If you think Covid infects humanized mice

You also believe it infects raccoon dogs from a Wuhan wet market

At the onset of the Covid outbreak, there was significant confusion about how the virus spread, as no lab could replicate SARS2 transmission, let alone sustain an infection. Two distinct in vivo tests emerged: which lab animals could be infected and which could transmit SARS2.

An effective animal model was crucial for testing treatments and halting transmission. Labs worldwide tried monkeys, ferrets, cats, and rabbits, but none proved viable. From the European CDC:

Among companion animal species, cats, ferrets and several hamster species are those most at risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which most likely originates from an infected human; in such situations, there is a very low risk of spillback infection to humans, and little or no animal-to-animal transmission, as indicated by genomic analysis…No sequences of SARS-CoV-2 originating from raccoon dogs have been uploaded to GISAID.

Mice, the workhorse of lab research, also failed—there was no SARS2 outbreak in lab mice.

Mice—easy to handle and breed—have long been the mainstay of biomedicine, and a good mouse model would be a boon for COVID-19 research. But they shrug off infection with SARS2 because the mouse ACE2 receptor has so many key differences from the human one. "It's funny how the virus can have such devastation in humans, and then you can give a million particles to a mouse and it's inert," said Timothy Sheahan, who is developing mouse COVID-19 models at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill.

Sheahan was a key participant in the 2018 DARPA Defuse document. “Humanized mice” were mentioned eight times in Defuse, while “bat" was referenced 350 times. Mice are everywhere, but Chinese bats are found only in Wuhan. Below are quotes from Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric’s colleague, Stanley Perlmann:

Virologists hoped the new virus would multiply in mice. They’re cheap and plentiful and easy to work with, meaning that important experiments could get started quicker. No such luck, it seems. When a group in Wuhan led by virologist Shi Zheng-Li adorned cells with receptors from a variety of mammals, the team found the virus could latch onto those of horseshoe bats, civets, and pigs — but not mice.

About 15 years ago, Perlman’s [University of Iowa coronavirus] lab engineered some [humanized] mice to have the receptors SARS1 co-opts to gain entry into our cells. But maintaining that colony was work in and of itself. Lab members had to keep propagating them, swiping skin and tail samples to check that they still had the desired genetic makeup.

Ironically, nearly every lab leak hypothesis converged on “humanized” mice as the intermediary species. Lab leakers like Richard Ebright, Alina Chan, and Matt Ridley still believe that mice are the intermediary species. It makes sense: a manmade mouse infected with Covid bites a lab technician from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), who then breathes on a friend at the Wuhan wet market, and a pandemic is born!

Peter Daszak @PeterDaszak

Not true - we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs, ID’ing >50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, ID’ing ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines...

The rumor about humanized mice began with Peter Daszak in November 2019. Daszak’s EcoHealth even funded the WIV to collaborate with Baric on chimeras in humanized mice.

Nearly every lab leak article referenced “humanized mice,” which was effective clickbait!

“The mice had been ‘humanized,’ meaning they were engineered to express a protein found in people, with the goal being to assess how the virus might react in humans.”

Fauci’s NIAID spent $12M to raise Chinese “horseshoe bats” in Colorado

There was one major issue: SARS2 does not infect humanized mice. The father of coronavirus research, Ralph Baric, stated that SARS2 did not infect mice. Baric then modified the SARS2 strain so it could infect standard lab mice. Without Baric’s reverse genetic work, the out-of-the-(BSL4)-box virus would not infect mice.

• Baric said he hates Prolines but referenced Perlman’s PAT7 in 2019.

Baric and Perlman’s humanized mice (K18) serve as a SARS2 infection model (not transmission) but die of brain swelling (unlike humans).

Early in the pandemic, Baric sent Shi humanized (i.e., transgenic) mice, and they co-published a paper on them. However, the mice had “brain infections” without transmission. What are humanized (BLT-L) mice? The rated R warning is linked here, but no SARS2 “transmission” exists.

Republicans recently debated transgenic mice (e.g., hACE2) versus transgender mice. But they previously grilled Fauci about mice. According to Fauci’s own truthful testimony, “anyone who knows anything about virology” understands that humanized mice (also known as hACE2) are not a “pathogenic or transmissible” model for SARS2.

A lab mouse didn’t sneeze or bite a Wuhan lab technician, nor did it spread Covid worldwide within weeks. How do we know?

In 2014, Baric said, when it comes to SARS and MERS, there are key differences between people and mice. “No. 1, mice don't sneeze,” says Baric, so they don't transmit these diseases through the air. And he says the process of adapting these viruses to mice actually makes the germs less able to infect human cells. “They're safer,” says Baric.

Everyone makes fun of Baric’s “sneeze” line but forgets the second line: “The process of adapting these coronaviruses to mice actually makes the germs less able to infect human cells.” How do we know?

Lab mice accidents have occurred 6 times at UNC, yet a lab technician has never been “sickened.” Theoretically, we could eat mice infected with SARS2 and belch the leftovers into the air, but we would not fall ill. This was the beauty of Baric's in vivo mouse model. His “humanized” mice were a failsafe against a human pandemic. 

Baric stated he sent the WIV a breeding pair in 2016-17 (2024 testimony page 203). The MTA specified he was the first to publish. Just as Shi shared bat samples with Baric, he also shared mice with Wuhan.

In 2013, Baric’s postdoc said, “As we know, mice don’t sneeze or cough, so we can’t do transmission studies in mice.”

Washing out the nose of a mouse and squirting it up the nose of another is not respiratory transmission. Mice are very poor models for the respiratory transmission of coronaviruses. Never in the history of SARS2 has one mouse infected another mouse with SARS2.

2014 photo of a raccoon dog in Wuhan's wet market by Eddie Holmes

I’ve asked many people on the internet to provide one paper showing SARS2 infecting “humanized” mice? I always get a raccoon dog experiment—a forced laboratory infection using a large amount of virus shoved up the nose of the animal.

We inoculated intranasally with SARS-CoV-2 strain HB-01 at a dosage of 100,000 50% tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) per 50 μl inoculum volume per mouse

We intranasally inoculated nine naive raccoon dogs with 100,000 50% tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) SARS-CoV-2 2019_nCoV Muc-IMB-1.

For reference, Syrian hamsters only require 5 infectious particles. The “first lab leaker,” Li-Meng Yan, co-published the hamster transmission model. Before the pandemic, she was a postdoc at Hong Kong University. A Hong Kong pet store named Little Boss had a sad 2022 follow-up story. It was a Covid trifecta of infection, transmission, and spillback outside a lab. It was a clue of where Covid came from.

In 2021, Yan prophetically wrote in her first of three lab leak reports, “It is noteworthy that, based on the work done on SARS-CoV, the hACE2-mice, although suitable for SARS-CoV-2 adaptation, is not a good model to reflect the virus’ transmissibility and associated clinical symptoms in humans. We believe that those scientists might not have used a proper animal model (such as the golden Syrian hamster) to test the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak of COVID-19. If they had done this experiment with a proper animal model, the highly contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 would be extremely evident. Consequently, SARS-CoV-2 would not have been described as “not causing human-to-human transmission” at the start of the outbreak.”

WP article based on Munster et al

In March 2020, Fauci and Munster exchanged emails downplaying Covid’s airborne contagion. They compared SARS2 to SARS1 and experimented with cardboard boxes. Munster and his Dutch colleagues called airborne transmission “plausible.” But Munster’s internal slides made it clear Covid lingered in the air for 30 minutes.

Fauci’s March 2020 email spreading Munster’s message

Rocky Mountain Lab scientists like Munster knew his Syrian hamsters were a transmission model, but he didn’t publish anything until 2021. Notice lab leak whistleblower Li-Meng Yan co-published Syrian hamster transmission in May 2020.

Yan published proof of a Wuhan lab leak in NATURE!

However, Munster used hamsters to prove that people were dying because of their fat “Western diets,” not his airborne bat vaccine. Munster even proposed hamsters as a transmission model in his 2018 DARPA PREEMPT project.

Syrian hamsters, the sneezing pets you had as a kid, are everywhere except the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Unlike hamsters, which transmit Covid, humanized mice from the WIV are a dead end for the pathogen. This type of mouse experiment was not a natural infection. Humans don’t inject each other with a virus; we breathe on one another, and the virus easily transmits through the air.

Remember the Taiwanese lab technician who was infected with SARS2 in late 2021? They claimed a humanized mouse bit her. Rootclaim held the best debate regarding this complicated subject. Peter Miller brilliantly explained that if there were a Wuhan lab leak involving humanized mice (called hACE2), it would have been this 2021 mutation (501Y) instead of the 2019 virgin virus, called lineage A, B, or WA1.

A later variant of SARS2, 501Y, from 2021, could infect mice through “contact transmission.” However, the ancestral strains (lineage A/B/WA1) do not infect mice. One 2020 paper, referenced nearly 70 times, claimed aerosol transmission between hACE2 mice but noted “no viral RNA was detected in any of the samples.” That means no onward transmission or mouse-to-mouse transmission, unlike human-to-human Covid transmission.

Before the outbreak

In February 2018, Daszak stayed up late in his Swiss hotel working on a rough draft of the DARPA Defuse document. USRTK obtained it, but the document—not the above headline—was the bombshell. Baric had a patented chimera that was 20% different from SARS1, and SARS2 was 20% different. But the lab leak world focused on humanized mice.

The controversial Daszak comment (above) about subcontracting work to the WIV was in his final Defuse document (below).

Shi always conducted binding assays (PCR tests) and worked with humanized mice.

Baric’s BSL2-3 “freak out” comment was more about coronaviruses being cheaper to work on than BSL4 pathogens like “Ebola, Marburg, Hendra, Nipah.” However, Linfa Wang and Dani Anderson always used a BSL4 for all live bat infection studies. The SARS2 “reservoir host” bat is not found in China but is found in Fauci’s biodefense lab in Montana.

After the outbreak

Fauci truthfully testified that his R01 subgrant to Shi’s BSL2 was “molecularly impossible” to create SARS2, a statement he often repeats because it is true. However, Fauci's funding of a project like DARPA Defuse made it molecularly possible to create SARS2. According to one Twitter account, “If humanized mice can't infect each other with Covid, the animal model(s) used for serial passaging become important.” All five animal models used for serial passaging are located in Fauci’s lab in Montana.

The Holland connection?

In 2023, the US Senate report, Muddy Waters, muddied the lab leak debate. They wrote:

While the DEFUSE proposal envisioned this work being done in the U.S., scientists at the WIV and other Wuhan based research institutes had demonstrated the ability and possessed the equipment necessary to insert a furin cleavage site in a related alpha coronavirus strain as early as 2015 (#1318).

Footnote 1318 was to a Utrecht University paper with a Wuhan postdoc. Lab leakers, like Ebright, often referenced this Utrech paper (UNC of Holland) as proof that Shi could engineer the SARS2 furin cleavage site. Why? Because there are 0 papers in China showing interest in a SARS-like furin cleavage site. Ebright, a Harvard-educated biology professor at Rutgers, conflates postdoc research, co-authorship, and humanized mice with SARS2. And Congressional reports used his lab leak footnotes, which muddied the water.

Dutch newspaper follow up

Last week, Toine de Graaf of De Andere Krant brought attention to Munster’s postdoc work in the Rotterdam lab of Ab Osterhaus. Ab sounds like the Fauci of Holland. When Ab was asked: What do you think is the most over-hyped field of science or medicine at the moment? “The threat posed by bioterrorism, keeping in mind that ‘Nature’ is the main bioterrorist.”

This week, Toine published an offline summary of the online debate that Jan Bonte and I had on Twitter. Jan claimed that Munster wasn’t connected to DARPA Defuse, but after Baric lost Defuse, he teamed up with DARPA winner Munster. This SARS2 connection to the Egyptian fruit bat led me to tell Ebright that in 2022, Covid was a contagious bat vaccine developed in Fauci’s personal biodefense lab. This irony highlights my US lab origin theory: I get along with virologists but debate fellow lab leakers. Toine writes:

Haslam's book is intriguing from the first to the last page, but it is based on a hypothesis that can also be (partly) incorrect, as experience shows. Immediately after the publication of our newspaper with ample attention for the American book, Jan Bonte on X made mincemeat of Haslam's hypothesis, which he responded to immediately. Bonte accuses Haslam of being "way off on a number of points" and is convinced that Munster has nothing to do with the development of sars-cov-2. "Munster was not asked to do the molecular work at all," he writes. "Baric and Shi would do that." He, therefore, believes that Shi is wrongly acquitted by Haslam, who in turn sticks to his view.

This week, we initiated an email exchange with Bonte for further clarification. He revealed that he has been following Haslam, who has a substack and is active on X, for “quite some time.” But his position lacks “hard evidence,” according to Bonte, who acknowledges “certainly similarities” between their views. “But I have documentation that he does not have, and the claim that Baric would need anything from Munster is completely out of the blue.” According to Bonte, the focus should be on Shi: “The fact is that Shi had all the techniques to make sars-cov-2.” Haslam, meanwhile, asked Bonte at X for evidence of a leak from Shi's lab. In response, Bonte reports in our email exchange that he has this and will reveal it in the revised edition of his Wuhan Trilogy. That is now at the printer “and is estimated to be available within two weeks.” Despite Bonte's harsh criticism, it remains that big names like cardiologist Peter McCullough and professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University do give credence to Haslam's vision.

Meanwhile, renowned virologist Angela (“Angie”) Rasmussen congratulated Haslam on his book. Sachs led a study for the medical journal The Lancet, a committee investigating the origin of sars-cov-2. He, like Haslam, believes the University of North Carolina should immediately release Baric's 2019 emails to provide clarity.

“I have no idea why Sachs supports Haslam's vision,” Bonte emailed. “With all due respect, Sachs is wrong here too, as is Haslam.” The fact is that Haslam and Bonte cannot both be right. If you look at it from a helicopter view, you can see that two Wuhan researchers who put an enormous amount of time into their books can agree on the big picture but have differing opinions on the details. And continue tirelessly. Bonte reports on X that the revised version of his Wuhan Trilogy is now 1335 pages and 2527 notes. Haslam continues to post weekly about the issue on his substack, on which he gave extensive coverage of our book review last Sunday. In it, he also gave insight into the questions he has submitted to Munster over time that have gone unanswered. The Newspaper has also still not heard from Munster.

These latest Substack posts didn’t fit the book, but the Munster evidence was overwhelming. I’m grateful that Toine has asked Munster for a response because I don’t believe we should defend a man who won’t defend himself.

Lab leak ‘fake’ news?

Prof Noymer writes in a San Diego newspaper:

The lab leak theory in a nutshell: some experiment similar to that proposed in DEFUSE was conducted, and the virus escaped the lab, which is not unusual. This explains why Wuhan, why the FCS, why no infected species of Chinese fauna, as well as the extreme resistance of the scientific establishment to talk about COVID origins. What is more, use of humanized mice likely explains why COVID started like a house on fire — instead of haltingly, like bird flu.

So I write:

Prof. Noymer’s opinion piece falsely claims that Covid infects humanized mice. Never in Covid's history has one lab mouse infected another. Mice don’t sneeze, explains Prof. Ralph Baric of UNC, so they cannot transmit diseases through the air. Adapting coronaviruses to humanized mice makes them less able to infect humans. The proof? Six lab mouse accidents occurred at UNC, yet the technician was never “sickened.”

To claim Covid infects humanized mice is to promote raccoon dogs in the Wuhan wet market—each requires 100,000 infectious particles, but neither transmits the disease. For instance, Syrian hamsters, which need only five infectious particles, were identified as a transmission model but are absent in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

While cats and dogs do not transmit Covid, North American white-tailed deer certainly do. It later emerged that American mink, deer, deer mice, hamsters, and lab bats efficiently transmit the disease from Wuhan. All five are housed at Rocky Mountain Lab, which won two of five DARPA PREEMPT projects. If a virus is engineered, its spillover location—like Wuhan—doesn’t indicate where it was created—such as NIAID’s biodefense lab in Montana.

Shi’s biological alibi

For those who claim Shi inserted the furin cleavage site, the latest Steven Quay paper argues that it was “statistically improbable” to publish a SARS2 paper within three weeks, but inadvertently highlights Shi’s innocence:

Virus isolation in Vero E6 cells requires serial passaging…These factors introduce significant variability in experimental timelines, making a 21-day full characterization unlikely without prior access to SARS-CoV-2.

On January 5, 2020, Shi’s WIV lab used Vero (monkey) cells to isolate the SARS2 genome, which meant they inadvertently deleted the SARS2 furin cleavage site. How do we know? Because Western labs like the US CDC did the same.

Using lentiviral pseudotypes and a cell-culture-adapted SARS-CoV-2 virus with an S1/S2 deletion, we show that the polybasic insertion endows SARS-CoV-2 with a selective advantage in lung cells and primary human airway epithelial cells, but impairs replication in Vero E6, a cell line used for passaging SARS-CoV-2.

Western labs needed Baric’s primary human airway epithelial cells (HAE) to keep the furin cleavage site. What HAE?

In April 2022, I told Ebright that Shi’s Vero cells would have deleted the SARS2 furin cleavage. Months later, he then lied to Congress by claiming Baric’s HAE was in Wuhan. He also conflated in vivo research (mice) with in vitro (HAE).

In a recent German media interview, Ebright continues this SARS2 lie because humanized mice are safe.

At least one new virus was created that exhibited 10,000-fold viral growth in [mice] lungs, 1,000,000-fold viral growth in the [mice] brain, and a threefold increase in [mice] lethality.

As Baric comically responded to making coronaviruses more dangerous? “If you're a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to.”

Ebright informs the German media about Kristian Andersen’s private Slack messages, yet he fails to mention that Baric “attacked” Andersen in an unredacted Slack message. Although Ebright is scarcely referenced in the book, it now becomes clear why I wrote it. He unwittingly participated in the Fauci-led cover-up.

Restriction sites

Quay published another WIV paper highlighting the well-documented SARS2 restriction sites.

Given the well-documented use of BsaI and BsmBI in synthetic virology, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s published methods for manipulating coronaviruses using these enzymes, the observed restriction site pattern in SARS-CoV-2 warrants further investigation.

Baric testified that the WIV used a different technology (BAC) than his No See’m system (cDNA).

They use baculoviruses, and their molecular clone is a virus called WIV1, which I don't think they engineered with class IIS restriction enzymes that don't leave any sequence. So I think there's a sequence signature in that virus. I would have to go back and reread the paper.

Baric then proceeded to brag and self-incriminate:

I can tell you what things we put in place in the 2015 paper. For example, although we published the approaches for building molecular clones of coronaviruses, we never had anyone from Dr. Shi's lab or any of the Wuhan Institute of Virology come to our lab and train. We never taught them. In fact, if you look at their cloning technology, they use baculoviruses. They may assemble some of the full length molecule using some of the enzymes that we have, but they implant it directly into an insect virus to maintain it as a baculovirus, which was a technology developed in Europe, not my technology. We think our approach is safer because we've divided the genome into six pieces.

“Six pieces,” just like Bruttel et al, “SARS-CoV-2 yields 6 fragments.”

Quay is getting warmer with UNC and ENaC

https://zenodo.org/records/15062163

The convergence of UNC’s work in these fields, including furin cleavage site engineering, ENaC cleavage studies, and the development of humanized ACE2 models, presents a pattern that deserves further scientific scrutiny. Given the extremely low probability that the SARS-CoV-2 FCS evolved naturally with an exact match to ENaC, independent investigations into these research intersections are warranted.

In March 2018, Baric received IBC approval to experiment with the SARS2 furin cleavage site (ENaC = RRAR/SVAS).