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Source: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-h...-media-1596958
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-h...-media-1596958
Exclusive: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media
By Rowan Jacobsen On 6/2/21 at 2:23 PM EDT
For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. (Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. intelligence. And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness.
The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab kept growing—until it became too substantial to ignore...
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Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...ump-china.html
The Groupthink That Produced the Lab-Leak Failure Should Scare Liberals
By Jonathan Chait
As we sift through the lab-leak debacle, the good news is that the healthy antibodies in the system are still strong enough to overcome the groupthink that produced the original error. News media are investigating a hypothesis they once dismissed, and the government has announced an investigation to find the truth.
The bad news is that the problem is turning out to be worse than it initially seemed — and worse still, the source of the failure is not going away. The implications of this episode are much broader than understanding the source of the pandemic. It is a question about whether institutions like the media and government can withstand the pressure of ideological conformity...
Comment
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Originally posted by Emily View Post
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on June 4, 2021
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Financial Times: Anthony Fauci has called on China to release the medical records of nine Chinese individuals, including three from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who got sick in late 2019. Is China open to releasing the medical records?
Wang Wenbin: The Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of sciences has issued a statement on March 23. According to the statement, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had not been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 before December 30, 2019, and a "zero-infection" record is kept among its staff and graduate students so far.
This January, the China-WHO joint mission made field trips to institutions including the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and visited biosafety laboratories and had in-depth and candid exchanges with experts there. Through these field trips and in-depth visits, members of the mission unanimously agreed that the hypothesis of lab leaking is extremely unlikely.
Meanwhile, I also want to point out that there are increasingly more reports on the virus and COVID-19 pandemic being spotted in various places around the world in the second half of 2019, and that the international community is highly concerned about the questions around the biological lab at Fort Detrick and the real intentions of the US' establishment of 200-plus overseas bio-labs. We hope the US side will follow China's example, take a scientific and cooperative attitude, invite WHO experts for origin-tracing study in the US, and make a responsible explanation to the international community without further delay on the real situation of more than 200 US biological laboratories around the world, so as to make positive contribution to the humanity's early victory over the pandemic and better capabilities in dealing with public health emergencies in the future.
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Financial Times: I wanted to follow up on the question about the medical records of the nine individuals. For the six individuals from the Mojiang mine, does China have those medical records and would those be ones that could be made available? And then a second question, you said that there was no one sick with COVID-19 before December. Were there staff members who were sick with other potential illnesses? Will China be willing to release the medical records of those individuals if there are any?
Wang Wenbin: I will take these two questions together. I have just stated China's position on relevant issue. To give you some more information, according to US media reports, in April 2020, Francis S. Collins, Director of the US National Institutes of Health, wrote to a number of heads of US research institutions, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, dismissing the Wuhan lab hypothesis as a conspiracy. Not long ago, Michael R. Gordon, an American journalist, by quoting a so-called "previously undisclosed US intelligence report," hinted a far-fetched connection between the "three sick staff" of a Wuhan lab and the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing unsubstantiated sources about Iraq's "attempt to acquire nuclear weapons", which directly lead to the Iraq war. Now, this same person, with similar means of falsely quoting anonymous information, hypes up the the Wuhan lab hypothesis that stretched any semblance of credibility.
On the issue of virus origin-tracing, many experts in the international community have made scientific, rational, objective and impartial voices. For example, Peter Daszak, member of the WHO international expert group and president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization, said in a recent interview with CNN, "There is no evidence that this was a virus created in a lab. There is no evidence at all that it ever was in a lab. We found about over 500 of these bat coronaviruses in collaboration with our colleagues in China. We arrange the field work. We manage the work that's done. We see all the data that comes through from the lab as soon as it's done. In fact, we've worked with the lab in Wuhan for 15 years now. We know everything they do. And we know that they do not have that virus in the lab. I've worked with this group for 15 years. I've never seen any evidence of anyone saying things that aren't true, or even hinting of anything untoward from that lab. It just did not happen." We hope those spreading the "lab-leak theory", be it individuals or media, will take seriously these objective and correct voices.
We also hope the US side can respond to the concerns at home and abroad and give a real explanation on why it deliberately covered up the truth of the Fort Detrick lab.
Financial Times: One more follow up from the FT. Is that a "No" to China sharing the medical records of these individuals?
Wang Wenbin: As I pointed out just now, the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of sciences has issued a statement on March 23. According to the statement, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had not been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 before December 30, 2019, and a "zero-infection" record is kept among its staff and graduate students so far. We believe that anyone who respects facts and truth will be able to find answers from this statement.
"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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From post above:
"Wang Wenbin: The Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of sciences has issued a statement on March 23. According to the statement, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had not been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 before December 30, 2019, and a "zero-infection" record is kept among its staff and graduate students so far."
This is the statement:
Translation Google
Statement from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: Wuhan Institute of VirologyTime: 2021-03-23
Recently, some foreign media have once again speculated that Wuhan Virus Institute may be the source of the outbreak of the new crown virus. I solemnly declare:
Before December 30, 2019, our institute has not been exposed to the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2); so far, our employees and graduate students have maintained "zero infection" of SARS-CoV-2.
Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
March 23, 2021
http://www.whiov.cas.cn/tzgg_160286/...3_5981805.htmlLast edited by Pathfinder; June 4, 2021, 06:30 PM."Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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snip
But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021...id-19s-origins
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At this point I feel that I can disclose that I was personally warned in the summer of 2020 to stop pushing the lab theory possibility on FluTrackers - especially my comments about "follow the money" link. I was told that my life could be made difficult. I replied that I was located far from China and "good luck" in trying to affect me. I was then further advised that I could be affected through adverse actions against my adult children. The implication was not violence but some other type of coercion which was not explained. I made light of the situation but the other party was serious and told me, "I have seen it happen."
I decided that my family's risk was low for any interference. Apparently no one is too small to squash.Comment
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You are credible, like Redfield.
But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
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Prominent NYC scientist backtracks on COVID origin over ‘disturbing information’
By Bruce GoldingJune 4, 2021 | 3:50pm | Updated
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Peter Palese was among 27 scientists who signed an influential statement last year in the British scientific journal The Lancet that denounced as “conspiracy theories” the notion that the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab — or even be man-made.
But Palese — chairman of the Microbiology Department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he runs a lab named after him — said he’s no longer convinced that’s the case.
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“A lot of disturbing information has surfaced since the Lancet letter I signed, so I want to see answers covering all questions.”
Palese declined to specify that information or say what led him to sign the Lancet statement...
"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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COVID lab leak theory: Why Berkeley scientist wants answers
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By JOHN WOOLFOLK | jwoolfolk@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: June 6, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: June 6, 2021 at 7:10 a.m.
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Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology at the UC Berkeley, was among 18 researchers from respected universities around the world who in a May 14 article in Science called for the scientific community to explore the lab-leak theory. We asked him why this is suddenly gaining interest.
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Q: Has anything new been learned this year that raises the possibility of a laboratory accident?
A: We know much more about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They were growing viruses on human cells, adding in elements of another virus, training viruses on human cells to see which ones are most infectious. When you’re doing that, you risk making viruses that are more infectious.
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Q: What about conflicting reports of the Wuhan lab manipulating coronaviruses with “gain-of-function” methods, in essence intentionally making the viruses more virulent, which they deny?
A: In some sense, it’s a matter of semantics. Technically there’s no evidence of gain-of-function research, but there is evidence of genetic manipulation of coronaviruses in labs. They have published papers that showed they are working on chimeric (man-made) viruses.
Creating a chimeric virus may not be a gain-of-function experiment. You don’t necessarily purposefully insert something into virus that you know will make it more efficient or infectious. You might simply mimic the natural way natural viruses recombine with each other.
Q Would it be hard to tell from the virus’s genetic sequence whether it was a chimera?
A Yes, that is right. Some ways of doing this work would leave no clear traces in the DNA (RNA) sequence.
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"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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Chinese Military Scientist Filed Patent For A Vaccine Soon After China Revealed Covid-19 Details in 2020
Bhaswati Guha Majumder
Sat, 5 June, 2021, 3:25 am·2-min read
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According to documents obtained by The Weekend Australian, Zhou Yusen, a respected military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who collaborated with the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and American experts, submitted a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on 24 February last year.
The scientist later died under mysterious circumstances in May 2020.
Despite Zhou’s status as an award-winning military scientist, there were no reports or tributes, with him only being labelled as “dead” in a Chinese media item from July and a scientific publication from December last year.
However, the report revealed that the patent, filed by the PLA’s Institute of Military Medicine, was lodged just five weeks after China acknowledged human-to-human transmission of the novel virus.
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper: “This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much earlier”.
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"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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More from this article posted earlier by Shiloh and Sharon:
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A growing number of people were demanding to know what exactly had gone on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Were the claims in the State Department’s fact sheet—of sick researchers and secret military research—accurate?
Metzl had managed to question Shi directly a week before the release of the mission report. At a March 23 online lecture by Shi, hosted by Rutgers Medical School, Metzl asked if she had full knowledge of all the research being done at the WIV and all the viruses held there, and if the U.S. government was correct that classified military research had taken place. She responded:
We—our work, our research is open, and we have a lot of international collaboration. And from my knowledge, all our research work is open, is transparency. So, at the beginning of COVID-19, we heard the rumors that it’s claimed in our laboratory we have some project, blah blah, with army, blah blah, these kinds of rumors. But this is not correct because I am the lab’s director and responsible for research activity. I don’t know any kind of research work performed in this lab. This is incorrect information.
A major argument against the lab-leak theory hinged on the presumption that Shi was telling the truth when she said the WIV was not hiding any virus samples that are closer cousins to SARS-CoV-2. In Metzl’s view, if she was lying about the military’s involvement, or anything else, then all bets were off.
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Though Shi has portrayed the WIV as a transparent hub of international research beset by false allegations, the State Department’s January fact sheet painted a different picture: of a facility conducting classified military research, and hiding it, which Shi adamantly denies. But a former national security official who reviewed U.S. classified materials told Vanity Fair that inside the WIV, military and civilian researchers are “doing animal research in the same fricking space.”
While that, in and of itself, does not prove a lab leak, Shi’s alleged lies about it are “absolutely material,” said a former State Department official. “It speaks to the honesty and credibility of the WIV that they kept this secret…. You have a web of lies, coercion, and disinformation that is killing people.”
Vanity Fair sent Shi Zhengli and the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology detailed questions. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment by email and phone.
..."Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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I moved a couple of posts to a new thread:
What is the meaning of "sticky" in virology? Real or not real?
Comment
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----------------------------------------------------------Originally posted by Pathfinder View Post
2020-06-08
Academician Zhong Nanshan mentioned in the live broadcast that the new crown vaccine can be used as an emergency as early as this fall or the end of the year. Six vaccines in mainland China are already in clinical trials.
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September 11, 2020, 04:54 PM
snip
China National Biotec Group Co., a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm, has given two experimental vaccine candidates to hundreds of thousands of people under an emergency-use condition approved by Beijing in July
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/...id-19-vaccinesComment
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A few years ago, Zhou Yusen developed a way to work with MERS that he thought would be safe enough to avoid the need for using BSL-3 restrictions.
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/...43-422X-10-266
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In this study, we produced a pseudovirus bearing the full-length S protein of MERS-CoV in the Env-defective, luciferase-expressing HIV-1 backbone. We then established a pseudovirus-based inhibition assay for the detection of neutralizing antibodies and anti-MERS-CoV entry inhibitors. This method was proven to be safe, convenient, reliable and effective for the rapid detection of neutralizing antibodies and viral entry inhibitors against MERS-CoV.
Results
Generated MERS-CoV pseudovirus was able to infect a variety of cell types from human and non-human hosts
We first detected the ability of the generated MERS-CoV pseudovirus to infect cells from various tissues and different hosts, including human cell lines Huh-7, HT-1080, Hep-2, HEP-G2, A549, MT-2, Caco-2, HeLa and 293T, as well as those from mink (NBL-7), pig (PK15), canine (MDCK), and monkey (FRhK-4, Vero, Vero E6 and MA-104) (Table 1). Pseudovirus expressing VSV-G was included as the positive control. The target cells were respectively infected with MERS-CoV pseudovirus normalized for equal HIV-1 p24 content, and luciferase activity was measured at 72 h after infection. As shown in Figure 1, almost all tested human cells and a variety of animal cells could be infected by the produced pseudovirus. Particularly, MERS-CoV pseudovirus infected HT-1080 and SARS receptor-expressing ACE2-293T cells, maintaining a high infective ability in identified MERS-CoV receptor DPP4-expressing Huh-7 cells. In addition, human cell types, such as Hep-2, HEP-G2, A549 and MT-2, and animal cell types, including FRhK-4, MDCK, Vero, Vero E6 and NBL-7, were infected by MERS-CoV pseudovirus to a significantly higher degree than other cell types, such as PK15, Caco-2 and HeLa. However, no high infectivity was observed in MA-104. Our results also demonstrated that VSV-G positive control could highly infect almost all tested cell types, possibly due to the broad host range of VSV-G in the capability of infecting multiple tissues in various hosts, while Env- pseudovirus negative control was unable to infect tested cell lines [10] (Figure 1)
_____________________________________________
Ask Congress to Investigate COVID Origins and Government Response to Pandemic.
i love myself. the quietest. simplest. most powerful. revolution ever. ---- nayyirah waheed
"...there’s an obvious contest that’s happening between different sectors of the colonial ruling class in this country. And they would, if they could, lump us into their beef, their struggle." ---- Omali Yeshitela, African People’s Socialist Party
(My posts are not intended as advice or professional assessments of any kind.)
Never forget Excalibur.Comment
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Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation," June 6, 2021
face-the-nation
JUNE 6, 2021 / 11:24 AM / CBS NEWS
The following is a transcript of an interview with former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb that aired Sunday, June 6, 2021, on "Face the Nation."
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JOHN DICKERSON:...Let me ask you about this term "gain of function." We've heard that come up in this, that gain-of-function research was going on at the lab and that that is somehow connected to the US government or even Dr. Anthony Fauci. What's your assessment of that?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, look, I- I don't think that gain-of-function research- if this did come out of a lab, so big if, it doesn't necessarily need to be the product of deliberate engineering. If they had a novel strain of coronavirus and we know that the WIV was the referral center for coronaviruses. So if the Chinese had discovered a novel strain of coronavirus, it probably would have been sent to the ER for further evaluation. We know that that Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing experiments where they were trying to infect transgenic animals, animals with fully human immune systems, to look at the behaviour of coronaviruses in people, in models.
JOHN DICKERSON: And they do that so that they can fight tougher--
DR. GOTTLIEB: Right. So they could figure out how it works and then they can try to develop drugs and vaccines against it. The process of doing that, the process of growing a vaccine in mammalian cell cultures, which is what they would have tried to do with that novel strain, and the process of then infecting transgenic animals would make it more humanized. So you don't need to deliberately try to engineer features into the virus to end up with a virus that you might have taken from an animal and then it became more humanized in the process of just experimenting with it. And we know that there were some outbreaks of unusual coronaviruses that the Chinese still haven't released. I mean, a real material fact here is the evidence that the Chinese government has not released.
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"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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Scientist Who Warned Fauci COVID Could Be 'Engineered' Deletes Twitter AccountOriginally posted by Pathfinder View Post
Jimmy Tobias
@JamesCTobias
Very interesting email from the Fauci documents obtained by
@JasonLeopold
:
1:33 PM · Jun 1, 2021·Twitter Web App
BY ANDERS ANGLESEY ON 6/7/21 AT 6:34 AM EDT
A virologist who said during the early phase of the pandemic that some of COVID's features "(potentially) look engineered" in an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci has deleted his Twitter account.
Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute removed his page on the social media platform following the release of email exchanges between himself and Dr. Fauci. His account was no longer accessible on Sunday, June 6, according to the internet archive The Wayback Machine.
Before Andersen's account was deleted, the virologist faced explosive claims that the email exchange about his changing views on how the virus came into being showed evidence of a cover-up.
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"Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
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‘Damning’ science shows COVID-19 likely engineered in lab: experts
By Aaron FeisJune 6, 2021 | 6:11pm | Updated
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Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation.
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Of the 36 possible genome pairings that can produce two arginine amino acids in a row — which results in boosting a virus’ lethality — the one most commonly used in gain-of-function research is CGG-CGG, or double CGG, wrote Quay and Muller.
Quay and Muller stated the double CGG sequence has never been found naturally among the entire group of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2.
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But, in what Quay and Muller called a “damning fact,” it was found in CoV-2.
“Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG,” they wrote. “Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
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SARS and MERS, which were confirmed to be of natural origin, “evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated,” the pair wrote.
By contrast, COVID-19 proved to be highly contagious from the point it was first detected.
“Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread,” wrote Quay and Muller. “Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research.”
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“The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration,” they wrote. “The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/06/damnin...neered-in-lab/
See also:
(Subscription required to read the full article)
OPINION COMMENTARY
The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
Last edited by Pathfinder; June 7, 2021, 11:23 AM."Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear."
-Nelson MandelaComment
Comment