>>14498204 (/pb)
https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1432208962808688645
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Then another very interesting question about the highly transmissible H5 influenza strain, whose virulence was already known to be dependent on the presence of the polybasic furin cleavage site.
SARS2 seems like someone put all of those things together.
https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1432209290211827719
So it was then, in pursuit of arguments against the virus’s lab-madeness, that I got infected by the virus of doubt. What was the source of my doubts? The fact that the deeper you dive into the research activities of coronavirologists over the past 15–20 years, the more you realize that creating chimeras like CoV2 was commonplace in their labs. And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not nesessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. Most likely, it was thanks to this new furin site that the new mutant managed to jump species from its original host to humans.
Indeed, virologists, including the leader of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, have done many similar things in the past — both replacing the RBM in one type of virus by an RBM from another, or adding a new furin site that can provide a species-specific coronavirus with an ability to start using the same receptor (e.g. ACE2) in other species. In fact, Shi Zhengli’s group was creating chimeric constructs as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2017,when they created a whole of 8 new chimeric coronaviruses with various RBMs.In 2019 such work was in full swing, as WIV was part of a $3.7 million NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Under its auspices, Shi Zhengli co-authored a 2019 paper that called for continued research into synthetic viruses and testing them in vitro and in vivo:
Also, hypoxia induces furin expression as well as all 3 FUR gene promoters harbor binding sites for hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1). Berberine, which is an HIF-1 inhibitor, maybe a potential treatment for COVID-19 patients.