Not only did SARS-2 emerge right next to the WIV (nothing to see here), it showed up highly adept to human-human transmission, as if it took a mysterious pit-stop before making its debut...
Great, great article. I particularly applaud your comments about the quality of the metagenomic sequences that are being discussed. This was very obvious in the Methods sections of the earliest SARS2 papers, which incidentally used only one of the methods for detecting recombination rather than the RDP suite. Another point you don't mention is that there is no reason to believe that viruses have a fixed mutation rate, especially when changing hosts, and so the estimates of 11 years between YN0?? And SARS2 may be quite wrong. Finally, the 'recombination' in 'flu is a shuffling of separate segments of the genome, and is usually called "reassortment". Please keep up the good work. Adrian
Look at how those involved conducted themselves. Surely any rational person could easily see that no honest people would have conducted themselves like that.
Liars, unless they are pathological, don't like for no reason. They lie to cover up something unpleasant!
That critique is exactly what we discuss & rebut in this article here (see "other methods of assembly exist"). This was a common misunderstanding - there are other methods for using IIS enzymes, but those methods were not commonly used on CoVs pre-COVID whereas the method we studied was common as confirmed by our meta-analysis of the literature of infectious clones from 2000-2019.
Thanks to you and your colleagues for your research and to you for your reply.
I re-read the above. With uncertainties about the genetic sequences of particular viral strains, potential conflicts of interest, unknown probabilities of particular research conclusions being due to chance and the intensely polarised nature of this debate, I think it would be a lot of work for even the best qualified people in the field to work through the arguments and counter-arguments for the lab escape hypothesis.
I lack the expertise to do this, but from all I know, lab escape of an engineered virus is by far the most probable explanation, with possibly multiple mutations in the wild as the disease spread before the evolution of the the strains of virus were the earliest so far sequenced.
The best source of such samples would be China, with the government highly unlikely to allow access.
In this Substack article, I suspect that your first two mentions of "WIV1" actually refer to "rWIV1", as described (as linked to from the mention of "WIV1" and implicitly - "was assembled" - in the second) by Zeng . . .Daszak and Shi et al. 2016-06-24 https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.03079-15 . If so, I suggest you make those first two mentions "rWIV1".
Even without evidence and arguments which reliably dismiss every current alternative to your hypothesis and more broadly the lab escape hypothesis, from my vantage point of lacking detailed virology knowledge, it still seems that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this kind of genetic manipulation of viruses was common (I am sure it is very interesting and scientifically fruitful)- and as you mentioned in https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-the-world now much more common precisely because of increased funding and interest due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
I wrote a Substack article citing your two Substack articles and your preprint: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/corrupted-groupthunk-ineptitude-in Your observations prompted me to revise my thinking that the quasi-vaccinocentric, pro-lockdown, anti early treatment, nutritionally clueless mainstream doctors, immunologists, epidemiologists and public health officials were, and still are, the most culpable and dangerous group of professionals on the planet.
I now think it was - and still is - the virologists. If virologists today were thinking straight and genuinely had the health of humanity as the top priority (rather than just mouthing this to get their life-giving - to them and their families - research funding) then they would admitted that SARS-CoV-2 most likely came from an escaped engineered virus, or that if it didn't, it very well could have. Then, they would be united and determined to make sure nothing like this happens again, primarily by setting new standards for virological research in all countries and working with governments to ensure these are reliably enforced.
Instead (as far as I can tell - and this is from quite a distance) mainstream virologists continue to demand, and get, more and more research funding for their prior and new approaches to research and so are doing a lot more of this dangerous genetic engineering than before - precisely because of the COVID-19 global disaster which was (as it is reasonable to assume) _caused_ by virologists!
The public needs to get wise about this, but it is very difficult to amass the required expertise, from outside the field, in order to convincingly argue against the seasoned professionals in the field who are avoiding their responsibilities and duping the public into paying for more potentially disastrous research.
I immediately thought of Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (Disney, 1940: Fantasia), who in attempting to destroy a manically active straw broom he had created by unwisely applying one of his master's spells, instead caused the proliferation of such brooms, all marching and marching, carrying pails of water and flooding the sorcerer's castle basement. I chose a frame from this - perhaps the most extraordinary animation of all time - as the frontispiece of my article.
If only this situation was a game, an animation, a dystopian novel or a nightmare.
It is real, and I think it is reasonable to assume that there will be further lab escapes of viruses which have been engineered to behave differently than any previously in existence, with some being more transmissible and/or virulent.
There's a real chance that one of these will take off and infect millions or billions of people and/or non-human animals. The people, at least, are mostly sitting ducks for viruses since most people's 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are 1/10 to 1/2 of the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L their immune system needs to work properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . (Agricultural animals, including those kept in buildings, often have better 25(OH)D levels than humans, since most of the production of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol is for cattle, pigs and chickens.)
I appreciate your comparison to Fantasia and tend to agree with it but lend a slightly different, more simplistic rationale. Although I lack the professional background to articulate a sensible discussion around the medical details involved, I do have intact critical thinking skills and a predilection away from some of the more accepted/assumed medical paradigms we are groomed to believe without question that allow for my contemplation outside the allopathic box. I am not a science denier, quite the contrary I believe in questioning everything and become suspicious when this is not allowed and censorship prevails. After years of research with no dog in this fight, no desire to feed in to the fear, no buy-in to masks or social distancing and no CV vaccinations/ boosters, and the experience of 100% perfect health for myself and family, I tend to resonate with the “lab escape” theory, only with a twist. I am not sold on the “viral theory” part of any of this. In simple terms: I question if perhaps this is all a chimeric perversion of actual toxicity poisoning followed by the desire for eventual genetic recombination. I lean towards the possibility that the genesis of “CV” or at least the fear stems originally from a method of “insertion/ contamination” by more of a poisoning/toxic measure of exposure. Yes, the lab rats glow in description above, however they did not spontaneously glow because they “caught” the bioluminescence (Luciferase) from a circulating virus or from each other. They glow because something was inserted into them by a human. Sometimes the answers are quite simple and rather obvious. Have we actually analyzed any human to human (airborne) communicability of any of the deadly “CV strains”? Do we really know that the questionable testing procedures we are directed towards using for diagnostic purpose of alleged CV are doing what they say or could they be assessing a multitude of independent symptoms spitting out the desired diagnosis by the testing cycle design to then proceed with a course of treatment that axiomatically channels unsuspecting and rather compliant people into an accepted course of “treatment” that has a less than favorable outcome? At the end of the day I am curious what the answers will reveal. At least this intellectual environment allows for proper discussion, which I appreciate.
I have initiated a conversation on your work at a blog called Peaceful Science. In post no 48 of that conversation, a guy named Nesslig20 analyzed your claim that most Cov infectious clones predating the SARS2 pandemy were produced by the same methodology you’ve described in your preprint. What he claims in his piece is that whenever they are used, the restriction sites of type IIS restriction enzymes (such as BsaI and BsmBI) are never retained in the final assembly in any of these synthetic coronaviruses. If true, I think that may be fatal for your argument. What do you think?
Here is the link to the aforementioned conversation, with the piece by Nesslig20 at 48.
Excellent, Alex! Keep up the great work!
Not only did SARS-2 emerge right next to the WIV (nothing to see here), it showed up highly adept to human-human transmission, as if it took a mysterious pit-stop before making its debut...
Love your work, Alex, and the issue-focused (not person-focused), gracious way you articulate your position. Thank you!
Great, great article. I particularly applaud your comments about the quality of the metagenomic sequences that are being discussed. This was very obvious in the Methods sections of the earliest SARS2 papers, which incidentally used only one of the methods for detecting recombination rather than the RDP suite. Another point you don't mention is that there is no reason to believe that viruses have a fixed mutation rate, especially when changing hosts, and so the estimates of 11 years between YN0?? And SARS2 may be quite wrong. Finally, the 'recombination' in 'flu is a shuffling of separate segments of the genome, and is usually called "reassortment". Please keep up the good work. Adrian
https://drjessesantiano.com/evidences-of-splicing-shows-sars-cov-2-is-man-made/
Your work is covered here by Dr. Santiano - he writes great articles - I'd take that as a nice happening.
Great work man. Loved your response to the hate and love this response too.
God bless.
"By their deeds shall ye know them."
Look at how those involved conducted themselves. Surely any rational person could easily see that no honest people would have conducted themselves like that.
Liars, unless they are pathological, don't like for no reason. They lie to cover up something unpleasant!
Badoom doom ching!
Excellent work, Alex. Keep fighting the good fight. Charlatans can never win a data driven argument.
Hi Alex, Gilbert Thill pointed to message 48 in a thread which discusses your preprint, Bruttel, Washburne and VanDongen: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1. I looked further up this thread, at https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/evidence-of-a-synthetic-origin-of-sars-cov-2/15509/24 . Both these posts, and most of the thread in general, seems like a constructive criitique of your article.
I lack the expertise to reliably evaluate the arguments, but would be interested in reading your response to these critiques.
Dear Robin,
That critique is exactly what we discuss & rebut in this article here (see "other methods of assembly exist"). This was a common misunderstanding - there are other methods for using IIS enzymes, but those methods were not commonly used on CoVs pre-COVID whereas the method we studied was common as confirmed by our meta-analysis of the literature of infectious clones from 2000-2019.
Thanks to you and your colleagues for your research and to you for your reply.
I re-read the above. With uncertainties about the genetic sequences of particular viral strains, potential conflicts of interest, unknown probabilities of particular research conclusions being due to chance and the intensely polarised nature of this debate, I think it would be a lot of work for even the best qualified people in the field to work through the arguments and counter-arguments for the lab escape hypothesis.
I lack the expertise to do this, but from all I know, lab escape of an engineered virus is by far the most probable explanation, with possibly multiple mutations in the wild as the disease spread before the evolution of the the strains of virus were the earliest so far sequenced.
I wonder if earlier stages of the virus could be found in blood samples taken routinely in China and other countries, in which antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 have been discovered. Those go back a few months inot mid to late July 2019: https://vitamindwiki.com/COVID+actually+started+in+second+half+of+2019+-+several+studies
Italy 2019-09: Apolone et al. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755 .
Italy 2019-10-10: Montomole et al. https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/14/1/61 .
Spain 2019-05 (sewerage): Stefano Peti https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/74/7/1313/6356216 .
Northern Italy 2019-09-12: Amendola et al. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122013068 .
The best source of such samples would be China, with the government highly unlikely to allow access.
In this Substack article, I suspect that your first two mentions of "WIV1" actually refer to "rWIV1", as described (as linked to from the mention of "WIV1" and implicitly - "was assembled" - in the second) by Zeng . . .Daszak and Shi et al. 2016-06-24 https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.03079-15 . If so, I suggest you make those first two mentions "rWIV1".
Even without evidence and arguments which reliably dismiss every current alternative to your hypothesis and more broadly the lab escape hypothesis, from my vantage point of lacking detailed virology knowledge, it still seems that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this kind of genetic manipulation of viruses was common (I am sure it is very interesting and scientifically fruitful)- and as you mentioned in https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-the-world now much more common precisely because of increased funding and interest due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
I wrote a Substack article citing your two Substack articles and your preprint: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/corrupted-groupthunk-ineptitude-in Your observations prompted me to revise my thinking that the quasi-vaccinocentric, pro-lockdown, anti early treatment, nutritionally clueless mainstream doctors, immunologists, epidemiologists and public health officials were, and still are, the most culpable and dangerous group of professionals on the planet.
I now think it was - and still is - the virologists. If virologists today were thinking straight and genuinely had the health of humanity as the top priority (rather than just mouthing this to get their life-giving - to them and their families - research funding) then they would admitted that SARS-CoV-2 most likely came from an escaped engineered virus, or that if it didn't, it very well could have. Then, they would be united and determined to make sure nothing like this happens again, primarily by setting new standards for virological research in all countries and working with governments to ensure these are reliably enforced.
Instead (as far as I can tell - and this is from quite a distance) mainstream virologists continue to demand, and get, more and more research funding for their prior and new approaches to research and so are doing a lot more of this dangerous genetic engineering than before - precisely because of the COVID-19 global disaster which was (as it is reasonable to assume) _caused_ by virologists!
The public needs to get wise about this, but it is very difficult to amass the required expertise, from outside the field, in order to convincingly argue against the seasoned professionals in the field who are avoiding their responsibilities and duping the public into paying for more potentially disastrous research.
I immediately thought of Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (Disney, 1940: Fantasia), who in attempting to destroy a manically active straw broom he had created by unwisely applying one of his master's spells, instead caused the proliferation of such brooms, all marching and marching, carrying pails of water and flooding the sorcerer's castle basement. I chose a frame from this - perhaps the most extraordinary animation of all time - as the frontispiece of my article.
If only this situation was a game, an animation, a dystopian novel or a nightmare.
It is real, and I think it is reasonable to assume that there will be further lab escapes of viruses which have been engineered to behave differently than any previously in existence, with some being more transmissible and/or virulent.
There's a real chance that one of these will take off and infect millions or billions of people and/or non-human animals. The people, at least, are mostly sitting ducks for viruses since most people's 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are 1/10 to 1/2 of the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L their immune system needs to work properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . (Agricultural animals, including those kept in buildings, often have better 25(OH)D levels than humans, since most of the production of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol is for cattle, pigs and chickens.)
Hi Alex, thank you for your brilliant work and analysis. I was wondering if this paper by Xuping Xie et al has relevance for your arguments https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/pdf/S1931-3128(20)30231-6.pdf
I appreciate your comparison to Fantasia and tend to agree with it but lend a slightly different, more simplistic rationale. Although I lack the professional background to articulate a sensible discussion around the medical details involved, I do have intact critical thinking skills and a predilection away from some of the more accepted/assumed medical paradigms we are groomed to believe without question that allow for my contemplation outside the allopathic box. I am not a science denier, quite the contrary I believe in questioning everything and become suspicious when this is not allowed and censorship prevails. After years of research with no dog in this fight, no desire to feed in to the fear, no buy-in to masks or social distancing and no CV vaccinations/ boosters, and the experience of 100% perfect health for myself and family, I tend to resonate with the “lab escape” theory, only with a twist. I am not sold on the “viral theory” part of any of this. In simple terms: I question if perhaps this is all a chimeric perversion of actual toxicity poisoning followed by the desire for eventual genetic recombination. I lean towards the possibility that the genesis of “CV” or at least the fear stems originally from a method of “insertion/ contamination” by more of a poisoning/toxic measure of exposure. Yes, the lab rats glow in description above, however they did not spontaneously glow because they “caught” the bioluminescence (Luciferase) from a circulating virus or from each other. They glow because something was inserted into them by a human. Sometimes the answers are quite simple and rather obvious. Have we actually analyzed any human to human (airborne) communicability of any of the deadly “CV strains”? Do we really know that the questionable testing procedures we are directed towards using for diagnostic purpose of alleged CV are doing what they say or could they be assessing a multitude of independent symptoms spitting out the desired diagnosis by the testing cycle design to then proceed with a course of treatment that axiomatically channels unsuspecting and rather compliant people into an accepted course of “treatment” that has a less than favorable outcome? At the end of the day I am curious what the answers will reveal. At least this intellectual environment allows for proper discussion, which I appreciate.
Dear Alex,
I have initiated a conversation on your work at a blog called Peaceful Science. In post no 48 of that conversation, a guy named Nesslig20 analyzed your claim that most Cov infectious clones predating the SARS2 pandemy were produced by the same methodology you’ve described in your preprint. What he claims in his piece is that whenever they are used, the restriction sites of type IIS restriction enzymes (such as BsaI and BsmBI) are never retained in the final assembly in any of these synthetic coronaviruses. If true, I think that may be fatal for your argument. What do you think?
Here is the link to the aforementioned conversation, with the piece by Nesslig20 at 48.
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/evidence-of-a-synthetic-origin-of-sars-cov-2/15509/48
Dear Gilbert,
The methodology Nesslig20 mentions is exactly what we discuss & rebut in this article you're commenting on (see "other methods of assembly exist").