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To begin, some heavy reading is unfortunately required. Unfortunate, as very few will, and less will then understand the technical material, but it's quite a good read.
Regardless, start here:
Mainstean media, Lightly technical, mostly politics and personality aspects of the story:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/202...inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
Key read, story laying out the technical evidence for a lab leak of a manipulated coronavirus being used for investigational study. This story kicked off the recent news cycle looking back into this explanation of origins.
Built off of this technical analysis, originally published April 2020
I'll try to summarize, but you should really read the sources. Mind-blowing.
Two possibilities for cv19's (a bat coronavirus) origins.
1. Animal to human jump, attributed to "wet" markets in Wuhan.
2. Escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a leading virus research lab, whose research director is a world leader in collection, genetic engineering, and study of bat coronaviruses.
Understand that genetic manipulation of coronaviruses has been common in research in virology for decades. This manipulation is commonly for "gain of function" (GOF), meaning fucking around with the virus to make it more infectious to human cells to understand how it works. Supposedly for future threat recognition and therapeutics. That's what the grant applications claim anyway.
Obviously highly controversial. Banned by Obama in 2014, loosened by Trump in 2017. Ha! You didn't think US taxpayer money would be involved? Did we learn nothing from Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?
Understand there are thousands of different coronavirus in the wild
Also, there are not that many labs like this in the world. WIV is intended for study of the most dangerous viruses, only two others like in the world (both US.)
Evidence:
* Covid-19 has some very odd genetic traits, and it's an outlier in it's features and epidemiology.
* No close genetic relation found in known discoveries.
-The virus is 96% similar to a sequence discovered by WIV in bats in southwest China a 1000 miles from Wuhan a decade ago. Also used in WIV published papers in engineering/GOF studies.
*But, CV19's spike protein is specifically very different tho, although its nearly identical to another animal's spike protein, a Pangolin. Specifically from a sick and dying group seized by Chinese customs agents in early 2019, who were then sampled for study of the illness...
... These pangolins were also 1000 miles from Wuhan and 1000 miles from the bat caves in the west.
*An additional feature, a furin cleavage site, not naturally found in related coronaviruses, but commonly engineered into manipulated viruses to make them more infectious to model human cells is inexplicably present in CV19.
* Even stranger, the type of furin site that is present is a human cell type encoding. Not encoded as you would expect for a bat species
* No animal reservoir for CV19 has yet to be found. Was found within months for SARS and MERS.
* No previous human outbreaks in the far away region the bat virus is endemic to.
* Bats are not sold at the wet markets in Wuhan
* It was winter, and any bats would be hibernating in Dec 2019 when the outbreak started.
* Hospital surveillance did not detect any cases of CV in Wuhan prior to Nov/Dev 2019. No slow build up. Just came out of nowhere then spread like wildfire. No records of infections outside of Wuhan, notably absent in the region host bat species is native to.
* 3 WIV researchers were contemporaneously hospitalized with severe influenza like illness in Nov 2019. Exact illness unknown.
* The Wuhan wild type Covid-19 spike protein is oddly well optimized to human ACE2 cell receptors.
* It's poorly adapted to bat ACE2
- typically when a virus jumps species, it's not well adapted to the new species. It takes mutation and natural selection to refine the virus to it's new target. CV was well tuned out of the gate, but poorly adapted for it's seemingly original host.
- This was the pattern for SARS and MERS. The virus initially sucks at infecting it's new host, it takes time for evolution to do its work, later the virus takes off into an outbreak. Not for covid-19. It hit the ground running in humans, but sucked at infecting it's original host?
* The Wuhan lab was noted for a poor track record for safety
* Chinese govt has been less than transparent with investigations. WIV has sequestered thier virus databases and information on prior research efforts after outbreak. Research director has been caught in notable lies. In knowledge of the original bat sequence for example.
* Overall, there is strong circumstantial evidence that WIV was using their unique bat virus as a vector, which they engineered with a new Spike protein from a recently acquired Pangolin sample, further tweaked with a furin cleavage site in order to make it more infectious in human cell based models they commonly use for their studies. They've published many papers describing such methods and techniques...
Highly plausible a researcher studying the construct could have been infected, or someone fucked up, and the virus escaped the lab and led to an outbreak in the local city.
OR.. we have to believe that somehow a rare bat virus recombined with pango virus a thousand miles away, then traveled to an out of season wet market another thousand miles away, meanwhile also independently evolving a furin site, but managed not to infect anyone along the way until it showed up in Wuhan. Totally by coincidence, a town with a leading bat coronavirus investigation lab... One of a few Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world.
Regardless, start here:
Mainstean media, Lightly technical, mostly politics and personality aspects of the story:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/202...inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
Key read, story laying out the technical evidence for a lab leak of a manipulated coronavirus being used for investigational study. This story kicked off the recent news cycle looking back into this explanation of origins.
Built off of this technical analysis, originally published April 2020
I'll try to summarize, but you should really read the sources. Mind-blowing.
Two possibilities for cv19's (a bat coronavirus) origins.
1. Animal to human jump, attributed to "wet" markets in Wuhan.
2. Escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a leading virus research lab, whose research director is a world leader in collection, genetic engineering, and study of bat coronaviruses.
Understand that genetic manipulation of coronaviruses has been common in research in virology for decades. This manipulation is commonly for "gain of function" (GOF), meaning fucking around with the virus to make it more infectious to human cells to understand how it works. Supposedly for future threat recognition and therapeutics. That's what the grant applications claim anyway.
Obviously highly controversial. Banned by Obama in 2014, loosened by Trump in 2017. Ha! You didn't think US taxpayer money would be involved? Did we learn nothing from Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?
Understand there are thousands of different coronavirus in the wild
Also, there are not that many labs like this in the world. WIV is intended for study of the most dangerous viruses, only two others like in the world (both US.)
Evidence:
* Covid-19 has some very odd genetic traits, and it's an outlier in it's features and epidemiology.
* No close genetic relation found in known discoveries.
-The virus is 96% similar to a sequence discovered by WIV in bats in southwest China a 1000 miles from Wuhan a decade ago. Also used in WIV published papers in engineering/GOF studies.
*But, CV19's spike protein is specifically very different tho, although its nearly identical to another animal's spike protein, a Pangolin. Specifically from a sick and dying group seized by Chinese customs agents in early 2019, who were then sampled for study of the illness...
... These pangolins were also 1000 miles from Wuhan and 1000 miles from the bat caves in the west.
*An additional feature, a furin cleavage site, not naturally found in related coronaviruses, but commonly engineered into manipulated viruses to make them more infectious to model human cells is inexplicably present in CV19.
* Even stranger, the type of furin site that is present is a human cell type encoding. Not encoded as you would expect for a bat species
* No animal reservoir for CV19 has yet to be found. Was found within months for SARS and MERS.
* No previous human outbreaks in the far away region the bat virus is endemic to.
* Bats are not sold at the wet markets in Wuhan
* It was winter, and any bats would be hibernating in Dec 2019 when the outbreak started.
* Hospital surveillance did not detect any cases of CV in Wuhan prior to Nov/Dev 2019. No slow build up. Just came out of nowhere then spread like wildfire. No records of infections outside of Wuhan, notably absent in the region host bat species is native to.
* 3 WIV researchers were contemporaneously hospitalized with severe influenza like illness in Nov 2019. Exact illness unknown.
* The Wuhan wild type Covid-19 spike protein is oddly well optimized to human ACE2 cell receptors.
* It's poorly adapted to bat ACE2
- typically when a virus jumps species, it's not well adapted to the new species. It takes mutation and natural selection to refine the virus to it's new target. CV was well tuned out of the gate, but poorly adapted for it's seemingly original host.
- This was the pattern for SARS and MERS. The virus initially sucks at infecting it's new host, it takes time for evolution to do its work, later the virus takes off into an outbreak. Not for covid-19. It hit the ground running in humans, but sucked at infecting it's original host?
* The Wuhan lab was noted for a poor track record for safety
* Chinese govt has been less than transparent with investigations. WIV has sequestered thier virus databases and information on prior research efforts after outbreak. Research director has been caught in notable lies. In knowledge of the original bat sequence for example.
* Overall, there is strong circumstantial evidence that WIV was using their unique bat virus as a vector, which they engineered with a new Spike protein from a recently acquired Pangolin sample, further tweaked with a furin cleavage site in order to make it more infectious in human cell based models they commonly use for their studies. They've published many papers describing such methods and techniques...
Highly plausible a researcher studying the construct could have been infected, or someone fucked up, and the virus escaped the lab and led to an outbreak in the local city.
OR.. we have to believe that somehow a rare bat virus recombined with pango virus a thousand miles away, then traveled to an out of season wet market another thousand miles away, meanwhile also independently evolving a furin site, but managed not to infect anyone along the way until it showed up in Wuhan. Totally by coincidence, a town with a leading bat coronavirus investigation lab... One of a few Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world.
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