018 blog post that was later removed, Dr. Shi said that the job was “not as dangerous” as everyone thought. “The chance of directly infecting humans is very small,” she wrote. “In most cases only ordinary protection will be taken,” unless a bat was known to carry a virus that might infect humans. She repeated something similar in a 2018 TED Talk-style video, according to The Washington Post, noting that “simpler protection” — illustrated with slides of unmasked or surgically masked colleagues with bare hands — was appropriate because it was believed that bat pathogens usually required an intermediate host.
 
Dr. Shi said that all the research at the institute is done in strict accordance with biosafety standards and the lab is tested annually by a third-party institution.
 
The Wuhan C.D.C. also reportedly conducts research on bat-borne viruses.
 
One of its staff members, Tian Junhua, has developed a reputation for adventurous scientific discovery. A 2013 paper notes his team caught 155 bats in Hubei Province. The Washington Post reported that in a video released on Dec. 10, 2019, he boasted about “having visited dozens of bat caves and studied 300 types of virus vectors.” Previously, he also talked about having made mistakes in the field, like forgetting personal protective equipment and being splashed with bat urine or accidentally getting bat blood on his skin, according to The Post. And yet the World Health Organization reported that the agency denied ever storing or working with bat viruses in the lab before the pandemic.
 
This March the W.H.O. reported that the Wuhan C.D.C. lab “moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market.” The W.H.O. report said there were “no disruptions or incidents” during the move. Given the Chinese government’s lack of candor, that raises suspicions that lab samples, if not bats themselves, were being hauled around near the market at the time of the outbreak.
 
Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from international norms. A bat field researcher in the United States told me she now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t standard practice before.

On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins and was announced as a member of the W.H.O. origins investigation committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collaborated with for 15 years. “That’s not how this science works,” he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”
 
But evidence to the contrary has accumulated. An assistant researcher told a reporter that Dr. Shi took on the role of feeding the bats when students were away. Another news report in 2018 said a team led by one of her doctoral trainees “collected a full rack of swabs and bagged a dozen live bats for further testing back at the lab.” The Chinese Academy of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan institute as having at least a dozen cages for bats, and in 2018 the institute applied for a patent for a bat cage. Dr. Shi has talked about monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that reportedly showed live bats in the institute.

But even if we put aside directed engineering, regular lab work at the Wuhan labs has raised concerns.
 
In 2016 the Wuhan institute reported experimenting on a live bat coronavirus that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab — a biosafety level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s office. Protective gear other than gloves and lab coats is usually optional at this level, and there’s often no airflow control sealing ventilation between the work area and the rest of the building. Michael Lin, an associate professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at Stanford, told me it was “an actual scandal, recorded in print,” that a SARS-like virus capable of replicating in human cells was worked on under such low safety conditions.
 
Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, Dr. Lin told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected. Under BSL-2 conditions or even sloppy BSL-3 conditions, researchers could get exposed to a pathogen they didn’t know existed.
 
Several scientists who signed The Lancet letter denouncing the consideration of anything but natural origins have since said they are more open to lab involvement. One, Bernard Roizman, an emeritus virologist at the University of Chicago with four honorary professorships from Chinese universities, said he was leaning toward believing there was a lab accident.
 
“I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it,” he told The Wall Street Journal, “and some sloppy individual brought it out.” He added, “They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”
 
Charles Calisher of Colorado State University, another signatory, recently told ABC News that “there is too much coincidence” to ignore the lab-leak theory and he now believes “it is more likely that it came out of that lab.”

The passengers, who were younger than 16 and traveling in the same group, left Adventure of the Seas before the end of the cruise on Thursday in Freeport with their companions. They returned home to Florida on a private flight arranged by the cruise company, CEO Michael Bayley said in a Facebook post.

«Le variant Delta s'avère être un ennemi particulièrement redoutable», a déclaré de à la presse le ministre de la Santé de l'Etat, Brad Hazzard. «Quelles que soient les mesures défensives qui sont prises, le virus semble savoir comment contre-attaquer», a-t-il ajouté.

As the Delta variant (B.1.617.2) becomes dominant throughout the world, there are 2 patterns emerging:
—Countries w/ low vaccination rates are seeing both case and fatality rates increase  
—Countries w/ high vaccination rate: some case increase and minimal to no fatality increase https://t.co/sSE4RlSeUJ

L'Australie avait déclaré mardi un nouveau cluster du virus, dont le nombre de contaminations s'élève à 80 personnes, toutes en lien avec un chauffeur qui conduisait des équipages de compagnies aériennes de l'aéroport de Sydney jusqu'aux hôtels de quarantaine.

Djillali Houari est décédé du Covid après trois mois de coma. Cet agent du Prej avait contracté la maladie en service, au mois de mars alors que son service était décimé par la maladie.
 
https://www.midilibre.fr/2021/06/25 [...] 631641.php
 
Djillali Houari était estimé de nombre de ses collègues de la prison de Béziers où il travaillait depuis 11 ans. Il est décédé ce jeudi 24 juin, à l'âge de 55 ans des suites du Covid. Djillali était tombé malade le 26 mars dernier avec plus d'une quinzaine de ses camarades du Prej ( Pôle de rattachement des extractions judiciaires). Il avait été placé dans le coma à Montpellier le 6 avril et n'a pu vaincre la maladie. Il avait intégré le Prej il y a trois ans à Béziers après des années de service auprès des détenus.

" Nous n'avons cessé d'alerter notre hiérarchie. Nous n'avons cessé de demande d'être mieux protégés, explique un représentant du personnel de la prison de Béziers et membre du Prej. Nous avons appelé à l'aide car nous sentions bien que plus rien n'était maîtrisé alors que nous devions travailler alors que notre service était totalement décimé. Aujourd'hui, il y a de la colère contre tous ceux qui n'ont pas pris en compte nos craintes. Aujourd'hui, nous perdons un ami. Un collègue méritant. Nous avons tous une pensée pour sa famille que nous nous devons de soutenir."

Les surveillants de prison en détention comme au Prej veulent que cet accident soit reconnu comme un accident de travail. Et pour cela ils l'annoncent tout de suite ils feront remonter ce dramatique accident au plus haut niveau.