A belated book review on "Viral" by Alina Chan & Matt Ridley
If you're going to write a book, make sure it ages well, unlike this one!
TLDR: they praised the UNC paper that created SARS-CoV-2 and went on a book tour to sell propaganda that would make the CCP blush.
The two listed authors probably did the least amount of research for “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.” They poached the unpaid research from members of DRASTIC, packaged it with scientific authority, and claimed to have uncovered a Chinese coverup. But in the process they helped cover up a true Western scientific coverup!
Matt Ridley is an established science writer who’s books are on my shelf. My favorite was the Rational Optimist, explaining why tomorrow will always be better than today, because of free trade and specialization (think modern day Adam Smith).
The unknown co-author is Dr Alina Chan from the Broad Institute, which is a joint venture of Harvard and MIT. She is a postdoc punching above her weight and has been attacked by a scientific consensus of natural origins. Alina has the most to lose, because of a bright future as an established scientist.
Twitter debates married the odd couple with a hint of yin and yang. She knew the dirty details on Dr Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, but he knew a loyal publisher that would help tell their story. In their manifesto they tried to balance a lab leak versus wet market debate, but in the process covered up a much bigger story.
Their book mentioned a sample collected by Shi in 2013, but published in early 2020. There were many unpublished samples in Shi’s lab, so suspicion grew when she published the nearest match after a lab leak. The RaTG13 sample was 96% match to SARS2, so this act ironically made Shi the face of the lab leak debate. The authors mentioned the RaTG13 sample 86 times, but the 400 page book never explained why it was even published?
The imperfect analogy was a murder suspect (Shi) handing over a knife with initials ‘UNC’ on it. But the authors claimed the person who found the evidence (Shi), had also planted the evidence to cover up her own crime (inserting the furin cleavage site into SARS2).
RaTG13 was a bat sample collected in 2013 from an abandoned copper mineshaft, about 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan. Shi’s team partially published the sequence, then called 4991, back in 2016. Alina knew both of these facts going in to her book writing endeavor, but proceeded to spin the evidence and muddy the water.
Matt and Alina’s book was cleverly written and never specifically mentioned the RaTG13 publication date on Jan 23, 2020. In chapter nine, they wrote “this was also the paper that first mentioned RaTG13 by its new name,” but you had to flip back one page to see the listed date of Jan 23rd. Or you had to make it to the timeline at the very end of the book, but the date was not given context.
For context, Jan 23rd was one week before Tony Fauci’s Feb 1st teleconference, so in essence Shi kept Fauci up until 3AM on a Friday night by publishing RaTG13. Two weeks after the teleconference, Dr Ralph Baric of UNC was in Fauci’s office hoping Shi was arrested for publishing RaTG13.
Why did the authors lie (by omission)?
In chapter one of the book, they inferred the publication date of RaTG13 was Feb 3rd; therefore, after Fauci’s Feb 1st teleconference. There are two dates in a scientific publication; one is preprint (Jan 23) and one is publication (Feb 3). RaTG13 was even mentioned in a Jan 31 news article.
Next door to Shi’s WIV lab was the unaffiliated Wuhan University. The university published a tiny sample of RaTG13 (called 4991) on Feb 5th. Alina and Matt write in chapter one:
This ought to have been big news: a nearly 99% match to the 4991 fragment was strikingly high and would have raised eyebrows, implying a possible connection to the outbreak. It got little attention, however, because two days earlier on Feb 3 a paper had been published in the prestigious journal Nature by Dr Shi’s team from the WIV just across town. In that paper, Dr Shi and her colleagues had also reported assembling a full genome sequence of the new virus. They found a 79.6% match between the new virus and the 2003 SARS epidemic virus (remember Baric misled with 78%). Only after noting this did they then mention a match between part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and ‘a short region’ of the genome of another bat coronavirus called RaTG13. This fragment, they said, derived from a virus sample collected from a Rhinolophus affinis bat from Yunnan province. They carried out full-length sequencing on this sample and found an overall 96.2% genome match to SARS-CoV-2.
The book ran with Alina’s complicated (conspiracy) theory for the reason why Dr Shi published RaTG13; to coverup the partial publication of RaTG13. Since Wuhan University had a smaller sample it had a higher match to SARS2 (98.7%) versus the full length sample called RaTG13 (96.2%).
To draw an analogy to the above incident, Shi anticipated a murder weapon (a shard of metal called 4991) would be found in her next door neighbor’s house (Wuhan University), so Shi preempted this move by handing over the knife (RaTG13) used in the murder. But the neighbor (Wuhan University) didn’t even know about the knife (RaTG13).
The confusion on the RaTG13 publication date came from the NIH database embargo. For the purpose of clarification, Dr Shi uploaded the sequence to the competitor’s database called GISAID. Both authors knew about the password protected GISAID database, since it was referenced in their book, but they (purposely?) omitted this important fact.
A U.S. Right to Know article outlined a long, but brilliant timeline showing the Western scientific coverup of SARS2. Notice the timeline starts Jan 24th with the publication of RaTG13 by Shi.
On Feb 5th, Wuhan University published their tiny fragment of RaTG13 (called 4991) but the Proximal Origin authors had already drafted their coverup paper. The Western scientific coverup started after the Wuhan Institute of Virology published RaTG13, but before Wuhan University published 4991. Matt and Alina’s wild conspiracy only gets better, since they claimed Shi tried to hide the peculiar furin cleavage site in SARS2.
Publishing RaTG13 exposed Baric’s furin cleavage site
According to chapter one of Matt and Alina’s book, Shi tried to hide the furin cleavage site in SARS2?
(Shi) paid careful attention to other features and insertions in the spike gene sequence but did not even once mention the feature that stands out like a sore thumb: the never-seen-in-a-sarbecovirus-before furin cleavage site insertion.
Shi was actually the “only scientist” to make the furin cleavage site insertion “stand out like a sore thumb.” But Alina and Matt somehow called this omission “the dog that didn’t bark in the night.” Shi actually kept the top dog, Tony Fauci, up until 3AM covering his biological tracks. The virological forum, used by Proximal Origins authors, explained the sticky situation very well.
The publication of the “highly similar” RaTG13 sequence about a week ago (Jan 23 2020) has fueled this type of (SARS2 engineering) speculation…
At first glance of an alignment of the spike protein sequence of both, it is natural that the issue of an engineered insertion should be considered. On either side of the new furin site (in SARS2), the amino acid sequence is identical in both from aa614 to aa1133 – an apparent insert of PRRA is the only difference (between RaTG13 and SARS2) in an otherwise 100% conserved 519 amino acid region.
By Jan 12th, the Proximal Origin authors knew about the SARS2 furin cleavage site (PRRAR), but none of them suspected engineering until after the Shi published RaTG13 on Jan 23rd.
The authors continue to dig a hole:
To us, however, the most shocking aspect of the furin cleavage site is Dr Shi’s failure to mention it in early papers first describing the novel coronavirus. The furin cleavage site stands out like a sore thumb and is a large part of the reason this virus is so infectious and virulent. In one recent collaboration between Dr Shi’s group and scientists in America, a furin cleavage site had been engineered into the spike of a bat MERS-like coronavirus. So there is no doubt that Dr Shi and her colleagues understood the functional significance of this feature in coronaviruses.
That American scientist was Baric. He also omitted the furin cleavage site from his first paper. Shi was the one person on the planet that brought attention to the furin cleavage site. After all, Fauci helped fund the collection of RaTG13, so Shi was a loyal soldier marching to her own tune.
Shi was now a whistleblower, that was blowing her own whistle! How did authors thank Shi? By derisively quoting her infamous WeChat line: ‘I, Shi Zhengli, use my life guarantee, and it has nothing to do with the laboratory. I advise those who believe in and spread the rumours of bad media, and those who believe in the so-called academic analysis of the unreliable Indian scholars, shut your stinky mouth.’
The book described Dr Li-Meng Yan (Ms. Fox News bioweapon wanting a US visa) as brave whistleblower, but the Viral authors conveniently conflated a bioweapon with a vaccine.
We think allegations that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon or a vaccine trial that went wrong are a distraction. If the virus came from a laboratory, it is much more likely that it was a leak from experiments designed to understand viruses that pose potential pandemic threats. The SARS-CoV-2 virus does not appear to have the features of an attenuated vaccine. If anything, it seems to have features that promote increased transmissibility, virulence and ability to evade the immune system.
Does “increased transmissibility, virulence and ability to evade the (mammalian) system” sound familiar?
The Viral book that praised the creation of SARS2
Alina and Matt call the most incriminating UNC paper a brilliant attempt at stopping the pandemic, but the UNC paper literally created the pandemic. In chapter 8 on “the vaccine hope” they glowingly write:
In America, in October 2018, Dr Baric’s group published a paper suggesting how to design a live vaccine that would work against SARS viruses. Briefly, vaccines work by raising immunity against real infections and to do this they are either inert, dead versions of (usually parts of) a virus or they are ‘live’ but attenuated viruses: still capable of causing an infection, but a very mild one (does this sound like SARS2?) Live vaccines have been used successfully against measles, mumps, rubella, yellow fever and chickenpox. The power of live vaccines is that, although the virus is weakened, they cause an infection similar to the natural virus and can stimulate strong immunity against it that can last a lifetime. The problem with live vaccines is that sometimes they revert to the untamed form (does this sounds like SARS?) usually via recombination with a natural, closely related virus that happens to infect the vaccinated person or animal. For instance, sporadic cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus have occurred when the weakened poliovirus used in the oral vaccine continues to circulate in a particular population for a long period of time, allowing it, through mutation, to regain its ability to cause severe disease (does this sound like SARS2?) For this reason, the US only uses the inactivated polio vaccine and not the live attenuated virus vaccine (but they are still approved for animals).
My sarcasm is expressed in bold type above, but let’s continue with their naiveté below:
Live attenuated African swine fever vaccines sometimes mutate back into a pathogenic form. In early 2021, reports began to surface that some of the recent African swine fever outbreaks in China had been caused by unlicensed vaccines being administered to large numbers of pigs. However, due to the issue’s political sensitivity, ‘reporting of the recent African swine fever outbreaks was extensively covered up’, according to Channel News Asia. These attenuated viruses are difficult to detect and can cause long-term and widespread infections across pig farms, with the potential to devastate the pork industry in China – particularly because some farms feed their pigs with kitchen waste that may still carry live viruses
A Chinese pig virus called PEDV was probably used by UNC to create create SARS2. Let us continue with Matt and Alina’s fawning over Baric’s cutting edge research:
Dr Baric’s team was trying to get around this limitation of live vaccines by making sure that their live attenuated SARS virus would not recombine with other SARS-like viruses and revert to virulence. They were going to do it by rewriting a small section of special text in the genome of the virus. This text, known as a transcription regulatory sequence (TRS), triggers the expression of genes. The team showed that within each of the nine regulatory sequences of the SARS genome there was a six-letter text that was the same – ACGAAC – and if they replaced this in each case with a slightly longer and markedly different text – UGGUCGC – they had effectively changed the password on the whole network.
The UGGUCGC motif was a reference to the RaTG13 sequence. In other words, Baric was creating a live attenuated vaccine using Shi’s RaTG13 sample. In 2018, Baric literally referenced the “lethal human sequences” of the Mojiang mineshaft. Alina knew this pesky fact, but she blissfully continues:
This attenuated the virus, weakening its virulence by messing up the efficiency of its gene transcription. Encouragingly, Dr Baric and his colleagues found that inoculating aged mice with this TRS mutant could protect against a lethal SARS virus challenge. This change in TRS also meant that an attenuated version of the virus would not revert to virulence if it found itself in the same cell as a virulent version of the virus since its ability to start swapping sequences and repairing faulty parts had been compromised. Thus, they had made a weakened and recombination-resistant virus as ‘a candidate strategy for a broadly applicable, rapidly implementable CoV vaccine platform’. There is a note of hope, even triumph, in the final words of the paper’s discussion: ‘This attenuation strategy…could bring live-attenuated CoV vaccines within the reach of realization in the face of the ever-growing threat of new human and animal CoV-based epidemics.’
Matt and Alina just triumphally described the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in Baric’s lab. But the naive authors keep going:
Sadly, this (UNC) technology was not developed in time to contribute to ending the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be other kinds of novel vaccines, messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccines and recombinant vector vaccines, rather than live attenuated vaccines, that would come to the rescue of humanity during 2021.
The authors infer Shi’s lab could “copy these techniques” used in Baric’s lab. In their mind Shi doesn’t share sequences, but Baric shares a lifetime of knowledge. While Shi was still researching prawns in 2003, Baric had patented his reverse genetic system.
It is with great irony that the author who wrote the modern day book on Adam Smith’s free trade cannot comprehend the free trade of bat samples. And the division of labor involved in creating a novel genome like SARS2.
A real coverup?
In 2021, Alina claimed Shi “broke that link between the Mojiang mine” by renaming the 4991 sample to RaTG13. She wrote:
It is as if you discover a unicorn and you compare it with other horses, describing in detail the hair and the hooves, but you don’t mention the horn. This was also the paper that first mentioned RaTG13 by its new name and did not connect it to the 4991 SARS-like virus sequence published in 2016 or to the mysterious pneumonia cases in 2012 that had spurred Chinese research teams to scour the Mojiang mine for viruses. If this were the plot of a novel, the reader would think something was up.
Alina then had to “sleuth” out the connection of the three dead miners to the RaTG13 sample, but this was reported in Jan 31, 2020.
Fauci was even passing around that same report on Feb 1 at 3AM, but Alina and Matt led everyone on a three year wild goose chase. They are now helping Fauci cover up a true Western scientific coverup!
From the Jon Cohen Science article that Fauci forwarded to everyone:
Daszak and Shi's group have for 8 years been trapping bats in caves around China to sample their feces and blood for viruses. He says they have sampled more than 10,000 bats and 2000 other species. They have found some 500 novel coronaviruses, about 50 of which fall relatively close to the SARS virus on the family tree, including RaTG13—it was fished out of a bat fecal sample they collected in 2013 from a cave in Mojiang in Yunnan province.
Alina, who was the queen of RaTG13 and mentioned it 83 times in her book, suddenly stopped talking about it after 2022, because she wrote:
If all the WIV’s virus sequences were indeed saved in GenBank, why was the full genome of the RaTG13 virus (a 96% match to SARS2) only made available after SARS2 had emerged?
We learned that Shi partially uploaded the RaTG13 sequence to the NIH server (Genbank) back in 2018. This allowed Baric to download RaTG13 and turn it into his patented SARS-CoV-2 genome.
“All our research results are published in English journals in the form of papers,” Shi said in 2020. “Virus sequences are saved in the [US-run] GenBank database too. It's completely transparent. We have nothing to hide.”
Matt from England had something to hide during a US book tour in 2022. This was well after DARPA Defuse leaked; well after the SARS2 furin cleavage site was found in a 2018 UNC paper; well after the US Navy collected the Laos Banal bat samples in 2017. None of these three American facts jived with the Brit’s new book, so he neglected to mention any of these dirty American details to the American audience.
Matt started his own bizarre conspiracy theory, and claimed Shi (via EcoHealth) had a copy of Laos Banal samples. As if the Pentagon would share its top secret bat loot with the Chinese? Ask yourself a simple logic question, if Shi had or knew about Laos samples, why not publish them instead of the Mojiang mineshaft headache called RaTG13? Matt still won’t answer why Shi even published RaTG13.
The WIV database was another conspiracy these two authors got carried away with.
The records showed that the database had gone offline on 12 September 2019 between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. local time. It stayed that way except for a few short spells from December to February, during which there was no record of external access from outside the WIV…
We think that even if the burden of proof was on the laboratory leak initially, it has since shifted. That the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, got to Wuhan via scientists shifts the burden of proof. So does the obfuscation and misdirection in the story of the Mojiang miners. So does the existence of the other eight SARS-CoV-2-like viruses from the mine. So does the missing database of more than twenty-two thousand entries.
The authors mentioned the missing database nearly 75 times, but it was biologically impossible to publish something closer than RaTG13. Shi passed the lab leak audit, because someone else failed.
Most of the authors research was poached from DRASTIC, which they derisively called “the sleuths.” But you can tell neither one of them ‘sleuthed’ since both are clueless to the details of this complex saga. Alina is from Singapore and old enough to remember the deadly SARS1 spillover event in 2003. She published a preprint comparing SARS1 to SARS2, claiming it was “well adapted for humans,” as if humans are the only mammal on the planet?
Compare a SARS1 natural origin, which showed a lot of genetic diversity, versus SARS2 with very low genetic diversity. As if SARS2 was pre-adapted in a lab using human airway epithelial cells (HAE). Per Baric, the “limited genetic diversity suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”
That “single source” was Baric’s colleague, Dr Danielle Anderson in the BSL4. So when Shi published RaTG13 and proudly declared SARS2 did not come from ‘my lab,’ she was pointing the finger at her Western colleagues.
This was the easiest jigsaw puzzle to solve, once you sort through the propaganda. Alina now claims the above Wuhan photo was “staged.” The only distraction was the author’s obsession with Shi Zhengli, so here is a suggestion for a follow up book that will age like fine wine.
