Revisiting Wuhan & D.C. in early 2020
Revisiting Wuhan & D.C. in early 2020
The experts speak without speaking
A University of Chicago professor, Dali L. Yang, just published a book on the Wuhan outbreak. Ironically Wuhan is considered the Chicago of China. He brings insight to the lab leak debate, but without touching the “controversial” debate.
Disclaimer: I have not read the entire book, but this is not a book review, since I just read between the lines. Dali is critical of China’s “neo-Communist Party-state that combines Leninist organizational discipline, Maoist mobilizational capabilities, and 21st century digital technologies.”
The Chinese born, Princeton educated author of “Wuhan” focused on the Wuhan wet market and the CCP’s poor response to the outbreak. In March 2020 he was open to a Wuhan lab leak, but was impressed with Shi Zhengli’s openness. Dr Shi defended both her lab (across the Yangtze river) and the China CDC lab (next door to the Wuhan market).
In August of 2020, professor Yang logically asked “if Shi knew her lab was responsible for a leak or something like that, she (and her team) would have had strong incentives to find the virus in the Seafood Market, right?” He was responding to a March 2020 article about Dr Shi collecting samples at the Wuhan wet market (Westerners call it ‘wet’ from the melting ice keeping the seafood fresh, so be thankful for refrigeration).
Shi Zhengli confirmed that this was her second visit to the South China Seafood Market, where she had come to collect samples for studying the environmental survival of the new coronavirus. "It's not easy to do this once."
"Compared with the Chinese CDC, we have extracted much fewer samples, and the current findings are the same as the results of China's disease control." Shi Zhengli said, "They have found more than us, but we have found nothing."
https://news.sina.com.cn/c/2020-03-05/doc-iimxyqvz8026669.shtml
The early Jan 2020 reports showed the Wuhan wet market was a super spreading event (i.e. SARS2 entered the market via humans and spread throughout China).
The China CDC followed up with a preprint on Feb 25, 2022, showing “an abundance of homo sapiens” brought SARS2 into the wet market. But Fauci’s army of well paid virologists swamped the NYT just hours later with their own propaganda. Their (flawed) Bayesian math model suggested the Wuhan wet market was the source of SARS2; not just a super spreader event of SARS2.
It turned out that Fauci’s virologists found SARS2 samples in “various fish,” but not raccoon dogs (think Chinese fox). The rinse and repeat cycle of virologists propaganda occurred one year later with more raccoon dog samples. But this time some Western virologists were banned from the GISAID database, for trying to preempt the China CDC results.
The East and West propaganda wars started on Jan 24, 2020. Dr Shi uploaded RaTG13 to GISIAD and proudly declared SARS2 did not come from ‘my lab.’ One week later, Fauci held a secret teleconference and his virologists drafted the Proximal Origins paper. The authors even admitted; “Indeed, the availability of the (Shi’s) RaTG13 bat sequence (uploaded to GISAID on Jan 24th) helped reveal key RBD mutations and the polybasic cleavage site.”
In May 2021, professor Yang was “still struck by Dr. Shi's first reaction when she heard of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. Likewise, a few days earlier, the first--and still unnamed--scientist who analyzed the genomic sequence for what became known as SARS2 had the same reaction.” That reaction by Dr Shi was recorded in April 2020 by Scientific American:
The mysterious patient samples arrived at the WIV at 7 P.M. on Dec 30, 2019. Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss (at the WIV). The Wuhan CDC had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate.
Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the Shanghai conference and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if they got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
To broadly paraphrase professor Yang’s online thoughts; if Dr Shi was a US virologist from a US lab, the “legal” consequences for the “controversial” situation would have required silence. The “rumor” about a Chinese coverup has more to do with the Chinese cultural obsession of “saving face.” But Dr Shi was the face of an international firestorm, defending her lab and her China CDC colleagues. Professor Yang (living in Chicago) is even reluctant to discuss lab leak openly.
This echoes a previous statement by Dr Linfa Wang (living in Singapore) regarding Shi’s freedom to publish bat sequences like RaTG13. Dr Shi “can publish more freely (inside of China) than I can, outside of China.”
Dr Shi’s detailed answers to Science Magazine’s detailed questions were very insightful. She said that “I would like to emphasize that we only have the (RaTG13) genome sequence and didn’t isolate this virus.” Only UNC’s reverse genetic system (cDNA) can turn a genome sequence like RaTG13 into a live virus like SARS2.
https://www.science.org/pb-assets/PDF/News%20PDFs/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q&A-1630433861.pdf
Regarding the furin cleavage site, Dr Shi said that “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.” Before 2020, there were no Chinese research papers showing interest in a furin cleavage site for a bat coronavirus. But UNC published three furin cleavage site papers in three years leading up to the pandemic.
The furin cleavage site is the single most distinguishing feature of SARS2. It’s “the magic sauce of this virus,” Michael Worobey said in the above debate. “Whether it’s natural or genetically modified, this is why this virus is circulating in humans.”
Chinese virologists thought they could have everything cleaned up (either lab leak or wet market origin) by the Lunar New Year in Feb 2020, but SARS2 was too contagious. Human-to-human transmission, in a non-random town called Wuhan, was the smoking gun for a Wuhan lab leak. But there are nearly a dozen labs in Wuhan, so from which lab did SARS2 leak?
The logistics of lab leak
Ms. Zhang Zhan was the only person jailed for reporting on a lab leak. She was a journalist posting YouTube videos of the remote BSL4 and she still remains imprisoned.
Dr Danielle Anderson of Duke rode a shuttle bus from her downtown dormitory to the remote BSL4. Based on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, Dani’s dormitory was the hotspot for early SARS2 transmission. The southeast side of the Yangtze river, opposite of the wet market, was also part of a larger Wuchang district hotspot for early transmission.
Dani claimed to be working on Ebola while in the BSL4, but her 2019 NIAID CV said “coronavirus replication.” According to the 2018 DARPA Defuse proposal, she “will lead the animal studies.” NIAID apparently knew Dani from Duke was in Wuhan, from their below email dated April 2020.
What made Shi confident & Fauci nervous?
To answer professor Yang’s question, Dr Shi knew her BSL2 lab was innocent. Her first move in Jan 2020 was to open her lab books for the (virology) world to see. As previously outlined in part 6, it was Shi’s publication of the natural RaTG13 sample that made the SARS2 virus look unnatural. Exactly one week after Dr Shi published the genome sequence on Jan 24, 2020, the famous Jan 31st email to Fauci followed.
Dr Kristian G Andersen of Scripps (no relation to Dani) told Fauci the SARS2 genome “looks engineered.” During the Feb 1st teleconference, Dr Andersen made his engineered argument using Shi’s published evidence. Dr Andersen compared the unnatural SARS2 sequence against Shi’s natural RaTG13 sequence. As you can see, “the genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Dr Andersen then zoomed in on the alignment of RaTG13 (bottom) versus SARS2 (top), exposing the now easy to see furin cleavage site (PRRA). Again, this was only possible because Dr Shi of the WIV had published RaTG13 exactly one week earlier on GISAID. Fauci echoed Dr Andersen’s evidence in a follow up email after the Feb 1st teleconference.
Dr Francis Collins, Fauci’s colleague and head of NIH, was nervous if they supported '“this (RaTG13) work?”
Yes, Fauci’s NIAID supported Shi’s collection of the RaTG13 sample.
Yes, Fauci’s NIAID supported Shi’s shipment of RaTG13 samples to UNC.
Yes, Fauci’s NIAID supported gain-of-function research at UNC.
Yes, Fauci’s NIAID supported the “coronavirus replication” work of Dani in the BSL4.
Yes, Fauci’s NIAID supported the coverup work of Dr Andersen and all involved.
Yes, Fauci referenced their coverup work (Proximal Origins paper) in April 2020.
Yes, Fauci’s “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences (in SARS2) and the sequences in bats (RaTG13) as they evolve, and the mutations it took to get to the point where it is now is totally” inconsistent “with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” like Dani in the Wuhan BSL4.
The US Constitution is the source of the First Amendment. Ironically, Dr Shi from her lab in Communist China relied on the idea of the First Amendment, by publishing RaTG13 and proudly declaring SARS2 did not come from ‘my lab.’ Dr Baric and Fauci thanked her two weeks later by wanting her arrested.
