New Canadian book
Excerpts and discussion on the lab leak Chapter 2
COVID-19 Pandemonium: A Pandemic of Ignorance, Fear, and Greed: The Capture of Our Institutions
Two Canadian scientists, Dr. Steven Pelech & Dr. Christopher A. Shaw, published two books on COVID-19: one opinionated book last year, and another scientific book this year. They recently discussed the contents of both books with
Unlike mine, their COVID-19 Pandemonium book is heavily footnoted, but they are willing to have an adult conversation about Ralph Baric of UNC. They permitted me to quote parts of Chapter 2, titled “The Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” where they start with the early outbreak:
In Canada, the first reported presumptive COVID-19 case, later confirmed, was on January 25, 2020, in Toronto. It was a male in his fifties who had returned from Wuhan, China. Earlier in the same month, the CDC reported the first laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 case in the US from samples taken from a 35-year-old man on January 18, 2020, in Snohomish County, Washington. The patient had also returned to the US from Wuhan a few days earlier, on January 15, 2020. There are indications of a much earlier presence of the SARS2 virus in North America than late January 2020. Serological testing of US blood donor samples collected by the American Red Cross between December 13 and January 20 revealed the presence of SARS2 antibodies in 1.4% of the 7,389 samples tested. Of the 90 SARS2 antibody-positive samples available for testing, 84 had neutralizing activity for blocking spike receptor-binding domain (RBD) binding to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in microneutralization tests. The RBD region of the viral spike permits the virus to attach and gain entry into cells through interaction with ACE2 expressed on the surface of host cells.
In my book, I use those two North American patients (Toronto and Seattle in January 2020) to provide biological proof of a Wuhan area lab leak (~October 2019) and US area lab origin. These two travelers served as a 'return-to-sender' address, pointing directly to Rocky Mountain Lab. An American TV documentary explores the story of America’s Patient One:
Virologists share and send samples/vaccines around the world. The Canadian authors bring attention to the most infamous “cold chain” example:
In consideration of how lethal pathogens may escape from high level security laboratories, it is noteworthy that the WIV had formal ties with Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML), which is the country’s only BioSafety Level 4 facility located in Winnipeg. This was until WIV staff scientists Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Dr. Keding Cheng, who were also paid by the Canadian government, were escorted from the NML by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for undisclosed reasons in July 2019. This couple was later fired in January 2021. Apparently, Dr. Qiu was responsible for a shipment of 15 strains of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the WIV earlier in March 2019, but the details of her and her husband’s firing and their whereabouts was a matter of Canadian federal government secrecy until recently.
My background of that Canadian story
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/files/editorial/politics/nw-na-labs/winnipeg-scientists-doc.pdf
Over 600 pages from a Canadian investigation were released to The Globe and Mail. It concerns Xiangguo Qiu, the scientist dismissed from Winnipeg's BSL4 lab. Qiu raised concerns about the Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) paperwork, particularly regarding the ownership of outbreak isolates. She found it unusual, but Western scientists often seek to monetize vaccines and treatments derived from such isolates. From Macleans:
But the focus on commercialization and intellectual property meant another layer of scrutiny: making sure that Canada retained ownership and credit for everything it reasonably could claim ownership and credit for. A former colleague says Qiu, and some of her colleagues, sometimes found themselves at odds with the intellectual property office. While Qiu was “extremely hardworking,” they say she was sometimes guilty of “playing a little bit fast and loose with the rules.” But, they stress, Qiu wasn’t the only one who bristled at the idea of worrying about paperwork and intellectual property rules, as scientists tried to make breakthroughs that promised to save thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Scientists are a weird bunch,” the former colleague says. “They’re willing to take the [funding] . . . but don’t like the idea of following all the rules.”
Notice the Canadian comment below about the difficulty of dealing with US labs. This is Linfa Wang’s comment on US labs, “Only in the US do BSL4 facilities worry about bioterrorism.”
Thirteen Ebola strains, two Nipah strains, and one Hendra strain were legally shipped from Canada to Wuhan on a commercial airline jet.
International virology is like an “anarchical society,” where BSL4 labs have “daily interactions with other labs within China and across the world.”
For more on the exact samples:
https://x.com/Engineer2The/status/1874314964745543756
In other words, if a virus is engineered, wherever it spilled over into the human population does not tell where it was engineered.
Rocky Mountain Lab logistics
The USRTK FOIA of Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab showed his preference for the MTA or Material Transfer Agreement.
Per NIH:
A Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) formalizes the transfer of materials between a provider and recipient for non-commercial research purposes. The following are typical materials that can be sent or received under an MTA such as lab mice, genomic DNA, antibodies, plasmids, vectors, cell lines, etc.
Per DARPA (Munster won but Daszak & Baric lost):
Samples taken from the bats at the study locations will be sent to Rocky Mountain Labs, the National Institutes of Health facility in Hamilton, Montana, that is specially equipped to study emerging pathogens.
Per Daszak’s losing DARPA Defuse bid:
Ebola scientist Heinz Feldmann, Vincent Munster's current boss, led Winnipeg's BSL4 lab special pathogens program from its opening in 1999 until 2008. In 2009, Feldmann became the chief of virology at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana—the same year Munster moved to America on a J1 visa, the academic counterpart to the H1B visa. NIAID sponsors the J1 visa of top scientists but relocates them to a small town in Montana to focus on bat vaccines.
More from Chapter 2 of the new Canadian book
Moreover, it seems that the gain-of-function research that may have led to the creation of SARS2 was originally supported by researchers in the US. In particular, two articles published in 2015 and 2016 in the journal Nature Medicine from Dr. Ralph Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the Chinese government appear to be smoking guns. In the 2015 publication entitled “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence,” also co-authored with Dr. Shi Zhengli, the team produced a chimeric coronavirus that combined portions of the genome of a horseshoe bat SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, with portions of a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-1 virus to encode a modified spike protein. This chimeric spike protein was able to bind to the human ACE2 protein, and the hybrid virus efficiently replicated in primary human airway cells in culture, and infected mice causing respiratory lung disease, which was poorly responsive to available monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches. The second 2016 publication, SARS-like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence, further documents that although the chimeric WIV1-CoV viruses could infect humans, they undergo limited transmission, and “additional adaptation is required for epidemic disease.”
Such adaptation apparently was undertaken at the WIV in China, because such gain-of-function research in the US was outlawed from 2014 to 2017 when the moratorium was lifted. A freedom of information (FOIA) request to the U.S. Department of the Interior, revealed in the 1,412-page document that Dr. Peter Daszak, who was the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Baric and his former graduate student Dr. Shi Zhengli submitted their DEFUSE grant application in 2018 to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to further fund gain-of-function research with SARS-related coronaviruses at the WIV. The FOI response records discussion that Dr. Baric “has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD [receptor binding domain] from group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1), which is 20% different than epidemic strains, and S2 region from HK3 which is 20% diff ” (page 483) and “the genome of consensus candidates will be synthesized commercially (e.g. BioBasic), as six contiguous cDNA pieces linked by unique restriction endonuclease sites for full length genome assembly” (page 857). Dr. Baric had previously used BsmBI restriction endonuclease sites and enzymes in genetic engineering with the MERS-CoV in 2013. As mentioned earlier, BsmBI and BsI restriction endonuclease sites are strikingly evenly spaced out in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Moreover, Dr. Baric planned to introduce a furin cleavage site in their SARS-like chimeras in the DEFUSE grant application; this site is found in SARS-CoV-2, but not SARS-CoV-1 or the Chinese SARS-related CoV – Rhinolophus bat viruses (page 859). Moreover, the location of the furin cleavage site was to be introduced at the S1/S2 boundary in the spike protein, which exactly matches the position of the furin cleavage site on SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. The DEFUSE project proposed to engineer twenty or more chimeric SARS related viral spike proteins per year and two to five full-length SARS-related viruses, some of which would be developed at the WIV at a lower biosafety level (BSL) (i.e., BSL2) to reduce costs. By contrast, the handling of SARS CoV-2 in the US and Canada has been restricted to no lower than BSL3-related facilities.
Baric’s 2024 testimony on those COVID-19 restriction sites
Baric criticized the Bruttel et al. paper, calling it “biostatistical BS” during his testimony.
The second thing is, they do count six pieces, but one of the pieces is about 8 KB and the other is about 300 base pairs. If you look at any of the molecular clones that I've engineered, with SARS, they're usually 5 KB apart, so that you have five or six KB pieces that you can work. Having a tiny little piece like that, if I looked at it, that would irritate me, like, to no end, and we would silence it, one of those sites. And then separate this, so that the fragments are of equal size. The first size piece is also too small, and so it leaves larger pieces, and the larger clones are unstable with passage.
So you would want it more equally distributed, unless there was a region that was super toxic. If there was a toxic region, then you would have a little piece. There's no toxic site there. So this is biostatistical BS, in my opinion.
Below is the only full-length genome (SHC014-MA15) that Baric has ever published. He kept his methods “obscure” so the Chinese couldn’t copy them. Ironically, Baric released this 2015 genome in 2020 to quiet the Wuhan lab leak rumors linking his research to the WIV.
The six segments in the SARS2 genome (~30,000 nucleotides) are not evenly distributed. The final segment is 1/3 of the genome (~10,000 nucleotides). But Baric testified that all his engineered segments are “usually 5 KB apart” (5,000 nucleotides). His 2024 testimony was “biostatistical BS.”
Notably, Baric didn’t remove the BglI restriction sites in the 2015 genome, likely because they aren't usable for No See’m engineering. BglI is a type IIG enzyme, not an IIS enzyme, meaning it can't remove its own sites. However, hiding restriction sites is typically a one-time process, so Baric left them intact for future genome modifications (and scientific reproducibility). As a German scientist said, 'Scarless is kinda one-time use, especially with a 30 kb fragment.
There is nothing nefarious about Baric’s No See’m engineering technique. He’s not attempting to conceal scars from a potential lab leak but rather to obscure them from a mammal’s immune system. If the Chinese lab animal perceives Baric’s synthetic genome as 'natural,' its immune system will accept the genome, become infected, and produce antibodies.
In 2016, Baric used a similar SARS2 system (6 segments with 5 restriction sites), leaving the sites intact. By early 2020, he covered his biological tracks and later claimed in testimony that this method wasn’t how it was done, raising doubts about his prior statements.
And it's a pathetic piece of work. By the way, you can see how I engineered the SARS-CoV-2 genome since it's published, and you will see that it's completely different than this.
To be more precise, Baric coordinated the coverup with his postdoc, Vineet Menachery, now at UTMB Galveston. They split the six segments of SARS2 into seven segments (including the small 600 nucleotide segment Baric complained about), placing a new restriction site between every existing restriction site. In other words, Baric created an alibi in 2020 for future 2024 testimony that doesn’t hold water.
Wild Wild West
Menachery called Baric’s lab the “Wild Wild West,” and Baric was “the big cheese.”
What’s in your freezer Dr Baric?
I discussed the most crucial evidence with one of the Canadian authors who wrote in the book:
A freedom of information (FOIA) request to the (USGS), revealed in the 1,412-page document that Dr. Peter Daszak, who was the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Baric and his former graduate student Dr. Shi Zhengli submitted their DEFUSE grant application in 2018 to DARPA to further fund gain-of-function research with SARS-related coronaviruses at the WIV. The FOIA response records discussion that Dr. Baric “has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD [receptor binding domain] from group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1), which is 20% different than epidemic strains, and S2 region from HK3 which is 20% diff”
On his DEFUSE grant application, back in 2018, Baric confessed to having a spike protein less than <1% different from SARS2. Since “epidemic strains” (aka SARS1) are 20% different from SARS2, this meant Baric had a spike protein less than <1% different from SARS2. At the amino acid level, the spike proteins on SARS2 are about 80% identical to those on SARS1 (or 20% diff).
It gets very complicated to compare nucleotides or amino acids (3 nucleotides per amino acid). Or compare spikes (~4,000 nucleotides) to the entire genome (~30,000 nucleotides). The Canadian scientist performed a blast (comparison) using the whole genome based on SARS2 and 279 (293 is a typo, so it’s a 279 coronavirus collected in 2005). Co-author Steven Pelech wrote to me:
Your substack article has a nice bit of sleuthing with respect to origin of SARS-CoV-2 and connection with Dr. Ralph Baric.
Calculations of the percent identities between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 in the literature have been confusing since it depends on whether the nucleotide or amino acids sequences are being compared. Ultimately, it is the protein sequence that is important from a functional standpoint and there are 29 proteins encoded by the genomes of these viruses. I have personally compared the amino acid sequence of the structural proteins in SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 using Clustal O (1.2.4) multiple sequence alignments and
1) The spike proteins are 77.3% identical
2) The nucleocapsid proteins are 89.74% identical
3) The membrane proteins are 89.59% identical
For your possible interest, the percent amino acid identities for these proteins between the SARS-CoV-2 virus compared to the bat 279/2005 coronavirus are calculated as:
1) The spike proteins are 76.8% identical
2) The nucleocapsid proteins are 88.76% identical
3) The membrane proteins are 90.5% identical
For your possible interest, the percent amino acid identities between these proteins for the SARS-CoV-1 virus for compared to the bat 279/2005 coronavirus are calculated as:
1) The spike proteins are 80.79% identical
2) The nucleocapsid proteins are 97.14% identical
3) The membrane proteins are 97.29% identical
Thus, in these three important coronavirus structural proteins, it is evident that the closest bat coronavirus, which is 96.8% genetically identical to SARS-CoV-2 in nucleotide sequence is still more closely related to SARS-CoV-1, which itself does not have a furin cleavage site in the spike protein. Genetic manipulation in the lab is most likely to account for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Baric’s chimera vs blasted genomes
Most lab leak scientists do not understand the virological concept of Baric’s chimera. According to the 1,412-page FOIA, Baric “has already generated SARS-like chimeras…which is 20% different” from SARS1. From my Substack post:
According to Greek mythology (and Wikipedia), a chimera is any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals, to describe anything composed of disparate parts or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling.
Dr Ralph Baric’s chimera is dazzling to nature’s eyes because Mother Nature has never seen a novel chimera like SARS-CoV-2. In virology, a chimera is a virus that contains genetic material derived from two or more distinct viruses. According to a 2018 meeting about the DARPA Defuse proposal, Baric has built a novel chimera that was 20% different than anything in China.
Chapter Two of the Canadian book continues
Although the DEFUSE grant was not funded by DARPA, Dr. Daszak has received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) PREDICT program, the Gates Foundation and WellcomeTrust’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, and National Institute of Autoimmune and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 2019, the team proposed for the DEFUSE project worked together with NIAID funding.
When the WHO recruited a panel of international scientists to investigate the possibility of SARS2 being the result of a lab leak at the WIV, Dr. Daszak, was the US emissary in the team, which downplayed the possibility. Dr. Daszuk also did not disclose his involvement in DEFUSE when he led The Lancet’s COVID-origins investigation, and he later coauthored an article with Dr. Baric and other DEFUSE grant applicants in The Lancet that claimed that lab origin theories were “conspiracy theories.”
COVID-19 Pandemonium: A Pandemic of Ignorance, Fear, and Greed: The Capture of Our Institutions will be available via Ekstasis Press in January 2025.
My suspects of lab leak
The October 2018 virology meeting in Wuhan was an impressive list of SARS2 suspects. Most of the scientists in this 2018 Wuhan photograph are on NIAID’s payroll. The list included Shi Zhengli of WIV, Ralph Baric of UNC, Linda Saif of OSU (who helped Baric cover up), Tony Schountz of CSU (DARPA Preempt winner), Danielle Anderson (DARPA Defuse) and Chris Broder (NIAID CREID winner).
Other NIAID funded researchers included Peter Daszak of EcoHealth, Fang Li from the University of Minnesota (Baric’s FCS collaborator), Peiyong Shi of UTMB (aka the ghost but no relation to Shi Zhengli), Shibo Jiang from Shanghai, and Linfa Wang of Duke who was a CREID winner with Danielle Anderson.
The 2018 group photo even included Xiangguo Qiu from Canada. Supposedly Qiu is back in China. But there were 0 Chinese military (PLA) members in Wuhan before 2020. The above faces are academics, not spies. The NBC News report alleged the PLA was in the BSL4, but it was based on a University of Minnesota paper. Dani had it all to herself. Wuhan was not a random spot on the map in 2018; it was an academic playground for live bat research.
Shi’s BSL2 vs Dani’s BSL4
Until January 24, 2020, the closest known sequence to SARS2 was a bat sample collected by a PLA lab nearly 500 miles from Wuhan. But when Shi published RaTG13 (96%) it was “much more closely related to (SARS2) than XC21 (86%) and ZC45 (87%) viruses.”
Just one week later, on February 2, Shi “guaranteed with my life that (SARS2) is not related to (my BSL2) lab.” In the summer of 2021, Shi told the NYT “my” lab was not involved in gain of function, and “I” did nothing wrong, so “I” have nothing to fear.
Can a ‘virus’ that floats 60 feet through the air leak from a low-level BSL2 lab? We were drawn to the lab leak debate because of the brand-new BSL4 lab in Wuhan. Most of the BSL4 details and pictures from Substack Post #1 were from Rodolphe de Maistre in France. Since French contractors designed the BSL4, he could deeply dive into the French documents.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PV4Br5WH2rQjMj1vImtDLAQlyGrf9-9U/edit#
Everyone who closely studied the BSL4 comes to the same conclusion: it was a fairly transparent, civilian lab built upon the idea of Western scientific collaboration. This is the reason Dani Anderson was inside the BSL4: to test Western-made bat vaccines on Chinese bats.
It is a myth that French scientists were kicked out of Wuhan by the Chinese military. There is zero evidence of any PLA scientists inside the Wuhan BSL4. Yes, the French left Wuhan, but UTMB Galveston became the training center for Wuhan in 2013. UNC began reverse engineering Chinese pathogens in 2015. For scientific or intelligence purposes? “The United States knows how to do both very well,” said the unnamed French official.
Baric or whomever could have removed all the BsaI/BsmBI sites, but perhaps left in some and perhaps removed others to mess with us. Showing that because they were left in that it wasn't engineered, and removing critical sites that would show it wasn't Baric for those still insisting it was engineered. Pretty clever.
Also the quote in the book
“ DEFUSE project proposed to engineer twenty or more chimeric SARS related viral spike proteins per year and two to five full-length SARS-related viruses, some of which would be developed at the WIV… ”
As you know DEFUSE never called for any of the engineering of full length viruses to be done at WIV. It was hoped WIV would find 2-5 Sars like natural viruses from bat samples. Chimeric spike proteins would not le to SC2 virus even if they did some of that work. It was Baric that was called on to engineer a full length consensus sequence virus, for reasons DARPA could not understand.
This was the only possible path to SC2. The odds of a SC2 backbone being discovered from bat samples is beyond remote.
The book sounds like its worth a read though
Great interviews Jim. Please don't take this Ron Unz guy seriously. He is a well-known maniac and conspiracy theorist. He has been pushing this biowarfare nonsense for many years and has become increasingly desperate and aggressive. He is notorious for insulting people who disagree with him. It's best to avoid and ignore him. I do agree it's important to stay open-minded, for instance we don't know if Anderson herself was infected or not, but at any rate your investigation is a major breakthrough.