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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.... - Ja

 
Source: https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/nih-a...utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=SocialFlow

NIH admits US funded gain-of-function in Wuhan — despite Fauci’s denials
By Emily Crane
October 21, 2021 1:43pm Updated

It’s another Fauci flub.

The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.

In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.

NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak.

“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said...
 
We cover all sides of an issue, including denials:

“I obviously totally disagree with Senator Paul. He's absolutely incorrect. Neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we’ve done,” Dr. Anthony Fauci tells
@GStephanopoulos in response to NIH letter on Wuhan lab. https://abcn.ws/3nmWiBk

-------------------------------------------------------

Thread


See new TweetsConversation


Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
In any event, there's no way for the corporate media to ignore this story now. The NIH letter *admitting* EcoHealth's research, funded by Fauci, made bat coronaviruses more contagious *proves* Fauci's statements to Congress were false. Only question is if Fauci knew it was false.
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
This
@VanityFair
article does a good job on the *highly incriminating* new evidence. Ironically, the FOIA requests of the
@TheIntercept
- intended to clear Fauci - provided the best proof until yesterday (and credit to them, I guess, for not hiding it).
Quote Tweet
cpYWuYI9_normal.jpg

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
· 17h
This article -- examining the new proof that research funded by Dr. Fauci did exactly what he's spent 18 months vehemently denying and calling everyone a liar for suggesting: making bat coronaviruses more contagious -- is absolutely crucial to read: https://vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan…
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
Here's another article that does a great job on this new evidence. There's no proof this research was what caused COVID-19. The key is Fauci's money went to research that made bat coronaviruses more contagious: what he's vehemently denied for 18 months: https://plus.cq.com/shareExternal/doc/news-6371861/oDCKlYdwHIA9lYeMv6QteTg03Es?0…
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
And yes,
@RandPaul
is absolutely owed an apology he'll never get. Unlike the media which wanted to bury the story, and social media that *banned* discussion of it, Paul just wanted answers about the research EcoHealth was doing. We now have those answers:
Quote Tweet
BiDICPwP_normal.jpg

Zaid Jilani
@ZaidJilani
· Oct 23
News media who attacked Rand Paul over Fauci questions owe him an apology. Paul was actually using his time to try and get crucial information, as opposed to the grandstanding members of both parties often use these hearings and briefings for.
Show this thread
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
But this whole debacle yet again proves how fundamentally broken the US media is. For a full year, they declared the lab leak theory so insane that social media companies censored it. The **NYT COVID Reporter** said it was "racist" to investigate it. And now the truth emerges.
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
Here's the key unanswered question: The NIH admits that the research it funded through EcoHealth under Fauci made bat coronaviruses more contagious, but Fauci didn't lie because he didn't know until now. But EcoHealth insists Fauci knew all along because they told him & NIH:

9:58 AM · Oct 24, 2021·Twitter Web App
 
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/nih-funded-research-wuhan-lab-225727049.html

NIH funded research in Wuhan lab, unrelated to pandemic
Aisha Powell
Sun, October 24, 2021, 6:57 PM·4 min read

The NIH revealed that federal funding was used to study bat coronavirus and said the research was not the source of the pandemic

The National Institute of Health (NIH), the government agency that is responsible for biomedical and public health research, has said that it funded virus-enhancing coronavirus research, after denying the claim for months. It should be noted that Covid-19 is a type of coronavirus and the coronavirus that was reportedly altered, is not Covid-19.

In a letter, the NIH stated that non-profit EcoHealth Alliance altered a bat coronavirus in an experiment and the virus became more infectious than the naturally occurring one. They also said that the organization failed to report all the findings relating to the changes of the virus...
 
Again, we publish all denials....


October 20, 2021

Statement on Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Origins


To date, the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has not been identified, despite intensive efforts to do so. This is not unusual — confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is a long and complicated process. It took 14 years for scientists to find a single bat population that contained all the necessary genetic components of SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic. We still do not know the origins of the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a definitive answer, misinformation and disinformation are filling the void, which does more harm than good. NIH wants to set the record straight on NIH-supported research to understand naturally occurring bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through a subaward from NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance. Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.

The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.

Public health and scientific organizations, including NIH, are intensely interested in getting a definitive answer to inform efforts to prevent future events. This effort would benefit from less speculation and more scientific cooperation, especially from China, without which the SARS-CoV-2 origins will be impossible to identify.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, National Institutes of Health

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we...-cov-2-origins
 
Fights over confidentiality pledge and conflicts of interest tore apart COVID-19 origin probe

...

18 OCT 20212:45 PMBYJON COHEN

An effort to probe the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic that was intended to sidestep politics has foundered amid accusations of conflicts of interest and bias. The head of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, an interdisciplinary initiative set up by the prestigious medical journal to improve the world’s response to the pandemic, last month quietly and abruptly dissolved its origin task force after 10 months of work. That news, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was preceded by a dispute over academic freedom, Science has learned, and also reflects the deep and bitter divisions that have been steadily escalating over whether a natural spillover of a virus was the trigger or whether laboratory studies might have played some role.

The commission’s chair, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, says he was concerned that five of the 12 task force members, including the original and current chairs, had potential conflicts of interest because of their direct and indirect ties to a lab in Wuhan, China, at the center of the origin debate. But Gerald Keusch, the current chair, charges that Sachs didn’t trust that the task force members would give the lab-origin hypothesis a fair evaluation and attempted to influence how they conducted their work, including demanding access to confidential interviews with experts on both sides of the debate whom they promised not to identify.
...
Last month, Sachs says, his concerns about conflicts broadened beyond Daszak to other task force members. On 10 September, he learned details of an NIH grant to EcoHealth, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” which was released following Freedom of Information Act requests from The Intercept. Keusch and three other task force members are listed as co-investigators. “None of them reported this involvement with the EcoHealth Alliance grant, though they had been asked to do so,” Sachs says. “In these circumstances, I ended the task force.”
...
https://www.science.org/content/art...cts-interest-tore-apart-covid-19-origin-probe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Opinion: One person who might know what really happened in Wuhan

Opinion by the Editorial Board
Today at 3:33 p.m. EDT
...
Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York, organized a five-year research program funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to study bat coronaviruses and potential spillover risk to people, with significant participation by the WIV and its scientist, Shi Zhengli. The government of China, Ms. Shi and Mr. Daszak all insist the laboratory could not be the source of the pandemic strain. Mr. Daszak has been particularly aggressive in promoting the zoonotic spillover hypothesis and attacking the laboratory leak as a “conspiracy theory.”
...
He was at the center of public debate over virus origins, the only American appointed to the joint World Health Organization-China mission. Why did he not disclose his 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research on bat coronaviruses with the WIV and others, which called for engineering a modification onto spike proteins of chimeric viruses that would make them infect human cells in the way the pandemic strain did? What does he know about the databases of viruses that WIV took offline in 2019 and never brought back? Does he know what research the WIV may have done on its own, during or after their collaboration? What was being done at WIV in the months before the pandemic?

Mr. Daszak must answer these questions...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...on-who-might-know-what-really-happened-wuhan/
 
https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/covering-up-faucis-role-in-covid-leak-devine/
By Miranda Devine
September 8, 2021 10:23pm Updated

...

Fauci’s outfit at the National Institutes of Health gave a total of $14 million to Daszak in various grants. But by far the largest donor to EcoHealth was the Department of Defense, which has given Daszak more than $40 million since 2014, almost all of it through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, for the stated purpose of “combating weapons of mass destruction,” and most of it since 2017.

A former EcoHealth employee says Daszak disclosed some years ago that he had been “approached by the CIA in late 2015.”

The employee believed that the CIA helped steer large chunks of federal funding to EcoHealth’s projects in parts of the world like China where they needed “human intelligence related to biological threats and capabilities. Many of these places are hard to collect good intelligence … Also, [the Department of Defense] was actively always asking for data, models, and analysis.”

If the intelligence community knew about the dangerous research going on at Wuhan and was directing funding to it through Daszak, then it is complicit in a coverup over COVID-19...
 
Proposed changes to the composition of the SAGO committee



October 2021

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.18805.50405/1

Projects: COVID-19 OriginPandemics

Authors:
Colin D Butler
Australian National University
Alina Chan
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Institut Jacques Monod
Gilles Demaneuf
Engineer and Data Scientist
Elisa Harris
Jonathan Russell Latham
The Bioscience Resource Project
Milton Leitenberg
University of Maryland, College Park
Jamie Metzl
Atlantic Council
Steven Quay
Atossa Therapeutics, Inc.
Günter Theißen
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Roland Wiesendanger
University of Hamburg

...

Abstract


Comments on the proposed SAGO committee and proposed changes. Official SAGO notice: https://www.who.int/news-room/articl...(sago)-members


Public Full-text 1

Content uploaded by Gilles Demaneuf
Author content
Content may be subject to copyright.
October 26, 2021

Dear Dr. Tedros,

As scientists and science communicators who have signed one or more of four open
letters on pandemic origins, dated March 4,April 7,April 30, and June 28,2021,
respectively, we support your statements recognizing the limitations of the joint study
mission which performed some initial and partial studies on Covid-19 pandemic origins.
We also strongly approve of your call for access to raw data in China and for a proper
audit of the relevant Wuhan laboratories and sampling trips, which the initial joint
study mission did not have the mandate, access, or required skill set to accomplish. Only
such an approach - which goes beyond the standard epidemiological tracing more apt to
a purely natural origin - will allow for the most credible scientific investigation into all
plausible hypotheses.

For these reasons, we welcome the establishment of the new WHO Scientific Advisory
Group on Pandemic Origins (SAGO) as a positive step forward. If designed properly,
SAGO has the significant potential to make present and future investigations far more
transparent, effective, accountable, and legitimate.

The full potential of this effort will only be realized, however, if SAGO has the mandate,
the access, and, above all, the necessary team to realize its ambitions. For this reason,
we are concerned that the proposed list of 26 nominees to SAGO, announced on 13
October, lacks the diversity of skills and the scientific impartiality necessary for its
mission.

Specifically, we note that there are far too few nominees with backgrounds in biosafety,
biosecurity, or forensics (we counted only two out of 26) -- skills that are critical for
realizing SAGO’s mission. At best this imbalance will strongly hamper SAGO’s ability to
accomplish its task. At worst this will fundamentally harm SAGO’s credibility, and the
credibility of the WHO by extension. To function optimally, SAGO will require a team
able to fairly and credibly examine all pandemic origin hypotheses, both now and in the
future.

The group also includes a number of people who are on public record dismissing a
possible research-related origin of the current pandemic in often extreme terms and
using language indicating a lack of openness to all credible hypotheses. Some nominees
also seem to have conflicts of interests which have the potential to sap the credibility of
SAGO. By conflict of interest, we mean here individuals whose funding and research
activities could be significantly curtailed if the origin of the Covid-19 outbreak was found
to be research-related.
...


https://www.researchgate.net/public...nges_to_the_composition_of_the_SAGO_committee
 
Re-opening – additional call for experts to join the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO)

1 November 2021
Call for experts

Issued on: 1 November 2021

Re-opening call for applications from 1 to 3 November 2021

WHO is re-opening the call for applications for three additional days to encourage additional applications from the fields of social science/anthropology/ethics/political science and biosafety/biosecurity.

The call will open from 1-3 November 2021, closing at 24:00CET 3 November. Applications require a Curriculum Vitae, a cover letter, and signed DOI form.

Please note applicants who have already submitted an expression of interest for the SAGO do not need to re-apply; this re-opening of applications is intended for newexpressions of interest only.



Background


The rapid emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the importance of being prepared for any future event, to be able to identify novel pathogens early and to address the risk factors that contribute to their emergence and spread. In May 2020, the World Health Assembly, through resolution WHA73.1, requested the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) to continue to work closely with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and countries, as part of the One Health approach, to identify the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the route of introduction to the human population.

There have been an increasing number of high threat pathogens emerging and reemerging in recent years with, for example, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Nipah, avian influenza, the latest being SARS-CoV-2. There is not only need for robust surveillance and early actions for rapid detection and mitigation efforts, but a need for a robust and systematic processes to establish the study around the emergence of these pathogens and routes of transmission from their natural reservoirs to humans.

To this end, the Director-General has established the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins on Novel Pathogens (hereinafter referred to as ‘SAGO”). The SAGO will advise the WHO Secretariat on technical and scientific considerations regarding emerging and re-emerging pathogens, and will be composed of experts acting in a personal capacity. It is established in accordance with the WHO Regulations for Study and Scientific Groups, Collaborating Institutions and Other Mechanisms of Collaboration.

Functions of the SAGO


In its capacity as an advisory body to WHO, the SAGO will have the following functions:
  1. To advise WHO on the development of a WHO global framework to define and guide studies into the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential;
  2. To advise WHO on prioritizing studies and field investigations into the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential, in accordance with the WHO global framework described in point (1) above;
  3. To provide information and views to assist the WHO Secretariat in the development of a detailed work plan of the SAGO;
  4. In the context of SARS-CoV-2 origins:
    • To provide the WHO Secretariat with an independent evaluation of all available scientific and technical findings from global studies on the origins of SARS-CoV-2;
    • To advise the WHO Secretariat regarding developing, monitoring and supporting the next series of studies into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, including rapid advice on WHO's operational plans to implement the next series of global studies into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, as outlined in the Joint WHO-China Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2:China Part report published on 30 March 2021 and advise on additional studies as needed; and
  5. To provide additional advice and support to WHO, as requested by the WHO SAGO Secretariat, which may include participation in future WHO-international missions to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 or for other emerging pathogens.
...


https://www.who.int/news-room/artic...roup-for-the-origins-of-novel-pathogens-(sago)
 
https://usrtk.org/biohazards-blog/why-we-are-suing-the-nih-for-covid-19-information/
Why we are suing the NIH for Covid-19 information
Posted on November 8, 2021 by Gary Ruskin

A year ago, a fearful world was struggling to emerge from a paralyzing pandemic, a confusing health care crisis that emerged swiftly to sicken and kill millions.
Today, nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still struggling to find our way back from the catastrophic global consequences of the vicious coronavirus. And we are still without answers as to how and why this virus emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Scientists around the world have been seeking answers about the origin of Covid-19 because knowing how this virus moved into and through the human population could be crucial to avoiding, or preparing for, a similar event in the future.
That is why our nonprofit research group U.S. Right to Know has filed seventeen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking this taxpayer-funded government agency to provide us – and the public – with correspondence, reports, and other information about the NIH knowledge of, and response to, the pandemic.
As a public interest group, our mission is focused on a fundamental tenet: Our government officials work for us, and we have a right to know what that work entails. That belief is not just sentiment; it is backed by public records laws across the country, and decades of court rulings that codify our right to know. We had hoped that the NIH would agree that there is a pressing public desire for transparency regarding Covid-19.
But after waiting and attempting to work with the NIH for more than a year, today we filed a lawsuit against the agency for violating the Freedom of Information Act regarding nine of our record requests. As an example, the NIH has not yet provided even a single record in response to a request we filed on Nov. 5, 2020, nor has the agency even provided a timeline for when it might provide documents. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, seeks a wide range of NIH records, including the following:
  • Communications between the NIH and a U.S. group called the EcoHealth Alliance, which has received tens of millions of dollars in U.S. government funding, and has partnered with and funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The record requests seek EcoHealth grant applications, progress reports, funding agreements, and related documents.
  • Communications between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • Documents regarding NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
  • Documents regarding the “Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) Program,” which is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
  • Communications between the NIH and the World Health Organization concerning the origins of COVID-19.
This is our second FOIA lawsuit against the NIH regarding the origins of Covid-19. In our first FOIA suit against NIH, the NIH proposed to provide the documents it was required to provide by law in a thirty-year timeframe. Even though we filed that FOIA request on July 10, 2020, the NIH has yet to provide us with a single document it has not previously released.
We’ve been told for almost two years now to ‘follow the science,’ to look to our government institutions for the facts about Covid-19, including how this novel coronavirus came to be. We’re trying to get to those facts and to bring them to light. Why the NIH is fighting us on this is not clear.
We know this much: It shouldn’t take lawsuits to get to the truth.
(Gary Ruskin is executive director of US Right to Know.)
Creative Commons License >
Biohazards, Biohazards Blog
 
09.11.2021 09:00 AM

A Flawed, Strange Covid-19 Origin Theory Is Gaining Traction

A spate of studies claim that the disease was circulating in Italy long before the pandemic—but they struggle to support the theory.
...
Rambaut says these findings “are being used by various parties to support a particular set of narratives.” In particular, they have been covered frequently by Chinese state media, spinning the studies to suggest that China was not the country of origin for the virus. “Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected, but it was not where it originated,” said Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at an academic conference in November 2020.

China is keen to shift the blame. “China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” Andrew Small, a senior fellow specializing in Chinese foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund told The Guardian. He referred to the reporting of potential other places of origin for the virus as a “propaganda campaign.” In a press briefing, Liang Wannian, team leader of the Chinese side of the WHO team tracing the origins of the pandemic, said the next phase of the enquiry should be conducted in other parts of the world where transmission of the virus had been identified as happening before it was detected in Wuhan. It bears a resemblance to another narrative earlier pushed by Chinese authorities, that the virus might have been brought to China on packaged frozen food.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic originated in China, almost certainly in Wuhan,” says Jesse Bloom, a viral evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. “Attempts by Chinese state media to argue that the pandemic might have originated elsewhere in the world are clearly scientific misinformation.”
...
https://www.wired.com/story/flawed-covid-19-origin-theory-italy/
 
Kathy said:
Thank you, Emily for the link.

It is a very cleaver strategy to define conspirator a researcher who consider legitimate an artificial origin for SARS-CoV-2. They make researchers feeling guilty in investigating this aspect.

SARS-CoV-2 combines SARS and MERS in the way to attack human cells. This is because of the inserted furin cleavage site, which is not present in this group of beta-coronaviruses. This insertion is much more likely to happen in a lab than in nature. The area around is totally conserved. It is a clean insertion.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2...showall%3Dtrue

Eco-Health Alliance has as goal to produce drugs and vaccine for future pandemics with the use of gain of function studies.

https://projectreporter.nih.gov/proj...&cs=ASC&pball=

The budget for these studies is enormous.

https://twitter.com/WhoWuhan/status/1262830529310625792

Given that virologists like Duehr, admit a possible artificial origin of the virus (see in his Tweets and replies)

https://twitter.com/viralphenomics

I do not understand how some many virologists could sign this letter to Lancet, where they claim that it is not possible. Daszak is one of them.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/sho...2820%2930418-9

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
Click to expand...

Here is the Lancet letter pdf downloaded onto FT.

View attachment scientistssupportingchinaletter.pdf
 
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-wuhan-market-lab-leak.html

First Known Covid Case Was Vendor at Wuhan Market, Scientist Claims
A new review of early Covid-19 cases in the journal Science will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over how the pandemic began.
By Carl Zimmer, Benjamin Mueller and Chris Buckley
Nov. 18, 2021, 2:00 p.m. ET

A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it.

The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question.

The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.

Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there...
 
https://nypost.com/2021/06/03/chines...iruses-report/
Chinese military helped create ‘humanized’ mice to test viruses: report
By Bruce Golding
June 3, 2021 6:23pm Updated

Chinese military researchers were part of a project that created mice with “humanized” lungs — apparently to test the infectiousness of various viruses, according to a blockbuster report Thursday.

The bio-engineered rodents were developed using gene-editing technology known as CRISPR and are mentioned in an April 2020 study that US government virologists flagged for National Security Council officials investigating the origin of the coronavirus, Vanity Fair said.

The study’s 23 co-authors include 11 who work for the Chinese army’s medical research institute, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and their project involved determining the mice’s susceptibility to the virus that causes COVID-19.

But when the NSC investigators worked backward to establish a timeline for the study, they realized that the critters were created sometime during summer 2019 — before the coronavirus pandemic exploded, according to Vanity Fair....


https://www.the-sun.com/news/3681845...stronger-leak/
SUPER VIRUS China lab created coronavirus ‘10,000-times stronger than usual’ as fears rage over Wuhan ‘leak’, scientists warn
  • 11:51 ET, Sep 17 2021
  • Updated: 12:14 ET, Sep 20 2021
A WUHAN lab-created coronavirus strains that were up to 10,000-times stronger than usual — amid fears a virus could have escaped when a technician was bitten by a mouse.

Bombshell documents have emerged which reveal how Chinese research funded by a US government agency involved souping up the virus and then transmitting it to "humanised mice".
The documents — released by US Right to Know — show grant applications between 2017 and 2019 by US nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance which were lodged with White House advisor Dr Fauci Anthony's National Institute of Health (NIH).

The research was carried out in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and studied coronavirus found in bats that had been captured in a former copper mine in Mojiang, some 1,118 miles away from the lab.

Richard Ebright, biosafety expert, and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University told The Sun Online the papers show this involved dangerous experiments that may lead to one of the bugs escaping the lab.

The research appears to involve making bat coronaviruses more virulent — potentially having viral loads up to 10,000 times higher than normal.

Mice, which had been "humanised" by splicing them with human tissue, were then infected with the altered virus.

But worryingly, some of the coronaviruses were manipulated to make them extremely hazardous, Dr Ebright warned.
...
Clearly, a lab leak is the by far most likely explanation for the current pandemic which is further supported by these new documents
Dr Roland Wiesendanger,University of Hamburg...


One more for the road? There is a HUGE reservoir of rodents in intimate contact with humans in laboratories around the world. - E.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.co...hed-in-rodents

‘You Dirty Rat’: Experts Posit That Omicron Hatched in Rodents

December 3, 2021
Frank Diamond

...
Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, tells STAT that “I know that most people think that these [come from] immunocompromised individuals, and I do think that that’s plausible, but to be perfectly honest, I actually think this reverse zoonosis followed by new zoonosis seems more likely to me given just the available evidence of the really deep branch, and then the mutations themselves, because some of them are quite unusual…. I don’t think we should dismiss that possibility, because I think it’s definitely on the table.”
...
STAT talks to Robert Garry, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School, who says that 7 SARS-CoV-2 mutations allow it infect mice and rats, and all 7 can be found in Omicron.

Angela Rasmussen, PhD, a coronavirus virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, tells STAT that “I think it’s pretty obvious to everybody … that this virus has been on an independent evolutionary track for quite some time and it’s very surprising, which to me just kind of goes back to say well, the idea that this could be … plausible,” she said....
 
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