>>8510292

Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)

>https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/

Posted on January 31, 2020 by harvard2thebighouse

This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs.

Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in mid February the Chinese Ministry of Science sent out a directive to all its labs emphasizing the important of carefully handling bio-infectious agents and alluding to slack oversight and past lapses, even mentioning coronaviruses specifically.

Mistakes may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for Johns Hopkins’ Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well. This is unlikely to be a plot twist in one of the novels Tom Clancy wrote after he started mailing it in.

Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.

Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which had already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.

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>>8510574

– By 2015, conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious. This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly gain-of-function research, a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus. Looking at UNC’s gain-of-function research on coronavirus spike-proteins, which received its funding just before the ban was implemented and was only allowed to go forward following a special review, a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.”

– But then oddly, in late January right as the pandemic was blooming, Dr. Ralph Baric claimed in an interview that people should be more concerned with the seasonal flu – despite having personally overseen the controversial engineering of a hyper-virulent strain of batty coronavirus just a few years back. Immediately discounting the burgeoning outbreak of an unknown coronavirus as a non-event seems particularly troubling for someone who’d trained two Chinese scientists on how to make hyper-virulent coronaviruses, especially when it’s hard to imagine that Dr. Baric was unaware his past colleagues were now working at the Wuhan Virology Lab, the epicenter of the outbreak. Highlighting the dissembling absurdity of this statement, based on reporting from Who: the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 appears to be thirty-four times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

– Scientists have expressed concern about China’s ability to safely monitor this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan since it opened in 2017: “an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. ‘Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.'” This lab is at most 20 miles from the wet market where the virus had been assumed to have jumped from animal to human. However the idea that a Chinese lab could have a viral sample escape is well-documented – as mentioned, one lab in Beijing has had four separate incidents of the SARS virus leaking out accidentally.

– Notably, the first three known cases from early December had no contact with that market, and roughly one-third of the initial exposed cohort had no direct ties to Wusan’s wild meat wet-market, the original presumptive source of the virus. And in mid February, reporting indicated that COVID-19’s patient zero in fact had no connection at all with the wet-market. This is reinforced by the fact Chinese research has also concluded that COVID-19 “may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”

>>8510781

– As explained in Nature, COVID-19’s Franken-genome combines a cornucopia of distinct genetic markers from each of the three other distinct branches of the coronavirus family tree, but is distinct enough from all of them that it in fact forms its own clade. Along those same lines, a full-genome evolutionary analysis of COVID-19 published in The Lancet concluded, “recombination is probably not the reason for emergence of this virus” since it seems that the Wuhan Strain isn’t a mosaic of previously known coronaviruses, but instead draws from distant, discrete parts of the coronavirus family tree – not how these viruses naturally evolve. Because even mixing and matching coronavirus genomes from every known zoological virus, scientists couldn’t find any possible combination that would explain those regions of the Wuhan Strain’s genome. The Lancet muses that a mysterious animal host could still be out there, however since they’ve already searched through every known possibility and been unable to find a match, another obvious explanation is that bio-engineering accounts for the inexplicable nucleotide signature of the Wuhan Strain’s genome.

– The successful end results of the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research at UNC that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, was published the following year and described the successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats which was achieved by tinkering with its spike-protein genes. In this paper, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” who’s listed as being attached to the “Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.”

– Zhengli Shi seems to have returned to Wuhan at some point since 2016, specifically to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center, since she then appears in this September 2019 paper on the human behaviors most likely to lead to bat-borne coronavirus exposure in southern China, and also in the paper claiming that this coronavirus was bat in origin, which was peculiarly submitted in coordination with the announcement of the outbreak. Very, very peculiarly. She also appears in this pending preprint on the current outbreak of COVID-19, just a small sample of the dozens of coronavirus-related papers she’s published over a three decade career.

>>8510940

– Another Chinese virologist, Xing-Yi Ge, appears as an author on the 2016 UNC paper and is also attached to the lab in Wuhan. Previously in 2013, he’d been the very first scientist to successfully isolated a SARS-like coronavirus from bats which targets the ACE2 receptor, just like our present virus, the Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19 uses. And it turns out that sections of the Wuhan Strain’s ACE2 receptor’s genes are unique: they’re almost identical to SARS’s spike-protein genes – despite the fact that almost none of the two coronavirus’s genomes are similar anywhere else at all. Beyond that, although the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome differs from SARS in four out of the five most important genomic spots that determine binding to the ACE2 receptor, they surprisingly don’t effect the protein-spike’s shape. And in an even bigger coincidence, these four spots also code for the outside region of the spike that allows entry into cells, and do not effect it either – allowing the Wuhan Strain to still use the ACE2 receptor to unlock cells while possibly gaining additional capabilities. The odds that this concordance was bio-engineered into the virus are several orders of magnitude more likely than for this to randomly have evolved in nature, and is exactly the sort of process used to make the H5N1 Bird Flu airborne and highly pathogenic.