Wuhan Lab did not use live viruses, Booby. You have been told this before.

A top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. non-profit that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about the work it was doing.

In the letter to Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), Lawrence A. Tabak of the NIH cites a “limited experiment” that was conducted to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” The laboratory mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than those infected with the unmodified bat virus.

So, when Wuhan researchers successfully bound a natural bat coronavirus to a human AC2 receptor in mice, they were supposed to inform the NIH, but they didn’t.

More here- https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nih-admits-to-funding-gain-of-function-resea...

SadKangaroo wrote on Apr 27^th, 2022 at 9:41pm:



How much more evidence do you want?

https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/nih-admits-us-funded-gain-of-function-in-wuhan-des...




By Emily Crane
October 21, 2021

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=410,quality=100/system/preview_cards/i...


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.”

A team in China including researchers at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now sequenced genetic material recovered from those positive samples, and released the results in a preprint posted on 25 February1. The scientists confirm that the samples contain SARS-CoV-2 sequences almost identical to those that have been circulating in humans. Furthermore, they show that the two original virus lineages circulating at the start of the pandemic, called A and B, were both present at the market.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and a former director of the China branch of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They’ve confirmed that the Huanan market was indeed a very important spreading location.”

In one2, the team zeroed in on the southwestern section of the Huanan market, where live animals were sold as recently as 2019, as being the potential epicentre of the outbreak. The researchers arrived at this conclusion by compiling information on the first known COVID-19 cases in China, as reported by various sources, including the WHO investigation, newspaper articles, and audio and video recordings of doctors and patients in Wuhan. This geospatial analysis found that 156 cases that occurred in December 2019 clustered tightly around the market, with cases gradually becoming more dispersed across Wuhan during January and February 2020.

The authors also examined the locations of the positive samples collected in the market, as reported in the WHO study, and fleshed out information about the potential surroundings of these spots by collecting business registration information, photographs of the market before it closed and scientific reports that have emerged since the WHO’s investigation. For example, one paper published last year5 documented some 47,000 animals — including 31 protected species — sold in Wuhan markets between 2017 and 2019.

One major finding reported by Andersen and colleagues is the mapping of five positive samples from the market to a single stall that sold live animals, and, more specifically, to a metal cage, to carts used to move animals and to a machine used to remove birds’ feathers2. One of the report’s co-authors, virologist Eddie Holmes at the University of Sydney in Australia, had been to this stall in 2014 and snapped photographs — included in this study — of a live raccoon dog in a metal cage, stacked above crates of poultry, with the whole assembly sitting on top of sewer drains. Notably, in the study by researchers at the China CDC, sewage at the market tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

In a second report3, Andersen and his colleagues concluded that, genetically, lineage A and lineage B of SARS-CoV-2 are too different from one another for one to have evolved into the other quickly in humans. Therefore, they suggest that the coronavirus must have evolved in non-human animals and that the two lineages spread to humans separately. For a few reasons, including the fact that lineage B was much more prevalent in January 2020, the authors suggest that it spilled over into humans before lineage A. Other outbreaks of coronaviruses, such as the SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) epidemics, also resulted from repeated introductions from wildlife, the paper notes.

Taking all of the new data together, and adding a degree of speculation, Andersen suggests that raccoon dogs could have been infected on a farm that then sold the animals at the markets in Wuhan in November or December 2019, and that the virus might have jumped to people handling them or to buyers. On at least two occasions, those infections could have spread from an index case to other people, he says.

Over the past year, Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a co-author on the papers with Andersen2,3, says that his thinking on the origins of COVID-19 has shifted. In May 2021, he led a letter published in Science6 in which he and others pressed the scientific community to keep an open mind about whether the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory, a controversial hypothesis suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was either created in a lab or was accidentally or intentionally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “You want to take this kind of thing seriously,” he explains.


After the WHO report: what’s next in the search for COVID’s origins

But since then, other evidence has come to light that supports a zoonotic origin story similar to that of HIV, Zika virus, Ebola virus and multiple influenza viruses, he says. “When you look at all of the evidence, it is clear that this started at the market.” Separate lines of analysis point to it, he says, and it’s extremely improbable that two distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 could have been derived from a laboratory and then coincidentally ended up at the market.