[D66] Columns: QAnon en Plandemic (2)

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

Bron:   Media Matters for America
Datum:  24 augustus 2020
Auteur: Alex Kaplan
URL:    
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/youtube-claims-plandemic-sequel-violates-its-rules-has-still-allowed-it-get


YouTube claims Plandemic sequel violates its rules but has still
allowed it to get more than 100,000 views
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YouTube has allowed multiple uploads of a sequel to a coronavirus 
conspiracy theory film to rack up well over 100,000 combined views, even 
though the platform claimed it would take down copies of the film for 
violating its coronavirus misinformation rules.

On August 18, the makers of the viral conspiracy theory video Plandemic 
released a follow-up video called Plandemic: Indoctornation. Like with 
the original Plandemic video, Indoctornation is full of misinformation: 
among other things, it falsely claims the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention somehow patented the virus and pushes a false conspiracy 
theory about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the virus, and microchips. 
The video's launch was announced in advance, and a few social media 
platforms took some action, cracking down on the video the day it was 
posted. YouTube even took down some uploads with fewer views that day, 
telling The Verge that it 'is removing full uploads as it sees them for 
violating its policies around COVID misinformation.'

But uploads of the video are still up, and they've drawn thousands of 
views. A review by Media Matters of YouTube videos with 'plandemic' in 
the title and with more than 10,000 views in the past week on the 
tracking tool BuzzSumo found that while the sequel was not viewed nearly 
as many times on YouTube as the original Plandemic video (which received 
at least 9 million views), it still earned a significant number of 
views. Despite YouTube's pledge, at least three full uploads of the 
video have earned a combined total of about 120,000 views so far.

Additionally, the upload with the most views, currently more than 
50,000, appears to be from an account supporting the QAnon conspiracy 
theory.

YouTube's difficulties containing the spread of the video despite 
promising to take it down for violating its rules come as the platform 
has repeatedly struggled to deal with coronavirus misinformation on its 
platform.

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(c) 2020 Media Matters for America

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Bron:   USA Today
Datum:  23 augustus 2020
Auteur: Camille Caldera, Miriam Fauzia
URL:    
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/23/fact-check-plandemic-ii-alleges-false-cdc-nih-conspiracy-theory/3408658001/


Fact check: 'Plandemic II' alleges false conspiracy theory
involving CDC, NIH; pandemic not planned
----------------------------------------------------------

The claim: The coronavirus pandemic is planned and profit-seeking, 
including by the CDC and NIH

A new video - entitled 'Plandemic II: Indoctornation' - has spread 
online and on Facebook since Aug. 18, proliferating a baseless 
conspiracy theory about the nature of the coronavirus pandemic.

The 75-minute documentary is a follow-up to a similar video that went 
viral in May - and was removed by social media platforms for spreading 
misinformation. Its description claims it 'tracks a three decade-long 
money trail that leads directly to the key players behind the COVID-19 
pandemic.'

This theory is explained by David E. Martin, credited as a national 
intelligence analyst, founder of IQ100 Index and self-proclaimed 
developer of 'Linguistic Genomics' with a Ph.D. from the University of 
Virginia.

He lays out three arguments.

First, Martin claims that after the February 2003 outbreak of Severe 
Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China, the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention 'saw the possibility of a goldstrike.'

'They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was 
something that was very valuable,' Martin said. 'In 2003, they sought to 
patent it, and they made sure that they controlled the proprietary 
rights to the disease, to the virus, and to its detection, and all of 
the measurement of it.'

As a result of the patent, he claimed the CDC controlled '100% of the 
cash flow that built the empire around the industrial complex of 
coronavirus.' With the patent secured, the CDC 'had the ability to 
control who was authorized and who was not authorized to make 
independent inquiries into coronavirus,' he added.

'Ultimately receiving the patents that constrained anyone from using it, 
they had the means, they had the motive, and most of all, they had the 
monetary gain, from turning coronavirus from a pathogen to profit,' he 
said.

Second, Martin draws on the patent to conclude that either the 
coronavirus is man-made or the patent on it is illegal because the 
Patent Act prohibits patents on 'natural phenomena.'

'Nature is prohibited from being patented,' he said. 'Either SARS-CoV 
was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal, or it was 
natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.'

'In either outcome, both are illegal,' he added.

Third, Martin alleged that the National Institutes of Health believed 
there were legal and moral issues with its research on coronaviruses, 
which motivated scientists to transfer the research to China.

He based that assertion on a protocol change that placed a moratorium on 
funding for gain-of-function research on a number of viruses in the 
United States, including coronaviruses.

'When the heat gets hot in 2014, 2015, what do you do?' he said. 'You 
offshore the research. You fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do 
the stuff that sounds like it's getting a little edgy with respect to 
its morality and legality.'

'But do you do it straightway? No,' he added. 'You run the money through 
a series of cover organizations to make it look like you're funding a 
U.S. operation which then subcontracts with the Wuhan Institute of 
Virology.'

As he spoke, images of NIH's Research Online Portfolio Reporting Tools 
appeared on the screen to show $3.7 million in funding to a project by 
the EcoHealth Alliance, 'Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus 
Emergence.'

Martin claimed these efforts were to obscure the origin of the 
coronavirus.

'The U.S. could say China did it,' Martin said. 'China could say, the 
U.S. did it.'

Fact check: Obama administration did not send $3.7 million to Wuhan lab


The patent of SARS-CoV by the CDC was not for profit
It's true that the CDC filed a patent application on SARS-CoV in 2004; 
it was granted in 2007.

Martin, in a follow-up email to USA TODAY, said the intentions behind 
the patent were to create a monopoly, and that the CDC's statements 
regarding the patent are 'falsified by their own actions.'

But contrary to Martin's claims of complete proprietary control and 
untold profit, the CDC said it filed a SARS-CoV patent to preserve 
access.

In May 2005, CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant told the Associated Press that 
'the whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling 
the technology.'

'This is being done to give the industry and other researchers 
reasonable access to the samples,' he added.

Later that month, then-CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding reiterated the 
importance of open access to the virus and its genome at a press 
conference.

'The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is that 
we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus if 
it's patented by someone else,' Gerberding wrote. 'By initiating steps 
to secure patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to 
make the virus and the products from the virus available in the public 
domain, and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological 
transfer of this biomedical information into tools and products that are 
useful to patients.'

'From our standpoint, it's a protective measure to make sure that the 
access to the virus remains open for everyone,' she added, noting that 
CDC had published the genome on its website.

That practice is known as 'defensive patenting,' and in the case of 
SARS-CoV, it wasn't just undertaken by the CDC. The British Columbia 
Cancer Agency and the University of Hong Kong also sought 
coronavirus-related patents in the name of 'defensive patenting,' per a 
paper on the subject in the Melbourne Journal of International Law in 
2004 by Matthew Rimmer, an intellectual property law professor.

'That is, by filing patent applications, they intended to pre-empt 
commercial applicants from obtaining patent rights that might hinder 
further research and development on SARS,' Rimmer wrote. 'Such a tactic 
is common amongst commercial firms.'

Fact check: US government did not engineer COVID-19


The patent was not illegal, and the virus is not man-made

But was the patent illegal?

It's true that the Patent Act prohibits patents on 'natural phenomena,' 
and the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that a naturally occurring DNA 
segment is a product of nature and not eligible for patent protection.  
However, the high court found that complimentary DNA - known as cDNA - 
'is not a 'product of nature' and is patent eligible under (the law).'

The specific patent of SARS-CoV featured in 'Plandemic II' - 
'Coronavirus isolated from humans,' Patent #7,220,852 B1 - includes the 
'isolated coronavirus genome, isolated coronavirus proteins, and 
isolated nucleic acid molecules.' About 20 pages of the patent describe 
the process of isolating the genome, including the synthesis of cDNA.

Experts also noted that other steps in the process - like stripping 
genetic material from its chromosome and creating copies, or the use of 
biotechnology in general - likely made the patent viable.

But just because the SARS-CoV patent was legal does not mean the virus 
was man-made or manufactured, as the video alleges. The patent includes 
man-made technology used to sequence the virus' genome, not to 
manufacture the virus itself.

SARS-CoV also isn't the same as COVID-19, which is technically called 
SARS-CoV-2.  While the viruses are from the same family, they differ in 
a number of key factors, including severity, transmission and genetic 
similarity - SARS-CoV-2 is only about 79% correlated to SARS-CoV.

Fact check: Coronavirus not man-made or engineered but its origin 
remains unclear

And there's scientific consensus that SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, is not 
man-made.

More than two dozen public health experts issued a statement to The 
Lancet in February to 'strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting 
that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.'

They continued: 'Scientists from multiple countries have published and 
analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory 
syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude 
that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other 
emerging pathogens.'

And an article published in Nature Medicine in March found that the 
genetic makeup of the virus that causes COVID-19 indicates that it has 
not been altered by humans. 'We do not believe that any type of 
laboratory-based scenario is plausible,' its authors wrote, instead 
concluding that the virus likely originated from bats, like SARS-CoV.

The video attempts to bolster its claims that the coronavirus is 
man-made with interviews from Dr. Meryl Nass - who claimed arguments 
that it is not man-made 'don't hold water,' but never explained why - 
and French virologist Luc Montagnier, whose theory about why the virus 
is man-made has been debunked.

Fact check: 'ShadowGate' video spreads misinformation, conspiracy 
theories about major events


The research moratorium at NIH was not related to the research project 
at EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan Institute

In October 2014, due to 'biosafety and biosecurity risks,' the White 
House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a moratorium on 
funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, SARS and MERS, per 
the NIH.

That refers to 'research that increases the ability of any of these 
infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by 
increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets,' 
NIH Director Francis S. Collins wrote in a statement at the time.

But the response to the pause in research in the United States wasn't to 
outsource.

In fact, the project that the video cites as an example of the 
'offshoring' of unsafe research actually started before the moratorium.

The first iteration of the EcoHealth Alliance's 'Understanding the Risk 
of Bat Coronavirus Emergence' project began in June 2014, months before 
the moratorium. It was established 'to understand what factors allow 
coronaviruses, including close relatives to SARS, to evolve and jump 
into the human population,' and yielded 20 scientific reports on how 
zoonotic diseases may transfer from bats to humans.

The study was aimed at identifying locations to monitor for new 
coronaviruses, forming strategies to prevent animal-to-human 
transmission of the virus, and creating vaccines and treatments, 
according to NPR. (There are many types of coronaviruses, seven of which 
are known to affect humans.)

USA TODAY previously reported that Over the course of the two grants 
approved by the NIH for EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute received 
about $600,000 from the NIH, according to Robert Kessler, a spokesperson 
for EcoHealth Alliance. The funding was a fee for the collection and 
analysis of viral samples.

In a grant approved in 2014, about $133,000 was sent to the institute in 
the first four years and about $66,000 in the past year. In a second 
grant approved in 2019, about $76,000 was budgeted for the Wuhan 
Institute, though no money was sent before the grant's termination, as 
previously reported by USA TODAY.

Fact check: Viral photo shows Obama, Fauci visiting NIH lab in 2014, not 
a 'Wuhan lab' in 2015

The moratorium on gain-of-function research in the U.S. was lifted in 
December 2017, when the Department of Health and Human Services issued 
new guidelines for the experiments, per the NIH.

The EcoHealth Alliance project - which had successfully identified 
hundreds of coronaviruses to date - only came to a halt in April, when 
conspiracy theories about the origins of virus began to intensify and 
its funding was abruptly cut by the Trump administration.

More: U.S. cuts funding to group studying bat coronaviruses in China


Our ruling: False

Based on our research, the claim that the pandemic was 'planned' or 
created by the CDC, NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, or the Wuhan Virology 
Institute is FALSE.

'Plandemic II: Indoctornation' is based on a number of cherry-picked 
facts, such as the existence of a patent on the genome of SARS-CoV, and 
the transfer of funds from the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan 
Institute of Virology. The nefarious extrapolations it makes are 
unsupported and even disproven by facts.

The CDC did patent the genome of SARS-CoV. But it was legal and intended 
to ensure open access for all researchers, not for profit. SARS-CoV is 
not the same virus as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. And the project 
funded by the NIH at EcoHealth Alliance, in part involving the Wuhan 
Virology Institute, was to identify and fight coronaviruses, not create 
them.


Our fact-check sources:

* National Institutes of Health, Research Online Portfolio Reporting 
Tools, Project Information: Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus 
Emergence (2014-2019)

* Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 6, 2003, CDC 
Telebriefing Transcript: CDC Update on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 
(SARS)

* Supreme Court of the United States, June 13, 2013, Association for 
Molecular Pathology Et Al. v Myriad Genetics, Inc., Et Al.

* Melbourne Journal of International Law, 2004, 'The Race to Patent the 
SARS Virus'

* United States Patent Office, Patent #7,220,852 B1, May 22, 2007, 
Coronavirus isolated from humans

* CBC, June 12, 2013, Can you patent a disease?

* FindLaw, May 29, 2003, SARS and the Patent Race: What Can We Learn 
from the HIV/AIDS Crisis?

* CDC, Human Coronavirus Types

* Healthline, April 2, COVID-19 vs. SARS: How Do They Differ?

* The Lancet, February 19, Statement in support of the scientists, 
public health professionals, and medical professionals of China 
combatting COVID-19

* Nature Medicine, March 17, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

* Science Feedback, Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier inaccurately claims 
that the novel coronavirus is man-made and contains genetic material 
from HIV

* National Institutes of Health, October 16, 2014, Statement on Funding 
Pause on Certain Types of Gain-of-Function Research

* National Institutes of Health, Research Online Portfolio Reporting 
Tools, Project Information: Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus 
Emergence (2014)

* NPR, April 29, 'Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research 
Project On Bats And Coronaviruses'
National Institutes of Health, December 19, 2017, NIH Lifts Funding 
Pause on Gain-of-Function Research

* USA TODAY, July 22, 'Fact check: Viral photo shows Obama, Fauci 
visiting NIH lab in 2014, not a 'Wuhan lab' in 2015'

* USA TODAY, May 4, 'Fact check: Obama administration did not send $3.7 
million to Wuhan lab'

* USA TODAY, May 9, ''What about COVID-20?' U.S. cuts funding to group 
studying bat coronaviruses in China'

* Associated Press, May 5, 2003, 'Race to Patent SARS Virus Renews 
Debate'

* CDC, May 6, 2003, CDC Update on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 
(SARS)

* USA TODAY, June 29, 'Fact check: US government did not engineer 
COVID-19'

* USA TODAY, March 21, 'Fact check: Coronavirus not man-made or 
engineered but its origin remains unclear'

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Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard, Matthew Brown

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