Posted on 07/20/2020 2:58:10 AM PDT by Grandpa Drudge
Wuhan, in short, is a rather unlikely epicentre for a natural zoonotic transfer. In contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both reasonable and obvious.
The fourth virologist interviewed was Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University. Petrovsky first addressed the question of whether the natural zoonosis pathway was viable. He told the Media Centre:
“no natural virus matching to COVID-19 has been found in nature despite an intensive search to find its origins.”
In his statement, Petrovsky goes on to describe the kind of experiment that, in principle, if done in a lab, would obtain the same result as the hypothesised natural zoonotic transfer–rapid adaptation of a bat coronavirus to a human host.
“Take a bat coronavirus that is not infectious to humans, and force its selection by culturing it with cells that express human ACE2 receptor, such cells having been created many years ago to culture SARS coronaviruses and you can force the bat virus to adapt to infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein, which would have the effect of increasing the strength of its binding to human ACE2, and inevitably reducing the strength of its binding to bat ACE2.
Viruses in prolonged culture will also develop other random mutations that do not affect its function. The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”
In other words, Petrovsky believes that current experimental methods could have led to an altered virus that escaped.
(Excerpt) Read more at independentsciencenews.org ...
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/
Wuhan, in short, is a rather unlikely epicentre for a natural zoonotic transfer. In contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both reasonable and obvious.
The fourth virologist interviewed was Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University. Petrovsky first addressed the question of whether the natural zoonosis pathway was viable. He told the Media Centre:
“no natural virus matching to COVID-19 has been found in nature despite an intensive search to find its origins.”
In his statement, Petrovsky goes on to describe the kind of experiment that, in principle, if done in a lab, would obtain the same result as the hypothesised natural zoonotic transfer–rapid adaptation of a bat coronavirus to a human host.
“Take a bat coronavirus that is not infectious to humans, and force its selection by culturing it with cells that express human ACE2 receptor, such cells having been created many years ago to culture SARS coronaviruses and you can force the bat virus to adapt to infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein, which would have the effect of increasing the strength of its binding to human ACE2, and inevitably reducing the strength of its binding to bat ACE2.
Viruses in prolonged culture will also develop other random mutations that do not affect its function. The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”
In other words, Petrovsky believes that current experimental methods could have led to an altered virus that escaped.
The experiment mentioned by Petrovsky represents a class of experiments called passaging. Passaging is the placing of a live virus into an animal or cell culture to which it is not adapted and then, before the virus dies out, transferring it to another animal or cell of the same type. Passaging is often done iteratively. The theory is that the virus will rapidly evolve (since viruses have high mutation rates) and become adapted to the new animal or cell type. Passaging a virus, by allowing it to become adapted to its new situation, creates a new pathogen. The most famous such experiment was conducted in the lab of Dutch researcher Ron Fouchier. Fouchier took an avian influenza virus (H5N1) that did not infect ferrets (or other mammals) and serially passaged it in ferrets. The intention of the experiment was specifically to evolve a PPP. After ten passages the researchers found that the virus had indeed evolved, to not only infect ferrets but to transmit to others in neighbouring cages (Herfst et al., 2012). They had created an airborne ferret virus, a Potential Pandemic Pathogen, and a storm in the international scientific community. The second class of experiments that have frequently been the recipients of criticism are GOF experiments. In GOF research, a novel virus is deliberately created, either by in vitro mutation or by cutting and pasting together two (or more) viruses. The intention of such reconfigurations is to make viruses more infectious by adding new functions such as increased infectivity or pathogenicity. These novel viruses are then experimented on, either in cell cultures or in whole animals. These are the class of experiments banned in the US from 2014 to 2017.
Some researchers have even combined GOF and passaging experiments by using recombinant viruses in passaging experiments (e.g. Sheahan et al., 2008). Such experiments all require recombinant DNA techniques and animal or cell culture experiments. But the very simplest hypothesis of how Sars-CoV-2 might have been caused by research is simply to suppose that a researcher from the WIV or the WCDCP became infected during a collecting expedition and passed their bat virus on to their colleagues or family. The natural virus then evolved, in these early cases, into Sars-CoV-2. For this reason, even collecting trips have their critics. Epidemiologist Richard Ebright called them “the definition of insanity“. Handling animals and samples exposes collectors to multiple pathogens and returning to their labs then brings those pathogens back to densely crowded locations.
Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have been collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et al., 2005). Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al., 2013; Ge et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018). Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013).
In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered live virus. The spike was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed “notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice (Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This rMA15 was “highly virulent and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to “overwhelming viral infection”.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1769406/
In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017). Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s laboratory participated in GOF experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors. The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge from the wild by creating one in the lab. (For a very informative technical summary of WIV research into bat coronaviruses and that of their collaborators we recommend this post, written by biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin).
It also seems that the Shi lab at WIV intended to do more of such research. In 2013 and again in 2017 Zheng-Li Shi (with the assistance of a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance) obtained a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most recent such grant proposed that:
“host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice” (NIH project #5R01Al110964-04). Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence
https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-M2esq3P6QIVBL7ACh3YaADkEAAYASAAEgJgO_D_BwE
https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-AI110964-04
It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both. Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses the WIV was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous publications since Sars-CoV-2 first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds with exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor “at least ten times more tightly” than the original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Letko et al., 2020).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1260
https://jvi.asm.org/content/94/7/e00127-20
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.19.956581v1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0688-y
This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates like snakes, civets and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020). In this preprint these modellers concluded “This indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen”.
Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely plausible that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the human ACE2 receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor. [On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further. Pointing out what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of collected coronaviruses, which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge et al., 2016).]
Here’s one for you. I may have some more:
https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf
Can’t get the title to copy for some reason.
Fauxi funded research grants to Wuhan lab to fund risky virus research that was illegal in the U.S.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-to-wuhan/
-Fauxi in 2017: President Trump Will Be Challenged By a “Surprise Global Disease Outbreak”. What did he know?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3812556/posts
Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag
Source paper has been withdrawn. Hmmm.
The link downloads the PDF, rather than displaying it in a browser.
This appeared clear from day 1.
Thanks for posting this. Good to read actual science.
Great reads. Real science. Thx.
Bump!
WIV = Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen security level).
Posting just so folks know what WIV is.
pong
Bet someone says they can see microscopic little Borg cubes in the virus...
Is there a higher-resolution (”actually readable”) version of the “coronavirus family tree”?
It was a screen shot from a video, best I could grab.
You can probably find it if you google the nomenclature.
The Chinese are probably well along on a new and improved covid 20. Bring out the nukes.
A question I haven’t seen asked:
If Fauci supported and knew of the Wuhan gain of function research (which he did), why wasn’t he advising Trump to pull out all stops and isolate the country early? He had “inside info” on gain-of-function work, the location of the outbreak, and its apparent contagion from the draconian actions taken by the Chinese to isolate Wuhan?
I’d have expected him to put two and two together, at least in private.
Hmmm?
Have been saying it was made in a lab just because it has so many facets. Mother nature is pretty simple which is why we can produce a flu vaccine in record time...EVERY YEAR.
In public, he was telling the public it was no big deal as of late January:
Government health agency official: Coronavirus ‘isn’t something the American public need to worry about’
BY J. EDWARD MORENO - 01/26/20 07:00 AM EST
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/479939-government-health-agency-official-corona-virus-isnt-something-the
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said Sunday the American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China.
“It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” Fauci said during an interview with radio show host John Catsimatidis.
“But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding - like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection.”
In mid-February he was still telling us it was no big deal:
Top disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is ‘minuscule’; skip mask and wash hands
Feb. 17, 2020
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/
Why this guy has any credibility at all is beyond me.
“A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic”
15 July 2020
by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD
Independent Science News
Their second paper is much more speculative, and I do not fully understand it.
However, many of the ISN Comments seem very enthusiastic, so I may need to have someone explain it to me in simpler language.
I have just posted their second paper at Free Republic:
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