cont’d from part 1…
Feb. 19: 27 scientists unitedly state that they condemn the conspiracy theories implying that the virus is man-made and overwhelmingly conclude that it originated in wildlife.
The Statement Published: LANCET
Ironically three of the signers have since said a laboratory accident cannot be ruled out.
March 11: Bat-woman, heading WIV coronavirus studies, concerned if the origin was an error by the lab but is relieved when none of the sequences her team had sampled from bat caves over the past two years matched those of the viruses.
Shi Zhengli: coronavirus research WIV
March 27: Intelligence Agency concludes that the possibility of the new coronavirus emerging accidentally due to unsafe laboratory practices is viable.
Five years of study have been engaged in so-called “gain of function” (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses to anticipate future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In 2015, the Wuhan lab performed a gain of function experiment using cut-and-paste genetic engineering, in which scientists take a natural virus and directly make substitutions in its RNA coding to make it more transmissible. They took a piece of the original SARS virus and inserted a snippet from a SARS-like bat coronavirus, resulting in a virus that is capable of infecting human cells. A natural virus altered with these methods would be easily flagged in genetic analysis, like a contemporary addition to an old Victorian house.
A virus produced with animal passage methods would be much harder to spot. These viruses are not directly manipulated. When the virus passes from one animal to the next, it undergoes something similar to what would happen in the wild during the course of its evolution. A wild coronavirus passed through 10 ferrets would be difficult to identify as having been engineered or manipulated.
April 14: In 2018, State Department officials visited the WIV. Two official warnings were given to Washington about prevailing inadequate safety measures as WIV was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
April 22: A biotech entrepreneur, reviews “gain-of-function” research. He confirms that it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to modify/ create a strain like the new coronavirus.
Yuri Deigin: Post on Virus Manipulation
April 24: National Institutes of Health terminates the grant to Eco-Health Alliance that funded study of bat coronaviruses at WIV.
April 30: Director of the National Intelligence office states that the scientific community concurs that the virus was not genetically modified, i.e. Man-made. However, will determine by information and intelligence analysis if the origin was Laboratory Error.
May 3: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. … Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
May 18: The Seeker, posts a medical thesis describing a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, where miners fell ill with viral-induced pneumonia in 2012.
June 4: Reviews of the history of lab safety and the type of research conducted at WIV leads to the hypothesis that the lab-leak theory cannot be easily dismissed. Both possibilities, natural or otherwise, for lack of definite evidence are equally probable.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Dive into Part 3 for the latest evidence…