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Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning....

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  • Source: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/...o-the-pandemic

    Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic
    Prof. Jeffrey Sachs says he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology” and warns that there is dangerous virus research taking place without public oversight.
    Current Affairs
    filed 02 August 2022 in The Virus

    Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal the Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.

    Prof. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity. In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent...

    Comment


    • The COVID lab leak theory is dead. Here’s how we know the virus came from a Wuhan market

      Published: August 14, 2022 4.04pm EDT
      Dake King/AP/AAP

      My colleagues and I published the most detailed studies of the earliest events in the COVID-19 pandemic last month in the journal Science.

      Together, these papers paint a coherent evidence-based picture of what took place in the city of Wuhan during the latter part of 2019.

      The take-home message is the COVID pandemic probably did begin where the first cases were detected – at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

      At the same time this lays to rest the idea that the virus escaped from a laboratory.

      Huanan market was the pandemic epicentre

      An analysis of the geographic locations of the earliest known COVID cases – dating to December 2019 – revealed a strong clustering around the Huanan market. This was true not only for people who worked at or visited the market, but also for those who had no links to it.

      Although there will be many missing cases, there’s no evidence of widespread sampling bias: the first COVID cases were not identified simply because they were linked to the Huanan market.

      The Huanan market was the pandemic epicentre. From its origin there, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread to other locations in Wuhan in early 2020 and then to the rest of the world.

      The Huanan market is an indoor space about the size of two soccer fields. The word “seafood” in its name leaves a misleading impression of its function. When I visited the market in 2014, a variety of live wildlife was for sale including raccoon dogs and muskrats.

      ... The lab leak theory rests on an unfortunate coincidence: that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in a city with a laboratory that works on bat coronaviruses.

      Some of these bat coronaviruses are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. But not close enough to be direct ancestors.

      Sadly, the focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology has distracted us from a far more important connection: that, like SARS-CoV-1 (which emerged in late 2002) before it, there’s a direct link between a coronavirus outbreak and a live animal market.

      For the lab leak theory to be true, SARS-CoV-2 must have been present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic started. But there’s not a single piece of data suggesting this.


      __________________________________________________ ______________
      The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic

      American Association for the Advancement of Science 26 Jul 2022 DOI: 10.1126/science.abp871 (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8715) MICHAEL WOROBEY (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715#con1), JOSHUA I. LEVY (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715#con2), LORENA MALPICA SERRANO (https://www.scienc

      Comment



      • Jamie Metzl
        @JamieMetzl
        ·Aug 15

        I have great respect for anyone and everyone following the evidence and working in good faith to assess #COVID19 origins. I have less respect for those trying to oversell working hypotheses as “dispositive evidence.“

        "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 Mandela

        Comment


        • 14. August 2022

          WHO declares "Wuhan market NOT origin of COVID-19."



          Dear fellow citizens,
          as many of you probably already know – in my position as a Member of the European Parliament – I am also a deputy member of its official "COVID-19 Investigating Committee" (COVI).

          Already last may, the chair of this committee attended the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) of the WHO in Geneva.
          Now, more than 2 months later, I finally received the proceedings of this meeting.

          I was quite astonished to find there - half hidden in a subordinate clause - the clandestine disappearance of another Corona narrative.

          So far - according to the official working hypothesis - the origin of COVID-19 is to be assumed on an animal market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. This official assumption has since been disseminated by almost all media worldwide. Scientists and experts, who in the meantime also tried to discuss other possibilities of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, were quickly branded as conspiracy theorists and excluded from the debate.

          Now, however, the minutes available to me indicate that even a high-ranking WHO scientist no longer considers the animal market in Wuhan to be the source of the "pandemic."

          Dr. Jaouad Mahjour, former WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean and current Director of Program Management states, according to the minutes, "WHO estimates that the first COVID cases [...] could date back to November 2019, which is why it does not consider the Wuhan market to be the origin of the virus."

          That's quite a mouthful, considering the ease with which another building block from the previous Corona narrative is simply disposed of here by official bodies.

          But it is also interesting to note that, according to Dr. Mahjour, WHO continues to "see Europe in a strong position to take a leadership role on the future pandemic treaty."

          Recently, I stumbled across a graphic on social media that stated, "We need new conspiracy theories - The old ones are all true now."
          I don't know about you, dear readers, but after the first laugh, somehow a certain pensiveness remains...

          Kind regards,
          Yours, Christine Anderson, MEP (AfD)

          https://christineanderson.eu/en/who-...n-of-covid-19/
          "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 Mandela

          Comment


          • The Russian press is using our beloved Dr. Fauci as a propaganda tool to pander to China's Covid origin theory. RT sounds as buffoonish as MSNBC now.

            Anthony Fauci has joked that Covid-19 originated not from China, but from his own kitchen


            11 Aug, 2022 15:26
            US Covid czar cracks joke about pandemic

            Anthony Fauci jested that coronavirus emerged not from China, but from his kitchen
            Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser joked on Tuesday that it was he who concocted coronavirus in his kitchen, in an apparent attempt to mock the proponents of anti-science rhetoric that is still widespread in the United States.

            Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down with his friend and colleague Dr. Larry Corey in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center campus in Seattle, Washington to discuss the Covid-19 pandemic.

            Speaking to the Covid czar, Corey noted that the event was being held in the state of Washington, “at the epicenter of the initial outbreak.” He was apparently referring to the first case of Covid-19 on US soil, which was brought in by an American who had returned home to the Seattle area after visiting Wuhan, the Chinese city from which the virus apparently originated.

            Fauci, however, responded with a joke. “No, I developed the ancestral model strain. I created it.”

            “You let it loose,” Cory interjected as the audience broke into laughter.

            “I was in my kitchen, and…” Fauci said, making a gesture to suggest he dropped something...
            _____________________________________________

            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


            • ANYWHERE BUT HERE
              China now insists the pandemic didn’t start within its borders. Its scientists are publishing a flurry of papers pointing the finger elsewhere


              18 AUG 2022 BYJON COHEN
              ...
              CHINA HAS NOT allowed foreign researchers into the country to conduct independent origin studies, but that hasn’t stymied all investigations. On 26 February, a large international team that included Holmes and Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, published two preprints that offered a new analysis of the outbreak’s early days—and pointed directly at the Huanan market. (Science published peer-reviewed versions—here and here—online on 26 July.)

              Early reports suggesting some cases were not connected to the market mistakenly identified people as having the disease who did not, the authors contended. They combined spatial analyses of where infected people lived and worked, genetic sequencing of early viral samples, and the location of positive environmental samples and the stalls that sold mammals highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 to conclude the market was the “epicenter” of the pandemic.

              But a preprint from China published a day earlier by Gao and many co-authors from CCDC reached a starkly different conclusion. The study analyzed more than 1000 environmental samples from the Huanan market and found SARS-CoV-2 in 73 of them, indicating the virus was in the sewer, on the ground, and in “containers,” some of which Worobey suspects may have been cages that held mammals, based on their location.

              In a so-called metagenomic analysis, the researchers also found several samples had a blend of viral and human RNA, “which highly suggests the SARS-CoV-2 might have derived from Homo sapiens” in the market, the authors wrote. In other words, humans didn’t catch SARS-CoV-2 from animals at the market. Instead, people might have brought it to the market from elsewhere.

              Again, the researchers mentioned viral traces on imported frozen food and the retrospective studies from other countries as clues to a foreign origin. “Definitely, more work involving international coordination is needed to investigate the real origins of SARS-CoV-2,” they concluded.

              Worobey and Holmes were gobsmacked by what the study didn’t say. In a graphic that illustrates the metagenomic analysis, dots show the virus mixed with RNA from several species other than humans, but the preprint does not specify which species. “They ignore all the other animals in there,” Holmes says.

              A researcher who claims to have reviewed the manuscript for Nature says it’s not clear whether the omission was intentional or due to sloppy science, but either way, “I said you cannot publish this unless they release the raw data.” The reviewer, who asked not to be named, noted that the paper also includes an analysis of a sample from a defeathering machine at the market that found only human DNA. “Either only humans were defeathered or the analysis was wrong—pick your favorite,” the reviewer says. Gao did not reply to Science’s specific request to discuss the metagenomic data.
              ...
              "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 Mandela

              Comment


              • Source: https://zenodo.org/record/7005332#.YwI4kfHMJa7

                August 18, 2022 Journal article Open Access
                Unwarranted exclusion of intermediate lineage A/B SARS-CoV-2 genomes is inconsistent with the two spillover hypothesis of the origin of COVID-19

                Steven E Massey; Adrian Jones; Daouyu Zhang; Yuri Deigin; Steven C Quay

                Pekar et al. (2022) propose that SARS-CoV-2 was a zoonotic spillover that first infected humans in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. The basis for their analysis is the hypothesis that there were two spillovers into humans that are recognized by a two-SNV difference, called Lineage A and B, and that the one-SNV intermediate A/B genomes found in numerous human infections are all sequencing errors, implying that the intermediate A/B genomes with a single SNV occurred in unsampled animal hosts. Consequently, confirmation of the existence of an intermediate A/B genome from humans would falsify their hypothesis. Pekar et al. identified and excluded 20 A/B intermediate genomes from their analysis. A variety of exclusion criteria were applied, including low sequencing depth, and the assertion of repeated sequencing errors at lineage defining positions 8782 and 28144. However, data from GISAID shows that most of the genomes were sequenced to high coverage, contradicting these criteria. The decision to exclude the majority of genomes was based on personal communications, with raw data not being available for inspection. Multiple errors and inconsistencies were observed in the exclusion process. Mapping analysis of a genome from Singapore, dismissed due to an arbitrary read depth cutoff, confirms it as a true intermediate, while an intermediate genome from Wuhan was discarded even though it conformed to the cutoff. Puzzlingly, two genomes from Beijing were discarded despite an average sequencing depth of 2175X. Lastly, we identify a new potential intermediate genome from Guangzhou. Consequently, we find that exclusion of many of the intermediate genomes is unfounded, leaving the conclusion of two natural zoonoses unsupported.

                Comment


                • Good to see this tendentious piece of research by Pekar et al. getting debunked.
                  Raccoon dogs are pretty common, if there was a circulating covid strain, it would be surprising to have it only in the wet market specimens.
                  Yet the search for a purported animal host has come up empty, despite diligent effort, suggesting that there was none, because the virus was a lab product.

                  Comment


                  • Source: https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-...virus-studies/


                    NIH to terminate EcoHealth Alliance grant after its Wuhan partners refuse to deliver information on coronavirus studies
                    By Matt Field | August 24, 2022

                    The National Institute of Health (NIH) is partially terminating a grant to a nonprofit that worked extensively with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronavirus research. In letters posted by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee this month, an NIH official said EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests.

                    In an Aug. 19 letter to Kentucky Rep James Comer, the top Republican member of the US House Oversight Committee, Michael Lauer, the deputy director of extramural research at NIH, said the agency had informed EcoHealth that it was terminating the sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology “for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request.”

                    The termination notice comes after the NIH chided EcoHealth last fall for not immediately notifying the agency after its experiments showed modified coronaviruses replicated at a faster rate in experimental mice than an unmodified virus. The agency then asked for lab notebooks and other files pertaining to the experiments, and EcoHealth reported that it would relay the request to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to the new NIH letters, the Wuhan institute never delivered...

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted on this thread in April 2020 (post #80).



                      Originally posted by sharon sanders View Post
                      You can judge the amount of work by the volume of publications especially those with high citations. It’s indisputable that Wuhan has worked on this since at least mid-2000s, and some really groundbreaking work has come out of that team in recent years. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was a BSL3 lab that upgraded to BSL4 in 2018, but by checking author affiliations, we know that some of the work involving dissection of bats to recover e.g. hantavirus is done at the Wuhan CDC (WHCDC) lab which is only BSL2 but which is <300m from the seafood market, plus also being right next door to the hospital with first major HCW outbreak in Dec, from asymptomatic neurosurgical patient.

                      In fact, this is a district with a large number of hospitals, and one can just as easily say the outbreak started with patients that arrived in those hospitals in that district, people who worked, lived, went to market there. Everything, market, lab, hospitals, are within 1km of each other, except for the WIV lab which is 9 miles away.

                      The conventional wisdom was bats are the natural reservoir, but bat CoV are not well adapted enough to jump directly to humans, and an intermediate host is required (e.g. civets or camels for MERS). So when a new virus of such transmissibility appears, one of the most urgent things to do is to try and find the intermediate host, because you know, it could still be spreading. Suspicions were first aroused because of the unusual behavior of the Wuhan authorities. Guan Yi was the HKU expert (top 11th cited in microbiology in world) who uncovered the connection with civets in 2003. He went to Wuhan mid-January and then gave an extraordinary interview, that a) the market was shut and decontaminated b) he was denied access to market or any environmental samples taken c) he knocked on several doors of scientific community but "epidemiology experts and scientists do not seem to be welcomed in the city."

                      That is a red flag, and it's been reinforced by the fact that Chinese researchers don’t seem particularly keen to work on this either. Wuhan is a center of expertise on this very subject, it’s inconceivable that they would decontaminate the market without taking animal samples. That’s like a researcher’s dream to be the first to identify the source. So either they were actively stopped, or they did take samples but kept quiet. (Raw data from environmental as opposed to animal samples have since been shared privately between researchers but not published, and it appears that these are poorly labelled with regards to where exactly they were taken. These partial sequences match patient samples, so they could well be from human shedding only.) The other thing is, even if that market was closed, it would be reasonable to go and take samples from other wildlife markets, because the stuff was being sold on the streets all through January. Nobody has published anything, even though a ton has been published on all other aspects of this outbreak, including from WIV scientists. The data from market surveillance is so important that even negative results would have been useful (perhaps too useful).

                      I’m skeptical in general with the bioweapons theory because it’s hard to control a respiratory virus, but I looked into some of these allegations, specifically that the virus may have been subject to human engineering because certain mutations seem suspiciously well adapted to humans or appear to be similar to other sequences from other viruses. But here’s the thing. There’s still a vast universe of bat CoV that’s not yet mapped, but the ones already sequenced show a great deal of heterogeneity and recombination (i.e. these viruses in the wild are mixing and exchanging genetic materials all the time), plus if you dig deeper, there’s published data that some of these specific regions are in fact found in wild-type bat-CoV, so it isn’t as unusual as some would make out, to find such features. Plus, it’s a basic requirement that a virus has to acquire human adaptations to be capable of h2h transmission, so it just seems circular logic to assert human intervention on such grounds alone.

                      With the 2003 virus, it was found that viruses found in humans and civets were very similar, with a mutation that allow the virus to bind to human-type ACE2 receptors, which was absent from the corresponding bat SLCoV. Since then many labs have done sampling of bat CoV from all over China. Despite diversity, not one sample showed the human-adapted receptor binding domain RBD, so it was believed that bat CoV would have difficulty infecting humans without adaptation via an intermediate host. Secondly, nobody had ever isolated a live bat-SL-CoV, one that could be grown in cell culture.

                      All that changed in 2013 when the WIV published a study, based on 5 years of surveillance of a particular bat population in Yunnan. link They found a bunch of bat-SL-CoV and published 2 representative sequences. For the first time, these had the human-adapted RBD mutation. Also, they were able to isolate a live virus, now called WIV1, with which they were able to do experiments. Prior to this experiments were done with genetically engineered viruses using the sequence under investigation on a backbone of a virus that’s lab-adapted to infect e.g. mice but is otherwise harmless. This is common practice. But now they had this wild-type virus with a human-adapted RBD, which is a whole different ballgame. On top of that, they took samples from villagers and found some of them had antibodies to this wild-type bat virus, thus showing that no intermediate host is required for human infection, although no evidence of h2h was found. All sorts of alarm bells started ringing and other labs started collaborating; one paper was explicitly titled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence.by researchers from N Carolina, Harvard, FDA, Switzerland, a whole who’s who of this field. link

                      Amazingly before 2002 the WIV lab was an agricultural lab (insect-borne viruses and pesticide testing), but converted to work on human pathogens in 2003, the same year during which approval was given to convert from BSL3 to BSL4. That seems a degree of haste, but in line with China government policy on rapid expansion of biotech sector. By the time construction was finished in 2015 (but before certification for actual research 2018) 3 other BSL4 were in various stages of completion. This is reminiscent of Chernobyl, when the Soviets brought nuclear power plants online without prototype and without sufficient time for the first one to be robustly tested. It doesn’t help that the French institute that was supposed to build the lab had its contract prematurely terminated and the Chinese finished the work on its own (having copied/stolen the plans to build the other 3). This hastiness is reckless, but also prompts suspicion of dual use intentions, because one can always do with more power plants, but the amount of civilian, medical research that requires such capabilities is kind of limited. SARS itself requires only BSL3, but experiments with non-human primates would require BSL4. In the 2013 paper and others that followed, they described transmission experiments in mice with WIV1 plus some chimera viruses with the human ACE2 affinity. The next logical step from rodents would be primates, but even smaller mammals they were using such as raccoon cats (simulating civets) would have been perfectly adequate intermediate hosts that could, if biosecurity was lax, result in a human-adapted virus escaping the lab. We already know that the 2003 virus escaped numerous times from a Beijing lab. Bear in mind their own finding, that you don’t even need an intermediate host.

                      With all that in mind, now check this out. In Jan, scientists studied the new virus in comparison to known sequences in the public database, and found some that were 89% match. And then, a bomb shell. The WIV lab published that the closest match 96% is actually a sequence RaTG13, from their own collection from the 2013 Yunnan studies. At first it was mystifying, because the paper did not give citations for RaTG13. Turns out this sequence was submitted to GISAID database (for researchers) only on Jan 27 2020, by the very same WIV lab! In other words, the closest match for this pandemic virus is a sample they’ve had in their lab but left unpublished all these years. Now, having a sequence is not the same as having a virus, and not publishing all your findings is not necessarily a sign of nefarious intentions, but at a minimum it shows that the same set of samples that produced the by-now well studied WIV1 group, also contained all along the closest one to this pandemic virus. And, as we know, they’ve been working hard at this, doing all sorts of experiments, all along.

                      One can still stick with the eating wildlife story, as many still do, and I can’t discount it, but what’s the statistical probability that this once-in-a-century virus would emerge, of all places, out of the millions of wet markets in China, in the exact same city that is on the forefront of this research, that hosts the lab with the closest sequence?

                      The possibility of lab escape is not hot air, with the WIV, but there’s also the WHCDC. On the surface, they appear to be working on viruses that do not require higher biosafety (BSL2 = general hospital precautions), but who knows?. I read one paper from that lab on hantavirus, and it is concerning, because for this study they were capturing wild animals, a total of 450 bats, 81 insectivores and 2 shrews from different provinces, all kept alive in cages until they were dissected. So if we were to ask, where in the city of Wuhan could you find large numbers of bats kept in close proximity with other wild animals so that the virus could cross species, well, by all accounts, no bats were found in the wet market, but lo and behold, you can find these exact conditions in the WHCDC lab. The bats in the study were from different provinces including Yunnan although not from same region as the 2013 samples, but some were of the same genus that carried RaTG13. So while they might have thought they were working on the hantavirus, did they not realize that CoV was also in there, being shed all over the place? And that’s just one study; I’m sure that line of work has been ongoing for some years.

                      We know that in the wild mixing and recombination among bat SL-CoV is very common, but the diversity at one single location is still limited geographically. Plus RBD is never the whole story, and even 96% similarity is quite a ways off from human adaptation. For a bat virus to get to h2h, most likely several changes are needed. It’s likely these mutations already exist in the wild, but not necessarily in the same virus, and most importantly not in the same geographic location. One particular mutation may be prevalent in a cave in Yunnan, but another may exist only in Zhejiang or elsewhere, so they would not have a chance to meet and mix, except now they’re being collected and brought together, not just as blood or swab samples as in the WIV study, but as live animals. Bats are naturally sequestered in their habitats, but when you remove them and put them together with those from other locations, and/or with other animals, you drastically increase the chance of mixing until eventually you hit the (pandemic) jackpot. And if you do that in a metropolis with 11 million people that’s also a transport hub, as opposed to a remote cave in Yunnan, and only under BSL2, technically you may not be deliberately making a bioweapon, but you ought to be accountable for the consequences just the same. Just saying.

                      More on biosafety. One author of the hantavirus paper, who also published other work in collaboration with WIV on CoV (working in both labs appears to be a common practice), had gotten some national fame for working on bat viruses, having described in media interviews being splashed with bat blood, and being peed on by bats in caves. On both occasions, he recounted having to self-quarantine for 14 days, so they understood perfectly well their exposure risk. I’m not sure, though, that BSL2 containment measures are sufficient for say, disposal of contaminated waste with such pathogens. I’m not just talking about carelessness and lack of adherence to protocol, both rampant in China. There’s also a whole underground industry of re-packaging medical waste to be sold as new, from syringes, IV sets to bandages and test swabs. Also the sale of ‘surplus’ experimental animals for meat, which in one officially reported case resulted in millions in profit. So biological waste is one entirely plausible route, for a virus with pandemic potential, to leak into the community.

                      Another equally plausible but less dramatic possibility would be quite simply someone got infected but was either asymptomatic or had such mild symptoms that they never got tested, but nevertheless infected others, as we now know happens frequently with this virus. The seemingly explosive transmission at the wet market is likely to be a super-spreader event, which has happened so many time all over the world that it should no longer be a curiosity, and certainly not an indicator of origins.


                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
                      COVID: summary of lab-origin hypothesis: 1) Pandemic caused by a bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan--a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses, but that contains labs conducting world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses.
                      12:30 PM · Sep 5, 2022·Twitter Web App
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
                      ·
                      Sep 5
                      Replying to
                      @R_H_Ebright
                      2) In 2015-2017, scientists and science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was conducting and contemplating research that posed an unacceptable risk of lab accident and pandemic (https://nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487…; https://nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787…),

                      nature.com
                      Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research
                      Nature - Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      Sep 5
                      3) In 2017-2018, WIV constructed a novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
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                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      4) In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct more novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, targeting chimeras that replace natural spike gene with novel spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding affinities to human cells.
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      Sep 5
                      5) Also in 2018, in a DARPA grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct novel "consensus" bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and to insert furin cleavage site (FCS) sequences at the spike gene S1-S2 border of bat SARS-like coronaviruses,
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      6) In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and patently inadequate to contain a virus having transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2
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                      Richard H. Ebright

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                      7) In 2019 a novel SARS-like coronavirus having a spike with high binding affinity for human cells, and having an FCS at the spike S1-S2 border--a virus having the properties set forth in the 2018 WIV NIH and DARPA grant proposals--emerges on the doorstep of WIV.
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      8) SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 100 known SARS-like coronaviruses that contains an FCS. This is a feature that does not rule out a natural origin, but that is more easily explained by a lab origin. Especially since insertion of FCS had been explicitly proposed in 2018.
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                      9) The FCS of SARS-CoV-2 has codon usage unusual for bat SARS-related coronaviruses and has an 8-of-8 amino-acid-sequence identity to the FCS of human ENaCa. These are features that do not rule out a natural origin, but that are more--much more--easily explained by a lab origin.
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                      Richard H. Ebright

                      @R_H_Ebright
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                      Sep 5
                      10) In 2020-present, WIV and its funders/collaborators at EcoHealth Alliance have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation...even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could clear their name though cooperation with investigation.


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                      Justin B. Kinney
                      @jbkinney
                      ·
                      Sep 5
                      Good summary of the publicly available evidence for SARS-CoV-2 having a lab leak origin, as opposed to a natural zoonotic origin. This evidence is not dispositive, but were the lab leak hypothesis incorrect, it would represent a staggering set of coincidences.
                      Quote Tweet

                      Richard H. Ebright
                      @R_H_Ebright
                      · Sep 5
                      COVID: summary of lab-origin hypothesis: 1) Pandemic caused by a bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan--a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses, but that contains labs conducting world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses.
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                      Justin B. Kinney
                      @jbkinney
                      ·
                      Sep 5
                      I for one find this evidence much more compelling than the evidence recently published by Worobey et al. and Pekar et al. in Science.
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                      82Justin B. Kinney Retweeted

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                      • The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic
                        Published:September 14, 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01585-9
                        ....

                        The second possible pathway is a research-related or laboratory-associated release of the pathogen. Such a pathway could have involved a researcher becoming infected in the field or in the laboratory with a natural virus, or becoming infected in the laboratory with a genetically manipulated virus. Advances in biotechnology in the past two decades have made it possible to create new and highly dangerous pathogens through genetic manipulation—for example, creating chimeric viruses by combining the genetic material of more than one viral pathogen, or mutant viruses through the deliberate insertion of a furin cleavage site. The bioengineering of SARS-CoV-like viruses for the study and testing of potential drugs and vaccines advanced substantially after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in the 2000s.52
                        , 64
                        Laboratory experiments included the creation of novel viruses (eg, so-called consensus viruses that average the genetic code across a set of natural viruses), the mutation of viruses (such as through the insertion of a furin cleavage site), the creation of chimeric viruses, and the serial passaging of viruses through cell cultures to test their transmissibility, virulence, immunogenicity, and host tropism. Research that can increase the transmissibility and virulence of pathogens is called gain-of-function research of concern, although which specific experiments should fall into this category is contested by scientists. As laboratory technologies have rapidly advanced, many scientists have warned of the increasing risks of undersupervised and under-regulated genetic manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses and other potential pandemic pathogens.65
                        There is currently no system for the global monitoring and regulation of gain-of-function research of concern.

                        As of the time of publication of this report, all three research-associated hypotheses are still plausible: infection in the field, infection with a natural virus in the laboratory, and infection with a manipulated virus in the laboratory. No independent, transparent, and science-based investigation has been carried out regarding the bioengineering of SARS-like viruses that was underway before the outbreak of COVID-19. The laboratory notebooks, databases, email records, and samples of institutions involved in such research have not been made available to independent researchers. Independent researchers have not yet investigated the US laboratories engaged in the laboratory manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses, nor have they investigated the details of the laboratory research that had been underway in Wuhan.47
                        Moreover, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resisted disclosing details of the research on SARS-CoV-related viruses that it had been supporting,66
                        providing extensively redacted information only as required by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.67


                        In brief, there are many potential proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2, but there is still a shortfall of independent, scientific, and collaborative work on the issue. The search for the origins of the virus requires unbiased, independent, transparent, and rigorous work by international teams in the fields of virology, epidemiology, bioinformatics, and other related fields, and supported by all governments....
                        ______________________________

                        Hat tip RT.
                        _____________________________________________

                        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


                        • WHO responds to The Lancet COVID-19 Commission

                          15 September 2022

                          WHO welcomes the overarching recommendations of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s report on “Lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic,” which align with our commitment to stronger global, regional and national pandemic preparedness, prevention, readiness and response.

                          At the same time, there are several key omissions and misinterpretations in the report, not least regarding the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) and the speed and scope of WHO’s actions. ...

                          WHO’s rapid response

                          The Commission does not, however, convey the full arc of WHO’s immediate, multi-year, life-saving response, detailed below:
                          • On 30 December 2019, WHO received the first alerts of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, and notified the IHR focal point, seeking further information from Chinese health authorities the next day.
                          • On 1 January 2020, WHO activated its Incident Management System to manage daily action. The team, which includes focal points on clinical care, infection prevention and control, diagnostics, logistics, communications and more, met daily throughout 2020, into 2021 and continues to meet this year.
                          • On 5 January 2020, WHO issued a global alert to all Member States through a formal IHR system – the Event Information System – based on our initial risk assessment of the situation in China. This alerted Member States and advised them to take measures to identify cases, care for patients, and prevent infection and onward human-to-human transmission for acute respiratory pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. This was WHO’s first global warning to take concrete measures for an unknown respiratory disease. WHO has consistently driven knowledge-sharing through dedicated briefings for countries, during which the critical experiences of early-affected countries were shared and the elements of WHO’s comprehensive response were outlined.
                          • On 9 January 2020, WHO convened the first of many teleconferences with established global expert networks, to discuss all available information on the cluster reported from China. These networks enabled the real-time exchange of direct knowledge, experience and early study findings, which fed directly into WHO’s early advice and recommendations.
                          • Between 10 and 12 January 2020, WHO published a comprehensive package of technical guidance for countries. This package covered how to test for a high threat respiratory coronavirus, treat patients for severe acute respiratory infection, inform the public to prevent infection and human- to-human transmission, and to prepare health systems to deal with more cases.
                          • On 13 January 2020, WHO published the first protocol to develop PCR tests to identify cases based on the release of the full genome sequence two days earlier. By 2 February 2020, WHO began shipping validated PCR assays to countries around the world.
                          • On 22 and 23 January 2020, when there were nine cases and no deaths reported outside China, the Director-General convened the Emergency Committee (EC) under the IHR to meet, and advise whether the event constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). The Committee advised that it did not. The Director-General saidpublicly: “Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one”.
                          • From 27 to 28 January, following the EC, the Director-General and senior staff travelled to China to meet with top government officials, gather information about the outbreak and seek cooperation.
                          • On 30 January 2020, when there were 98 reported cases (and no deaths) in 18 countries outside China, the Director-General reconvened the Emergency Committee. It advised that the outbreak constituted a PHEIC. The DG took their advice and declared a PHEIC, issuing temporary recommendations for how countries could further prepare and respond.
                          • On 4 February 2020, WHO’s Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP) was published. It outlined comprehensive measures all countries needed to take to suppress transmission and save lives, using a package of interventions including early identification and isolation and care of cases, contact tracing and supported quarantine, use of medical masks, distancing, ventilation, infection prevention and control in health facilities, taking a risk-based approach to small and large gatherings, and for travel.
                          • Following regular media briefings held in January, daily briefings began on 5 February 2020. Media briefings continue on a weekly basis, alongside regular live social media conversations with senior WHO experts, demonstrating the priority placed on communicating with leaders and the public.
                          • From 11 to 12 February 2020, WHO led a Global Research and Innovation Forum on the new virus, convening nearly 900 experts and funders from more than 40 countries, to take stock of what was known about the novel coronavirus and to set the agenda going forward. A follow-up achievement was WHO’s Solidarity trial, which became one of the largest clinical trials for COVID-19 therapeutics, involving more than 30 countries, over 14 000 patients and nearly 500 hospitals at its peak. ...
                          https://www.who.int/news/item/15-09-...-19-commission

                          Comment





                          • Ashley Rindsberg
                            @AshleyRindsberg
                            The incredible thing about my story on Harvard, Evergrande, China and Fauci is it's not even the whole story. The key (not in my piece) is that
                            @harvardmed
                            was party to the gain-of-function research called a "prototype" for lab-made SARS-Cov-2: https://twitter.com/AshleyRindsberg/status/1570354711223492608…
                            Quote Tweet

                            Marty Makary MD, MPH
                            @MartyMakary
                            · Sep 16
                            Evergrande, a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, donated $115M to Harvard Med Sch. Days after the donation, Harvard-linked experts (some who had proposed a lab leak origin) suddenly changed their position, condemning the lab leak idea https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fau...nd-the-ccp/…
                            5:37 AM · Sep 18, 2022·Twitter Web App

                            Comment



                            • Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy


                              A Presidential Document by the Executive Office of the President on 09/15/2022

                              ...
                              Simultaneously, we must take concrete steps to reduce biological risks associated with advances in biotechnology. We need to invest in and promote biosafety and biosecurity to ensure that biotechnology is developed and deployed in ways that align with United States principles and values and international best practices, and not in ways that lead to accidental or deliberate harm to people, animals, or the environment. In addition, we must safeguard the United States bioeconomy, as foreign adversaries and strategic competitors alike use legal and illegal means to acquire United States technologies and data, including biological data, and proprietary or precompetitive information, which threatens United States economic competitiveness and national security.
                              ...
                              (h) elevate biological risk management as a cornerstone of the life cycle of biotechnology and biomanufacturing R&D, including by providing for research and investment in applied biosafety and biosecurity innovation;
                              ...

                              b) Each report specified in subsection (a) of this section shall identify high-priority basic research and technology development needs to achieve the overall objectives described in subsection (a) of this section, as well as opportunities for public-private collaboration. Each of these reports shall also include recommendations for actions to enhance biosafety and biosecurity to reduce risk throughout the biotechnology R&D and biomanufacturing lifecycles.
                              ...

                              Sec. 9 . Reducing Risk by Advancing Biosafety and Biosecurity. (a) The United States Government shall launch a Biosafety and Biosecurity Innovation Initiative, which shall seek to reduce biological risks associated with Start Printed Page 56856 advances in biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and the bioeconomy. Through the Biosafety and Biosecurity Innovation Initiative—which shall be established by the Secretary of HHS, in coordination with the heads of other relevant agencies as determined by the Secretary—agencies that fund, conduct, or sponsor life sciences research shall implement the following actions, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law:

                              (i) support, as a priority, investments in applied biosafety research and innovations in biosecurity to reduce biological risk throughout the biotechnology R&D and biomanufacturing lifecycles; and

                              (ii) use Federal investments in biotechnology and biomanufacturing to incentivize and enhance biosafety and biosecurity practices and best practices throughout the United States and international research enterprises.

                              (b) Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of HHS and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with agencies that fund, conduct, or sponsor life sciences research, shall produce a plan for biosafety and biosecurity for the bioeconomy, including recommendations to:

                              (i) enhance applied biosafety research and bolster innovations in biosecurity to reduce risk throughout the biotechnology R&D and biomanufacturing lifecycles; and

                              (ii) use Federal investments in biological sciences, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing to enhance biosafety and biosecurity best practices throughout the bioeconomy R&D enterprise.
                              ...

                              (vii) develop, and work to promote and implement, biosafety and biosecurity best practices, tools, and resources bilaterally and multilaterally to facilitate appropriate oversight for life sciences, dual-use research of concern, and research involving potentially pandemic and other high-consequence pathogens, and to enhance sound risk management of biotechnology- and biomanufacturing-related R&D globally; and

                              (viii) explore how to align international classifications of biomanufactured products, as appropriate, to measure the value of those products to both the United States and global bioeconomies...
                              _____________________________________________

                              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



                              • The Telegraph
                                China ‘began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’

                                Ashley Rindsberg - Yesterday 14:21

                                China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
                                PPE exports to the US fell by around 50 per cent between August and September of 2019, in a significant drop which raised alarm bells at key US government agencies.

                                China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts said.

                                The fall in PPE supplies exiting China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of PPE, raises new questions about the true timeline of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

                                An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.

                                The anomaly was uncovered by former US government officials including Dr Tom McGinn, a Senior Health Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Colonel John Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow with the Food Protection and Defence Institute whose career spans decades in US government and military.

                                The pair were unconvinced that the virus had started at the Wuhan Wet Market in December 2019, after and began looking for an alternative theory.

                                After scouring a Customs and Border Protection database which tracks goods entering the US, they noticed China had started hoarding PPE far earlier than the initial date of the outbreak...
                                _____________________________________________

                                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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