#6 If you believe the WIV engineered SARS2, then published RaTG13:
You are probably a simpleton (unlike KGA)
The same disclaimer from part 5: this is obviously a Wuhan lab leak hypothetical based on an accident, not an accusation. This is a series of posts not so much to discuss ‘lab’ leak but ‘what’ leaked.
On January 24th, 2020, a world-class evolutionary virologist walked into his San Diego office, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and logged into his favorite forum, Virological.org.
Dr. Kristian G. Andersen (KGA) of the Scripps Institute was excited to download the latest mutations from the (not yet named) Wuhan coronavirus.
Since I believe ~50% of the diversity in the tree comes from sequencing errors…that means that the outbreak was detected almost immediately after the first case, which - given that this is flu season in China - is just amazing. Detecting an outbreak of pneumonia (similar to flu) of a novel coronavirus that fast is truly impressive.
KGA had spent the previous days debating if snakes were the zoonotic source for the natural spillover event. But today, a British colleague posted a very relevant pre-print: “Discovery of a novel coronavirus associated with the recent pneumonia outbreak in humans and its potential bat origin.”
Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a never-before-seen bat sample, called RaTG13. Shi uploaded its sequence to GISAID (a competitor to the NIH NCBI database) on January 24, 2020. This was technically the second time Shi uploaded RaTG13, but oddly, the NIH server (NCBI) didn’t release parts of the genome until 2022.
Until January 24th, the closest known sequence to SARS2 was a bat sample collected by a PLA lab nearly 500 miles from Wuhan. But RaTG13 (96%) was “much more closely related to (SARS2) than XC21 (86%) and ZC45 (87%) viruses.” The virological thread and KGA went quiet for nearly one month.
Only now do we know what happened next
KGA aligned the natural RaTG13 sequence over the circulating SARS2 virus, and the results were astonishing. The world-class evolutionary virologist called his evolutionary colleague Bob Garry of Tulane University.
I aligned (SARS2) with the 96% (similar RaTG13) bat sequence from WIV…they are essentially identical at the amino acid level - well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin cleavage site (PRRAR)…I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario…where you insert exactly 4 amino acids (PRRA)…at the exact same time to gain this function…do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level - it’s stunning - Bob by February 1st.
KGA then called Dr Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney on Jan 30th to show the alignment, exposing the furin cleavage site. They also noticed two restriction sites flanking the furin cleavage site, so both were “nervous.” Eddie said he was “about 80% sure this thing had come out of a lab.” KGA was “60 to 70%” and admitted that “I drank about three beers after that early call with Eddie.”
Eddie and KGA mistakenly identified BamHI as the restriction site flanking the RxxR furin cleavage site, but it was Dr Ralph Baric’s BsaXI.
Bob Garry knew about the SARS2 furin cleavage site (PRRAR) by Jan 12th, when Eddie published the complete SARS2 sequence on the Virological forum. But KGA, Bob, and Eddie didn’t suspect engineering until after the WIV published RaTG13 on Jan 24th.
Dr Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was looped in. Andrew had created the Virological forum just five years earlier, during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. His website was designed to share and discuss the available sequences rapidly during an outbreak. Still, now, the SARS2 origin was too sensitive a subject to discuss on his public forum.
These four world-class evolutionary virologists created a private Slack channel on Feb 1st. Andrew noted, “RaTG13 is identical except for the four residue insertions.” Eddie said this “would also be exactly what was expected by engineering.” They were preparing for the infamous February 1st teleconference.
If you’re not a professional evolutionary virologist who knows how to align sequences, your conclusion would have been “based on the (SARS2) genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” said Richard Ebright on January 29th. The gain-of-function critic repeated this line to Chinese media on Feb 5th.
The (burner) phone calls
Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust was the Fauci of the UK. Early in the outbreak, he tried to get scientists to share SARS2 sequences. But after the WIV shared RaTG13, he was scared enough about the origins of SARS2 to buy a burner phone:
In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US (presumably KGA & Bob) suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release….
This novel coronavirus did, at first sight, seem to be a random bat virus–one not specifically documented before either in nature or in the lab. Its closest relative, RaTG13, a 96% match, had just been sequenced but not yet published; I had got hold of a preliminary analysis. It had come from a horseshoe bat (& the WIV lab records) and it seemed reasonable to assume this novel coronavirus had come from a bat too. RaTG13 was a closer fit than the two viruses, ZXC21 and ZC45, that Kristian and Andrew had previously been looking at, which were a 86% to 87% fit.
One week after the WIV uploaded RaTG13, on Jan 31st, Farrar told a collection of money managers how bad it would get. The furin cleavage site made SARS2 a “prepandemic potential” pathogen. Farrar “made a very data-rich argument, not just an intuition-based argument. It seemed like he was on an explicit strategy to get people ready.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman made $2.6B shorting the stock market and then went on CNBC wanting to “shut down the country.”
Farrar had been trying to contact Fauci all week to warn the same and finally got through on the 31st. Farrar introduced Fauci to three concerned virologists: KGA, Bob, and Eddie.
The next day, I contacted Tony Fauci about the rumors over the origins of the virus and asked him to speak with Kristian Andersen at Scripps. We agreed that a bunch of specialists needed to urgently look into it. We needed to know if this virus came from nature or was a product of deliberate nurture, followed by either accidental or intentional release from the BSL-4 lab based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Who wanted to call the FBI?
On Friday night, Jan 31st, Fauci tried to dampen the lab leak rumors. He forwarded a recently released article that gave “a balanced view.” The article mentioned that “RaTG13…was fished out of a bat fecal sample (the WIV had) collected in 2013 from a cave in Mojiang in Yunnan province.” Eddie and KGA were quoted in the article as cautiously optimistic that SARS2 had natural origins, but behind the scenes, they were ringing the biological fire alarm.
Four world-class evolutionary virologists with PhDs from Harvard, Texas, and Cambridge emailed Fauci to say that we find “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Why? Because the WIV had published RaTG13 one week earlier. The 80-year-old Fauci would be up until 3 AM covering his tracks.
At the behest of Farrar, Fauci finally called one of the concerned virologists. KGA told Fauci about Baric’s 2015 paper, which “looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.” UNC just months later uploaded the genome sequence for this 2015 paper, which meant Baric’s No See’m method was too “obscure” for Chinese copying.
KGA also told Fauci about the “furin site mutation.” Fauci replied, “They should report it to the appropriate authorities…FBI.” Farrar’s book said that KGA asked, “Am I supposed to call the FBI? What burden of proof were we looking for?”
It was widely reported that Fauci wanted to call the FBI because of this midnight email, but Fauci was parroting what KGA told him via phone. In a recent testimony, KGA repeated that he wanted to call the FBI, but Fauci told him he would do it. KGA had some FBI “brochures and pamphlets” ready to go!
The following day, KGA, Andrew, Bob, and Eddie started preparing for the teleconference in their newly created Slack channel. Andrew noticed that Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands would be on the call. “It will be interesting to know what Ron thinks. He will not want it to be a Gain of Function escape.” KGA noted, “Ron will likely push back hard - which is fine.” Eddie shared a Montana lab paper, which inserted a furin cleavage site into a bovine (e.g. deer) coronavirus at the exact same location (R667) as SARS2.
The teleconference heard around the world
On Saturday morning, Feb 1st, Farrar still begged Fauci to join the teleconference.
Fauci joined at the last minute and invited the head of NIH, Francis Collins, and the soon-to-be head of NIH, Lawrence Tabak. These were the only three US government officials on the international call (i.e. no FBI).
KGA presented a six-page paper to the audience comparing the unnatural SARS2 (top) and the natural RaTG13 (bottom).
KGA then zoomed in on the alignment of RaTG13 versus SARS2, exposing the now easy-to-see furin cleavage site. Again, this was only possible because Dr Shi of the WIV had published RaTG13 precisely one week earlier.
KGA also discussed the BamHI restriction site, which is not found in RaTG13 but in SARS2. He later testified that Francis Collins said, "That nails it for a lab leak, doesn't it?"
KGA later downplayed the significance because it was “so minor.”
KGA ended the presentation with references for his engineered hypothesis. All of the papers were from Baric, including the infamous 2015 Baric-Shi Nature Medicine paper, along with five others.
Baric, in 2021 (but before Defuse leaked), explained why Shi was an irrelevant co-author on that 2015 ‘how-to manual’ since Shi shared the SHC014 bat sequence “beforehand.” Therefore, “co-authorship on the (2015) paper was appropriate,” but he reiterated there was no “collaboration” between UNC and the WIV.
The most recent of KGA’s references was a January 2020 Baric paper, in which Baric didn’t mention the SARS2 furin cleavage site. Baric was also missing from the infamous Feb 1st teleconference, not because they missed his expertise, but because they suspected his involvement.
2024 update: Fauci secretly invited Baric to the Feb 1, 2020, call, who then attacked Andersen on Feb 3 for suggesting the SARS2 genome “looks engineered.” Andersen said he had “no idea” Baric was on the Feb 1 call listening to his evidence for engineering.
Who shot down KGA’s lab origin theory?
KGA testified, “I honestly don't remember Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins even chiming in on the call itself.” But he later told the New Yorker: “I think there were people that thought I was an idiot for even suggesting it came from a lab.” Coronavirus colleagues were gaslighting KGA on his engineered concerns. KGA, in turn, would try to gaslight a NYT writer out of his engineering concerns.
KGA only lied about one thing: the publication date of RaTG13. He claimed (via Scripps) that Shi published RaTG13 after the Feb 1st teleconference, but he was using it to prove SARS2 was engineered during the teleconference. This piece of RaTG13 evidence was the biological tattletale, leading them to believe SARS2 was (potentially) engineered.
After the Feb 1st teleconference, Dr. Collins shared the RaTG13 preprint with Fauci, Tabak, and Carrie Wolinetz. Therefore, they were all aware of the natural RaTG13 sequence, which made SARS2 look potentially engineered.
NIAID even funded Shi’s 2013 collection of RaTG13 (called 4991) from the Mojiang mine in China.
After the Feb 1st teleconference was over, KGA and company hopped back on their private Slack channel to note that “both Ron (Fouchier) and Christian (Drosten) are much too conflicted to think about this issue straight - to them the hypothesis of accidental lab escape is so unlikely and not something they want to consider…the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain.”
Christian Drosten was called the Fauci of Germany and had worked with the WIV on coronavirus research. He identified the first patient with SARS1 and was the only virologist on the call who worked in a lab using reverse genetics to engineer coronaviruses. Per Drosten, “the main topic of discussion was the so-called furin cleavage site in the gene sequence of the virus, and also about a certain ‘restriction site’ in its vicinity.”
Drosten has been open on his German podcast, detailing how the WIV can’t engineer SARS2, so he leaned towards nature. Drosten repeated the engineering line, stating that this advanced work can only be “done in the USA” and that “building such a system takes years.” It takes “2-3 years,” to be exact, so the WIV couldn't create a new virus backbone like SARS2.
Drosten also noted Shi’s Vero cells would “destroy” the furin cleavage site “immediately.” Because of this biological fact, many theories have died (and lied) trying to prove the WIV inserted the furin cleavage site. After the 2018 DARPA Defuse proposal leaked in September 2021, Drosten said, “There were plans to incorporate furin cleavage sites, but this was to be done in an American laboratory (UNC), and the project was not funded.”
Drosten, the German, was half-right because biodefense funding was not an issue in the rich Washington D.C. area. And KGA, a Danish citizen working in America, repeated the same in his Congressional testimony: the furin cleavage site was to be inserted “in the United States, not in China.”
KGA said, “I was quite appalled to see (how DARPA Defuse) was released...I think the U.S.-based researchers on this particular grant (Baric & Daszak) have done a huge disservice by not releasing this information earlier.”
The Erasmus/Dutch/RML/Fauci connection
Farrar invited the two Dutch virologists, Fouchier and Marion Koopmans of Erasmus. They mentored many lab personnel at Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana (Neeltje van Doremalen, Emmie de Wit, and husband Vincent Munster). This same Dutch clan published a February 2020 paper hypothesizing about human-to-human transmissibility, but the furin cleavage site was not mentioned. This Dutch group inserted a furin cleavage site into a flu virus ten years earlier.
It turned out that Andrew Rambaut knew Ron well because that was exactly what Ron did: bully the evolutionary virologist out of their “conspiracy theory” with three pages of notes. Andrew responded, “The only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.” Fouchier claimed the FCS could arise in passaging (inadvertently in a lab), but that was false. Fouchier made a natural origin argument in the final copy of the Proximal Origins paper.
The Proximal Origins paper used the new backbone from SARS2 as an excuse for the virus being natural, implying that the WIV couldn't engineer a new backbone, which was true.
The Proximal Origin footnotes
The authors claimed that the virus could not possibly have come from a laboratory because “the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” Yet the single footnote (number 20) backing up that key claim refers to a paper from 2014, which means that the authors’ supposedly “irrefutable evidence” was at least five years out of date.
Jeff Sachs and Neil Harrison of Columbia linked to Baric’s 2017 paper, while discussing “US-developed biotechnology.” The same Baric paper included the BsaXI restriction site, now flanking the furin cleavage site. It also showed an ability to create a new coronavirus backbone, using a cDNA reverse genetic system exclusive to UNC (the WIV used BAC).
The Proximal Origin writers initially referenced Baric’s 2015 Nature paper. The same paper that prompted Eddie to say: “Fuck, this is bad.” The same research paper that UNC, not the WIV, exclusively created. The same paper had 2,000 words deleted from the manuscript to keep Baric’s recipe a State secret. The same paper that Fauci emailed to his lieutenant at midnight, demanding “you will have tasks today that must be done.”
The authors of Proximal Origin eventually referenced an irrelevant 2014 paper. It was from Baric’s Spanish colleague, Luis Enjuanes (shown here in 2012). However, the authors did reference Baric’s January 2020 paper (footnote #7). The same Baric paper that missed the “highly unusual” furin cleavage site.
In that January 2020 paper, Baric said the receptor binding domain was “not ideal.” This was the exact phrase used for Proximal Origins: not ideal. Both papers are trying to say ‘no man engineered this virus for man.’ However, it was well engineered for American lab bats, which share a “similar” ACE2 receptor to humans.
Regarding the furin cleavage site in a bat vaccine, Baric and Munster wanted “intracellular proteases” within the bat cells, which also have furin like us humans. Baric saw the furin cleavage site as the biological key for ‘jumping species’ so it was a good target for an “attenuated (bat) vaccine.”
Baric’s 2020 RBD paper focused on the K31 hotspot, a possible failed safety kill switch?
Fouchier later leaked (anonymously) the details of the Feb 1st teleconference to a Science reporter in July 2020, but he sat on it. The teleconference only surfaced via the Fauci gate emails one year later.
We must move quickly
After the teleconference, Farrar again forwarded the concerns of the evolutionary virologists to Fauci and Collins.
Francis Collins didn’t want to wait because it “sounds like a really bad idea.” Fauci echoed Collins' impatience about waiting. Notice that Tabak was now cc’d on the emails since he joined the teleconference at the last minute.
Farrar then forwarded Fauci the HIV Insertion bioweapon rumor, linking to a Zerohedge article (which just one day later had its Twitter account shut down). Those “HIV inserts” are called GP120, and Fauci holds a patent on it. But it was a red herring because those HIV ‘inserts’ are also found in RaTG13, ZC45, and Laos Banal-52 (collected by the US government in 2017).
Luc Montagnier, the late Nobel Prize winner who discovered HIV, went on French TV to tell us this virus has a lab origin, and it was the “meticulous” job of a “professional.”
Fauci recalled Farrar was probably “having a bad day” for using posh words like “conclave” and “prevaricate.”
After the teleconference, Fauci called KGA on Feb 1st to discuss the HIV paper, which had nothing to do with Eddie and KGA’s engineered concerns.
Again, Eddie, Bob, Andrew, Mike (Farzan), and KGA are only concerned with SARS2 being engineered after the WIV published RaTG13. As Eddie noted to Drosten, “Things were made worse when (the WIV) published (the RaTG13) sequence.”
About three months later, Eddie wondered why “Shi’s group” published RaTG13 since “that would only help point the finger at them? Makes no sense.”
So why did Shi publish RaTG13?
I’ve asked everyone involved with the lab leak debate this question over the past year, and not one decent answer has ever emerged. The most common answer was that Shi ‘had to’ publish RaTG13 because the partial sequence 4991 was already in the 2016 public domain. Never mind that Shi published RaTG13 two full weeks before Wuhan University (not affiliated with WIV) published 4991, who themselves didn’t even know about RaTG13.
Shi didn’t have to do anything. If she remained quiet, the nearest sequence was in a PLA lab hundreds of miles away from Wuhan. So, ironically, when Shi published the “highly similar” RaTG13, she brought attention to the WIV and the SARS2 furin cleavage site.
2024 update: Alina now appears to understand that Baric possessed a copy of RaTG13 before the pandemic.
KGA and his academic friends went from debating snakes to an international teleconference in just one week. Why? Shi made that FCS stick out like a sore thumb. Unless you were a professional French virology lab that noted the “peculiar” furin cleavage site in February, it was nearly impossible to find without aligning SARS2 with RaTG13.
Look hard at the above, and you will eventually see PRRA, but not so hard below.
On Feb 10th, Bob shared the same French paper on the Slack channel: “If they had compared it to RaTG13 escape, it might have been even more explicitly implied.” KGA highlighted the French scientific text of “supposedly” and “peculiar.”
KGA followed up with Baric’s RxxR cleavage site paper from September 2019 (Baric often used MERS as a workaround for SARS select agent status).
The rest of their Virological colleagues would slowly catch up. On Jan 29th, one of Bob’s local New Orleans buddies was the first to ‘publicly’ notice the furin cleavage site. On Feb 6th, he did the exact alignment with RaTG13 and thought, “Oh crap” it is a bioweapon!
I have been privately dealing with rumors and inquiries, focused on the RRAR potential furin cleavage site, that (SARS2) may have a suspicious origin as an engineered, laboratory-generated virus either accidentally or deliberately released in the area of the Wuhan seafood and animal market. The publication of the highly similar RaTG13 sequence about a week ago has fueled this type of speculation.
A few weeks later, fellow academics started discussing the RaTG13 alignment with SARS2.
Direct emails to both Dr Richard Ebright and Dr Alina Chan remain unanswered. Ebright claimed Shi published RaTG13 because she needed $20,000. Alina claimed it was a race for recognition. Well, Shi got it! Alina pushed a wild theory that Shi was trying to hide the fact that RaTG13 came from the Mojiang mine. The Science article that Fauci was passing around on January 31, 2020, explicitly said that RaTG13 came from the Mojiang mine (just misspelled at the time).
We have all heard of the infamous WIV database taken down in September 2019, but it remained online until February 2020. We don’t need to see the WIV database, because it’s biologically impossible to publish something closer than RaTG13.
Alina Chan and others even claimed Shi tried to hide the furin cleavage site! But the WIV used 25 year old MS-DOS based software. In July 2020, Dr Shi of the WIV provided detailed answers to specific lab leak questions:
“We have only isolated three strains of live SARS-related coronaviruses,” and Shi’s lab was the only one on the planet (before 2020) to isolate bat coronaviruses.
“RaTG13 has never been isolated or cultured,” and “I would like to emphasize that we have only the genome sequence and didn’t isolate this virus.” Peter Daszak repeated: “I think they tried to culture (isolate) RaTG13, but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.”
“We didn't perform any experiment with any coronavirus in which we attempted to insert a furin cleavage site. It's not within my expertise; that's simple.”
Who wrote the Proximal Origins?
On Feb 6th, Eddie sent emails and hoped the infamous pangolins were the intermediary species, but that was a red herring. A Chinese paper was published the same day, suggesting the Wuhan CDC BSL2 could have been the SARS2 source. The Proximal Origin group even debated including the BSL2 paper in their draft.
Eddie replied, “I’m now as tainted as Ian (Lipkin)” because he collaborated with the Wuhan CDC. Eddie threatened to quit the group and “recuse himself” if they put that BSL2 information in the draft. KGA said he was out of the loop and driving his Jeep across the Mojave desert. On Feb 16th, the Proximal Origins crew uploaded a draft of their paper to the Virological forum, breaking their one-month silence.
Oddly, the Feb 14th Eddie discussion was redacted from the Slack files, but the incident was discussed in both Bob's and KGA’s testimony.
Eddie wrote the Proximal Origins but did it for selfish reasons. He collaborated with the BSL2 lab, which uploaded a bat collection video in December 2019. The new Wuhan CDC BSL2 was located just 1,000 feet from the Wuhan wet market. But don’t worry, a ‘virus’ that spreads up to 60 feet through the air didn’t leak from a BSL2 (aka dentist’s office).
International video link.
Eddie was on Twitter then, and now, defending the CDC BSL2. Ironically, Eddie won because the lab leak ‘narrative’ shifted from the Wuhan CDC BSL2, across the Yangtze River, over to Shi’s WIV BSL2, after RaTG13 was published.
Why the flip-flop?
Bob said the RaTG13 alignment was “stunning,” but Tulane had previously been accused of a lab leak.
Bob and KGA were bidding on the ongoing $82M CREID project and allegedly scored a 27, which was in the “fundable range.”
Andrew was “agnostic” but noted the unusual furin cleavage site.
Mike Farzan, who discovered the SARS1 receptor, was 70/30% lab origin.
Farzan later called Covid a “dumb virus” that “flunked immunology 101” because SARS2 “moves from host to host before your adaptive immune system kicks in (i.e., antibodies).” But this was a design feature, not a bug, for a self-spreading vaccine designed to evade a mammal’s immune response.
Farrar was 50/50% lab origin but also funded self-spreading vaccine research.
The three good friends of KGA, Eddie, and Andrew, even wrote an anti-gain-of-function paper in 2018.
Making promises about disease prevention and control that cannot be kept will only further undermine trust…In short, there aren’t enough data on virus outbreaks for researchers to be able to accurately predict the next outbreak strain. Nor is there a good enough understanding of what drives viruses to jump hosts, making it difficult to construct predictive models.
What started as KGA’s lab leak ‘report’ slowly evolved into a natural origins paper. On Feb 4th, Eddie submitted the first draft, which speculated about possible reasons for a natural origin, but Farrar responded:
Both KGA and Bob laughed at the same Farrar email they also received.
At this point, it was a four-on-four biological basketball game. KGA, Bob, Eddie, and Andrew debated Fouchier, Drosten, Koopman, and Farrar. These were four truth seekers up against a biological juggernaut of funding. KGA comically called it Peter Daszak’s “EgoHealth,” and Ian Lipkin was known as “Butt Lesion.”
On Feb 12th, Eddie asked KGA to contact Nature for publication. KGA then noted in his email that we were “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins” to submit a paper. Farrar was eyeing the top job at the WHO, Collins was courting the White House OSTP position, and Fauci was being Fauci.
Eddie noted, “The US drives global science…because of the government money in the system, which helps all of us. But the funding in the UK depended upon Farrar’s Wellcome Trust.” In 2016, Fauci bragged (46:00) that the NIH provided 42% of all global research R&D for neglected diseases.
By Feb 12th, the draft had evolved from KGA’s lab leak report into Eddie’s natural origin paper. Nature Medicine’s editor replied, “Yes, please!” but they had to edit it down to 2,200 words and 30 references. Little space was left for nuance, and by Feb 25th, Eddie had convinced himself and the others that SARS2 had a natural origin.
The paper was formally published on March 17th, and the Slack group was amazed at the reception. They counted Tweets and page views as their paper climbed to number one in less than a month. “We win!” and “WE RUUUUUUULE!” screamed KGA since “that’s tenure secured, right there.”
The entire scientific enterprise (grants, funding, administrators, publication, patents, medals, Scripps 89.5% overhead) rested on the natural origins idea because otherwise, “it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.”
Who edited the Proximal Origins?
On Feb 4th, Fauci replied, “?? serial passage in ACE2 transgenic mice,” which implied he was a ghostwriter on the Proximal Origins paper. Humanized mice were never mentioned, even in the drafts. Ironically, this was a good edit because Baric and Shi’s humanized mice were safe. They are not transmission models for SARS2 and have never “sickened” a lab technician.
If you believe SARS2 infects ‘humanized’ mice, you also believe SARS2 infects raccoon dogs (which it doesn’t).
Two days later, Fauci nominated Pardis Sabeti of MIT to the WHO lab leak investigation team. Sabeti would later appear next to KGA and Bob with $9M CREID grant money from NIAID.
On April 17th, Fauci referenced the natural origins paper at a major press conference.
On the same April day, Fauci told Collins not to worry; the lab leak conspiracy is just a “shiny object that will go away in times.”
Fauci then sent Eddie’s Proximal Origins paper, Eddie’s own natural origin paper, and Eddie’s natural origin statement. Eddie echoed the same via Twitter, defending his BSL2 colleagues, located next door to the Wuhan wet market.
The 2nd (American-only) teleconference
If Anthony (“Tony”) S. Fauci was quiet on the Feb 1st international teleconference, he was the leader on the Feb 3rd domestic teleconference. He organized, via NASEM, an “expert meeting” and gave the “perspective from NIH/NIAID.” The NASEM teleconference was even referenced nine times in the Proximal Origins draft.
This time, the FBI, White House OSTP, and ODNI were invited, along with Dr. Ralph Baric of UNC. But this Fauci meeting wasn’t about comparing RaTG13 to SARS2; it was about the hokey HIV paper, which was quickly shot down.
Dr Stanley Perlman of Iowa let us know what the group discussed on Feb 3rd: the odd furin cleavage site, but they won’t mention it. Dr Trevor Bedford later admitted the Feb 3rd meeting had more to do with the “HIV inserts” paper.
The NASEM Feb 4th draft is above, and the final Feb 6th letter is below
The final Feb 6th NASEM letter didn’t even mention the HIV inserts or potential engineering. It referenced the closest known relative (RaTG13) as proof that SARS2 was a product of natural evolution (just a 50-year gap per Eddie).
The two experts consulted, Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak, had submitted an unfunded grant to DARPA just months earlier. They proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses and testing on live bats in Wuhan. Unlike DARPA, this exact same group had a decade-long financial relationship with Fauci and NIAID.
Baric & Fauci will become BFF
On Feb 11th, Fauci met with Baric of UNC, which included Emily Erbelding (above email), the Director of the NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.
The Fauci/Baric meeting backs up against the National Security Council meeting with Phil Ferro. It’s unclear where Baric was during the NSC meeting, but Baric and Fauci discussed the “outbreak and chimeras.”
Page 283 of USRTK FOIA
Fauci later claimed to have never met Baric but was shown his calendar during a deposition.
Fauci and Baric gave a joint presentation during the outbreak in March 2020. Baric again ‘missed’ the furin cleavage site while comparing SARS2 to SARS1. Fauci would follow up with $65M of NIAID (hush) money for Baric’s pet project.
Remember that Slack message about Baric and Fauci meeting on Feb 17th? Baric wondered if Shi was going to be “arrested” for publishing RaTG13!
Why did Baric want Shi arrested?
Shi kicked off the Fauci-led cover-up by publishing RaTG13 on Jan 24th and proudly declared that SARS2 did not come from “my lab.” In the process, Shi probably broke her (SHC014 type of) deal after sharing the RaTG13 sequence, which was uploaded to the NIH database in 2018.
In 2015, Baric said he looked for “25% different” viruses than SARS1. The 25% language was repeated in DARPA Defuse since he wanted to ‘box in’ the next pandemic pathogen via animal vaccines. In 2018, Shi finally sequenced the RaTG13 spike, which was 24.6% different than SARS1, making RaTG13 his unicorn. There was a good reason the ‘consensus sequence’ of SARS2 was 22% different from SARS1, and RaTG13 was <5% different from SARS2.
Baric and UNC had a copy of RaTG13 in 2018. He referenced a “fascinating” and “unique” sequence of RaTG13 (UGGUCGC) in his 2018 LAV bat vaccine paper. That same year, UNC also published the unique R/SVAS sequence of RaTG13, which later appeared as part of the infamous SARS2 furin cleavage site.
In 2018, Baric even referenced the “lethal human sequences” found in the Mojiang mine, where RaTG13 was collected. Fauci also referenced the “death of three mineworkers” in his $82M CREID project, awarded in 2019 per KGA. This match was made in Defuse Heaven by Preempting the next human spillover event.
Since Shi was “gracious enough” to share the RaTG13 sequence before publication, Baric planned to add her as a co-author on an upcoming Nature paper, just like in 2015. However, this bat vaccine paper leaked out the back door of the Wuhan Institute of Virology before it could be published.
In April 2020, Shi sent Baric a blunt note about a recent lab leak article. In May 2020, Baric praised Proximal Origins, saying, “Genetic and biological data are strong evidence against deliberate generation, and the arguments are compelling.”
Great Stuff. Clearly engineered on the US side. So why did ZLS release RatG13 whose lab was no doubt under control of the PLA at that time ?
Baric understandably was not happy as it exposed him,
I believe China (not WIV) was a partner in Operation Covid. Virus Made in USA and released in Wuhan. I can not say who or how it was released. It was not necessarily via WIV although thats possible too.
WIV was being set up as the designated patsy so as to provide the antithesis (accidental lab release) to the natural origin thesis. A False dichotomy. This was in order to deflect from anyone considering intentional release of an engineered virus to facilitate the One Health Agenda which would put both US and its partner China in a difficult situation. ZLS was no doubt told she was being set up as a patsy and to release the sequence since anyone with a brain would know inserting a FCS was not in the WIV playbook.
I might be wrong but thats my hypothesis.
Humanized mice are lab animals, unlike Raccoon Dogs, so it matters not if they can be naturally infected and transmit . They can be infected via inoculation for various purposes.
Fascinating narrative, thanks.
you stated above that
"Prominent lab leaker Alina Chan didn’t know the closest sequences to SARS2 (pre-RaTG13) were ZXC21 and ZC45" with your "evidence" being a vanished tweet by flo debarre: https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1576668212694962176?s=20
but if you view this tweet linked below, it is clear she did know.
"In early Jan, 2020, the most closely related virus genomes were from two SARS-like coronaviruses sampled from bats in Zhoushan city, Zhejiang province: the ZXC21 virus was obtained in July, 2015, and ZC45 in February, 2017."
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1307060032576593921
Secondly you state falsely that sars-cov-2 does not infect humanized mice, perhaps you meant to say "does not transmit well"?