Chinese communists created Sars-Cov-2 — also known as the China Virus — in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, two scientists say.
The pair say they found telltale “fingerprints” in the virus, the Daily Mail reported recently, that show it was retro-engineered, and will soon publish a paper that fingers China for loosing the potentially fatal pathogen on the world.
The revelation follows major reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that suggest likewise — and the leftist media’s grudging admission that the lab-leak hypothesis is not a crazy “debunked conspiracy theory.”
Over the weekend, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration also blamed a lab leak.
“Fingerprints”
The two authors are Angus Dalgleish and Dr. Birger Sørensen, who say they have had “‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year — but were ignored by academics and major journals,’” the Mail reported.
The two scientists allege that China destroyed or contaminated data and silenced scientists who dared to speak out:
The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and slated for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.
While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered “unique fingerprints” in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.
They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.
Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists’ theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as “fake news.”
MI6 is the British foreign intelligence service for which the fictional James Bond toils.
Dalgleish and Sørensen now say “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor.” It is “beyond reasonable doubt” that scientists created the virulent germ, the Mail reported of the pair’s paper:
Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike,” turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2.
One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious.
But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is ‘extremely unlikely,’ the scientist said.
“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” Dalgleish told DailyMail.com.
Their new paper says these features of SARS-Cov-2 are “unique fingerprints” which are “indicative of purposive manipulation,” and that “the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small.”
The two wrote that gain of function research must be reconsidered. Scientists must not be allowed to decide what types of research should be allowed.
The soon-to-be-released paper echoes a major piece by Nicholas Wade, former science writer for the New York Times. Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Wade reported that an American scientist helped China’s notorious Bat Lady — Shi Zheng-li, an expert in bat coronaviruses — manipulate the virus in the lab.
U.S. taxpayers subsidized those experiments through direct and indirect grants to the institute for the research.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that three lab workers were hospitalized in November 2019. As well, former State Department official David Asher, who led the probe into the pathogen’s origin during the Trump Administration, has said a lab worker’s wife died of virus-like symptoms the following month.
Chinese military is tied to the lab, as well.
The obvious question: Did real-life Dr. Fu Manchus concoct a bioweapon at the behest of their Red masters?
Gottlieb On Face The Nation
The latest revelation also comports with comments from Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who was President Trump’s FDA chieftain.
Gottlieb told Face The Nation’s John Dickerson that viruses escape from labs “all the time,” and that “in China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs.”
The theory that the infection is zoonotic — from nature — is discredited.
China, he said, must provide access to its labs, as well as lab inventory, lab workers’ blood samples, and the original virus strains. So far, the Reds have refused:
[W]e know that that lab was poorly constructed, had poor controls. That was reported at the time that it was first opened. We know the lab was engaging in very high-risk research, including infecting transgenic animals, animals with fully human immune systems. We know they were working with SARS-like viruses that have never been disclosed before. And now we have new evidence that some lab workers became infected right at the time that this virus was believed to be first introduced.
