Posted on 02/01/2021 8:45:13 PM PST by SeekAndFind
China, the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Institutes of Health have dimissed the theory that the virus causing the global pandemic that has killed more than 2 million people and devastated economies worldwide escaped from the Wuhan, China, lab funded by the United States.
Article by Art Moore originally published at WND.
But there’s no disputing the fact, as Newsweek reported in April 2020, that NIH executive Dr. Anthony Fauci promoted a highly controversial type of research involving the manipulation of viruses to explore their potential for infecting humans. And it’s known that more than 200 scientists pressured the Obama administration in 2014 to temporarily halt U.S. funding for that research because of the risk of a manipulated virus accidentally escaping a lab and igniting a pandemic. Nevertheless, under Fauci’s direction, the dangerous virus engineering resumed in 2017 and continued until April 2020.
Now, documentary evidence makes it a “near certainty” that the coronavirus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where so-called “gain-of-function” research was funded by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to Steve Hilton, who is leading a special investigation for his Fox News show “The Next Revolution.”
Significantly, his investigation found a direct link between a bat coronavirus discovered a decade ago in a mine in Yunnan province and one that had been engineered in the Wuhan lab, 1,000 miles away.
Hilton noted on his show Sunday night that scientists at the Wuhan lab published a paper in February 2020 stating they had recently discovered a virus in Yunnan province that “showed high sequence identity” to COVID-19.
However, Hilton discovered after running the virus’s genome sequence through the NIH’s GenBank database that only one virus was an exact match to COVID-19. It wasn’t the virus discovered recently. It was the once discovered a decade ago in Yunnan province that killed miners who had stirred up bat feces.
Hilton found it curious that the Wuhan researchers not only didn’t reveal that fact, they changed the name of the Yunnan virus, as indicated by GenBank.
As evidence that the Yunnan virus was manipulated in the Wuhan lab, Hilton pointed out that the two viruses are the same, except for two key elements: The COVID-19 virus is more infectious and can enter human cells in the respiratory system.
“Those are the exact places in the viral sequence where gain-of-function techniques would be applied, if … you were funded by the NAID to research bat coronaviruses to explore emergences or spillover potential,” he said.
“Spillover potential” refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans.
That exact gain-of-function research, he pointed out, was touted in a Nov. 30, 2017, progress report tied to an NAID grant. The crucial question is, Hilton said, was the virus at the center of that U.S.-funded work the one that was discovered in the mine a decade ago?
“The match between that virus and the work commissioned by NAID is so perfect, it’s impossible to believe they weren’t,” he said.
He noted that workers in the Wuhan lab were the first identified cases of COVID-19 in the fall of 2019.
The WHO and others are leaning on a “natural” explanation for the pandemic, Hilton noted. But if the COVID-19 pandemic originated naturally in the Yunnan mine – as the genome sequence indicates – but had nothing to do with research at the Wuhan lab, you would “have to believe in a laughably implausible set of coincidences.”
The bats in Yunnan province would have had to infect each other and another unknown animal or a human and then travel 1,000 miles – without infecting anyone else – until they got to Wuhan.
Before any mutations, he argued, the virus was 10 to 20 times more infectious than any previously observed virus occuring in nature.
“And most incredibly of all,” he continued, “the infected animal or human would have somehow chosen to make that 1,000-mile trek to the only place in all of China that had been working for years on the virus it was already infected with,” the Wuhan lab.
Significantly, the Chinese regime has blocked access to the Wuhan lab. Last week, NBC News reported a Wuhan Institute of Virology database with 20,000 entries was removed last spring due to “security reasons.”
But Hilton said the U.S. government also has not been forthcoming. After two weeks, the NIH finally responded last Friday to his request for comment on the coronavirus gain-of-function research project that began after the Obama administration’s halt in funding.
The NIH replied that the project did not involve gain-of-function research. But Hilton noted that the project to which NIH referred was not the project he was asking about, which clearly was gain-of-function research.
Calling the response “deceptive,” he wanted to know whether or not the director of NIH, the famed scientist France Collins, was aware of the statement.
The Chinese regime can certainly be blamed for a cover-up allowing the outbreak to become a global pandemic, Hilton said. But the reason the virus exists and is so contagious, he asserted, can be traced back to the decision of Collins and Fauci to go ahead with the gain-of-function research as a “risk worth taking” after the Obama administration stopped the funding.
“Of course Dr. Collins or Dr. Fauci didn’t create the pandemic on purpose. That is obviously ludicrous. They’ve dedicated their careers to fighting disease,” Hilton said.
“But there’s little doubt that one of their weapons of choice in that fight did lead to this pandemic.”
And they were warned that it could happen.
A Newsweek report in April 2020 confirmed that NAID funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. In 2011, Fauci played an important role in promoting the work, arguing the research was worth the risk, because it could enable scientists to prepare treatments and vaccines in advance if a pandemic occurred, Newsweek said.
Fauci and two co-authors defended the work in the Washington Post in December 2011, arguing that “determining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected.”
The work was halted by the Obama administration in 2014 under pressure from scientists but resumed in December 2017 when the NIH lifted the moratorium. Going forward, scientists had to get approval from a panel of experts who would determine whether or not the risks were justified.
The research was conducted in secret until, in early 2019, a reporter for Science magazine discovered the NIH had approved two gain-of-function projects, drawing rebuke from scientists in an editorial in the Washington Post.
“We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all,” wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. “[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process.”
See Hilton’s segment:
In April 2020, a U.S. government report concluded the Wuhan lab was the “most likely” source of COVID-19, finding other explanations “highly unlikely.”
The report noted the activities of Shi Zhengli, a leader in bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab. A 2015 academic report in Nature Medicine by Shi and 14 other scientists said that while researching the potential for bat coronaviruses to infect humans, “we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic (animal-origin) spike protein … that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats.”
The U.S. government analysis, reported by the Washington Times, found virus-carrying animals had been “sold as pets, dead laboratory animals were not properly disposed of, and lab workers were known to boil and eat laboratory-used eggs.”
The report noted that China was clamping down on efforts to investigate whether the virus came from a lab, issuing a “gag order” and putting a military microbiologist in charge of the Wuhan lab.
Mengele would be so jealous.
THE FAUCI VIRUS
+++++
You took the words right out of my mouth. It is simply amazing that this story is not getting traction in the media.
Oops, a mental lapse - It really isn’t surprising at all.
Here is the alleged "smoking gun" paper shown briefly and discussed in the first linked video [video of Steve Hilton's special investigation for his Fox News show “The Next Revolution.”]:
While this may be fodder for conspiracy theorists, it does NOT describe any gain of function experiments. What it DOES describe are the researcher's efforts to catalog and characterize the coronaviruses that are circulating in a population of bats in a specific cave.
They chose these bats because of the similarity of the coronaviruses these bats carry to the SARS that could have become a pandemic back in 2001. (Actually, the authors of the study described it as a pandemic. But it was controlled very quickly and is now gone.)
They mapped the evolutionary relationships of the many strains of coronavirus they found in the cave. They found them all to be very similar, with the exception of one protein, called the "S protein," which was highly variable between different coronavirus strains.
The S proteins differ in a region called the "receptor binding domain" (RBD). Since the researchers thought that the RBD is important for coronaviruses to infect humans, they did some experiments in which they swapped the different S proteins into a strain of SARS that they know can infect humans and tested them. Indeed, two of the S proteins that they tested enabled the "recombined" viruses to enter into cells and replicate. Viruses containing the other S proteins did not infect cells.
Very importantly, nothing in this paper describes "gain of function." The researchers only tested naturally occurring components of naturally occurring viruses to see which ones could cause human disease.
This kind of research is important because there remains a fear that another coronavirus with deadly potential can emerge to cause a pandemic (which is what happened in 2019). The more we understand about the viruses and the factors that enable them to be pandemic capable, the better we can respond when such a virus emerges. Who knows, with more time and more research like this, there could be drugs in the pipeline to target the S protein, which could be used to treat the first affected patients and stop another pandemic capable coronavirus from spreading. Similar concerns about deadly pandemics have driven influenza research for the last century. The more we know, the better we are able to counter the threat.
The bat cave where those researchers collected their samples is a perfect incubator for such a virus--many strains of coronavirus are circulating in that cave, and new strains arise frequently through sharing genetic material and through various mutational mechanisms. In addition, bats are very good incubators of deadly viruses, because they are not affected the way humans are. Their immune systems protect them from viruses that would kill us. For this reason, bats have also given us Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses that don't affect them nearly as severely.
Last, two points: one, that if researchers were clandestinely trying to create a pandemic virus, they would not publish papers that anyone can access in the scientific literature. Such work would be done in secret. Two, that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of creating pandemic organisms and has done so many times throughout history.
Collins is a brilliant scientists and a humble Christian.
Fauci is a phony punk who crushes those he feels inferior to which is just about everyone.
The KEEBLER ELF made cookies, POISONED COOKIES!
Old news to us?
Faux chi was exposed here in FreeRepublic about a year ago.
Obama defunded hyperviralization during his pres.. i was shocked becaus this is dangerous work. Does no one except me remember? Looks like he just outsourced it. For a reason. Shut the darn lab door.. o wait, how can you develop a vax without producing immunity in a population. For the forced vax crowd you need to understand how they are maed. With the exception of our miracle mrna vax.
The connection is there for all to see, soros, gates, fauci Hillary, bill, Obama, bushes.
Finally, the truth about Fauci and his part in the pandemic is slowly starting to creep out. What I don’t understand is how he can justify playing with a dangerous virus. It was completely unnecessary and could only end badly like it has.
Fauci: “I had to create the virus, otherwise we couldn’t herd the entire world into taking the Mark-O-the-Beast”
Supposedly to study how viruses mutate so they can be better able to develop new vaccines and prevent pandemics. But could also be used for nefarious purposes. And if one of these mutated viruses manages to escape the lab ......
How does one man in our government unilaterally make the decision to arm a nation sworn to destroy us with this biological agent? How has the American government gone astray? Purely rhetorical question but fundamental to the Fauci for 40 years story.
In a sane world, Fauci would be tried for treason.
In a sane world, a lot of peeps in DC would be.
“None Dare Call It Treason”
“if researchers were clandestinely trying to create a pandemic virus, they would not publish papers that anyone can access in the scientific literature.”
No, I don’t think that’s quite right.
They would publish papers, but what they would publish would be for the purpose of covering up or diverting attention from the criminal aspects of the research.
It really is not that easy to fool scientists. No one gets accepted into graduate school or has a career in research unless they are extremely intelligent.
Believe me, when someone is conducting the type of research that we call "dual purpose"--research that could have malevolent or benign purpose--we (the scientific community) watch VERY closely.
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