October 21, 2021

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.

The revelation vindicates Republican senator Rand Paul, who got into heated exchanges with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci during his May and July testimonials before Congress over the gain-of-function question. At the second hearing, Paul accused Fauci of misleading Congress by denying that the U.S. had funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Gain-of-function research involves extracting viruses from animals and artificially engineering them in a laboratory to make them more transmissible or deadly to humans.

In keeping with Fauci’s refusal to use “gain-of-function,” Tabak avoids the term, though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely.

A previously unpublished EcoHealth grant proposal filed with NIAID, obtained by The Intercept, had already exposed that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research designed to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.

Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, had previously rebutted Fauci’s claim that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]” as “demonstrably false.”

Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research, which deals with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” or those pathogens “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”




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

issuevoter wrote on Dec 18^th, 2021 at 5:16pm:

Sorry from China ? In your dreams mate.
However, we still trade with the bastards ignoring the ongoing dangers posed by their trade in ‘warm meat’ sourced from wild animals. There’s no need to prove or disprove virus potency was engineered in a Gov’t lab. On the other hand the practice of eating wild meat and, in the case of monkeys and Ebola in Africa, having sex with monkeys tells us it’s not only the Chinese who indulge in suicidal practices.
Our species reaps what it sows.

Conclusion

The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been, and continues to be, a public health catastrophe—the most serious in a century. Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are, at once, matters of legal, financial, and moral concern. For the moment, researchers can do no better than to hope for an inference to the best explanation; and, for the moment, the best explanation seems to be that the virus escaped from the WIV.

The WIV was the biggest transporter of viruses to Wuhan from all over Asia, including many SARS-like viruses from Laos and Yunnan. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was perfectly localized in Wuhan, as all strains that have been found in other locations are descendants of the Wuhan strain. Had the virus been circulating undetected in other parts of China, virologists would have eventually noted those pre-Wuhan strains and their descendants in the phylogenetic tree. Even after sequencing over six million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, no evidence has been found of pre-Wuhan SARS-CoV-2.

Not only was the WIV the biggest reservoir of SARS-like viruses in Wuhan, if not the world, its scientists were engaged in creating novel SARS-like and MERS-like chimeras and potentially supercharging their transmissibility and pathogenicity. With these circumstances in mind, consider the following facts:


    Shi and Jiang were experts in spike protein cleavage and were working on a pan-coronavirus therapeutic to inhibit post-cleavage fusion of the virus with cell membranes.

    Jiang had previously created a novel furin cleavage site via a 12-nucleotide insertion, though not in a coronavirus.

    In a joint grant proposal the WIV and EcoHealth submitted to DARPA they suggested creating novel human-specific cleavage sites.

Taken together, these points make the 12-nucleotide insertion that has created a novel furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2—so uncharacteristic of SARS-like viruses—look extremely suspicious.

The behavior of the WIV and its scientists also raises any number of troubling questions. The viral strain RaTG13 is a case in point. First collected by the WIV in 2013, RaTG13 was sequenced in 2018, but not disclosed until after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. In their initial disclosure, the WIV failed to mention how or when they came to possess RaTG13, failed to indicate that it was previously called Ra4991, failed to cite their own 2016 paper first mentioning it, and seemed to imply that they only sequenced the sample after the outbreak. This does not seem like the behavior of scientists trying their utmost to establish how a Laotian or Yunnan virus came to cause an outbreak in Wuhan.

None of these points is in itself conclusive, but the circumstantial evidence is more suggestive of a lab leak than an act of nature.

There is an additional reason to take seriously the question at hand. It is prophylactic. Knowing at last that COVID-19 had its origins in the WIV would go some way toward enforcing a worldwide ban on gain-of-function research—research that is almost as useless as it is dangerous.

https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china