A) 9-22-20 All the basic procedures required to synthesize a virus like SARS-CoV-2 were described in a single scientific publication entitled “Mechanisms of Zoonotic Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Host Range Expansion in Human Airway Epithelium,” which appeared in the Journal of Virology in March, 2008.
The construction of new viruses capable of infecting humans began by using, as a viral “backbone,” SARS-CoV-1, the coronavirus responsible for the 2002-2003 pandemic.
The spike protein of the SARS-CoV-1 backbone, which contains the receptor-binding domain, was artificially replaced with the spike protein from another coronavirus.
The new spike protein underwent additional genetic manipulation by single amino acid substitution in a manner roughly equivalent to inserting a furin polybasic cleavage site.
Using a process called serial passaging, the new artificial virus was then exposed to human airway epithelial cell cultures (lung surface cells)
-L. Sellin https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/a-2008-synthetic-model-to-make-covid-19-in-the-laboratory-329367
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B) 11-17-20 In order to evaluate the emergence potential of novel CoVs, researchers have created a number of chimeric CoVs, consisting of bat CoV backbones, normally unable to infect human cells, whose spike proteins were replaced by those from CoVs compatible with human ACE2. These chimeras were meant to simulate recombination events that might occur in nature.[19, 20] Such gain-of-function experiments have raised a number of biosafety concerns and stirred controversy among researchers and the general public. One of the main arguments in favor of gain-of-function studies is the need to be prepared with an arsenal of drugs and vaccines for the next pandemic.[21] By contrast, one of the main arguments against them is that the next pandemic itself could be caused by those experiments, due to the risk of lab escape.[22, 23]
In recent years the field of corona-virology had been focused on pan-CoV therapies and vaccines, as evident from research conducted in the past 5 years,[24-27] as well as from media reports.vii Synthetically generating diverse panels of potential pre-emergent CoVs was declared a goal of active grants for the EcoHealth Alliance, which funded some of such research at WIV, in collaboration with laboratories in the USA and other international partners.viii
CREATING CHIMERIC COVS WITH NOVEL RBDS HAS GONE ON FOR DECADES
Researchers have been generating chimeric CoVs for over two decades, long before the advent of modern sequencing or genetic engineering techniques. For example, in 1999 a group from Utrecht University used targeted RNA recombination to create a “cat-and-mouse” CoV chimera: the RBDs of a feline and murine CoV were swapped, demonstrating that this exchange swapped also species tropism during in vitro experiments.[28]
In 2007 the Shi group at WIV created a series of “bat-man” CoV chimeric spike proteins while trying to determine what exactly confers CoVs the ability to jump from one species to another. The researchers used different segments of the spike protein of the human SARS virus to replace corresponding segments in the spike protein of a bat viral backbone. It was concluded that a relatively short region (aa 310 to 518) of the spike protein “was necessary and sufficient to convert Rp3-S into a huACE2-binding molecule,”29 that is to provide the bat CoV spike protein with a novel ability of binding to a human ACE2 receptor.
In 2008 the Baric group at the University of North Carolina (UNC) took the WIV research one step further: instead of using human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) pseudo-viruses with bat CoV spike proteins, a live chimeric CoV was created. Following the experiments of their 2007 WIV colleagues, the Baric group used a bat SARS-like CoV as a backbone and replaced its RBD with the RBD from human SARS.[30]
In 2015 the Shi and Baric groups joined forces and published probably the most famous gain-of-function virology paper, which described the creation of another synthetic chimeric virus.[19] This time the RBD of a mouse-adapted SARS backbone (SARS-MA15) was replaced by the RBD of RsSHC014, a bat strain previously isolated from Yunnan bats in 2011 by the Shi group. In 2016 the Baric group repeated their 2015 experiment using the same SARS-MA15 backbone and the RBD from Rs3367,[31] a close relative of RsSHC014 also previously found in Yunnan by WIV and renamed “WIV1” after live culturing.[17]
Probably the largest reported number of novel chimeric viruses created was described in a 2017 paper from the Shi group at WIV,[15] in which the authors reported creating eight chimeric viruses using WIV1 as a backbone and transplanting into it various RBDs from bat SARS-like viruses. These viruses were collected over a span of 5 years from the same cave near Kunming, Yunnan Province, where the Shi group originally found Rs3367 and RsSHC014. Only two of the eight live chimeric viruses were successfully rescued, and those two strains were found to possess the ability to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, as confirmed by experiments in hACE2-expressing HeLa cells and RT-PCR quantification of viral RNA. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202000240
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C) 6-5-21 high India officer reviews Chinese biowarfare strategy: https://balance10.blogspot.com/2021/09/grave-danger-according-to-india-maj-gen.html
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D) 6-6-21 in what Quay and Muller called a “damning fact” it was found in CoV-2. “Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG,” they wrote. “Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
“At the minimum this fact — that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”…
Beyond apparent signs of gain-of-function engineering, Quay and Muller wrote in the WS Journal that the evidence “most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.”
SARS and MERS, which were confirmed to be of natural origin, “evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated,” the pair wrote.
By contrast COVID-19 proved to be highly contagious from the point it was first detected. “Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread,” wrote Quay and Muller. “Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research.” https://nypost.com/2021/06/06/damning-science-shows-covid-19-likely-engineered-in-lab/
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E) On 6-27-21 Brett P. Giroir, MD, former Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offered to House Committee: Perspective #2: There is now an increasing body of circumstantial evidence pointing to a lab leak origin of the virus: 1. The comprehensive WHO investigation published March 1 failed to detect the presence of the virus after testing more than 80,000 wildlife, livestock and poultry samples from 31 provinces in China. Moreover the closest virus found in nature was several decades of evolution removed from the COVID-19 virus. And we now know definitively that the Wuhan wet market was NOT the origin of the virus but was a site of secondary spread. 2. We know that the Wuhan lab was conducting potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses and their ability to cause pandemics, including gain of function research. This was proven by a 2015 Nature Medicine publication in which investigators from Wuhan and collaborators across the globe reported the creation of a new, hybrid bat coronavirus that could bind to and infect human airway cells. 3. Since then there have been multiple NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance all entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” and from the limited publically available information, appear to be using the same laboratory methods that could create novel, hybrid, pandemic causing pathogens. 4. Independent scientific studies have concluded that the first cases of COVID in China occurred sometime between mid-October to mid-November of 2019. This is the exact time frame, according to US Intelligence, that some Wuhan lab workers became ill with a respiratory infection, and that according to the Wall Street Journal, three Wuhan lab workers sought hospital care for an unknown respiratory illness….
Perceptive #4: The investigation of the origins of COVID-19, and the regulation of gain of function research, cannot be left to scientists alone, many of whom have serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts include hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary, pharmaceutical company paid advisory board seats, millions of dollars in grants, rights to inventions that could result in 10s of millions of dollars in royalties, and perhaps most important, their reputations among an often-elitist scientific community that is overwhelmingly biased against anything related to the Trump Administration. Similarly Americans should be careful of defenses of China by experts who are employed by, or on the boards of, companies with billions of dollars at stake in China and who fear reprisals from the Chinese Communist Party. https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Giroir-Testimony-June-2021-House-Subcomittee-6.27.21.pdf
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F) Rep. Gallagher Press Office
@RepGallagher Sep 23
At 3:00 of video: “On the other hand adding a burin cleavage site to a virus to increase its pathogenicity is a long-standing gain of fiction practice. In fact as Dr. Steven Quay has found, there are at least 11 published gain of function experiments that add a furin site to make a virus more effective” (i.e., to cross-species jump). https://twitter.com/whereisyanling?lang=en
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