new viruses being discovered/developed--here's how

5-24    On December 9, 2019, long before the world knew anything about it, a video interview took place with one of the key players in the COVID-19 drama, Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance…Beginning at 27:49

 Dr. Daszak explains the basis of the naturally-occurring narrative and the collection of over one hundred bat coronaviruses capable of infecting humans, but untreatable with drugs or vaccines. Those coronaviruses are presumed to be stored in Chinese laboratories.

  “So, we did a couple of things with it.  So, one is around SARS.  We focused on SARS c”oronavirus emerged from a wildlife market.  And whilst the first pandemic of this century. So, it’s big event.  And, so we started to trace back from the wildlife market, which species carried the virus, that came into those markets.  We found that it was bats, not civets, was the original idea.  So, we started looking where did they come from.  And we went out to southern China. And did surveillance of bats across southern China.  And we’ve now found, after six or seven years of doing this, over one hundred new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS. Some of them get into human cells in the lab. And some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mouse models.  And are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals [antibodies] and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine.”

At 29:51, Dr Daszak describes bioengineering of those viruses by inserting components of one coronavirus into another.

  “Well, I think, coronavirus is a pretty good, I mean, you’re a virologist [the interviewer], you know all this stuff, but the, you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily.  Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk.  So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC [University of North Carolina] to do this.  Insert it into a backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab.  So, you can get more predictive, when you find the sequence.  You have this diversity.  Now, the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert these other related and get a better vaccine.”…

  It is important to note that the EcoHealth Alliance gets 80% of its funding from the U.S. government (9:22), has “been working in China for years” (19:40), and presumably uses U.S. taxpayer money to “hire technicians in labs or Ph.D. students” (12:08) in order to “teach people how to do it and give them the capacity and the tools” and “then you have really made a difference” (13:15).      

https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/tracing-the-origins-of-covid-19-300766

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5-25  New viruses being discovered are “just the tip of the iceberg,” a Chinese virologist known for her work on researching coronavirus in bats, told Chinese state television, the Daily Mail reported on Monday.

Wuhan Institute of Virology Deputy Director Shi Zhengli, also known as China’s “bat woman,” also urged greater international cooperation in the fight against pandemics.  https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/shi-zhengli-wuhan-research-virology/2020/05/25/id/968892/