Has China Discovered a New Coronavirus?

Chinese scientists have discovered a new coronavirus carried by bats! But while some are worried about a new pandemic, I’m worried the CCP has something else in mind. Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell. Well, it’s time to take a break from fighting YouTube censorship...so we can fight Apple’s censorship.For the last few months, we’ve been building you an exclusive China Uncensored app. Or at least, we designed it, programmed it, and submitted it to Apple for review. They typically approve or reject an app within 48 hours, a week at most. We submitted our app for review more than a month ago, on January 24. After two weeks, we hadn’t gotten a response, so we applied to expedite Apple’s processing. Still no response. Weird. So we pulled that version and resubmitted it, hoping it would land with a new reviewer. Still, no response. Now it’s been more than a month. No one from Apple has contacted us, and they won’t approve or even reject our app—which they probably won’t do, because they have no legitimate *cause* to reject our app. We tried everything we could. And now we’re concerned that Apple is actually *censoring* us. But they don’t want to explicitly say so, so they’re ghosting us. An Apple a day is keeping *us* away. You might ask, But Chris, aren’t you being paranoid? Maybe. Except Apple has censored China Uncensored before. Back in 2017, we built an app for Apple TV. Apple approved it, but then immediately blocked it in mainland China, Hong Kong, and *Taiwan*. Their excuse? “Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where you make them available”. Well, our app *did* comply with the laws in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But it took 10,000 of you signing this online petition to Apple to pressure them to uncensor us. Which was kind of important since Uncensored is our whole thing. So here’s what I want you to do now. Sign our new petition calling on Apple to NOT CENSOR the China Uncensored App! The link is in the description. But hey, maybe it’s all just a big misunderstanding or just a simple technical delay. That would be great. In which case, the petition is just your enthusiastic support for the coming China Uncensored iOS app. So thank you for signing. Now back to the episode. Ahh, Wuhan, called by some the Chicago of China. Known for the Yellow Crane Tower, Baotong Temple, and *absolutely nothing else!* Really puts a damper on that touristy image. Wuhan is also home to a lot of educational hotspots in China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, employer of Batwoman! No, not this very disappointing Batwoman. I’m talking about Shi Zheng-li, Who was known as China’s Bat Woman Internationally renowned for her work with bats and bat coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. She has discovered loads of coronaviruses associated with bats in China. And she’s at it again! Because according to an article published in the medical journal Cell by her and a team of researchers, a new bat coronavirus has been discovered in China. And no, you didn’t step into a time loop. This is a recent study. Now, if you’re heading out the door to stock up on toilet paper, just hold your horses for a moment. The virus – called HKU5-CoV-2 – doesn’t appear to be a major public health threat, and new bat coronaviruses are discovered all the time. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an email to CNN that they were aware of the publication, “but there is no reason to believe it currently poses a threat to public health.” And if we learned anything from the last pandemic, it’s that you can always trust scientists, because they’d never lie or claim to know something when they don’t. Even the authors of the study wrote that the “risk of emergence in human populations should not be exaggerated.” But there is something interesting about this new virus, and that is the way that it ostensibly targets… the same human receptor as other coronaviruses that have infected humans, like, oh, I don’t know, the one that causes Covid. That receptor is the ACE2. What that means is that the virus *could* potentially jump from bats to other animals that have an ACE2 receptor, including humans. In that way, this new virus is similar to SARS-CoV-2, or, at least, that’s what people are saying, although it’s actually more closely related to MERS–Middle East Respiratory Syndrome MERS has had a number of small outbreaks since 2012, with 2600 cases confirmed between 2012 and 2021, most in Saudi Arabia. Thirty-six percent of those infected died. But it isn’t a major public health threat. It isn’t airborne, with people usually catching it from close interaction with camels or other infected people, mainly in hospitals. And it’s very uncommon. And this new study only shows that HKU5-CoV-2 *could* be transmissible to humans because it was found to infect human cells in the lab and artificially-grown lung and intestine tissue. It currently is not transmissible to humans. In fact, the transmission risk for this new virus is much lower than that of COVID-19 because both the binding and the virus are weaker. And, so far, there have been no reports of infected people. So no need to hoard toilet paper yet… or ever, you maniacs. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from panicking. Word of the discovery even caused some vaccine makers’ stocks to rise. Moderna rose as much as 6.6% on Friday afternoon and Novavax rose as much as 7.8%. American depositary receipts of BioNTech SE, Pfizer’s Covid vaccine partner, climbed as much as 5.1%, while Pfizer gained as much as 2.6%. So why are people saying that this new virus is like Covid when it’s actually more like MERS? Well, a lot of that probably comes down to how the Chinese Communist Party wants this reported. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists – and, let’s face it, the media – have argued over the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Early on, leading scientific experts said it came from a wet market in Wuhan. It had a natural origin and jumped from an animal to humans. The idea that it might have escaped from one of the labs in Wuhan was widely dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory. Turned out that those experts were working on bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of virology Where it is now accepted as the most likely source of the covid outbreak. But that makes China look bad, and communism is all about the vibes. That’s why the CCP desperately tried to shift the blame away from the Wuhan lab Doubling down on the claim that it actually came from the US. To this day, China still claims it’s extremely unlikely Covid came from a lab leak. This is also probably why, back in 2020, the “Bat woman,” Shi Zhengli, reportedly went missing for a period of time. One of the strongest arguments against a natural origin of Covid is that “scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic make-up of Covid-19” In other words, since there’s no indication that something like Covid existed in nature, it probably didn’t jump from animals to humans It was probably made in a lab. But now, lo and behold, as reported first by the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post, which is, let’s say friendly, towards the CCP A Chinese team has found a new bat coronavirus *in nature* that could infect humans *via the same route as Covid-19*. They are purposefully linking this new virus to Covid, even when it’s not like Covid at all. In fact, the abstract for the study makes the conclusion from the research clear: “This study reveals a distinct lineage of HKU5-CoVs in bats that efficiently use human ACE2” I’m not saying they didn’t find the virus or that the research on it isn’t accurate or productive. But the CCP is clearly trying to frame this as a virus found in nature similar to Covid, even though it’s not that similar to Covid, so it’s totally possible Covid didn’t come from US-fund bat coronavirus research done by China’s batwoman. The CCP is playing a very dirty game. And you know who else is? That’s right, Apple—which just so happens to rely on the China market for more than $50 billion in revenue per year. Weird coincidence that Apple could be censoring the China Uncensored App, by refusing to either approve it or reject it. So click below and sign this petition to tell Apple to not censor the China Uncensored App! I’m Chris Chappell. Click below.