#1: A 'consensus' sequence of SARS like events
Leading up to patient 0 in Wuhan
Disclaimer: this is obviously a Wuhan lab leak hypothetical based on an accident, not an accusation. This is a series of post not so much to discuss ‘lab’ leak but ‘what’ leaked.
This is written to answer the 2 biggest questions:
Why did the WIV publish RaTG13 on January 24, 2020, starting engineering rumors by US virologists, leading to a February 1st teleconference creating a natural origin paper, later referenced in a major press conference?
Why only North American (lab) animals (not Chinese bats) can become both infected and can ‘efficiently’ transmit SARS2?
Why is she studying coronaviruses?
On an October morning of 2019 Dr Danielle Anderson is eagerly waiting to catch the bus to the new lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). She enjoys the hour-long ride to get away from the main campus and the office bureaucracy of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). It’s been four months of failed test results, but a new FedEx package is waiting for her, and the small number of virologists who worked on this global project would be excited.
Like the viruses they hunt, this is an academic project without borders, without nationalities, nor even a particular species. Ideally, this is the beginning of the end for any zoonotic disease spillover events, which increased recently because molecular diagnostics in the late 1990’s started identifying unknown pathogens, from both foreign travelers and domesticated livestock.
In the winter of 2002, a Chinese wet market was the source of SARS killing hundreds while hurting China’s economy and political reputation. The first SARS would spread within 500 miles of Washington D.C., killing dozens with Canadian hospitals suspending non-essential services.
Americans would be introduced to America’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, who raised the potential of bioterrorism in Congress, but reassured the panicked C-SPAN callers that SARS “jumped species from an animal to a human” and there is “no evidence…of genetic engineering.” Fauci explained his NIAID virologists can do “genetic manipulation, to get only segments of the virus that can be used in a vaccine.”
The SARS outbreak ended by the summer of 2003, but Fauci funded a University of North Carolina (UNC) virologist to create the first infectious clone (lab created version) of SARS. This would “provide a template for manipulation of the viral genome, allowing for the rapid and rational development and testing of candidate vaccines and therapeutics against this important human pathogen.”
“Within a few years, this clone could lead to an attenuated virus — a live SARS virus that has been tweaked so it’s no longer deadly. That, in turn, could be used to create an effective (animal) vaccine.”
The 62-year-old "science in a suit" started using and repeating his post 9/11 line “bioterrorism is just another form of emerging and reemerging infection.” In the same 2003 C-SPAN interview, a caller asked him to resign, but nearly two decades later the ”J. Edgar Hoover” of biology became the highest paid bureaucrat, because “his work on biodefense research activities.”
Billions of biodefense research would flow from Congress to NIAID, which started a building spree of biolabs. SARS research money allocated two decades ago would continue into 2019, with $44M from Fauci’s NIAID, now partially funding Danielle’s Wuhan research.
Why is she studying bat viruses?
In the 2000s, Danielle spent time in North America as a technician at Harvard, as an animal research postdoc in Canada, even as an anti-doping scientist for the Winter Olympics. In 2012 Danielle and her US-educated boss Linfa Wang, were recruited into this growing NIAID biodefense network via Duke University. They would both relocate to Duke-Singapore where an animal BSL3 lab was built. That same year, SARS became a select agent, because its potential use as a bioweapon, ironically giving Duke’s rival UNC a monopoly on SARS research.
In 2014, MERS from Middle Eastern camels found its way to the US and China, so Fauci’s Rocky Mountain lab (RML) began development on a camel vaccine for Middle East and Far East camels. Fauci explained that NIAID had developed a human vaccine for almost every outbreak like MERS, but pharmaceutical companies didn’t have a viable market, so the concept was to vaccinate the camels to protect the people.
Around that same time, interest in bat viruses took off and 2017 virologists started the bat genome project. In 2018 bats were big news, and by 2019, with decreasing cost of next generation sequencing (NGS) technology and increased bat cave sampling, virologists rightly or wrongly (even comically) blamed all these global events on bats.
Pork & poultry biosecurity is both US & China national security
China’s meat production once depended on small rural farms, but today, they can cannot meet modern biosecurity standards (bird nets, roofs, boots, etc). Illicit vaccines are thought to have caused accidental pig infections causing rising pork prices. Consumption has also tripled in the past two decades and suffered some serious disease setbacks.
A 2013 coronavirus, 99% similar to a Chinese strain, had evolved around the local pig vaccine and wiped out 10% of US pork production. A 2016-17 SARS-like bat virus was blamed for infecting pork farms in China, where food security was national security. What you thought was a drug-sniffing dog at the international airport was looking for illegal pork.
In early 2019, US virologists traveled to a Chinese veterinary research center. A meeting took place between the two largest pork and poultry producers worldwide on “combating infectious diseases and further enhancing cooperation between China and USA” (i.e. CAS and NAS).
Can we “predict” and intervene to prevent virus transfers? A ‘cleavage site’ has been identified for avian disease emergence in a new species.
Can we use “deliberate design” to create novel animal vaccines? Yes, but there may be “unintended consequences.”
In their meeting, the biggest pork and poultry producers came to a decision: culling is not the answer, “leading to the decision to undertake (mass) vaccination.” The head of China's CDC notes that his scientists are “relative newcomers to this area.”
Western scientists have been carpet-bombing wild intermediary species with delicious vaccine baits for decades. Using planes along the Mexican border and helicopters over mountains, the scientists even dropped chicken heads over Europe. All in a successful effort to rid the Western world of rabies, which originates from bats, but it still kills 50,000 worldwide in remote areas of the developing world. The aerial vaccine delivery method was successful but expensive, and Chinese bats are picky eaters, so baits will not work.
Why is she in Wuhan?
This is still an Asian culture that needs to save ‘face’ and wear masks without mandates. Danielle has been maskless in Wuhan since this brand-new BSL4 opened in 2017. Like Fauci’s NIAID, CAS had a post-SARS biolab building boom, and this is the special one built upon the idea of international collaboration. It serves as a training center between the East and the West, providing another routine morning for the only Westerner in this Eastern lab.
Her colleagues called her ‘Dani’, the 40-year-old “single big girl from Australia with strong eyes.” She is a special guest of CAS and an “unpaid visiting scientist during regular short trips” to the WIV from her Duke lab in Singapore. Her CV proudly declares, “My research aims to identify host factors important for…coronavirus replication” and “I have extensive experience in designing animal experiments with…bats.” She is probably the only Wuhan technician trained to use the BSL4 and qualified for this specialized bat immunology test. Most importantly, Dani is a trusted team member on both sides of the world.
She passes through WIV security with a body temperature check, replacing her cell phone with a headset, and ‘suits up.’ She hooks up her positive pressure suit to an umbilical cord of fresh air and steps into a negative pressure room, full of what truly makes this BSL4 lab special; no monkeys, no bioweapons, no PLA, no RaTG13, no Gain-of-Function, no remdesivir, no humanized mice, just a lot of individualized bat cages.
Dani would ‘spacewalk' past the many colonized bats that grew up in captivity and step into room #3. This special room holds a special group of wild-caught bats from a remote Chinese cave 1000 miles southwest of Wuhan.
She has been trying to get a “better understanding of the asymptomatic infection of bats by viruses highly lethal in other mammals.” She has been applying the same NGS technology used to detect pathogens in humans, but for bats, measuring coronavirus shedding and vaccine efficacy.
What is she doing in the BSL4?
The procedure was simple since most of the R&D work was done over many years. Just take one needle out for a single injection into one of the many wild bats flying around. The room was ‘big enough’ to allow the bats to fly with elevated bat body temperature, but small enough for a controlled experiment. Dani wanted to evaluate if this particular bat virus would spread orally among a few dozen live bats kept inside this simulated bat cave. The first prototypes successfully inoculated this species of bat but didn’t spread as designed to the other bats.
This new animal vaccine approach was cheaper than aerial delivery of baits, but it was unproven and radical.
It “relies on inserting a small piece of the genome of the infectious disease agent into a benign virus that spreads naturally through the animal population. As this transmissible vaccine spreads from animal to animal, it immunizes them against the target infectious disease, vastly increasing immunity within the animal population and reducing the risk of spillover to humans.”
The tiny Chinese bats naturally live in dense forests and deep caves on steep cliffs, so they are ideal for a contagious animal vaccine trial. This type of self-spreading bat vaccine doesn’t require expensive field equipment in remote areas.
The ‘small piece’ was an engineered spike protein that makes a good target for both human and animal vaccines like “a camel or a bat.” For MERS, the spike protein was directly injected into the intermediary species of camels, which are easier to catch than bats. For SARS, the coronavirus spike protein was seamlessly inserted into a regional bat virus. The local bat population will now produce antibodies against this high-risk strain; therefore, it will not spread this high-risk strain into local wet markets or pig farms.
Dani’s experiment is called targeted immune boosting using a synthesized bat virus. The initial concept had worked well in the New World ‘bats’ in the New World labs. Now was another in vivo experiment (Latin for “within the living”) for the Old World bats in this Old World lab.
Is she playing with a virus or a vaccine?
Fauci aptly calls it Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC). Over the past 2 decades, the focus has been on One Health since animals are responsible for 75% of “human infectious threats.” Can we stop the disease there before it spills over to humans? The idea is to “keep it in the bats…and the birds in China.”
Bat vaccine? US Military and even USGS studied bat vaccines.
Follow the money? Economically, animal vaccines have higher margins and promotions before Covid and bat health is a big deal with a lot of jobs.
A waste of money? Of course, but NIAID also funded an Australian horse vaccine for a Hendra bat virus that killed 7 humans. This was tested in a foreign BSL4 by Dani’s boss, Linfa.
Why bats? They are the new lab rats that don’t have lawyers, randomized control trials, licensing, PETA protection, or FDA approvals like us humans, which takes 15-20 years for vaccine approval but 2-5 years for animals.
Targeted immune boosting? Think immunotherapy on a mammalian model (immune stimulation in vivo), which is cutting-edge research with broad applications. “Because bats and humans are both mammals, whatever we discover in bats would be highly applicable to humans.”
Why SARS? For this geographic area of the world, SARS falls under the ‘known unknown’ category, and this ‘consensus’ bat sequence can cause human infection.
Why now? The live bat colony will be put into hibernation at the end of October.
Why here? This infectious aerosol test requires a BSL4 with a live Chinese bat colony, and Wuhan is the only lab on the planet with a live Chinese bat colony.
Why design it to be so contagious? It’s the most economical (‘free’) way to reach millions of bats hiding in deep, narrow caves on steep mountain cliffs (R0>1).
Too sci-fi? A TED talk about self-spreading bat vaccines and TWiV comparing the contagious concept to (accidental) human-to-human transmission with OPV.
In 2019, the NIH funded a study on contagious vaccine transmission.
Vaccine transmission is a relatively new concept with few examples, so the possibility of transmission changing in time has scarcely been entertained. The oral polio vaccine (OPV) is perhaps the best documented case of vaccine transmission.
Does high transmissibility and low virulence sound familiar?
A vaccine that spreads like a virus?
Dani is experimenting with a synthetic Chinese bat virus designed to look natural to the local Chinese bat species. She is a bat immunologist trying to trick the bat’s own immune system to recognize it, accept it, and create antibodies against it. This vaccine is designed to ‘steer’ bat-like viruses away from human-like viruses. This synthetic coronavirus is designed to be stable and mirror the local strain circulating among the local species of bats.
What kind of self-spreading vaccine? An attenuated (weakened) transmissible vaccine. It is the double-edged sword of a live attenuated vaccine (LAV).
What does this prototype vaccinate against? For example, the Laos Banal bat (sample #2 below) collected by the US Military in 2017.
This high-tech vaccine is designed to spread like a virus through the air from one bat lung to the next; bat-to-bat oral transmission via aerosol. This vaccine is designed to infect the next mammalian host through bad bat breath—as soon as possible, in significant quantities. This vaccine is even designed to reinfect its mammalian host (called ‘superinfection’ or ‘boosters’) to overcome any natural immunity.
Why? So that the vaccine can keep spreading and shedding!
This prototype is designed to remain suspended in the bat cave (lab) air for hours. Dani, in her spacesuit, may have noted this newest prototype is a brilliant superspreader in the tiny mammalian bat lungs. This prototype is a success as it inoculates one bat and may have started to spread orally to the other bats through the lab air.
How did a bat vaccine cause Covid-19?
Then something bad happened, which hasn’t been documented, since her experiment was safely contained inside this room, but accidently gets outside. Maybe a needle punctured her hand while trying to handle the tiny wild bat, turning her human lungs into the superspreader. Most labs do not require a two person security rule, but use headsets and surveillance cameras to monitor technicians; other labs require two people while using needles.
A few weeks earlier, in September 2019, the director of the WIV complained of a lack of maintenance funds. Maybe the power failed, losing negative air pressure, the duct tape sealing the door failed, a bat sneezed on her face, bit a hole in her spacesuit, a toilet break, who knows? Dani may not know since this prototype was designed to spread asymptomatically among its mammalian host.
Like any good self-spreading animal vaccine it is designed to evade the animals immune response (e.g. using Nsp1 Orf6 Orf8 etc) since any pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow the vaccine spread. There is a 5–15% probability the escape event was not even detected.
Dani’s shift ended with a chemical and personal shower. She grabbed her cell phone, passed a temperature check, and walked back through WIV security. Most of her colleagues worked on different projects; others caught up on their Weibo accounts. They all climbed back on the crowded Wuhan bus for the 15-mile ride to their downtown living quarters, and probably changed the course of human history.
Days later the BSL4 was in lockdown, weeks later the entire city of Wuhan was locked down, and months later the entire world followed. This contagious bat vaccine, ironically designed to prevent SARS spillover, had spilled over into the human population, from an animal vaccine trial gone sideways.
Biologically impossible? What you think of as a dirty bird is just a long-armed furry mammal, with an immune system closer to humans than lab mice.
Has this happened before?
A Far East lab leak led to the 1977 flu pandemic. A year later, smallpox leaked via an air duct from an adjacent room, killing an English photographer. SARS in 2004 leaked four times, once from a Beijing lab that killed the technician’s mother. That same year, a Russian scientist, receiving US money, died after sticking herself with an Ebola vaccine needle.
Animal vaccines have been documented to cause occasional human infection. In 1978, a cat vaccine was spreading around the world in dogs, due to a lab origin mix-up of feline and canine cells. Just 1000 miles northwest of Wuhan, at the same 2019 timeline, an animal vaccine plant infected thousands of local residents. Most of these hazardous events were localized or using traditional vaccines.
In 1995, a killer rabbit calicivirus escaped a remote Australian island and later spread to New Zealand. In 2001, the first self-spreading vaccine trial on a tiny rabbit island worked, but the technology at the time didn’t spread well. The veterinarian noted “transmissible vaccines had not drawn much interest from pharmaceutical companies because they look unprofitable.”
In 2016, there was renewed interest by Western Universities and Western governments in controversial self-spreading vaccines. For example, there was an interest in a transmissible rabies vaccine for bats. It was speculated that self-spreading vaccines “could mutate” or “may jump species.” This Wuhan lab trial was a vaccination program for SARS-like disease in bats, naturally located in rural Chinese caves, which are, unfortunately, now ravaging urban human populations around the globe.
Bats are social mammals, just like us ground-based humans. We fly off to work daily foraging for food in crowded (dry) markets, catching the virus, and then commuting home to ‘roost’ in our man caves spreading this vaccine.
What on earth led up to this?
In the past, governments culled the infected species, but in recent years, there have been mass protests against mass culling, even winding up on the basketball courts of the NBA. So the logical answer was to vaccinate the bats, the animal reservoir of most global emerging infectious diseases.
This was not a nefarious act on anyone’s part, just a tragic accident. This act was an unintended consequence of 2-3 decades of wildlife vaccines mixed with the modern revolution of synthetic biology and vaccinology. Synthetic viral genomics allowed the “seamless” engineering of a self-spreading vaccine. This No See'm biotechnology was not used to confuse the lab origin debate, but to confuse an animal’s immune system into thinking this virus is natural and local; therefore, more likely to infect the local bat species. Virologists created a Chinese strain for the Chinese bats.
The confusing origins debate had a few prominent US virologists claiming lab origin was possible. “Well, of course, the answers to those questions are in China,” but WIV's “proximity is a problem” to a Wuhan outbreak. On the other hand, international virologists argue that the WIV couldn’t engineer this type of virus. Both groups were right for the wrong reasons; if a virus is engineered, wherever it spills over into the human population does not tell us where it was engineered.
Months earlier, NIAID scientists from the Vaccine Research Center traveled to Wuhan for “open scientific exchange and data sharing between China and the US for the benefit of global health.” The French, who built the BSL4, were fading from view as the WIV signed a Letter of Support in 2013 with NIAID for bat sample collection and sharing. That same year, UTMB became the training center for WIV technicians, and UNC started reverse engineering Chinese pathogens in 2015-16.
For scientific or intelligence purposes? "The United States knows how to do both very well."
To appreciate the international collaboration on this project, understand that “the mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried onto filter paper that scientists routinely send each other.” A virus sample collected in one far away Asian bat cave, can be sent to another far away US lab for in house engineering. A vaccine created on one continent, can be tested on another, from D.C. to Brisbane to Dani’s boss within 48 hours!
MTA’s were signed with the WIV “to ensure the free exchange of reagents needed for research purposes only and fully supported by the NIH.” Asian contractors signed NIAID Letters of Support for “sharing technology, samples, reagents, data, and research results” with all coronavirus samples “shipped to North Carolina for further characterization.” An international division of labor and institutional knowledge allowed for this amazing biotechnology to be created in the first place, one that transcends national borders in the same way the virus now spreads.
This was a direct spillover event from bats into humans inside the WIV. Therefore, no intermediary species (in Wuhan) will be found. To bet on Fauci, he was 100% correct: "If you want to put some money on it, you'd get a bat involved." Fauci, just a few years earlier, wrote, “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?”
It’s a blurry line, but this civilian project was more of an academic science fair experiment than military biodefense. This project involved more dorks than spooks, working for the USDA, not PLA. CAS had Western biologists on the local payroll mapping local bats. NAS had high-level Chinese officials elected as members and they met at least once a year. A century of ties existed between U.S. and Chinese medical universities that reached back to 1835 and 1917. Fauci’s collaboration with China went back “decades,” starting in 1983 to be exact, just one year before Fauci became head of NIAID.
All this was financially supported by the bipartisan funding (SARS is 1st disease on 1st page) of a modern ‘Manhattan Project.’ No one is breaking laws or regulations, just working with them, since a “bat virus” is exempt from DURC. There is one change to one sentence back in 2017: bats, unlike mice, are not considered a “mammalian” model in a Gain of Function ban or regulation. Self spreading vaccines are not even on the regulatory radar.
It’s always the cover-up, never the crime
What started as a SARS animal vaccine is now called SARS-CoV-2. This ‘virus’ is actually a bat vaccine, a contagious vaccine designed for Chinese bats. This vaccine is designed for an animal reservoir that none of us knew about while using biotechnology that none of us heard about. This vaccine is developed by NIAID funded virologists and tested by a blameless NIAID contractor. Dani is herself a world class bat immunologist, inside the BSL4, at the same time a world class airborne bat vaccine came out of it.
“There's an old saying in science: You don't publish your mistakes," but the creation and coverup were no mistakes. We will find the guilty parties straddling this hard-line debate. Anonymous WHO sources will go on record after scientists issue death threats. Clues will be found in the boring bowels of academic research, while others will discover unclassified information in classified folders. Let’s adopt Hanlon's razor while working through this sordid SARS2 story: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In essence, China will cover up the lab leak while US virologists will cover up what leaked. Ironically, the ‘virus’ itself will turn into the biggest whistleblower in human history, self-disseminating around the globe, searching for the return address on the FedEx package opened earlier that October day.
Here is part 2, but in the meantime, Dani and collaborators, can we look at your lab books?
Whataboutism? (inside baseball)
If you accept SARS2 is an animal vaccine, nothing nefarious, a lot more will make sense. It’s designed to be contagious and transmissible for a remote animal reservoir (like bats) via the upper respiratory tract of a mammal, with RBD similar to that of humans.
Based on emails and books, probably less than a dozen virologists directly developed and knew about it, so easy to keep an R&D accident quiet.
US biologists are infatuated with bats (aka sky puppies) testing vaccines
US virologists are infatuated with bats because of their incredible immune system
US biodefense money was infatuated with bats.
NIAID alone budgeted nearly $15M for bats in 2019 since bats are reservoirs for many viruses like SARS, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, and Marburg.
Created by Chinese virologists? More later but biologically impossible. To keep a Chinese bat colony alive in a US lab is biologically impossible.
In 2005, Shi and WIV were still plucking prawns from the Yangtze River while UNC was developing No See’M “seamless” engineering methods.
Shi and WIV have zero interest in Furin Cleavage Site (FCS) and zero ability to produce vaccines.
There are no human airway cells in the WIV, only vero (primate) cells which delete FCS.
Created by China using US biotechnology? More about this later, but it is technically impossible due to ‘tacit’ knowledge
The janitor required FBI security clearance to enter US select agent labs (e.g. UNC). In 2012 UNC was given de facto monopoly on SARS research because of it’s expensive select agent status. Both Penn Med and Iowa State stopped studying SARS but both suspected SARS2 engineering.
UTMB, a US military BSL4 lab, stopped engineering SARS in 2009, noting in 2021 “due to large size of coronavirus genome (~30,000nts) and several toxic elements, manipulation of SARS2 is not a trivial task & requires sophisticated methods”
No collaboration occurred between the WIV and UNC, which kept engineering methods “obscure” and employ much different technology.
No reverse genetic system exist for a new backbone (SARS2) in WIV, they can only shuffle spikes into the existing isolated “backbone of WIV1”
No infectious clone was developed for creating SARS2 in WIV before 2020
The lab animal for developing a transmission model for a coronavirus vaccine is unpublished. But in future posts, we will sort this out. This involves many labs.
“Transmission models have never been developed for SARS” which “does not replicate in the guinea pig, and replication in the ferret is limited…Moreover, passage experiments have not been reported, because research laboratories have focused their studies in the mouse model, which more accurately and faithfully reproduces the human disease condition. In addition, no one has reported or attempted to develop a SARS-CoV transmission model.”
SARS2 infects American mink, found in Europe but not China, and its cousin, the ferret, is a well-known GoF lab animal.
Ironically, US biosecurity hawks in 2012 kept Fauci from publishing Fouchier’s ferret aerosol procedures.
On the February 1, 2020 teleconference, Ron Fouchier would call US virologists “idiots” for claiming SARS2 is engineered, probably because Fauci’s RML is staffed with Fouchier aerosol protégés.
Created by Dani’s Australian virologists? Covid-19 doesn’t infect kangaroos.
Linfa tried but failed to keep a Chinese bat colony alive in an Australian BSL4.
No BSL4 existed in Dani’s Singapore lab, which is part of NIAID post 9/11 regional biodefense network. UNC being part of Duke’s biodefense network built a BSL3 on campus but live bats and nasty bat diseases require BSL4.
Dani “the last and only foreign scientist” claimed to be working on Ebola but zero Ebola papers exist in her 100+ publications. She is a specialist in Asian bat immunology and developed a novel NGS for detecting bat shedding of “Nipah virus and betacoronaviruses.”
Dani isolated Nipah viruses from Bangladesh bats in CSIRO BSL4, which may have shown up in WIV BSL4.
In 2019 Dani and Linfa are cross refencing UNC “consensus” sequence DARPA Defuse type work.
Per Linfa Duke is only responsible for bat immunology, not virology.
If WIV knew about Laos Banal, why not publish it instead of the headache of RaTG13?
Does this sound crazier than the frozen food hypothesis Dani proposed? Bat immunology is a highly specialized discipline. A tiny international group of virologists that share reagents, bat cells, samples, vaccines, etc., among themselves.
Linfa can transfer bat disease antibodies in 48 hours from NIAID in Washington, D.C.
What about monkeys? WIV is not setup for primates, it is setup for bats.
US labs are also full of monkeys and Egyptian fruit bats but do not house Chinese bats.
WIV in Feb 2020 submitted a primate paper, which referenced Fauci’s RML March paper.
WIV stated no primate research occurred in BSL4 before 2020.
Rhesus Macaques are transmission model for SARS based on NIAID, RML and Dutch studies, who are all Fauci’s aerosol specialist.
Beijing bioweapon? This thing is to be taken seriously. This thing is not Chinese junk.
Covid has 99% survival rate and WIV is a “safety school” per a DARPA source.
Bioweapon because of immune evasion? Western virologists are glorified veterinarians, zoologists, and bat immunologists. They design animal vaccines to “modulate an immune response in a subject without deleterious effect on the subject.”
PLA ties to the WIV? Disinformation without any evidence. The PLA is still four months away from taking over the the WIV. It is a civilian bat lab collaborating with many "interested” NIAID virologists.
Human vaccine challenge trials in China? No one aerosols a human vaccine since no one can charge for it!
CCP organ harvesting used for vaccine development? Organ harvesting was involved in creating SARS2, but not what you assumed.
Chinese money? CAS budget of $15B versus HHS budget of $1.7T
Per capita, China = Mexico, which is $12,000.
The NIH budget of $42B is similar to the South Korean military of $50B.
US money “drives global science”
Fauci, who provided 1/2 of all global funding for emerging infectious diseases (e.g. SARS) which can “threaten the economy and political security of nations.”
HIV vaccine? The same HIV ‘inserts’ were found elsewhere in natural coronaviruses and HIV research in the past.
Therapeutics? Not airborne or contagious.
Gain of Function? SARS2 doesn’t infect regular lab mice, only transgenic mice provided to WIV by UNC.
Outsourced to China? “Ever since the moratorium, everyone has gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
Did the WIV database go offline in September 2019? USAID Predict project taxpayer money ended at the same time, and the database stayed online until February 2020, when PLA showed up to WIV.
The 20,000 number was exaggerated as WIV isolated three samples, three more than any other lab, and none of the other 19,997 samples infected US biolab animals.
There are “several” infectious clones of Chinese viruses in UNC freezer that are not available on a database, but all collected with taxpayer money.
WIV concealed the deadly and “highly unusual” furin cleavage site? So did Western virologist, hiding it from US Congressional staff and US military
Ironically, WIV published RaTG13 on January 24, bringing attention to the furin cleavage site (PRRA), starting rumors of engineering, causing a confidential teleconference,culminating with an influential natural origin paper, which Fauci referenced in April 2020.
Is Fauci covering for China? The J Edgar Hoover of biology is covering up for himself, RML, UNC, Duke, and Dani and funding a revised DARPA Defuse grant, which listed Dani as a bat immunologist for testing in WIV.
In 2018, Fauci was caught by SciencInsider secretly funding GoF experiments.
Zero papers originate from China that studied furin cleavage sites on 30kb bat coronaviruses.
There is a lot of interest in FCS sites from western virologists, which is “required” for self-spreading vaccines.
Well before the infamous February 1 2020 teleconference, Fauci with RML and probably UNC virologists, had meetings early January 2020 to discuss sequence, which most knew about January 12.
Peter Daszak stated Ralph Baric of UNC wrote Furin Cleavage Site section of Defuse, and Linfa has said UNC was responsible for virology in Defuse.
A unique and peculiar furin cleavage site is found in SARS2.
RaTG13? A 96% match to SARS2 was collected from a Chinese mineshaft in 2013 with NIAID funding.
Dead Mojiang miners? Probably on USIAD payroll but reported in 2014 and linked to rats, not bats
What is unique about bat viruses? It is the live bats that are special, where the virus came from, and the lab where they can be studied, which is a lot more interesting to Western virologists (i.e. $$$). They call it immune stimulation in vivo (live bats), the new frontier of Western virology.
Was the Wuhan wet market the source of SARS2? No animals with SARS2 virus were found there, so why did SARS2 originate in Wuhan?
What confused everyone (including UTMB) was Fauci’s NIAID had two projects in Wuhan: one was public data bat sample testing in Shi’s BSL2, and one was bat vaccine R&D in Dani’s BSL4. Both projects dovetailed nicely (same personnel in the same city, same samples from the same bats, etc).
This is the best piece of inquiry I've ever read. I took the liberty to translate it into French for my blog: http://skidmark.blog/2024/06/29/une-sequence-consensuelle-des-evenements-lies-au-sars-par-jim-haslan/ *
... and published it just after my translation of Will Jones article about your work: http://skidmark.blog/2024/06/29/serait-ce-cet-homme-qui-a-cree-le-covid-19-dans-le-laboratoire-americain-de-fauci-par-will-jones/
I assumed you wouldn't mind!
(*) There's a typo in your name only in the link, not in the article itself
Love your work Jim! Is this claim by Alex Washburne about Ben Hu correct? And is it relevant?
"Ben Hu (2017) is the only person to have used BsaI + BsmBI enzymes together for engineering SARS-CoVs." https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1734723144303190257