The purported benign aim of this line of research was to investigate the potential of bat coronaviruses to infect humans, to improve scientists’ ability to predict pandemics, and to develop vaccines or other therapies.
However, this is also gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more infective or transmissible. Such research has come under increasing criticism by scientists for many years, due to its tendency to pose huge risks for little benefit.
This fear is borne out by the results of a particularly risky gain-of-function experiment carried out in the US and published in 2015 by scientists from the UNC in collaboration with WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli, dubbed China’s “bat woman” for her work with bat coronaviruses. The work was funded by: * The National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease (NIAID) of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The director of the NIAID is Dr Anthony Fauci, who currently heads up the US COVID-19 response. The NIH’s money was directed through the US-based Eco-Health Alliance, headed by Dr Peter Daszak;
* USAID; and
* Chinese institutions.
In the published paper reporting the risky experiment, the scientists state that they began their work before the 2014 US temporary moratorium on virus gain-of-function studies, which was prompted by several high-profile biosafety failures at US labs. But in spite of the moratorium, as stated in the paper, the NIH gave permission for the study to continue. Dr Fauci of the NIAID “outsourced” the research to the WIV in China, in the words of one media article.
Infectivity is supposed to be determined just by the spike protein. So joining the bat spike protein with the mouse virus backbone should have resulted in a virus that was non-infectious to humans.
But the resulting genetically engineered chimeric virus unexpectedly turned out to be highly infectious to humans. In fact, its infectivity, tested in human airway cells, was comparable to the human epidemic-causing virus strain SARS-CoV Urbani.
(end of excerpt, but there is much more...)
Here is a good web search if you want to do your own research.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=gain-of-function+research+on+bat+coronaviruses&ia=web
And when gain of function research was made illegal here, Fauci and his crowd moved it to Wuhan.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985/
Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Eric F Donaldson & Ralph S Baric
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Kari Debbink & Ralph S Baric
National Center for Toxicological Research, Food and Drug Administration, Jefferson, Arkansas, USA
Sudhakar Agnihothram
Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China
Xing-Yi Ge & Zhengli-Li Shi
Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Scott H Randell
Cystic Fibrosis Center, Marsico Lung Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Scott H Randell
Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology, Zurich, Switzerland
Antonio Lanzavecchia
Department of Cancer Immunology and AIDS, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Wayne A Marasco
Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Wayne A Marasco
From 2016
Bkmk
Hmmm, ya got an over populated hungry country with bunch of issues and their leaders are genetically engineering bat corona viruses and God knows what else for the benefit of all?
Right.
All paid for by Fauci
“However, this is also gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more infective or transmissible. Such research has come under increasing criticism by scientists for many years, due to its tendency to pose huge risks for little benefit.”
Things I call “stupid virology tricks”.
p
Excellent thread,thanks
Something to be revisited, now that they are finally talking “Lab Leak”.