Sars-Cov-2 was not a zoonotic transfer like the first Sars, or Mers, or Ebola, or H5N1.
There is a very clear process of adaption to the new virus host when a virus jumps from one species to a new one. The early cases may be deadly, but they don't jump between the members of the new species very easily. The people who caught Mers from camels and sars from bats, were very ill, some died, but the disease was very hard to catch human to human. All of the human victims had intimate and regular contact with the infected host species. The people who have been infected with the new H5N1 bird flu, have caught it in the main from infected cows, but they have all been workers who were dealing with large quantities of body fluids from the cows and without PPE. Slaughterhouse workers, drenched in infected cow blood, milking parlour workers who have been urinated on by cows while attaching milking equipment. They got big doses of virus in their eyes often. No one has caught it from another human. The thing about Sars-Cov-2 - commonly known as Covid-19 is that as soon as it emerged it was viciously infectious. It was nothing like as likely to ill you as Sars or Mers, but it went through our population like a whirlwind. You only had to be in a room with someone who had it, and you were infected. This is TOTALLY out of line with any new zoonosis. It had been messed with.
Another clue that the virus came from a lab and had been engineered, was that even until now, there have been no animal populations identified with the virus that emerged in 2019. It did not exist in the wild in the form we all caught. The Chinese authorities have been hunting for it and have taken many tens of thousands of samples from animals - especially those which are reservoirs for this particular family of corona viruses - bats and civets. There are none. The nearest genetic variant in the wild is found in caves in Hunan, but not THE virus we caught - only antecedents.
There is no trace of that virus among farmed populations, wild life traders or animal transporters until late autumn 2019 and they all come back to Wuhan a massive city containing two virology labs. It exists nowhere until it exploded out of that city. There are none of the bats that host corona viruses in that region, and no bats were sold in the wildlife market.
What we do have there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by Professor Shi Jingli.
Shi Jingli is an eminent vial geneticist. Her work at the WIV has since at least 2016 focused on the study and genetic manipulation of bat corona viruses. The manipulation is/was aimed at the discovery of dangerous viruses which might make the leap from animals to humans. They do this work through a process of what is called Gain of Function - which means manipulating viruses which do not infect humans so that they can infect human tissue. The purpose is pandemic protection - the reasoning being that if they can identify likely potential zoonotic viruses, we can prepare vaccines or treatments or take precautions. It was never meant to be malign.
This is done by genetically modifying mice so that they have some of the same proteins as humans - specifically lung proteins, and infecting the mice with versions of the target virus. By selecting the versions of the virus which show most effect at infecting the mice and selectively propagating these down a lot of generations, the virus gradually changes into a more infective one. This is called Serial Passage. This is what was being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
How do we know this?
It is on record. In 2016 Shi Jingli applied for a research grant to do exactly what I have just described. She applied to the Eco Health Alliance of America, a funding body run by Dr Peter Daszak. That in turn was superintended and funded by an organisation run by Dr Anthony Fauci who had a major role in advising Trump during the pandemic. The research grant application is on record. We know exactly what they were hoping to get funding for in around 2016 /2017. The grant was finally refused, but the WIV was not short of other funding partners. The Chinese state also funded them.
The WIV used to have an openly available database of the genomes of viruses it held. The nearest genome to Sars-Cov-2 that was known before 2019 was held there. Its code name is RaTG13. This is the nearest antecedent virus to Sars-Cov-2 that we know of and it was held at the HIV and they published its genome on their database.
In the late autumn of 2019 the WIV virus database which had been available for access by virologists world wide, suddenly disappeared. You can make your own mind up about why that happened. Then we began to hear that a novel form of pneumonia had broken out in Wuhan. Then we heard it had killed people, but that it was not passing human to human. Then we heard by leaks that it WAS passing human to human and that it had a marked impact on older people or fat people, or those with other problems. Then we heard that it was in our own country - wherever we lived all around the world. Then Chinese government spokesmen said the disease had come into China on foreign sea food. I think they said it came from New Zealand. Recently, the Chinese government said that the virus came from a lab, but it was a foreign lab. Not theirs, not the one in Wuhan that was applying for grants to make bat corona viruses infective to humans. Not the one with thousands of bat viruses in store. Not the one that had the nearest genomic relative to Sars-Cov-2.
I will leave the facts to speak for themselves.
This was written by me today 28th August from memory, but you can check the details online or better still, but the book Viral by molecular Biologist, Dr Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. This is a photograph of my copy. It is a great, accessible read and written in an open and science led fashion.
View attachment 64151
Yujia Alina Chan is a Canadian
molecular biologist specializing in
gene therapy and
cell engineering at the
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a
postdoctoral fellow. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, she became known for supporting the hypothesis that the
SARS-CoV-2 virus
escaped from a lab, contrary to the prevailing consensus at the time regarding the
origins of the virus.
[1][2][3][4]
chatgpt.com
