Thank you for the hard work you do Alex. I'm just a lay person trying to understand so I follow along. I admire your due diligence and determination to seek truth.
I don't know the "truth" about the origins. Yet, I read all the "sides" and try to make sense of what I can. I settle on this quote, based upon the behavior of key players regarding this topic, "all the lies people tell just to cover, cover up the truth that reveals itself in the end" Something has always struck me about Alex. He isn't lying. Just a hunch.
Hi Alex, Thanks for explaining this in a Substack article. I found it hard to navigate the blizzard of tweets about it at: https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/.
However, searching the file I found only "We will analyze all SARSr-CoV- S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites" and ref 75.
This is not the same as "inserting" a furin cleavage site.
I recall reading that this DEFUSE grant was later funded by the NIH through Dr Fauci, and then reading that it was not. As far as I know, it was not. Can you clarify this?
It is nonetheless significant in that it shows what the EcoHealth Alliance and its subcontractors Ralph Baric et al. at University of North Carolina (UNC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV) might have been working on at that time, to support or at least partially achieve what they were proposing to do.
"In Year 5, we continued with in vivo infection experiments of diverse bat SARSr-CoVs on transgenic mice expressing human ACE2. Mice were infected with 4 strains of SARSr-CoVs with different S protein, including the full-length recombinant virus of SARSr-CoV WIV1 and three chimeric viruses with the backbone of WIV1 and S proteins of SHC014, WIV16 and Rs4231, respectively. Pathogenicity of the 4 SARSr-CoVs was evaluated by recording the survival rate of challenged mice in a 2-week course. All of the 4 SARSr-CoVs caused lethal infection in hACE2 transgenic mice."
This is GoF research, but as Andrew Huff explains in his book, it was not described specifically as "gain of function" research. Somehow, this project was funded by the US government, in violation of the requirements to specifically identify and seek approval for such research. Also, as he points out, the principal investigator organization is required to have a biosafety officer, committee etc. and to take full responsibility for biosafety in all subcontractor operations. Instead, the EcoHealth Alliance had none of this and stated that the WiV took on this role.
All these people and organizations should provide full and truthful records of their work. The fact that they do not leads to us invoking Sherlock Holmes' "dog which didn't bark" reasoning: https://brieflywriting.com/2012/07/25/the-dog-that-didnt-bark-what-we-can-learn-from-sir-arthur-conan-doyle-about-using-the-absence-of-expected-facts/ . It is reasonable to conclude, from the lack of genuine interest and action regarding disclosing all this work, in an effort to understand the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 having emerged from a lab leak of an engineered virus, that both the Chinese and the United States governments have something to hide. So it reasonably be assumed, until any substantial evidence to the contrary emerges, that both governments were jointly responsible for such reckless research.
"claimed that because SARS-CoV-2 is not like any other published virus"
And they cite a 2014 review article to make their point. Of course, in that review most of the cited papers were published prior to 2013, which means they probably submitted them sometime around 2012 and did the work in 2011 or 2012. So KA et al. are basically saying LL is "implausible" in part because SC2 doesn't look like any virus sequence that we could find that people had worked on before 2012. That is some mighty thin gruel.
Very helpful explanation, in a very well-written piece!
You are kinda doing that thing, again, where you neglect to include the other Americans listed on the DARPA DEFUSE proposal. Especially the Americans with coronavirus expertise and labs, like those who have the know how to insert a furin cleavage site. Suppose you have your reasons…we are left to speculate about all the secrets and the secret keepers.
This sort of research was employed, also, to create the vaccines against these viruses, and it has been found out that not only do these vaccines neither prevent infection nor stop transmission, they have dangerous effects on various organ systems - and the immune system. And every lab in the US doing this kind of research - and the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - have a long history of viral pathogens escaping the controlled environment of the lab. And it is well known that people have suffered severe illness and death from these released pathogens, and yet the researchers and their funders exhibit reckless indifference to the easily predictable outcomes of their acts - and that’s the definition of second-degree murder…
And hiding evidence of criminal activity is in itself a crime, and conspiring to do so is yet another crime. It’s time for a grand jury to have a look into this - a real grand jury, convened by a real prosecutor in a court of law, with the power to compel testimony.
Sadly, it's the way the world is going to go. I don't think there is any stopping any of them now. It's that, and of course, it's a new Eldorado. A terrible one, with terrible consequences.
The word ‘and’ appears to be missing after ‘Zhengli’ in this sentence:
“While this bat coronavirus is not technically a SARS coronavirus, it is part of another clade that, like SARS-CoVs, has been extensively studied by Daszak and Zhengli is of interest for anyone looking to recombine furin cleavage sites.”
Thanks for posting this. It's clear and helpful. A couple comments:
- MERS has a 34% human fatality rate over the last decade. Why the hell are they creating chimeric MERS viruses? The cost/benefit ratio of such experiments is astronomical.
- Doesn't the discovery of this unpublished infectious clone put a nail through the heart of the "Proximal Origin" paper? Didn't they argue that sars-cov-2 must be from a natural origin because there were no published viruses that could be used as the backbone? And here we have an unpublished backbone serving as a template for creating chimeric MERS viruses.
In short, WIV still hasn't been shown to insert FCS into CoVs, only Baric did this (hidden behind the "and colleagues" in your article). So this preprint actually adds evidence against a WIV origin.
Except your unreported CoV infectious clone was in fact reported. From the EHA progress report to May 2019 :
“We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China,”
What the authors seem to be saying is they believe the inverse was also happening: ie the MERS RBD was being also put into an HKU4-related coronavirus backbone.
Had either of these resulted in a pandemic we would immediately known these were chimeric viruses because a) the MERS backbone is well known and not from China and b) the HKU sequences had already been claimed and uploaded by the WIV.
Thank you for the hard work you do Alex. I'm just a lay person trying to understand so I follow along. I admire your due diligence and determination to seek truth.
I don't know the "truth" about the origins. Yet, I read all the "sides" and try to make sense of what I can. I settle on this quote, based upon the behavior of key players regarding this topic, "all the lies people tell just to cover, cover up the truth that reveals itself in the end" Something has always struck me about Alex. He isn't lying. Just a hunch.
Hi Alex, Thanks for explaining this in a Substack article. I found it hard to navigate the blizzard of tweets about it at: https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/.
You wrote that the DEFUSE grant proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal from the EcoHealth Alliance (in response to DARPA's PREEMPT request, which DARPA did not fund: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about-gain-of-function-contradict-fauci-testimony-under/) proposed "to insert furin cleavage sites inside bat coronavirus infectious clones at Wuhan".
However, searching the file I found only "We will analyze all SARSr-CoV- S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites" and ref 75.
This is not the same as "inserting" a furin cleavage site.
I recall reading that this DEFUSE grant was later funded by the NIH through Dr Fauci, and then reading that it was not. As far as I know, it was not. Can you clarify this?
It is nonetheless significant in that it shows what the EcoHealth Alliance and its subcontractors Ralph Baric et al. at University of North Carolina (UNC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV) might have been working on at that time, to support or at least partially achieve what they were proposing to do.
The EcoHealth Alliance was already working as the Principal Investigator on bat coronaviruses with UNC and WiV as subcrontractors for years before, including when Andrew Huff worked at the EcoHealth Alliance, under the project "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676 . I have not yet figured out how to navigate all the documents listed there, but one related PDF is https://www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/institutes/foia/20211020-risk-of-bat-emergence.pdf .This includes, on page 15:
"In Year 5, we continued with in vivo infection experiments of diverse bat SARSr-CoVs on transgenic mice expressing human ACE2. Mice were infected with 4 strains of SARSr-CoVs with different S protein, including the full-length recombinant virus of SARSr-CoV WIV1 and three chimeric viruses with the backbone of WIV1 and S proteins of SHC014, WIV16 and Rs4231, respectively. Pathogenicity of the 4 SARSr-CoVs was evaluated by recording the survival rate of challenged mice in a 2-week course. All of the 4 SARSr-CoVs caused lethal infection in hACE2 transgenic mice."
This is GoF research, but as Andrew Huff explains in his book, it was not described specifically as "gain of function" research. Somehow, this project was funded by the US government, in violation of the requirements to specifically identify and seek approval for such research. Also, as he points out, the principal investigator organization is required to have a biosafety officer, committee etc. and to take full responsibility for biosafety in all subcontractor operations. Instead, the EcoHealth Alliance had none of this and stated that the WiV took on this role.
All these people and organizations should provide full and truthful records of their work. The fact that they do not leads to us invoking Sherlock Holmes' "dog which didn't bark" reasoning: https://brieflywriting.com/2012/07/25/the-dog-that-didnt-bark-what-we-can-learn-from-sir-arthur-conan-doyle-about-using-the-absence-of-expected-facts/ . It is reasonable to conclude, from the lack of genuine interest and action regarding disclosing all this work, in an effort to understand the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 having emerged from a lab leak of an engineered virus, that both the Chinese and the United States governments have something to hide. So it reasonably be assumed, until any substantial evidence to the contrary emerges, that both governments were jointly responsible for such reckless research.
"claimed that because SARS-CoV-2 is not like any other published virus"
And they cite a 2014 review article to make their point. Of course, in that review most of the cited papers were published prior to 2013, which means they probably submitted them sometime around 2012 and did the work in 2011 or 2012. So KA et al. are basically saying LL is "implausible" in part because SC2 doesn't look like any virus sequence that we could find that people had worked on before 2012. That is some mighty thin gruel.
Very helpful explanation, in a very well-written piece!
You are kinda doing that thing, again, where you neglect to include the other Americans listed on the DARPA DEFUSE proposal. Especially the Americans with coronavirus expertise and labs, like those who have the know how to insert a furin cleavage site. Suppose you have your reasons…we are left to speculate about all the secrets and the secret keepers.
This sort of research was employed, also, to create the vaccines against these viruses, and it has been found out that not only do these vaccines neither prevent infection nor stop transmission, they have dangerous effects on various organ systems - and the immune system. And every lab in the US doing this kind of research - and the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - have a long history of viral pathogens escaping the controlled environment of the lab. And it is well known that people have suffered severe illness and death from these released pathogens, and yet the researchers and their funders exhibit reckless indifference to the easily predictable outcomes of their acts - and that’s the definition of second-degree murder…
And hiding evidence of criminal activity is in itself a crime, and conspiring to do so is yet another crime. It’s time for a grand jury to have a look into this - a real grand jury, convened by a real prosecutor in a court of law, with the power to compel testimony.
Sadly, it's the way the world is going to go. I don't think there is any stopping any of them now. It's that, and of course, it's a new Eldorado. A terrible one, with terrible consequences.
Question is whether the media will report on any of this. Not holding my breath given their track record.
The word ‘and’ appears to be missing after ‘Zhengli’ in this sentence:
“While this bat coronavirus is not technically a SARS coronavirus, it is part of another clade that, like SARS-CoVs, has been extensively studied by Daszak and Zhengli is of interest for anyone looking to recombine furin cleavage sites.”
Thanks for posting this. It's clear and helpful. A couple comments:
- MERS has a 34% human fatality rate over the last decade. Why the hell are they creating chimeric MERS viruses? The cost/benefit ratio of such experiments is astronomical.
- Doesn't the discovery of this unpublished infectious clone put a nail through the heart of the "Proximal Origin" paper? Didn't they argue that sars-cov-2 must be from a natural origin because there were no published viruses that could be used as the backbone? And here we have an unpublished backbone serving as a template for creating chimeric MERS viruses.
Keep up the good work.
In short, WIV still hasn't been shown to insert FCS into CoVs, only Baric did this (hidden behind the "and colleagues" in your article). So this preprint actually adds evidence against a WIV origin.
Humanity. Civilization.
#ExtinctionRebellion
Except your unreported CoV infectious clone was in fact reported. From the EHA progress report to May 2019 :
“We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China,”
What the authors seem to be saying is they believe the inverse was also happening: ie the MERS RBD was being also put into an HKU4-related coronavirus backbone.
Had either of these resulted in a pandemic we would immediately known these were chimeric viruses because a) the MERS backbone is well known and not from China and b) the HKU sequences had already been claimed and uploaded by the WIV.
Is it known when in 2019 the rice sequences were collected?