That Tangled Web : Hiding In Plain Sight

COVID-19’s Early Spread In Wuhan, China

"[The team planned to] take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them ..."

"They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses."

"If SARS-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 percent of similarity to each other ... I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing."

"The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more ..."

"Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation."

Unidentified WHO collaborator

An aerial view of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wuhan scientists have consistently denied creating Sars-CoV-2 in a lab Credit: AFP via Getty Images/Hector Retamal

 

"...In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists—including the world’s foremost coronavirus researcher—are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China’s laboratories and agencies to 'open their records' to independent analysis."

"'We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data', the scientists write."

"The letter, which was organized by the Stanford University microbiologist David Relman and the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, takes aim at a recent joint study of covid origins undertaken by the World Health Organization and China, which concluded that a bat virus likely reached humans via an intermediate animal and that a lab accident was 'extremely unlikely'."

"That conclusion was not scientifically justified, according to the authors of the new letter, since no trace of how the virus first jumped to humans has been found and the possibility of a laboratory accident received only a cursory look. Just a handful of the 313 pages of the WHO origins report and its annexes are devoted to the subject."

Rowan Jacobsen, MIT Technology Review

Newly-revealed information has now seen publication to the effect that Chinese scientists in Wuhan and American scientists working alongside them, had planned the creation of an entirely new coronavirus outside of nature. Their idea was to combine the genetic code of other viruses in the creation of one which, while unique, saw its creation as laboratory-made, not one spontaneously appearing through natural means unassisted by human intervention.

 

A grant application that had been submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed through newly leaked documents that the team of international scientists planned to combine closely related strains' genetic data for the purpose of producing new viruses. The plan was uncovered by a genetics expert who worked with the World Health Organization who took the time to study the proposals in detail and concluded that had SARS-CoV2 been produced like this the mystery of a close match in nature never having been found would be solved.

 

Shi Zhengli in a high security laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Chinese virologist says calls by outsiders to inspect her lab's records are "not acceptable."  AP Images

A virus strain called Banal-52, discovered in Laos a month ago shares 96.8 percent of the genome, as the closest naturally occurring virus to SARS-CoV-2. The expectation by scientists is a direct ancestor to the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 should be found to be 99.98 percent of a match, and to the present none has been found. The international scientific team had laid plans to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses for use in the creation of a totally new sequence, according to the DARPA proposals, leaked to the pandemic origins analysis group Drastic.

 

It was revealed that British zoologist Peter Daszak submitted the proposal on behalf of a consortium which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore. As a member of the WHO investigating team who travelled to China to look into the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been leaked from the WIV laboratory as many have suggested and Beijing angrily denies, the team's search for the virus's origins, canted heavily toward Dr. Duszak's confident denials.

 

Dr.Duszak, in fact, had close professional ties to the Wuhan Institute and had spent some time there previously in his collaborative scientific capacity. Just incidentally, Dr. Duszak was seen to be the knowledgeable individual behind the investigation's conclusion, published in The Lancet, dismissing any suggestions that COVID's origins were not natural, dismissing the expressed doubts of its origin in nature as a conspiracy theory.

"A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest,"

"Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public."

"Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn."

Search-of-SARS-CoV-2-origins Letter

Peter Daszak and others visit a cave at Seven Star Park in Guilin, China, where visitors are likely to encounter bats.   Credit: EcoHealth Alliance

"Scientists have called for Peter Daszak, the president of U.S.-based research organization EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) to quit, accusing him of concealing conflicts of interest, witholding critical information, and misleading public opinion during the COVID pandemic."

"EHA has been thrust into the public eye during the pandemic because of its work studying bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is located in the city Chinese city that was the first epicentre of the COVID outbreak."

"EHA recently came under heavy scrutiny after a group of online researchers and correspondents known as the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19 (DRASTIC) published a 2018 proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research that would have involved enhancing viruses to study them."

Newsweek