China's Export of SARS/CoV-2 Under State Wraps

 

“I would like to sincerely thank all the netizens and people from all walks of life who have supported me and my team for a long time.”

“I won’t leave, I won’t quit, I am pursuing science and the truth! The Public Health Center are refusing to let me and my students go in the laboratory and take shelter.”

“I trusted myself. I have so much experience, my team has made so many discoveries over the years, that we were able to make accurate judgments.”

Dr. Zhang Yongzhen, research virologist, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

A security guard stands outside a wet market in Wuhan linked to some of the earliest known cases of Covid-19. Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

When the World Health Organization issued its pandemic alert globally, scientists everywhere lauded the swift assistance they were given when the SARS/CoV-2 sequencing was distributed worldwide, enabling pharmaceutical companies an early start on their search for an effective and reliable vaccine against the dread COVID-19 virus that lost no time escaping its place of origin in Wuhan, China, replicating itself and infecting people all over the world with utterly disastrous results in illness and death. 

But the release of the sequencing was not the result of a conscientious leadership in Beijing, anxious to help the world cope with an impending natural disaster of a virus leaping from wild animals to humans with a consequential human-to-human infectiousness that soon saw Europe brought to its knees, attempting to stem the tide of an implacable pathogen, leaving hospitals overcome with new patients, incapable of tending to the needs of the infected, speedily leaving countries with soaring death rates.

Dr. Zhang's generosity of spirit in releasing the priceless data was a lifesaver, enabling researchers to formulate a vaccine to help stave off the infection for a large proportion of the world's population, as the virus underwent various mutations that made it ever more infectious and dangerously lethal in the numbers it was infecting. Beijing, however, was anything but pleased with the release of the sequencing. It had not given its assent and regarded the fact that Dr. Zhang and his colleagues sent out 'proprietary' data in the name of open science and a true regard for the welfare of humanity, an unforgivable insubordination.

The result was that Dr. Zhang, his research team and any who were associated with them were harassed, pressured and punished. Once the sequencing had been completed in Dr. Zhang's laboratory, Chinese authorities were notified of the dangerous and lethal nature of the coronavirus and the urgency to act. What Chinese authorities were interested in was maintaining an aura of secrecy, more invested in seeing that the global community not become aware that a globe-threatening virus had come out of China leaving them with no intention of alerting the WHO and by extension the world community.

Nothing has changed since then. From hampering international investigations, refusing to permit investigators from the WHO open access to the Wuhan Market, much less the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withholding scientific papers, and controlling what investigators could see, who they could interview and what they could have access to in the interests of discovering the source of the virus, Beijing still maintains that the virus might have entered China from elsewhere.

Now, Dr. Zhang has found himself and his colleagues locked out of their laboratory as Beijing continues to repress those scientists conducting ongoing research on the coronavirus. Having been abruptly notified that they were being evicted from their lab, the most recent setback to the researchers after demotions and ousters since the sequence was published in January of 2020, the latest assault on open science has left Dr. Zhang helpless, with guards barring entry to his lab.

He did not go quietly and accept the inevitable, but has since been protesting, sitting outside his lab, sleeping on the ground in the rain overnight on Monday. The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center claimed in an online statement on Chinese social media platform Weibo that the lob was in the process of renovation and therefore closed for "safety reasons", and Dr. Zhang's team had been provided with an alternative laboratory. Dr. Zhang on the other hand, denied an alternative had been offered until after their eviction.Moreover the lab in question failed to meet the safety standards required for conducting the type of research that they were engaged in.

From the very first weeks of the viral outbreak in China, its government froze domestic and international efforts to trace its source, a pattern that continues. Labs have been closed, collaborations with other, foreign scientists have been blocked, foreign scientists were forced to leave, while Chinese researchers found themselves barred from leaving the country. And Dr.Zhang finds himself now in a position where he is under close scrutiny and communicating with outside, unauthorized sources forbidden to him.

The virologist Zhang Yongzhen is staging a sit-in protest after Chinese authorities allegedly locked him out of his lab.

That Tangled Web : Hiding In Plain Sight

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"[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