Was Coronavirus Cooked Up in a Wuhan Lab? While Media and Ruling Class Denies It, Evidence Continues Piling Up That This Is an Artificially-Created Virus

A cover-up of the most lethal accident in history. Worse even than Chernobyl.

And just as covered-up by ruthlessly self-interested governments.

Including the US's.

[I]f you brush away all the politics about the issue -- Donald Trump said it came from a lab, therefore it can't have -- and look just at the scientific facts, a reasonably likely answer is buried there. I'll try to explain what it is and sort out some of the consequences.

There are two theories about the origin of SARS2, as the virus can be called for short. One is that it jumped naturally from bats to people, as the SARS1 epidemic did in 2002. The other is that it escaped from an experiment in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China's leading center of research on bat-type viruses.

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Scientists "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife," they said, calling for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the front line of fighting the disease.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to The Lancet's readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, "We declare no competing interests."

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The lab-escape scenario explains the facts above far more easily than does natural emergence. So let's ask who is to blame, provisionally, if the virus did indeed escape from a lab.

Who's to blame for coronavirus? Well, assuming it was made in a lab-- which it very likely was -- then "the bat lady" Dr. Shi is responsible first of all, for experimenting with extremely dangerous bat viruses with only rudimentary precautions.

Then of course comes China.

Then would come the US's National Institutes of Health:

Fourth may be the US National Institutes of Health, which funded Shi's research via Daszak, despite a moratorium from 2014 to 2017. The reporting system that replaced the moratorium required funding agencies to mention hazardous research but the NIH did not do so. If the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from Shi's lab, the NIH will be in the unenviable position of having funded research that has killed 3 million people worldwide, including 500,000 US citizens.

That NY Post article is a digest of Nicholas Wade's longer paper.

Here is that longer paper:

Dr. Baric had developed, and taught Dr. Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanised mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. "CoV" stands for coronavirus and "S protein" refers to the virus's spike protein.

"Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanised mice."

"We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes ("reverse genetics" and "infectious clone technology"), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures ("in vitro") and humanised mice ("in vivo"). And this information would help predict the likelihood of "spillover," the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Dr. Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. "It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice," says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

"It is also clear," Dr. Ebright said, "that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2." "Genomic context" refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID.

Even if the grant required the work plan described above, how can we be sure that the plan was in fact carried out? For that we can rely on the word of Dr. Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanised mice.

"And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS," Dr. Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. "Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanised mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can't vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger...

Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can't vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals -- so what do we do?

"Daszak: Well I think... coronaviruses -- you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You've got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine." The insertions he referred to perhaps included an element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly increases viral infectivity for human cells.

In disjointed style, Dr. Daszak is referring to the fact that once you have generated a novel coronavirus that can attack human cells, you can take the spike protein and make it the basis for a vaccine.

Huh.

We developed the vaccine pretty fast, eh?

The paper explains that covid just so happens to have a "furin cleavage site."

What a coincidence.

One can only imagine Dr. Daszak's reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute's goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute's souped-up viruses. "The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It's simply not true," he declared in an April 2020 interview.

The media instantly leapt to claim that in their completely untrained, ignorant opinion, the virus could not have escaped from a lab, and anyone suggesting otherwise was spreading "conspiracy theories."

And they did this because whatever Trump says is a lie or must be made into a lie, and furthermore, because the media is not the tribune of the people, it is the tribune of the ruling classes and the government bureaucracy, and they have taken it as their only mission to defend the ruling classes and the government bureaucracy and cover up any scandals they might be responsible for.

The below video is worth watching. They emphasize that the people charged with investigating if covid came from the Wuhan lab are the same people responsible for funding the Wuhan lab.

They also point out the ruling class' and media's lies aren't merely political: If labs are simply not capable of keeping their Frankenvirus' from escaping into the world, then this type of research must be stopped. Permanently.

It does us no good to get insight into a coronavirus-type vaccine when the labs are releasing that very plague upon the world. We do not allow firefighters to set fire to cities -- even if it helps them get better at putting fires out.

But because the media is abetting the ruling class' cover-up, they are keeping us from having an informed cost-benefit analysis of this type of research.

Admire how incredibly inadequate the safety standards were for The Bat Lady's bat virus splicing:

Not only was she generating dangerous viruses, she was doing so in arguably unsafe conditions. There are many Internet photos of Shi working in a bubble suit in the highest-level safety lab, known as a BSL4. But these labs are a pain to work in, and all her coronavirus work, she has said, was done at lower safety levels, including one known as BSL2.

But despite the fancy acronym, BSL2 doesn’t require very much. You have to wear a lab coat and gloves, put up a biohazard warning, and that's about it.

"It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard -- biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist's office -- that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2," says Ebright.

They're keeping the Wuhan open to create new monsters that it will, of course, then let escape.

And they will not admit that the virus probably came from a lab, which would, at the very least, spur us to increase the safety standards in labs to above those of the local dentist office.

As Krystal Ball notes, the "escaped-from-a-lab" hypothesis has never been crazy, because at least one Frankenvirus has escaped from the labs creating them in almost every single year since this type of virus-splicing started.

It's a crime that the media and ruling classes have declared it essentially illegal to speculate that something that happens at least once per year happened again in Wuhan in 2019/2020.

And yes, they repeatedly note that Anthony Fauci himself directed America to fund this bat virus research at Wuhan, using an "exception" to avoid the US ban on using US money to fund these dangerous projects.

posted by Ace at 04:38 PM

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