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Dr. Deepak Natarajan's avatar

May I say an extremely insightful piece on the origin of SARS-CoV-2? I would urge that anyone interested in the subject must read Jim's book, which is the best work on the subject.

To make things easier to understand without changing the truth, Baric made a novel synthetic virus by adding 4 amino acids (furin cleavage site) that allowed it to infect Egyptian bats that were previously immune to other coronaviruses, including RaTG13 that was found by the Chinese Bat Lady. The Chinese Bat Lady then wrote about this virus in the third week of January 2020, making it clear that her virus, while very similar to SARS-CoV-2, did NOT have the furin cleavage amino acids. This was a signal to the world that she had not designed nor leaked SARS-CoV-2 from her lab, which was distinct from the WIV lab.The virus created by Baric was subsequently made airborne by Munster, who had the necessary expertise to do so. The airborne Baric/Munster virus was transported to the WIV laboratory to be tested in Chinese horseshoe bats.

.interestingly, the first man to be detected with SARS-CoV-2 in Washington had travelled from Wuhan with a virus identical to the one recognised as SARS-CoV-2 by the CDC; the difference lay in only 3 nucleotides and one amino acid. The hospital admitted this patient who had been suffering from fever and cough for the past four days. He remained ill for 11 days, had a clear X-ray initially but developed atypical pneumonia around the 10th day, and had a course of heavy antibiotics for his fever.The same patient (remember the first reported in the USA) was administered an experimental drug on "compassionate" grounds; he had a magical transformation by the next day; he became entirely asymptomatic and was soon discharged from the hospital. This was the first advertisement for remdesivir to treat Covid, despite a paper on Ebola reporting mortality of 50% with the same drug (also published by the same journal).

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191

Let's now shift our focus to Munster, where he authored a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 20, 2020, in which he goes to enormous lengths about surveilling the new virus from China and the effects of quarantine. He makes no mention of the virus's potential for airborne transmission! His expertise in the field of virology is widely known, which is why he received an invitation to be the chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIAID.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2000929

If someone is still unable to grasp the chronology of events in the building of SARS-CoV-2, the explanation is not that the individual is incapable but rather is reluctant to.

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Gilgamech's avatar

So was it quite unlucky then that an animal to human spillover (horseshoe bat to Dani) happened when the horseshoe bat actually was not such a great candidate for transmission as say an Egyptian fruit bat would have been? (Hence the suggestion of a needle stick accident?) Or have I got that the wrong way around?

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