COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday, with another expert claiming that evidence of the likelihood has reached "the level of a smoking gun."
Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus.
"[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun," Ebright said in the piece by former New York Times editor Nicholas Wade.
The papers from the lab cited by Ebright contained drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, which sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans.
DEFUSE? More like DIFFUSE amirite
I am right. The whole point was to make it highly transmissible.
The proposal was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but Wade suggested that their work could have been carried out by researchers in Wuhan who had secured Chinese government funding.
Like from EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci, maybe?
"Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019," wrote Wade, a former science editor of the New York Times. "This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin."
Along with the research notes, Wade claimed the specific genetic structure of the coronavirus that allowed it to infect humans served as another strong indication of "the virus's laboratory birth."
"Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol," Wade wrote.
You know, I shouldn't have said EcoHealth was behind this, as I did a couple of paragraphs ago. That was totally speculative and it's wrong of me to just accuse them with no evidence.
While scientists continue to debate whether the coronavirus pandemic was a natural occurrence or manmade, Ebright believed there was credibility that the work proposed by the now-controversial EcoHealth Alliance led to the development COVID-19.
Oh. Nevermind.
City Journal discussed these documents a month ago.
Researchers write that covid-19 was manufactured using known laboratory procedures for creating new viruses, and definitely not by any known processes:
New documents may explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats, from which it might have jumped to people. The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence--the genetically most infectious form--of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002. The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure.
Note that covid-19 is "caused by SARS2."
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus."
I feel like a real idiot and poser for not knowing this, but apparently covid-19 is the disease, and SARS-CoV-2 (aka SARS2) is the virus that causes the disease.
The documents unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, and analyzed by its reporter Emily Kopp, include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.
The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers--Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen--noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.
Restriction enzymes, made naturally by bacteria as a defense against viruses, are an invaluable tool for biologists because they cut DNA at specific points known as recognition sites. These sites occur randomly across the genome, so a natural virus treated with a restriction enzyme will be cut into pieces of different sizes. However, researchers who want to synthesize a virus from scratch in order to manipulate its parts more effectively will often rearrange the recognition sites so that they are evenly spaced. This allows short chunks of DNA, all of roughly equal length, to be synthesized chemically and then strung together in a complete viral genome. Bottom line: if your virus has evenly spaced recognition sites, it's a pretty good bet that it was made in a laboratory.
Bruttel and his colleagues guessed that a commonly used pair of restriction enzymes, known as BsaI and BsmBI, might have been used to assemble the SARS2 virus's genome. When they examined the structure of SARS2, they found that the recognition sites used by these enzymes were indeed evenly spaced across the genome, marking it into six sections. "Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2," they wrote.
Their paper did not receive the attention it deserved, in part because of the difficulty of ruling out a natural explanation for the even spacing. The small group of virologists who adamantly oppose the lab-leak hypothesis attacked the paper as "confected nonsense" (Edward Holmes) and "kindergarten molecular biology" (Kristian Andersen).
Kristian Anderson is the "scientist" bankrolled by Anthony Fauci who first warned that covid-19 appeared to be manufactured and then, after some phone calls with Fauci, produced a paper under his direction claiming anyone who thought that covid-19 looked manufactured is a conspiracy theorist.
He must go to jail.