The virus that subsequently escaped from the Wuhan Lab

Sauce on it's origins… Part one.

What is Gain-of-Function Research & Who is at High Risk?

https://ahrp.org/what-is-gain-of-function-research-who-is-at-high-risk/

Excerpt:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, has played a major role in promoting and funding gain-of-function research, both in the US and China. Newsweek reported: “He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.”

Those claims are belied by the empirical evidence GoF experiments have neither prevented a pandemic, nor provided useful information about safe and effective pandemic countermeasures. Numerous prominent scientists argue that these experiments deviate from morally justifiable research, and the experimentally altered pathogens have put the entire human species at risk.

“Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities. Of greatest concern is a release of a lab-created, mammalian-airborne-transmissible, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, such as the airborne-transmissible H5N1 viruses created in the laboratories of Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka In Madison Wisconsin.

Such releases are fairly likely over time, as there are at least 14 labs (mostly in Asia) now carrying out this research. Whatever release probability the world is gambling with, it is clearly far too high a risk to human lives. Mammal-transmissible bird flu research poses a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.”

"Dr. Fauci, the head of the NIAID since 1984, has been in the forefront in supporting highest risk pathogen experiments. Dr. Fauci bears grave responsibility for having ignored a continuous series of documented reports — all of which warned of impending catastrophic pandemics, directly caused by experimental laboratory-created pathogens.

It should be evident to everyone, that as long as irresponsible government officials continue to fund and promote experiments whose aim is to increase the virulence and lethal capacity of biological pathogens and viruses, the risk that those lethal pathogens can, have, and will escape from laboratories, is certain.

Those accidental escapes pose catastrophic existential risk for the global human community.

If we want to preserve our existence on the planet, our government must stop funding this line of research."

A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

“Against this background Shi Zhengli published her landmark paper in the journal Nature in February this year, after the COVID-19 pandemic had spread across the globe. In this paper, Shi and her co-authors claimed to have identified the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 and its “probable” origin, a natural bat coronavirus, which she called RaTG13. The paper highlights the natural origin zoonotic theory for SARS-CoV-2 – that it jumped from an animal into humans at the Huanan seafood and wildlife market. This theory has not subsequently been supported by emerging evidence.

All publications arguing for a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 rely heavily on this one paper by Shi Zhengli and colleagues, describing the sequence of a purported natural bat coronavirus named RaTG13. But notably absent from the paper is any reference at all to Shi and her collaborators’ long history of gain-of-function genetic engineering research with bat coronaviruses, described above. That includes the important paper by UNC and WIV scientists of 2015, which had the alarming result of turning a harmless bat virus into a human pathogen.”

The Feb 2020 Nature paper described in the article has a publication timeline as reported below.

. Zhou, P., Yang, X., Wang, X. et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 579, 270–273 (2020).

Received20 January 2020

Accepted29 January 2020

Published03 February 2020

Issue Date12 March 2020

WOW. The skids were really greased to make this happen in a timely fashion, to highlight the concept that the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 and it jumped from an animal into humans at the Huanan seafood and wildlife market.

SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence

Published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Strates of America) March 14, 2016

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) appears to be a man made chimeric virus

Here is the blueprint for Modifying (man made) SARS-Cov based Virus

From the first paragraph of this article:

“This manuscript describes efforts to extend surveillance beyond sequence analysis, constructing chimeric and full-length zoonotic coronaviruses to evaluate emergence potential. Focusing on SARS-like virus sequences isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats, the results indicate a significant threat posed by WIV1-CoV. Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans.”

And from the results summary in this article:

Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B). WIV1-MA15 incorporates the original binding and entry capabilities of WIV1-CoV, but maintains the backbone changes to mouse-adapted SARS-CoV. Importantly, WIV1-MA15 does not incorporate the Y436H mutation in spike that is required for SARS-MA15 pathogenesis (8). Following electroporation into Vero cells, robust stock titers were recovered from both chimeric WIV1-MA15 and WIV1-CoV.

And the connection to Wuhan Labs in China is highlighted in the Acknowledgments:

We thank Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for access to bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein. Research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the National Institute of Aging of the NIH under Awards U19AI109761 and U19AI107810 (to R.S.B.), AI1085524 (to W.A.M.), and F32AI102561 and K99AG049092 (to V.D.M.). Human airway epithelial cell cultures were supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease under Award NIH DK065988 (to S.H.R.). Support for the generation of the mice expressing human ACE2 was provided by NIH Grants AI076159 and AI079521 (to A.C.S.).

And an interesting side note: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) is managed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, in case you were wondering if he had any connection to this.

My assessment is that the PNAS article indicates strongly that NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, managed br Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, managed by Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi cooperated to create what ultimately became the chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic.

Chinese and US scientists genetically engineered bat coronaviruses in dangerous gain-of-function research stretching back years

https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19410-chinese-and-us-scientists-genetically-engineered-bat-coronaviruses-in-dangerous-gain-of-function-research-stretching-back-years

Excerpt from this article:

Research was omitted from landmark paper claiming natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Report: Claire Robinson

Chinese and US scientists have been collaborating for years in dangerous gain-of-function experiments that involve genetically engineering coronaviruses from bats and other animals, as revealed by a series of scientific publications. The coronaviruses are related to the SARS viruses that cause severe respiratory diseases in humans. The scientists were based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, the lab suspected by some of accidentally releasing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in the US.

Oddly, however, this long and high-profile research history was entirely omitted from the scientific paper, published in Nature in February this year, in which Shi Zhengli and her team at the WIV claimed to have identified a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. The origin, according to the WIV scientists, was a bat virus, RaTG13, that was thought to have jumped from an animal to a human at a Wuhan seafood and wildlife market (the “zoonotic” theory – that is, coming from animals by a natural spillover event).

Why the omission? To understand the possible reason, we need to first understand the nature of the research work that was done by the WIV scientists and their US collaborators.

The purported benign aim of this line of research was to investigate the potential of bat coronaviruses to infect humans, to improve scientists’ ability to predict pandemics, and to develop vaccines or other therapies.

However, this is also gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more infective or transmissible. Such research has come under increasing criticism by scientists for many years, due to its tendency to pose huge risks for little benefit.

This fear is borne out by the results of a particularly risky gain-of-function experiment carried out in the US and published in 2015 by scientists from the UNC in collaboration with WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli, dubbed China’s “bat woman” for her work with bat coronaviruses. The work was funded by: * The National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease (NIAID) of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The director of the NIAID is Dr Anthony Fauci, who currently heads up the US COVID-19 response. The NIH’s money was directed through the US-based Eco-Health Alliance, headed by Dr Peter Daszak;

• USAID; and

• Chinese institutions.

In the published paper reporting the risky experiment, the scientists state that they began their work before the 2014 US temporary moratorium on virus gain-of-function studies, which was prompted by several high-profile biosafety failures at US labs. But in spite of the moratorium, as stated in the paper, the NIH gave permission for the study to continue. Dr Fauci of the NIAID “outsourced” the research to the WIV in China, in the words of one media article.

Alarming finding

In the experiment, the scientists took a mouse coronavirus and exchanged its spike protein – the part on the surface of the virus that determines infectivity – for one from a bat coronavirus that was similar to the virus that causes the human epidemic disease SARS. They kept the mouse virus “backbone” – its basic RNA and protein molecular structure. The bat coronavirus, in its natural state, was unable to infect humans as its spike protein was inadequate – it was not able to dock onto the ACE2 receptor on human cells.

Infectivity is supposed to be determined just by the spike protein. So joining the bat spike protein with the mouse virus backbone should have resulted in a virus that was non-infectious to humans

. But the resulting genetically engineered chimeric virus unexpectedly turned out to be highly infectious to humans. In fact, its infectivity, tested in human airway cells, was comparable to the human epidemic-causing virus strain SARS-CoV Urbani.