In a 2014 article, Shibo Jiang was working with the Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing. In 2017, he conducted research with the Translational Medicine Center, People’s Liberation Army Hospital No. 454 and the Department of Epidemiology, Medicinal Research Institute, Nanjing Military Command. He is a long-time collaborator with institutions associated with the Chinese military and, since 1997, a recipient of U.S. government research grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Between 2012 and 2020, Shibo Jiang has published twelve scientific articles with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and eleven articles between 2013 and 2020 with the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston Texas. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/faucis-nih-institute-financially-assist-chinas-military/
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5-9-21 Billions with a “B,” billions of American taxpayer dollars in knowledge, skills and money have directly or indirectly contributed to China’s virus research programs, ultimately leading to COVID-19. Much of that funding came from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but there was also substantial funding provided by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
I explain how it happened in this video….Those initial Chinese military scientists, invited more Chinese military scientists until literally thousands were being trained in U.S. virus laboratories and taking knowledge and skills back to China….https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/exclusive-billions-us-money-knowledge-skills-given-chinas-virus-research-programs-ultimately-leading-covid-19/
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at video “Lawrence Sellin statement on PLA influence”: Shibo Jiang came to Rockefeller U., NYC in 1990s, then landed a longterm position at nearby New York Blood Center, from which base many PLA scientists came to US , often on grant money, and from where Shibo Jiang contacted virologists throughout the US (while he still linked with PLA in China). He then returned to Fudan U. at Shanghai, described in 2013 insertion of furin cleavage site. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/exclusive-billions-us-money-knowledge-skills-given-chinas-virus-re(search-programs-ultimately-leading-covid-19/
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5-19-20 viruses can only replicate by entering into and infecting a cell. To gain entry the virus must first bind to an ACE2 or CD147 receptor on the cell. Next, the S2 spike protein subunit must be proteolytically cleaved (cut). Without this protein cleavage, the virus would simply attach to the receptor and not get any further. There are several enzymes that can do this job, including plasmin and furin….
Furin is a protein coding gene that activates certain proteins by snipping off specific sections. As explained by Martenson, contrary to other protein-cutting enzymes, furin is very specific about the locations it cuts. What’s more, when arginine is present in the second or third place of the protein sequence then the efficiency of the cleavage is magnified.
This, he says, is “the smoking gun” that proves SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab. An excellent, well-written article7 in Medium also addresses this finding and explains why furin cleavage sites are so important for determining whether SARS-CoV-2 is natural or not.
In “Furin, a Potential Therapeutic Target for COVID-19,”8,9 Chinese researchers report that CoV-2 is the only coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. Not even distant relatives of CoV-2 have it, and the coronaviruses that do have it share only 40% of CoV-2’s genome. As reported in this paper:10
“It was found that all Spike with a SARS-CoV-2 Spike sequence homology greater than 40% did not have a furin cleavage site … including Bat-CoVRaTG13 and SARS-CoV (with sequence identity as 97.4% and 78.6%, respectively).
The furin cleavage site ‘RRAR’ in SARS-CoV-2 is unique in its family, rendering by its unique insert of ‘PRRA.’ The furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have evolved from MERS, HCoV-HKU1, and so on.
From the currently available sequences in databases, it is difficult for us to find the source. Perhaps there are still many evolutionary intermediate sequences waiting to be discovered.”…
Martenson calls out leading virologist Michael Osterholm who, in a March 10, 2020, interview with Joe Rogan, stated that “we could not have crafted a virus like this to do what it’s doing; I mean we don’t have the creative imagination or the skill set.”
Really? Published research shows we clearly have the technology, know-how and “creative imagination” to create SARS-CoV-2, and Osterholm simply cannot be ignorant of that fact….
Professor Newman says19 that this is totally unconvincing because “The ‘key differences’ (referred to by several researchers) were in regions of the coronavirus spike protein that were the subject of genetic engineering experiments in labs around the world (mainly in the U.S. and China) for two decades’ …
Dr. Meryl Nass: Here are just a few possibilities for how one might create new, virulent mutants:
- Exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics
- Passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures
- Mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors”
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/19/smoking-gun-proving-sars-cov-2-was-lab-created.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20200519Z1&et_cid=DM540618&et_rid=875221293&fbclid=IwAR1_n5S3myWtgOf177VanLeCBkHpB0Vpqn3OodUlwWyrgl1cEtHQkayuK90
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3-16-20 Shibo Jiang wrote: Decades ago, vaccines developed against another coronavirus, feline infectious peritonitis virus, increased cats’ risk of developing the disease caused by the virus (T. Takano et al. J. Vet. Med. Sci. 81, 911–915; 2019). Similar phenomena have been seen in animal studies for other viruses, including the coronavirus that causes SARS (Y. W. Kam et al. Vaccine 25, 729–740; 2007)….
Therefore any regulatory agency considering ways to accelerate treatments into testing should also weigh up how likely these drugs are to work beyond this particular coronavirus.
Testing vaccines and medicines without taking the time to fully understand safety risks could bring unwarranted setbacks during the current pandemic, and into the future. The public’s willingness to back quarantines and other public-health measures to slow spread tends to correlate with how much people trust the government’s health advice. A rush into potentially risky vaccines and therapies will betray that trust and discourage work to develop better assessments. Despite the genuine need for urgency, the old saying holds: measure twice, cut once. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00751-9
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5-4-20 The binding and membrane-fusing capability of COVID-19 resides in a structure called the spike protein, specifically sections of the “S” protein, which contain the receptor-binding domain and the furin polybasic cleavage site.
The bioengineering capabilities to “splice” the receptor-binding domain from one virus to another and to insert a furin polybasic cleavage site are both well-established laboratory techniques for which I provide the following specific examples.
In 2015, Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, co-patent holder of US9884895B2, and Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology jointly published a scientific article describing the combination of the receptor-binding spike protein from a newly isolated coronavirus (SHC014) and the “backbone” from SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the 2002-2003 pandemic.
The above experiment produced a novel virus, chimera SHC014-MA15, which showed “robust viral replication both in vitro [cell cultures] and in vivo [animals],” using models adapted to test human infectivity.
In 2013, Chinese scientists demonstrated the capability to insert a furin polybasic cleavage site, similar to that of COVID-19, into a protein, an article which cited US patent “Insertion of Furin Protease Cleavage Sites in Membrane Proteins and Uses Thereof.”
One of the authors of that 2013 article, Chinese scientist Shibo Jiang, has a joint appointment at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute in New York and Fudan University in Shanghai and is a long-time collaborator of Zheng-Li Shi and Ralph Baric in coronavirus research. https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/how-us-expertise-may-have-inadvertently-contributed-to-covid-19-296512
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3. The furin cleavage site:
Without getting too deeply into the details of the SARS2 virus’ anatomy, there is a small region of its spike protein called the furin cleavage site, just 12 units of its 30,000-unit genome.
A virus usually acquires inserts like this by accidentally exchanging genomic units with another virus when both invade the same cell. But no other known virus in SARS2’s group has this 12-unit insert.
Proponents of natural emergence argue that the virus could have acquired the insert from human cells after it had jumped to people. Maybe, but no one has yet found the human population in which the virus might have evolved this way. The insert also contains entities known as arginine codons, which are common in humans but not in coronaviruses like SARS2.
Under the lab-escape scenario, the insert is easy to explain. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. At least 11 such experiments have been published, including one by Dr. Shi.
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology.
“These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said. https://nypost.com/2021/05/09/theory-that-covid-escaped-from-a-lab-may-not-be-far-fetched/
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11-11-2013 Simultaneous Expression of Displayed and Secreted Antibodies for Antibody Screen
We also incorporated a furin cleavage site between the constant region and PDGFR transmembrane domain to obtain secreted antibodies. As a result, antibodies can be expressed simultaneously on the cell surface in a membrane-anchored version for screening and selecting through fluorescence-activated cell sorting https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3823846/
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4-14-21 “The most pronounced difference between SARS-S and SARS-2-S is an additional furin cleavage site (site 1, Figure 2A) resulting from an insertion of 12 nt at the boundary between S1 and S2 [8,11,29]. This additional furin cleavage site is shared among all sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes, but absent in all their closest known relatives such as bat RaTG13 and those isolated from pangolin [29]. The seemingly sudden appearance of this additional polybasic furin cleavage site 1 has been a lasting source of conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 is man-made, which is discussed later.”…
A somewhat similar furin cleavage site was present at a roughly homologous site in S protein of the murine hepatitis virus [45] and in a few alphacoronaviruses [2,8,29]. However, it is not clear how SARS-CoV-2 could gain it from these remote relatives. While recombination might be a possibility, there is hardly any sequence homology between SARS-2-S and its homologues in the murine hepatitis virus or alphacoronaviruses at sequences flanking the cleavage site, therefore a recombination origin of the cleavage site is tenuous at present. https://trialsitenews.com/forums/reply/60602/
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Dr. Ebright, on the other hand, views the plans as a recipe for catastrophe. The laboratories, called biosafety level 4, or BSL-4, are costly, unnecessary and dangerous, he says.
”I’m concerned about them from the standpoint of science, safety, security, public health and economics,” he added in an interview. ”They lose on all counts.”
The labs, Dr. Ebright says, are a perilous overreaction to an inflated threat and will do more harm than good. Although the threat of biological warfare is real, the weapons used by terrorists are unlikely to be the next-generation agents that the high-security labs are intended to study, he says. Yet by increasing the availability of such pathogens, Dr. Ebright argues, the labs will ”bring that threat to fruition. It’s arming our opponents,” he said.
In addition, he says, the laboratories could leak. They could put deadly pathogens into irresponsible hands and they will divert money from other worthy endeavors like public health and the frontiers of biology. Moreover, their many hundreds of new employees would become a pool of deadly expertise that could turn malevolent, unleashing lethal germs on an unsuspecting public. But Dr. Ebright noted that the deadly SARS virus recently escaped from BSL-4 and BSL-3 labs in Taiwan, Singapore and Beijing, in each case setting off minor epidemics that killed or sickened people. https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/04/25/digging-through-the-science-and-the-noise-on-what-is-known-about-the-origin-of-sars-cov-2/
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Yes. Gain of function research involves putting evolutionary pressure on an organism to give it certain traits that can be found in the wild, but the resulting virus is anything but natural.
I think a lot of people dismiss the lab leak hypothesis based on the idea that a lab-created virus must have an engineered genome rather than an evolved one.
> generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.
Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.
Introducing mutations with purpose is beyond us, but inserting a variety of mutations randomly in areas of the proteins known to be impactful in various processes, then observing the behavior of the mutants in vivo is not. We do high throughput mutant screening all the time.
From the OP, it appears that scientists knew exactly where to insert a furin cleavage site:
>“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.
he left out the most damning part: > “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” |
This is covered in detail in the article. To me the smoking gun in this article is the linked video of Daszak saying "we have now found... over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS...some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models...these are a clear and present danger". I've been aware of this for many months after reading this tweet [1] which says essentially the same thing. [1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s... |
trompetenaccoun 3 days ago [–] Your article mentions the "Wuhan Institute of Virology", which one also finds named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak. |
People fuck up accidentally and then intentionally cover it up all the time. |
reuben_scratton 3 days ago [–] Lab escapes are not that rare, SARS-1 is known to have escaped 6 times. It also doesn't matter how safe and secure the WIV's BSL-4 lab is, since coronavirus research was done at BSL-2 and BSL-3. |
No matter how much posturing and geopolitical theatre is going the same fragmented transnational elite is continuing actual resource oriented realpolitics completely outside of the narratives presented in the media that is owned by this class.
Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet: Where are all the bats infected with this virus? If it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 ………............................................. |
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