Recent reports suggest that the China virus, also known as SARS-COV-2, originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Still more frightening, the virus could be a bioweapon engineered for the Chinese military.
Last week, Nicholas Wade, a former science writer for the New York Times, described experiments conducted at the institute by a Chinese scientist known as the Bat Lady because of her work with bat coronaviruses. With subsidies from Anthony’s Fauci’s infectious disease agency, the Bat Lady tried to create a virus that could attack human beings.
The weekend edition of the Weekend Australian reported the bioweapon angle. A document produced by the Chinese military discussed genetically engineered SARS coronaviruses that, once unleashed, would infect so many people that an enemy’s medical system would collapse.
Thus, claims that the virus oozed from the filthy wet markets of Wuhan, where merchants sell exotic animals for human consumption, are highly suspect. But those claims did protect individuals who might be held responsible if the lab did, indeed, unleash the global outbreak.
Wade’s Report
In his 11,000-word report for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Wade explained the origins of the wet-markets story.
The claim appeared in a letter to the British medical journal, the Lancet, that “had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Thus, “Daszak would be potentially culpable,” Wade wrote::
Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories, they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.
A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Wade explained in detail why that second letter was “another case of poor science,” a “political, not scientific statement,” and why the virus might have escaped from a lab.
Scientists at the Wuhan virus institute performed gain-of-function experiments that alter coronaviruses, supposedly to get “ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans.” Thus, “researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.”
The leader of those researchers was China’s top expert in coronaviruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” who “mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses,” Wade reported:
Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans. … In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015, they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.
The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.
Baric taught Shi how to engineer a bat virus to infect other species, Wade wrote. Shi’s target in the lab: human cells grown in the lab and in “humanized” mice.
“It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so,” Wade reported:
“It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.
“It is also clear,” Ebright said, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” “Genomic context” refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.
The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID. …
On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice. …
One can only imagine Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak … a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.
But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” he declared in an April 2020 interview.
Safety at the Wuhan lab highly concerned officials with the U.S. State Department, Wade reported. The New American (TNA) noted those concerns, which appeared in the Washington Post, last year in its report that said U.S. intelligence officials believed the virus escaped the lab.
Biosecurity at the Wuhan lab was the same as that of a dental office. “It also is clear,” Ebright said, “that this work never should have been funded and never should have been performed,” Wade reported.
Wade also suggested that assessing responsibility must be considered including the role of U.S. subsidies:
From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. … [I]f the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.
Ebright, Wade reported, says Fauci and NIH head Francis Collins “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”
Responsible for assisting two presidents in SARS2 pandemic health protocols, Fauci backs GoF experiments, as TNA reported last year. And he oversees the agency that sent grants to the low-biosecurity lab in Wuhan where those experiments might have created the virulent pathogen, then let it escape to infect 160 million people worldwide and kill 3.3 million.
Weaponized Virus?
Even worse, in 2015, the same year that Baric and the Bat Lady created the novel virus, Chinese military scientists discussed weaponizing SARS coronaviruses. That news, again, surfaced in the Weekend Australian, Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge reported.
In a 263-page document, written by People’s Liberation Army scientists and senior Chinese public health officials and obtained by the US State Department during its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, PLA scientists note how a sudden surge of patients requiring hospitalization during a bioweapon attack “could cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse,” according to The Weekend Australian. …
It suggests that SARS coronaviruses could herald a “new era of genetic weapons,” and noted that they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed in a way never seen before.”
The paper also discussed “the new-found ability to freeze-dry micro-organisms has made it possible to store biological agents and aerosolise them during attacks.”
This raises two questions: What is Bat Lady’s connection to the Chinese military, and is SARS2 — which wrecked the U.S. economy and helped end a successful presidency — a bioweapon?
