Rand Paul: MSM not asking Fauci the right questions about China lab, virus research

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., slammed the mainstream media on Thursday for not asking NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, the right questions about the funding of virus research in China and the origins of coronavirus.

"If he [Fauci] was being interviewed by a journalist they would have asked, ‘Did the NIH, did your specific division of the NIH, give money to the Wuhan lab?" Paul told "Fox & Friends," reacting to Fauci slamming him on CBS earlier on Thursday following a clash between the two at a Senate hearing two days earlier.

"That’s incontrovertibly true. What he’s arguing is he’s parsing his words."

Paul claimed on Thursday that Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan-based "bat woman" virologist who researched coronavirus variants in animals, wrote a paper that MIT scientists surmised was referencing gain-of-function research (making pathogens deadlier or more easily transmissible).

Paul claimed that the paper acknowledged that their funding came from NIAID, a subset of NIH.

The Kentucky senator alleged that when Zhengli "published her papers, which scientists across the board are saying are gain-of-function, they were juicing up viruses, she gave credit to Dr. Fauci."

"We have this in black and white from a peer-review journal, she said the funding came from Dr. Fauci’s NIAID, this is Dr. Fauci’s baby for 40 years, she lists him in the credits, he can’t escape this," Paul added. "He did the funding."

He went on to note that "China is a rich country and they’re kicking our butt in so many places."

"Why would we be giving them money for their research? Can’t they spend their own money on their own research?" Paul then asked.

First, this is at least one of the articles published in Nature Medicine by Zhengli-Li Shi & Ralph S Baric re: Gain of Function research in 2015.

Note that it has been "corrected" on May 22, 2020 with the following note. "30 March 2020 Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."

Please read it yourself, and consider the "correction"

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

So here is another article published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Strates of America) March 14, 2016

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence

SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) appears to be a man made chimeric virus

From the first paragraph of this article:

“This manuscript describes efforts to extend surveillance beyond sequence analysis, constructing chimeric and full-length zoonotic coronaviruses to evaluate emergence potential. Focusing on SARS-like virus sequences isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats, the results indicate a significant threat posed by WIV1-CoV. Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans.”

And from the results summary in this article:

Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B). WIV1-MA15 incorporates the original binding and entry capabilities of WIV1-CoV, but maintains the backbone changes to mouse-adapted SARS-CoV. Importantly, WIV1-MA15 does not incorporate the Y436H mutation in spike that is required for SARS-MA15 pathogenesis (8). Following electroporation into Vero cells, robust stock titers were recovered from both chimeric WIV1-MA15 and WIV1-CoV.

And the connection to Wuhan Labs in China is highlighted in the Acknowledgments:

We thank Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for access to bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein. Research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the National Institute of Aging of the NIH under Awards U19AI109761 and U19AI107810 (to R.S.B.), AI1085524 (to W.A.M.), and F32AI102561 and K99AG049092 (to V.D.M.). Human airway epithelial cell cultures were supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease under Award NIH DK065988 (to S.H.R.). Support for the generation of the mice expressing human ACE2 was provided by NIH Grants AI076159 and AI079521 (to A.C.S.).

And an interesting side note: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) is managed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, in case you were wondering if he had any connection to this.

My assessment is that the PNAS article indicates strongly that NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, managed br Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, managed by Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi cooperated to create what ultimately became the chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic.

And finally:

Chinese and US scientists genetically engineered bat coronaviruses in dangerous gain-of-function research stretching back years.

https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19410-chinese-and-us-scientists-genetically-engineered-bat-coronaviruses-in-dangerous-gain-of-function-research-stretching-back-years

Excerpt from this article:

Research was omitted from landmark paper claiming natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Report: Claire Robinson.

Chinese and US scientists have been collaborating for years in dangerous gain-of-function experiments that involve genetically engineering coronaviruses from bats and other animals, as revealed by a series of scientific publications.

The coronaviruses are related to the SARS viruses that cause severe respiratory diseases in humans. The scientists were based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, the lab suspected by some of accidentally releasing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in the US.

Oddly, however, this long and high-profile research history was entirely omitted from the scientific paper, published in Nature in February this year, in which Shi Zhengli and her team at the WIV claimed to have identified a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. The origin, according to the WIV scientists, was a bat virus, RaTG13, that was thought to have jumped from an animal to a human at a Wuhan seafood and wildlife market (the “zoonotic” theory – that is, coming from animals by a natural spillover event).

Why the omission? To understand the possible reason, we need to first understand the nature of the research work that was done by the WIV scientists and their US collaborators.

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.

Alarming finding

In the experiment, the scientists took a mouse coronavirus and exchanged its spike protein – the part on the surface of the virus that determines infectivity – for one from a bat coronavirus that was similar to the virus that causes the human epidemic disease SARS. They kept the mouse virus “backbone” – its basic RNA and protein molecular structure. The bat coronavirus, in its natural state, was unable to infect humans as its spike protein was inadequate – it was not able to dock onto the ACE2 receptor on human cells.

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...)

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