meet the leading chimeric coronavirus team

4-20-20  In the virology community their project is known as "chimeric coronavirus", eerily similar to COVID-19.  This chimera is created in a petri-dish, reportedly with the "surface spike protein (S protein) of a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats, called SHC014, and the backbone of a SARS virus that could be grown in mice".

Dr Vineet D. Menachery (left), Assistant Professor at the Department of Microbiology & Immunology of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Dr. Ralph S Baric, who works for the University of North Carolina's Department of Microbiology and Immunology, is known to have also worked in "rewired TRN SARS-CoV mutants" with proceedings published in 2018.

  The team refered to the chimeric coronavirus as "SHC014-MA15".  The study lists the following as authors:  Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Sudhakar Agnihothram, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Xing-Yi Ge, Eric F Donaldson, Scott H Randell, Antonio Lanzavecchia, Wayne A Marasco, Zhengli-Li Shi & Ralph S Baric.

  Menachery designed, coordinated and performed experiments, completed analysis and wrote the manuscript, according to Nature Medicine.

  Here's the scary bit about the chimeric CoV:  in the lab (not clear which one), researchers said, this new coronavirus was found so potent it could infect and replicate in human airway cells "naturally".  It also infected mice lung cells.  It's one of the experiments which prompted Prof Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, to warn that such research is "misleading" and "irrational", stating thus:  “The consequence of any accident would be anywhere from a handful of infections to a catastrophic pandemic. "

-Wain-Hobson

https://gulfnews.com/world/coronavirus-meet-the-legend-the-chinese-bat-woman-1.1587380739770