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Monday, March 23, 2020
A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19
Published: March 14, 2020; Updated: March 23, 2020
Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Norwegian
A Swiss medical doctor provided the following information on the current situation in order to enable our readers to make a realistic risk assessment. (Daily updates below)
According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old.
80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer.
Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. Only about 30% of the deceased are women.
The Italian Institute of Health moreover distinguishes between those who died from the coronavirus and those who died with the coronavirus. In many cases it is not yet clear whether the persons died from the virus or from their pre-existing chronic diseases or from a combination of both.
The two Italians deceased under 40 years of age (both 39 years old) were a cancer patient and a diabetes patient with additional complications. In these cases, too, the exact cause of death was not yet clear (i.e. if from the virus or from their pre-existing diseases).
The partial overloading of the hospitals is due to the general rush of patients and the increased number of patients requiring special or intensive care. In particular, the aim is to stabilize respiratory function and, in severe cases, to provide anti-viral therapies.
(Update: The Italian National Institute of Health published a statistical report on test-positive patients and deceased, confirming the above data.)
The doctor also points out the following aspects:
Northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe, which has already led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past and is likely an additional risk factor in the current epidemic.
South Korea, for instance, has experienced a much milder course than Italy and has already passed the peak of the epidemic. In South Korea, only about 70 deaths with a positive test result have been reported so far. As in Italy, those affected were mostly high-risk patients.
The approximately twelve test-positive Swiss deaths so far were also high-risk patients with chronic diseases, an average age of 80 years and a maximum age of 90 years, whose exact cause of death, i.e. from the virus or from their pre-existing diseases, is not yet known.
Furthermore, according to a first Chinese study, the internationally used virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. In these cases, the persons may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but presumably one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual (and currently ongoing) common cold and flu epidemics. (1)
Thus the most important indicator for judging the danger of the disease is not the frequently reported number of positively-tested persons and deaths, but the number of persons actually and unexpectedly developing or dying from pneumonia (so-called excess mortality).
According to all current data, for the healthy general population of school and working age, a mild to moderate course of the Covid-19 disease can be expected. Senior citizens and persons with existing chronic diseases should be protected. The medical capacities should be optimally prepared.
Medical literature
(1) Zhuang et al., Potential false-positive rate among the ‚asymptomatic infected individuals‘ in close contacts of COVID-19 patients, Chinese Medical Association Publishing House, March 2020.
(2) Grasselli et al., Critical Care Utilization for the COVID-19 Outbreak in Lombardy, JAMA, March 2020.
(3) WHO, Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019, February 2020.
Reference values
Important reference values include the number of annual flu deaths, which is up to 8,000 in Italy and up to 60,000 in the US; normal overall mortality, which in Italy is up to 2,000 deaths per day; and the average number of pneumonia cases per year, which in Italy is over 120,000.
Current all-cause mortality in Europe and in Italy is still normal or even below-average. Any excess mortality due to Covid-19 should become visible in the European monitoring charts.
Updates
March 17, 2020 (I)
The mortality profile remains puzzling from a virological point of view because, in contrast to influenza viruses, children are spared and men are affected about twice as often as women. On the other hand, this profile corresponds to natural mortality, which is close to zero for children and almost twice as high for 75-year-old men as for women of the same age.
The younger test-positive deceased almost always had severe pre-existing conditions. For example, a 21-year-old Spanish soccer coach had died test-positive, making international headlines. However, the doctors diagnosed an unrecognized leukemia, whose typical complications include severe pneumonia.
The decisive factor in assessing the danger of the disease is therefore not the number of test-positive persons and deceased, which is often mentioned in the media, but the number of people actually and unexpectedly developing or dying from pneumonia (so-called excess mortality). So far, this value remains very low in most countries.
In Switzerland, some emergency units are already overloaded simply because of the large number of people who want to be tested. This points to an additional psychological and logistical component of the current situation.
March 17, 2020 (II)
Italian immunology professor Sergio Romagnani from the University of Florence comes to the conclusion in a study on 3000 people that 50 to 75% of the test-positive people of all ages remain completely symptom-free – significantly more than previously assumed.
The occupancy rate of the North Italian ICUs in the winter months is typically already 85 to 90%. Some or many of these existing patients could also be test-positive by now. However, the number of additional unexpected pneumonia cases is not yet known.
A hospital doctor in the Spanish city of Malaga writes on Twitter that people are currently more likely to die from panic and systemic collapse than from the virus. The hospital is being overrun by people with colds, flu and possibly Covid19 and doctors have lost control.
March 18, 2020
A new epidemiological study (preprint) concludes that the fatality of Covid19 even in the Chinese city of Wuhan was only 0.04% to 0.12% and thus rather lower than that of seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. As a reason for the overestimated fatality of Covid19, the researchers suspect that initially only a small number of cases were recorded in Wuhan, as the disease was probably asymptomatic or mild in many people.
Chinese researchers argue that extreme winter smog in the city of Wuhan may have played a causal role in the outbreak of pneumonia. In the summer of 2019, public protests were already taking place in Wuhan because of the poor air quality.
New satellite images show how Northern Italy has the highest levels of air pollution in Europe, and how this air pollution has been greatly reduced by the quarantine.
A manufacturer of the Covid19 test kit states that it should only be used for research purposes and not for diagnostic applications, as it has not yet been clinically validated.
March 19, 2020 (I)
The Italian National Health Institute ISS has published a new report on test-positive deaths:
The median age is 80.5 years (79.5 for men, 83.7 for women).
10% of the deceased was over 90 years old; 90% of the deceased was over 70 years old.
At most 0.8% of the deceased had no pre-existing chronic illnesses.
Approximately 75% of the deceased had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three more pre-existing conditions, in particular heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Five of the deceased were between 31 and 39 years old, all of them with serious pre-existing health conditions (e.g. cancer or heart disease).
The National Health Institute hasn’t yet determined what the patients examined ultimately died of and refers to them in general terms as Covid19-positive deaths.
March 19, 2020 (II)
A report in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera points out that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.
German virologist Hendrik Streeck argues that Covid19 is unlikely to increase total mortality in Germany, which normally is around 2500 people per day. Streeck mentions the case of a 78-year-old man with preconditions who died of heart failure, subsequently tested positive for Covid19 and thus was included in the statistics of Covid19 deaths.
According to Stanford Professor John Ioannidis, the new coronavirus may be no more dangerous than some of the common coronaviruses, even in older people. Ioannidis argues that there is no reliable medical data backing the measures currently decided upon.
March 20, 2020
According to the latest European monitoring report, overall mortality in all countries (including Italy) and in all age groups remains within or even below the normal range so far.
According to the latest German statistics, the median age of test-positive deaths is about 83 years, most with pre-existing health conditions that might be a possible cause of death.
A 2006 Canadian study referred to by Stanford Professor John Ioannidis found that common cold coronaviruses may also cause death rates of up to 6% in risk groups such as residents of a care facility, and that virus test kits initially falsely indicated an infection with SARS coronaviruses.
March 21, 2020 (I)
Spain reports only three test-positive deaths under the age of 65 (out of a total of about 1000). Their pre-existing health conditions and actual cause of death are not yet known.
On March 20, Italy reported 627 nationwide test-positive deaths in one day. By comparison, normal overall mortality in Italy is about 1800 deaths per day. Since February 21, Italy has reported about 4000 test-positive deaths. Normal overall mortality during this time frame is up to 50,000 deaths. It is not yet known to what extent normal overall mortality has increased, or to what extent it has simply turned test-positive. Moreover, Italy and Europe have had a very mild flu season in 2019/2020 that has spared many otherwise vulnerable people.
According to Italian news reports, 90% of test-positive deceased in the Lombardy region have died outside of intensive care units, mostly at home or in general care sections. Their cause of death and the possible role of quarantine measures in their deaths remain unclear. Only 260 out of 2168 test-positive persons have died in ICUs.
Bloomberg highlights that „99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says“
March 21, 2020 (II)
The Japan Times asks: Japan was expecting a coronavirus explosion. Where is it? Despite being one of the first countries getting positive test results and having imposed no lockdown, Japan is one of the least-affected nations. Quote: „Even if Japan may not be counting all those infected, hospitals aren’t being stretched thin and there has been no spike in pneumonia cases.“
Italian researchers argue that the extreme smog in Northern Italy, the worst in Europe, may be playing a causative role in the current pneumonia outbreak there, as in Wuhan before.
In a new interview, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, a world renowned expert in medical microbiology, says blaming the new coronavirus alone for deaths is „wrong“ and „dangerously misleading“, as there are other more important factors at play, notably pre-existing health conditions and poor air quality in Chinese and Northern Italian cities. Professor Bhakdi describes the currently discussed or imposed measures as „grotesque“, „useless“, „self-destructive“ and a „collective suicide“ that will shorten the lifespan of the elderly and should not be accepted by society.
March 22, 2020 (I)
Regarding the situation in Italy: Most major media falsely report that Italy has up to 800 deaths per day from the coronavirus. In reality, the president of the Italian Civil Protection Service stresses that these are deaths „with the coronavirus and not from the coronavirus“ (minute 03:30 of the press conference). In other words, these persons died while also testing positive.
As Professors Ioannidis and Bhakdi have shown, countries like South Korea and Japan that introduced no lockdown measures have experienced near-zero excess mortality in connection with Covid-19, while the Diamond Princess cruise ship experienced an extrapolated mortality figure in the per mille range, i.e. at or below the level of the seasonal flu.
Current test-positive death figures in Italy are still less than 50% of normal daily overall mortality in Italy, which is around 1800 deaths per day. Thus it is possible, perhaps even likely, that a large part of normal daily mortality now simply counts as „Covid19“ deaths (as they test positive). This is the point stressed by the President of the Italian Civil Protection Service.
However, by now it is clear that certain regions in Northern Italy, i.e. those facing the toughest lockdown measures, are experiencing markedly increased daily mortality figures. It is also known that in the Lombardy region, 90% of test-positive deaths occur not in intensive care units, but instead mostly at home. And more than 99% have serious pre-existing health conditions.
Professor Sucharit Bhakdi has called lockdown measures „useless“, „self-destructive“ and a „collective suicide“. Thus the extremely troubling question arises as to what extent the increased mortality of these elderly, isolated, highly stressed people with multiple pre-existing health conditions may in fact be caused by the weeks-long lockdown measures still in force.
If so, it may be one of those cases where the treatment is worse than the disease. (See update below: only 12% of death certificates show the coronavirus as a cause.)
March 22, 2020 (II)
In Switzerland, there are currently 56 test-positive deaths, all of whom were „high risk patients“ due to their advanced age and/or pre-existing health conditions. Their actual cause of death, i.e. from or simply with the virus, has not been communicated.
The Swiss government claimed that the situation in southern Switzerland (next to Italy) is „dramatic“, yet local doctors denied this and said everything is normal.
According to press reports, oxygen bottles may become scarce. The reason, however, is not a currently higher usage, but rather hoarding due to fear of future shortages.
In many countries, there is already an increasing shortage of doctors and nurses. This is primarily because healthcare workers testing positive have to self-quarantine, even though in many cases they will remain fully or largely symptom-free.
March 22, 2020 (III)
A model from Imperial College London predicted between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths in the UK „from“ Covid-19, but the authors of the study have now conceded that many of these deaths would not be in addition to, but rather part of the normal annual mortality rate, which in the UK is about 600,000 people per year. In other words, excess mortality would remain low.
Dr. David Katz, founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, asks in the New York Times: „Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease? There may be more targeted ways to beat the pandemic.“
According to Italian Professor Walter Ricciardi, „only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus“, whereas in public reports „all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus“. This means that Italian death figures reported by the media have to be reduced by at least a factor of 8 to obtain actual deaths caused by the virus. Thus one ends up with at most a few dozen deaths per day, compared to an overall daily mortality of 1800 deaths and up to 20,000 flu deaths per year.
March 23, 2020 (I)
A new French study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, titled SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data, concludes that „the problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated“, since „the mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is not significantly different from that for common coronaviruses identified at the study hospital in France“.
An Italian study of August 2019 found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far.
In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza.
A leading Italian doctor reports that „strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy.
Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is „an epidemic of mass panic“ and „logic was one of the first victims.“
March 23, 2020 (II)
Former Israeli Health Minister, Professor Yoram Lass, says that the new coronavirus is „less dangerous than the flu“ and lockdown measures „will kill more people than the virus“. He adds that „the numbers do not match the panic“ and „psychology is prevailing over science“. He also notes that „Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country.“
Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss infectious disease specialist, argues that many of the imposed measures are not based on science and should be reversed. According to Vernazza, mass testing makes no sense because 90% of the population will see no symptoms, and lockdowns and closing schools are even „counterproductive“. He recommends protecting only risk groups while keeping the economy and society at large undisturbed.
The President of the World Doctors Federation, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, argues that lockdown measures as in Italy are „unreasonable“ and „counterproductive“ and should be reversed.
Switzerland: Despite media panic, excess mortality still at or near zero: the latest testpositive „victims“ were a 96yo in palliative care and a 97yo with pre-existing conditions.
The latest statistical report of the Italian National Health Institute is now available in English.
Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Norwegian
A Swiss medical doctor provided the following information on the current situation in order to enable our readers to make a realistic risk assessment. (Daily updates below)
According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old.
80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer.
Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. Only about 30% of the deceased are women.
The Italian Institute of Health moreover distinguishes between those who died from the coronavirus and those who died with the coronavirus. In many cases it is not yet clear whether the persons died from the virus or from their pre-existing chronic diseases or from a combination of both.
The two Italians deceased under 40 years of age (both 39 years old) were a cancer patient and a diabetes patient with additional complications. In these cases, too, the exact cause of death was not yet clear (i.e. if from the virus or from their pre-existing diseases).
The partial overloading of the hospitals is due to the general rush of patients and the increased number of patients requiring special or intensive care. In particular, the aim is to stabilize respiratory function and, in severe cases, to provide anti-viral therapies.
(Update: The Italian National Institute of Health published a statistical report on test-positive patients and deceased, confirming the above data.)
The doctor also points out the following aspects:
Northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe, which has already led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past and is likely an additional risk factor in the current epidemic.
South Korea, for instance, has experienced a much milder course than Italy and has already passed the peak of the epidemic. In South Korea, only about 70 deaths with a positive test result have been reported so far. As in Italy, those affected were mostly high-risk patients.
The approximately twelve test-positive Swiss deaths so far were also high-risk patients with chronic diseases, an average age of 80 years and a maximum age of 90 years, whose exact cause of death, i.e. from the virus or from their pre-existing diseases, is not yet known.
Furthermore, according to a first Chinese study, the internationally used virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. In these cases, the persons may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but presumably one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual (and currently ongoing) common cold and flu epidemics. (1)
Thus the most important indicator for judging the danger of the disease is not the frequently reported number of positively-tested persons and deaths, but the number of persons actually and unexpectedly developing or dying from pneumonia (so-called excess mortality).
According to all current data, for the healthy general population of school and working age, a mild to moderate course of the Covid-19 disease can be expected. Senior citizens and persons with existing chronic diseases should be protected. The medical capacities should be optimally prepared.
Medical literature
(1) Zhuang et al., Potential false-positive rate among the ‚asymptomatic infected individuals‘ in close contacts of COVID-19 patients, Chinese Medical Association Publishing House, March 2020.
(2) Grasselli et al., Critical Care Utilization for the COVID-19 Outbreak in Lombardy, JAMA, March 2020.
(3) WHO, Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019, February 2020.
Reference values
Important reference values include the number of annual flu deaths, which is up to 8,000 in Italy and up to 60,000 in the US; normal overall mortality, which in Italy is up to 2,000 deaths per day; and the average number of pneumonia cases per year, which in Italy is over 120,000.
Current all-cause mortality in Europe and in Italy is still normal or even below-average. Any excess mortality due to Covid-19 should become visible in the European monitoring charts.
Updates
March 17, 2020 (I)
The mortality profile remains puzzling from a virological point of view because, in contrast to influenza viruses, children are spared and men are affected about twice as often as women. On the other hand, this profile corresponds to natural mortality, which is close to zero for children and almost twice as high for 75-year-old men as for women of the same age.
The younger test-positive deceased almost always had severe pre-existing conditions. For example, a 21-year-old Spanish soccer coach had died test-positive, making international headlines. However, the doctors diagnosed an unrecognized leukemia, whose typical complications include severe pneumonia.
The decisive factor in assessing the danger of the disease is therefore not the number of test-positive persons and deceased, which is often mentioned in the media, but the number of people actually and unexpectedly developing or dying from pneumonia (so-called excess mortality). So far, this value remains very low in most countries.
In Switzerland, some emergency units are already overloaded simply because of the large number of people who want to be tested. This points to an additional psychological and logistical component of the current situation.
March 17, 2020 (II)
Italian immunology professor Sergio Romagnani from the University of Florence comes to the conclusion in a study on 3000 people that 50 to 75% of the test-positive people of all ages remain completely symptom-free – significantly more than previously assumed.
The occupancy rate of the North Italian ICUs in the winter months is typically already 85 to 90%. Some or many of these existing patients could also be test-positive by now. However, the number of additional unexpected pneumonia cases is not yet known.
A hospital doctor in the Spanish city of Malaga writes on Twitter that people are currently more likely to die from panic and systemic collapse than from the virus. The hospital is being overrun by people with colds, flu and possibly Covid19 and doctors have lost control.
March 18, 2020
A new epidemiological study (preprint) concludes that the fatality of Covid19 even in the Chinese city of Wuhan was only 0.04% to 0.12% and thus rather lower than that of seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. As a reason for the overestimated fatality of Covid19, the researchers suspect that initially only a small number of cases were recorded in Wuhan, as the disease was probably asymptomatic or mild in many people.
Chinese researchers argue that extreme winter smog in the city of Wuhan may have played a causal role in the outbreak of pneumonia. In the summer of 2019, public protests were already taking place in Wuhan because of the poor air quality.
New satellite images show how Northern Italy has the highest levels of air pollution in Europe, and how this air pollution has been greatly reduced by the quarantine.
A manufacturer of the Covid19 test kit states that it should only be used for research purposes and not for diagnostic applications, as it has not yet been clinically validated.
March 19, 2020 (I)
The Italian National Health Institute ISS has published a new report on test-positive deaths:
The median age is 80.5 years (79.5 for men, 83.7 for women).
10% of the deceased was over 90 years old; 90% of the deceased was over 70 years old.
At most 0.8% of the deceased had no pre-existing chronic illnesses.
Approximately 75% of the deceased had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three more pre-existing conditions, in particular heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Five of the deceased were between 31 and 39 years old, all of them with serious pre-existing health conditions (e.g. cancer or heart disease).
The National Health Institute hasn’t yet determined what the patients examined ultimately died of and refers to them in general terms as Covid19-positive deaths.
March 19, 2020 (II)
A report in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera points out that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.
German virologist Hendrik Streeck argues that Covid19 is unlikely to increase total mortality in Germany, which normally is around 2500 people per day. Streeck mentions the case of a 78-year-old man with preconditions who died of heart failure, subsequently tested positive for Covid19 and thus was included in the statistics of Covid19 deaths.
According to Stanford Professor John Ioannidis, the new coronavirus may be no more dangerous than some of the common coronaviruses, even in older people. Ioannidis argues that there is no reliable medical data backing the measures currently decided upon.
March 20, 2020
According to the latest European monitoring report, overall mortality in all countries (including Italy) and in all age groups remains within or even below the normal range so far.
According to the latest German statistics, the median age of test-positive deaths is about 83 years, most with pre-existing health conditions that might be a possible cause of death.
A 2006 Canadian study referred to by Stanford Professor John Ioannidis found that common cold coronaviruses may also cause death rates of up to 6% in risk groups such as residents of a care facility, and that virus test kits initially falsely indicated an infection with SARS coronaviruses.
March 21, 2020 (I)
Spain reports only three test-positive deaths under the age of 65 (out of a total of about 1000). Their pre-existing health conditions and actual cause of death are not yet known.
On March 20, Italy reported 627 nationwide test-positive deaths in one day. By comparison, normal overall mortality in Italy is about 1800 deaths per day. Since February 21, Italy has reported about 4000 test-positive deaths. Normal overall mortality during this time frame is up to 50,000 deaths. It is not yet known to what extent normal overall mortality has increased, or to what extent it has simply turned test-positive. Moreover, Italy and Europe have had a very mild flu season in 2019/2020 that has spared many otherwise vulnerable people.
According to Italian news reports, 90% of test-positive deceased in the Lombardy region have died outside of intensive care units, mostly at home or in general care sections. Their cause of death and the possible role of quarantine measures in their deaths remain unclear. Only 260 out of 2168 test-positive persons have died in ICUs.
Bloomberg highlights that „99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says“
March 21, 2020 (II)
The Japan Times asks: Japan was expecting a coronavirus explosion. Where is it? Despite being one of the first countries getting positive test results and having imposed no lockdown, Japan is one of the least-affected nations. Quote: „Even if Japan may not be counting all those infected, hospitals aren’t being stretched thin and there has been no spike in pneumonia cases.“
Italian researchers argue that the extreme smog in Northern Italy, the worst in Europe, may be playing a causative role in the current pneumonia outbreak there, as in Wuhan before.
In a new interview, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, a world renowned expert in medical microbiology, says blaming the new coronavirus alone for deaths is „wrong“ and „dangerously misleading“, as there are other more important factors at play, notably pre-existing health conditions and poor air quality in Chinese and Northern Italian cities. Professor Bhakdi describes the currently discussed or imposed measures as „grotesque“, „useless“, „self-destructive“ and a „collective suicide“ that will shorten the lifespan of the elderly and should not be accepted by society.
March 22, 2020 (I)
Regarding the situation in Italy: Most major media falsely report that Italy has up to 800 deaths per day from the coronavirus. In reality, the president of the Italian Civil Protection Service stresses that these are deaths „with the coronavirus and not from the coronavirus“ (minute 03:30 of the press conference). In other words, these persons died while also testing positive.
As Professors Ioannidis and Bhakdi have shown, countries like South Korea and Japan that introduced no lockdown measures have experienced near-zero excess mortality in connection with Covid-19, while the Diamond Princess cruise ship experienced an extrapolated mortality figure in the per mille range, i.e. at or below the level of the seasonal flu.
Current test-positive death figures in Italy are still less than 50% of normal daily overall mortality in Italy, which is around 1800 deaths per day. Thus it is possible, perhaps even likely, that a large part of normal daily mortality now simply counts as „Covid19“ deaths (as they test positive). This is the point stressed by the President of the Italian Civil Protection Service.
However, by now it is clear that certain regions in Northern Italy, i.e. those facing the toughest lockdown measures, are experiencing markedly increased daily mortality figures. It is also known that in the Lombardy region, 90% of test-positive deaths occur not in intensive care units, but instead mostly at home. And more than 99% have serious pre-existing health conditions.
Professor Sucharit Bhakdi has called lockdown measures „useless“, „self-destructive“ and a „collective suicide“. Thus the extremely troubling question arises as to what extent the increased mortality of these elderly, isolated, highly stressed people with multiple pre-existing health conditions may in fact be caused by the weeks-long lockdown measures still in force.
If so, it may be one of those cases where the treatment is worse than the disease. (See update below: only 12% of death certificates show the coronavirus as a cause.)
March 22, 2020 (II)
In Switzerland, there are currently 56 test-positive deaths, all of whom were „high risk patients“ due to their advanced age and/or pre-existing health conditions. Their actual cause of death, i.e. from or simply with the virus, has not been communicated.
The Swiss government claimed that the situation in southern Switzerland (next to Italy) is „dramatic“, yet local doctors denied this and said everything is normal.
According to press reports, oxygen bottles may become scarce. The reason, however, is not a currently higher usage, but rather hoarding due to fear of future shortages.
In many countries, there is already an increasing shortage of doctors and nurses. This is primarily because healthcare workers testing positive have to self-quarantine, even though in many cases they will remain fully or largely symptom-free.
March 22, 2020 (III)
A model from Imperial College London predicted between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths in the UK „from“ Covid-19, but the authors of the study have now conceded that many of these deaths would not be in addition to, but rather part of the normal annual mortality rate, which in the UK is about 600,000 people per year. In other words, excess mortality would remain low.
Dr. David Katz, founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, asks in the New York Times: „Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease? There may be more targeted ways to beat the pandemic.“
According to Italian Professor Walter Ricciardi, „only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus“, whereas in public reports „all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus“. This means that Italian death figures reported by the media have to be reduced by at least a factor of 8 to obtain actual deaths caused by the virus. Thus one ends up with at most a few dozen deaths per day, compared to an overall daily mortality of 1800 deaths and up to 20,000 flu deaths per year.
March 23, 2020 (I)
A new French study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, titled SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data, concludes that „the problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated“, since „the mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is not significantly different from that for common coronaviruses identified at the study hospital in France“.
An Italian study of August 2019 found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far.
In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza.
A leading Italian doctor reports that „strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy.
Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is „an epidemic of mass panic“ and „logic was one of the first victims.“
March 23, 2020 (II)
Former Israeli Health Minister, Professor Yoram Lass, says that the new coronavirus is „less dangerous than the flu“ and lockdown measures „will kill more people than the virus“. He adds that „the numbers do not match the panic“ and „psychology is prevailing over science“. He also notes that „Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country.“
Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss infectious disease specialist, argues that many of the imposed measures are not based on science and should be reversed. According to Vernazza, mass testing makes no sense because 90% of the population will see no symptoms, and lockdowns and closing schools are even „counterproductive“. He recommends protecting only risk groups while keeping the economy and society at large undisturbed.
The President of the World Doctors Federation, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, argues that lockdown measures as in Italy are „unreasonable“ and „counterproductive“ and should be reversed.
Switzerland: Despite media panic, excess mortality still at or near zero: the latest testpositive „victims“ were a 96yo in palliative care and a 97yo with pre-existing conditions.
The latest statistical report of the Italian National Health Institute is now available in English.
"The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated“ - The conclusion of a new French study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, titled "SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data"
from reddit:
There is an excellent piece of on-going research into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic being done by a Swiss Doctor over on SwissPropagandaResearch. They are making new updates everyday, and have been doing for over a week.
Here are the updates for today, 23rd March 2020:
- A new French study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, titled SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data, concludes that „the problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated“, since „the mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is not significantly different from that for common coronaviruses identified at the study hospital in France“.
- An Italian study of August 2019 (https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/fulltext) found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far.
- In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza.
- A leading Italian doctor reports that „strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy.
- Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is „an epidemic of mass panic“ and „logic was one of the first victims.“
- Former Israeli Health Minister, Professor Yoram Lass, says that the new coronavirus is „less dangerous than the flu“ and lockdown measures „will kill more people than the virus“. He adds that „the numbers do not match the panic“ and „psychology is prevailing over science“. He also notes that „Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country.“
- Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss infectious disease specialist, argues that many of the imposed measures are not based on science and should be reversed. According to Vernazza, mass testing makes no sense because 90% of the population will see no symptoms, and lockdowns and closing schools are even „counterproductive“. He recommends protecting only risk groups while keeping the economy and society at large undisturbed.
- The President of the World Doctors Federation, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, argues that lockdown measures as in Italy are „unreasonable“ and „counterproductive“ and should be reversed.
- Switzerland: Despite media panic, excess mortality still at or near zero: the latest testpositive „victims“ were a 96yo in palliative care and a 97yo with pre-existing conditions.
- The latest statistical report of the Italian National Health Institute is now available in English.
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?
via unz
[The following is the republication of several long and very detailed comments by an unidentified purported expert on biowarfare that originally appeared on a recent thread of the Saker blogsite.]
[Update: an investigation strongly suggests that the author’s claims regarding his personal background and professional expertise are accurate.]
I’ll throw my 2 cents in here. I have zero proof other than my gut feeling that this is a bioweapon. I do have 40 year of biodefense research experience behind me and worked at Fort Detrich on bacterial vaccines where I developed my own aerosol infection routes and developed multi-species models of pathogenesis to establish correlates of immunity. Because I was a one-stop shop doing everything including animal care, aerosol exposures, sample analysis, necropsy, and histopathology, etc. plus I had research programs in endemic areas studying the immunopathological response in human populations to establish immune correlates of protection for candidate vaccines all for the Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP).
I recall the early years when the Department of Homeland Security was stood up and they got the lion’s share of poorly performing ciivil servants un-fireable under the then OPMA policies. I was brought in as a technical expert as we were in dire straits for funding so I (and others) was lent out as a research prostitute. This is a little known problem with civil service employees. They are impossible to eliminate and generally rise to levels where they can cause the most damage. However, an opportunity arose whereby agencies in the Federal government had to contribute bodies to the new Department of Homeland Security (as no new vacancies were created when the agency was stood up meaning everyone had to sacrifice personnel) so most, if not all, employees sent to DHS were the worst of the worst. However, the DHS labs (specifically NBACC) also tied into some nefarious microbiologists working at the CIA (ostensibly part of DHS) and it is an understatement to say that what I saw being proposed horrified me. That work, I am certain was performed at Battle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio under a DHS contract doing the work for the CIA under the auspices of NBACC. As I was very vocally opposed to this stuff I was removed from the secure access at DHS but not DoD to the offensive work which I had pointed out was not only illegal but unethical. I have since retired now more than 10 years and am far away from all of that. I won’t say more as they will reach out and seek retribution. But, if you look hard enough you can find still on the internet some references. There are some pissed off people out there should anyone care to actually do some leg work and try and figure this out. But, our news people no longer does this work so there is very little possibility of ever learning the truth.
However, that said, I notice some interesting things with COVID-19, that perked my ears up a bit. Yes, it could be a natural infection jumping species from bats to humans with a probable intermediate host, under conditions of human encroachment into world habitats. It is actually most likely to have been that, except for the strain differences being observed. That leads one to believe if it is in fact true, and I have no reason to doubt the Chinese on this, that it originated outside of China and it seems likely to have originated in the US. If, in fact, the US has 5 strains currently and China only one then it must have been percolating in the US for some time before it arose in China. Likely, deaths in the US were attributed to other diseases such as influenza and only retrospective sampling will determine this. It would be interesting to do a combination GPS-Molecular biology tracking of strains over time and distance. Also, a definite genetic analysis of strains over time would also be beneficial and can be done easily on every isolated strain. This would have value in attributing the course of the disease over time as part of a natural history study of the virus. We would need access to all samples of every lung disease related death for the past 12 months to be certain to track all potential deaths. NBACC is the key to figuring out what nefarious stuff was being funded.
It is possible that this virus has mutated over time to become more virulent. In particular engineered strains are generally unstable over multiple passages through multiple hosts. In my experience when testing strains for pathogenesis and lethality it is wise to first passage a frozen isolate several times through a susceptible animal host to regain full strength. If you test a lab isolate (usually frozen or lyophilized) generally it is wimpy unless you passage it at least 3 passages through an animal model. The worst strains are always those recovered from humans who died from the disease and not field collected strains. If this was perceived to be a useful agent from the likes of Bolton or Pompeo, who are terrible and evil people, then it is conceivable this was thought to teach the Chinese a lesson in economics. You have to be a complete idiot to release a virus for which you have no effective countermeasures but this administration seems to be filled with complete idiots. So, expecting normal behavior from these people is futile.
It could have been released during the 7th CISM military games held in Wuhan October 18-27, 2019 and that fits perfectly into the time scale for the actual infections. Now interestingly enough, I was a participant in several CISM competitions in Europe for skiing (I was on active duty for 26 years) so I am very well versed in who these athletes are. In general the best are Olympic competitors who are ostensibly part of the National Guard of their states who pay for their training by extended military active duty periods where their sole job is sports training. I used to lose every year to one of these guys and generally I placed a distant second place in cross country skiing. I also participated in the biathlon competitions and our soldiers were the very top level because they were in fact Olympic athletes. Rumor is that the US participants at CISM were atrocious which is very atypical so one wonders who these “athletes” were. I am reminded of the US military mission in Brazil to help flood victims which coincidentally was the exact same time that all the power transmission stations in Venezuela were destroyed. So, again a hackle or 2 rise when I heard about that. However, it is the perfect opportunity to release a virus on a target population.
I will also like to add that not all biological warfare agents are lethal. In fact, the worst are non-lethal as it consumes vast amounts of resources in treatment and lost productivity. Deaths are actually cheaper. So, a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy. As Trump’s administration claims they are waging war against economic enemies (currently China heads the list) using all possible actions. This fits perfectly into that; however, it may end up destroying the American economy which would be ironic.
I believe the Chinese response was exactly what a country would do if they were attacked with a bioweapon which explains a lot of their actions. I do not believe it was an accidental release from the BSL-4 labs in Wuhan. In fact, this may have been an irresistible opportunity similar to the alleged Novichuk release just 8 k away from Porton Down laboratories (the UK Fort Detrich). Interestingly, the potential release from PDL was never put forward as a logical explanation. Anyway, it sticks me that the CIA seems to have developed a pattern over time. As long as I am pushing my gut feelings I will throw out there the potential for a bioengineered adenovirus with c-fos and c-jun over expression which would cause sarcomas. That work was all published at the National Cancer Institute located where? Fort Detrich. I am certain it is just a coincidence. I can imagine the cackling going on at the CIA when planning this operation and again the coronavirus operation(s). I believe there were at least two attacks with Iran being the second and perhaps North Korea as well. However, evidence against it being a bioweapon is Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are minimally affected. This could mean effective countermeasures or botched attacks. It is inconsistent though with the way the CIA operates.
Adenovirus is another virus similar to coronavirus in usage and easily aerosolized. I have made my own for over expression of medical treatments for wound infections. Has anyone other than myself noted that so many enemies of the US have died from sarcomas particularly in South America? My point is perhaps this stuff has been ongoing for quite some time and with some fairly good results. So, familiarity breeds contempt so as they gin more experience and begin to think this is good stuff, it is not out of the realm of possibility that this is in fact a bioweapon. That Iran was hit so hard is another hackle rising. It is just simply too good (for the idiots in the US government) to be a coincidence.
So, we are left with some interesting problems about this virus. Where was patient zero in China. What will be the results if a natural history study is conducted correlating geolocation, strain identity, severity of disease over time? Will that work be prevented? If so, that is yet another reason to be suspicious. Will it continue to mutate and what will be the outcome of this? Lots of good stuff to examine here and it will keep a lot of people busy for years.
Maybe you can explain this:
“Coronavirus have not previously been known to cause severe disease in humans”.
This is excerpt from the patent issued to CDC, US government. Link:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7220852B1/en
So the question for me is why should a harmless virus be patented by the US government and used for research in labs like US army research at Ft. Derick? That makes it military. Why is there then the SARS-CoV, and the latest COVID-19 which is SARS-CoV-2 ? The swineflu was likewise proven to be lab made at least in sources other than mainstream and WHO, the same was the case with Ebola, and even HIV.
It immediately raises the question of ban of biological weapons labs in my mind, by internatiopnal treaties just like a ban on the use of napalm, landmines and so on, since a harmless virus are researched in army labs and suddenly appears as aggresive viruses .
It is an interesting question. Under the bioweapons conference treaty no offensive work can legally be done and any signatory can demand an onsite inspection of facilities for verification at any time. To my knowledge that has never been demanded of the US. It has been done to Russia and China is not a signatory, nor is Israel or North Korea. We have been caught doing inappropriate biodefense research several times now but only because it became known and there were no consequences.
The slippery slope within DoD is to make a counter measure you have to try and look forwards and using intelligence based informatics to design offensive agents. In my opinion this is fallacious as we can’t make countermeasures against the normal 10 agents on the high threat list (since the program’s inception in 1942) other than anthrax and smallpox for which we have had effective vaccines for decades. Since 9/11 no new effective and/or safe vaccines have been been made for any of the rest of the agents on the list. This includes several far more likely biothreats like the plague, tularemia, glanders, brucella, Ebola, Marburg, etc. This was despite pouring billions into biodefense research most of which went to universities. When things cooled down the funding dried up as always. USAMRIID is currently shut down and may never re-open. But contracted services still go on and are funded using black money so not under the purview of Congress. So trying to make vaccines against biothreat agents that don’t exist seems ridiculous when the real threats, some of which the US has used in warfare, are still out there without effective preventatives. What happens is when you pour money into an area as happened after 9/11 all kinds of ridiculous stuff gets funded with very little oversight. The goal is to spend the money and no one really cares if any actual product is created. In fact, success means the demise of your program so the incentive is to drag it out for as long as funding is available. I had programs managed under DTRA funding that because I got new program managers as often as every 3 months had no clue or even any expertise in the matter and had zero idea of what we were doing. I got tired of doing a new dog and pony show each time I was assigned a new manager who usually was some very young recent PhD graduate with no experience at all. Often they were nebutistic appointments and daddy was a Congressman or Under Secretary.
The intelligence based decisions are as usual idiotic as is most intelligence coming out of the CIA and its affiliates. You get better intelligence reading PUBMED than you get out of any intelligence agencies. The microbiologists who work at the CIA and its contract companies were all military microbiologists who because they were essentially incompetent drifted over to the CIA. Then you have some IMHO ridiculous events. I recall when Ken Alibekov “defected” he spoonfed a bunch of made up BS which the CIA bought lock stock and barrel. I had working for me at the same time several former Soviet microbiologists (one of who was a senior researcher at Biopreparat) who were in fact the real deal and all told me he was a bullshit artist. One thing he peddled was a chimeric smallpox-Ebola and another a Ebola-anthrax. So the CIA immediately funded an effort to create chimeric viruses. To my knowledge these were unsuccessful however, the COVID-19 may be being caused by a chimeric virus. The only good reason to make a chimeric virus is to develop a attenuated strain for use as a vaccine. But, as often happens some attenuated mutants become more lethal as an unintended consequence. Another event was trying to force photo data from Iraq to prove they had an offensive bioweapons program. These guys had no clue what laboratory equipment was in actuality and had offered up a cooking truck with pots and pans etc. as proof. They were and I assume still are, idiots.
DoD programs are actually transparent and managed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Less transparent are the foreign stuff being funded under the Nunn-Lugar Act which includes the debacle of the “white elephant” lab and its satellite labs in the Republic of Georgia. No one will ever look into any of this but likely will end up blaming Russia or China.
They tend to underestimate their adversaries. China has an offensive program and if they get convinced they were attacked then I believe something nasty will be coming soon to the US. But, China is not stupid and won’t release a biothreat agent they have no preventative or treatment for. I also had several Chinese scientists working for me and I respect them immensely.
That should be PROMED for current infectious disease reporting around the world. It is exceptionally good and not funded or controlled by governments. PUBMED is for online publications which is also good but controlled by the government. I am fully aware of censorship of research papers by the US. I recall I wrote a letter to the editor of Science back in 1999 when the government decided to stockpile billions of doses of ciprofloxacin. I did a quick BLAST search and found that only a single base pair mutation in anthrax made it completely resistant to cipro. That letter was published and after 9/11 never seen again. There are other example such as the Canadian paper maybe also in 1999 showing that anthrax delivered in envelopes was not very effective. That one disappeared as well and the same as the Canadian paper where they were aerosolizing B. cereus spores out the back of a moving truck and using aerial infrared cameras demonstrated that these streams of aerosolized spores agglomerated into cloudlets which moved along in the wind and would usually avoid detector arrays which sampled airflow for aerosol particles. That is still the current state of the art for battlefield detection and that paper showed it to be ineffective at best. I can think of dozens of papers that were removed. After 9/11 any research paper that could be used by a foreign actor to develop better biothreat agents was rejected for publication outright. Almost none of my work was published after that except in classified reports which I believe were never read by anyone. I recall part of the madness in setting up NBACC was to generate very lengthy “white papers” that scrubbed through all published articles to assemble the complete picture for the then 10 threat agents. I wrote or edited two of those and they were immediately buried in some deep classified archive to the researchers who might benefit from this work could never actually use it. A complete waste of months and a ton of money. If you are perceiving that the US government biothreat programs are a complete shambles then you are not wrong.
I’ll go into that a bit more as well. It used to be in the military programs we were “command directed”. This means the military made a decision to make a vaccine against a perceived threat agent. They would assemble a research group assign them the mission and give 5 years funding to be continued if milestones (reasonable given the pittance of funding given). If you made progress then you got another 5 years of funding. That funding agency located at MRMC Fort Detrick was a Research area managed usually by a Major and a Captain, both microbiologists and experienced. Two people. There were 5 research area Directorates so a total of 10 program managers and a couple administrative colonels. This managed the entire DoD biothreat research programs and did it well. However, someone decided we needed an Agency to manage this stuff and DTRA which was funded by the Nunn-Lugar Act was already involved in the disassembly of Soviet nuclear capabilities so they wanted a bigger piece of the pie so absorbed the Research Directorates. The BDRP program at DTRA (basically identical as before) was now managed by over 400 contractors. The money came out of the research money we were supposed to be allocated.
After DTRA took over the funding was no longer Command Directed and we were all required to go out and fu-ind whatever funding we could hence why we made “deals” with DHS and the CIA. We went to an annual funding cycle instead of 5 years and never ending Gantt charts and reports. This was the age of 6 Sigma and the end of Management by Objective. We were also charged rent and had to pay for every service at our Institute including the security and even the library. Even our higher command MRMC stole 6% off the top to pay for pet projects unfunded by anyone with a brain. So, this became the age of entrepreneurial research and the end of productive research. Our commander, as an example, had no idea what we were doing at all and was shocked at all the “cool” stuff we were doing. This is the new breed of commander who manages by committee and never goes out walking the floors to visit labs. What the old school commanders call management by walking around and poking your nose into everything. But now these guys sit in their office and are fed whatever the REMFs decide they should hear. This is management in the US government as a whole and there are so many hidden agendas and internal conflicts between programs it is difficult to describe just how awful it is to try and do research in that environment. A lot of the worst of those commanders or research Division Directors went on to be current heads of HHS, CDC, and their undersecretaries, etc. which explains why those agencies are so screwed up and why there is such a horrible response to this virus.
[The following is the republication of several long and very detailed comments by an unidentified purported expert on biowarfare that originally appeared on a recent thread of the Saker blogsite.]
[Update: an investigation strongly suggests that the author’s claims regarding his personal background and professional expertise are accurate.]
I’ll throw my 2 cents in here. I have zero proof other than my gut feeling that this is a bioweapon. I do have 40 year of biodefense research experience behind me and worked at Fort Detrich on bacterial vaccines where I developed my own aerosol infection routes and developed multi-species models of pathogenesis to establish correlates of immunity. Because I was a one-stop shop doing everything including animal care, aerosol exposures, sample analysis, necropsy, and histopathology, etc. plus I had research programs in endemic areas studying the immunopathological response in human populations to establish immune correlates of protection for candidate vaccines all for the Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP).
I recall the early years when the Department of Homeland Security was stood up and they got the lion’s share of poorly performing ciivil servants un-fireable under the then OPMA policies. I was brought in as a technical expert as we were in dire straits for funding so I (and others) was lent out as a research prostitute. This is a little known problem with civil service employees. They are impossible to eliminate and generally rise to levels where they can cause the most damage. However, an opportunity arose whereby agencies in the Federal government had to contribute bodies to the new Department of Homeland Security (as no new vacancies were created when the agency was stood up meaning everyone had to sacrifice personnel) so most, if not all, employees sent to DHS were the worst of the worst. However, the DHS labs (specifically NBACC) also tied into some nefarious microbiologists working at the CIA (ostensibly part of DHS) and it is an understatement to say that what I saw being proposed horrified me. That work, I am certain was performed at Battle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio under a DHS contract doing the work for the CIA under the auspices of NBACC. As I was very vocally opposed to this stuff I was removed from the secure access at DHS but not DoD to the offensive work which I had pointed out was not only illegal but unethical. I have since retired now more than 10 years and am far away from all of that. I won’t say more as they will reach out and seek retribution. But, if you look hard enough you can find still on the internet some references. There are some pissed off people out there should anyone care to actually do some leg work and try and figure this out. But, our news people no longer does this work so there is very little possibility of ever learning the truth.
However, that said, I notice some interesting things with COVID-19, that perked my ears up a bit. Yes, it could be a natural infection jumping species from bats to humans with a probable intermediate host, under conditions of human encroachment into world habitats. It is actually most likely to have been that, except for the strain differences being observed. That leads one to believe if it is in fact true, and I have no reason to doubt the Chinese on this, that it originated outside of China and it seems likely to have originated in the US. If, in fact, the US has 5 strains currently and China only one then it must have been percolating in the US for some time before it arose in China. Likely, deaths in the US were attributed to other diseases such as influenza and only retrospective sampling will determine this. It would be interesting to do a combination GPS-Molecular biology tracking of strains over time and distance. Also, a definite genetic analysis of strains over time would also be beneficial and can be done easily on every isolated strain. This would have value in attributing the course of the disease over time as part of a natural history study of the virus. We would need access to all samples of every lung disease related death for the past 12 months to be certain to track all potential deaths. NBACC is the key to figuring out what nefarious stuff was being funded.
It is possible that this virus has mutated over time to become more virulent. In particular engineered strains are generally unstable over multiple passages through multiple hosts. In my experience when testing strains for pathogenesis and lethality it is wise to first passage a frozen isolate several times through a susceptible animal host to regain full strength. If you test a lab isolate (usually frozen or lyophilized) generally it is wimpy unless you passage it at least 3 passages through an animal model. The worst strains are always those recovered from humans who died from the disease and not field collected strains. If this was perceived to be a useful agent from the likes of Bolton or Pompeo, who are terrible and evil people, then it is conceivable this was thought to teach the Chinese a lesson in economics. You have to be a complete idiot to release a virus for which you have no effective countermeasures but this administration seems to be filled with complete idiots. So, expecting normal behavior from these people is futile.
It could have been released during the 7th CISM military games held in Wuhan October 18-27, 2019 and that fits perfectly into the time scale for the actual infections. Now interestingly enough, I was a participant in several CISM competitions in Europe for skiing (I was on active duty for 26 years) so I am very well versed in who these athletes are. In general the best are Olympic competitors who are ostensibly part of the National Guard of their states who pay for their training by extended military active duty periods where their sole job is sports training. I used to lose every year to one of these guys and generally I placed a distant second place in cross country skiing. I also participated in the biathlon competitions and our soldiers were the very top level because they were in fact Olympic athletes. Rumor is that the US participants at CISM were atrocious which is very atypical so one wonders who these “athletes” were. I am reminded of the US military mission in Brazil to help flood victims which coincidentally was the exact same time that all the power transmission stations in Venezuela were destroyed. So, again a hackle or 2 rise when I heard about that. However, it is the perfect opportunity to release a virus on a target population.
I will also like to add that not all biological warfare agents are lethal. In fact, the worst are non-lethal as it consumes vast amounts of resources in treatment and lost productivity. Deaths are actually cheaper. So, a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy. As Trump’s administration claims they are waging war against economic enemies (currently China heads the list) using all possible actions. This fits perfectly into that; however, it may end up destroying the American economy which would be ironic.
I believe the Chinese response was exactly what a country would do if they were attacked with a bioweapon which explains a lot of their actions. I do not believe it was an accidental release from the BSL-4 labs in Wuhan. In fact, this may have been an irresistible opportunity similar to the alleged Novichuk release just 8 k away from Porton Down laboratories (the UK Fort Detrich). Interestingly, the potential release from PDL was never put forward as a logical explanation. Anyway, it sticks me that the CIA seems to have developed a pattern over time. As long as I am pushing my gut feelings I will throw out there the potential for a bioengineered adenovirus with c-fos and c-jun over expression which would cause sarcomas. That work was all published at the National Cancer Institute located where? Fort Detrich. I am certain it is just a coincidence. I can imagine the cackling going on at the CIA when planning this operation and again the coronavirus operation(s). I believe there were at least two attacks with Iran being the second and perhaps North Korea as well. However, evidence against it being a bioweapon is Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are minimally affected. This could mean effective countermeasures or botched attacks. It is inconsistent though with the way the CIA operates.
Adenovirus is another virus similar to coronavirus in usage and easily aerosolized. I have made my own for over expression of medical treatments for wound infections. Has anyone other than myself noted that so many enemies of the US have died from sarcomas particularly in South America? My point is perhaps this stuff has been ongoing for quite some time and with some fairly good results. So, familiarity breeds contempt so as they gin more experience and begin to think this is good stuff, it is not out of the realm of possibility that this is in fact a bioweapon. That Iran was hit so hard is another hackle rising. It is just simply too good (for the idiots in the US government) to be a coincidence.
So, we are left with some interesting problems about this virus. Where was patient zero in China. What will be the results if a natural history study is conducted correlating geolocation, strain identity, severity of disease over time? Will that work be prevented? If so, that is yet another reason to be suspicious. Will it continue to mutate and what will be the outcome of this? Lots of good stuff to examine here and it will keep a lot of people busy for years.
Maybe you can explain this:
“Coronavirus have not previously been known to cause severe disease in humans”.
This is excerpt from the patent issued to CDC, US government. Link:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7220852B1/en
So the question for me is why should a harmless virus be patented by the US government and used for research in labs like US army research at Ft. Derick? That makes it military. Why is there then the SARS-CoV, and the latest COVID-19 which is SARS-CoV-2 ? The swineflu was likewise proven to be lab made at least in sources other than mainstream and WHO, the same was the case with Ebola, and even HIV.
It immediately raises the question of ban of biological weapons labs in my mind, by internatiopnal treaties just like a ban on the use of napalm, landmines and so on, since a harmless virus are researched in army labs and suddenly appears as aggresive viruses .
It is an interesting question. Under the bioweapons conference treaty no offensive work can legally be done and any signatory can demand an onsite inspection of facilities for verification at any time. To my knowledge that has never been demanded of the US. It has been done to Russia and China is not a signatory, nor is Israel or North Korea. We have been caught doing inappropriate biodefense research several times now but only because it became known and there were no consequences.
The slippery slope within DoD is to make a counter measure you have to try and look forwards and using intelligence based informatics to design offensive agents. In my opinion this is fallacious as we can’t make countermeasures against the normal 10 agents on the high threat list (since the program’s inception in 1942) other than anthrax and smallpox for which we have had effective vaccines for decades. Since 9/11 no new effective and/or safe vaccines have been been made for any of the rest of the agents on the list. This includes several far more likely biothreats like the plague, tularemia, glanders, brucella, Ebola, Marburg, etc. This was despite pouring billions into biodefense research most of which went to universities. When things cooled down the funding dried up as always. USAMRIID is currently shut down and may never re-open. But contracted services still go on and are funded using black money so not under the purview of Congress. So trying to make vaccines against biothreat agents that don’t exist seems ridiculous when the real threats, some of which the US has used in warfare, are still out there without effective preventatives. What happens is when you pour money into an area as happened after 9/11 all kinds of ridiculous stuff gets funded with very little oversight. The goal is to spend the money and no one really cares if any actual product is created. In fact, success means the demise of your program so the incentive is to drag it out for as long as funding is available. I had programs managed under DTRA funding that because I got new program managers as often as every 3 months had no clue or even any expertise in the matter and had zero idea of what we were doing. I got tired of doing a new dog and pony show each time I was assigned a new manager who usually was some very young recent PhD graduate with no experience at all. Often they were nebutistic appointments and daddy was a Congressman or Under Secretary.
The intelligence based decisions are as usual idiotic as is most intelligence coming out of the CIA and its affiliates. You get better intelligence reading PUBMED than you get out of any intelligence agencies. The microbiologists who work at the CIA and its contract companies were all military microbiologists who because they were essentially incompetent drifted over to the CIA. Then you have some IMHO ridiculous events. I recall when Ken Alibekov “defected” he spoonfed a bunch of made up BS which the CIA bought lock stock and barrel. I had working for me at the same time several former Soviet microbiologists (one of who was a senior researcher at Biopreparat) who were in fact the real deal and all told me he was a bullshit artist. One thing he peddled was a chimeric smallpox-Ebola and another a Ebola-anthrax. So the CIA immediately funded an effort to create chimeric viruses. To my knowledge these were unsuccessful however, the COVID-19 may be being caused by a chimeric virus. The only good reason to make a chimeric virus is to develop a attenuated strain for use as a vaccine. But, as often happens some attenuated mutants become more lethal as an unintended consequence. Another event was trying to force photo data from Iraq to prove they had an offensive bioweapons program. These guys had no clue what laboratory equipment was in actuality and had offered up a cooking truck with pots and pans etc. as proof. They were and I assume still are, idiots.
DoD programs are actually transparent and managed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Less transparent are the foreign stuff being funded under the Nunn-Lugar Act which includes the debacle of the “white elephant” lab and its satellite labs in the Republic of Georgia. No one will ever look into any of this but likely will end up blaming Russia or China.
They tend to underestimate their adversaries. China has an offensive program and if they get convinced they were attacked then I believe something nasty will be coming soon to the US. But, China is not stupid and won’t release a biothreat agent they have no preventative or treatment for. I also had several Chinese scientists working for me and I respect them immensely.
That should be PROMED for current infectious disease reporting around the world. It is exceptionally good and not funded or controlled by governments. PUBMED is for online publications which is also good but controlled by the government. I am fully aware of censorship of research papers by the US. I recall I wrote a letter to the editor of Science back in 1999 when the government decided to stockpile billions of doses of ciprofloxacin. I did a quick BLAST search and found that only a single base pair mutation in anthrax made it completely resistant to cipro. That letter was published and after 9/11 never seen again. There are other example such as the Canadian paper maybe also in 1999 showing that anthrax delivered in envelopes was not very effective. That one disappeared as well and the same as the Canadian paper where they were aerosolizing B. cereus spores out the back of a moving truck and using aerial infrared cameras demonstrated that these streams of aerosolized spores agglomerated into cloudlets which moved along in the wind and would usually avoid detector arrays which sampled airflow for aerosol particles. That is still the current state of the art for battlefield detection and that paper showed it to be ineffective at best. I can think of dozens of papers that were removed. After 9/11 any research paper that could be used by a foreign actor to develop better biothreat agents was rejected for publication outright. Almost none of my work was published after that except in classified reports which I believe were never read by anyone. I recall part of the madness in setting up NBACC was to generate very lengthy “white papers” that scrubbed through all published articles to assemble the complete picture for the then 10 threat agents. I wrote or edited two of those and they were immediately buried in some deep classified archive to the researchers who might benefit from this work could never actually use it. A complete waste of months and a ton of money. If you are perceiving that the US government biothreat programs are a complete shambles then you are not wrong.
I’ll go into that a bit more as well. It used to be in the military programs we were “command directed”. This means the military made a decision to make a vaccine against a perceived threat agent. They would assemble a research group assign them the mission and give 5 years funding to be continued if milestones (reasonable given the pittance of funding given). If you made progress then you got another 5 years of funding. That funding agency located at MRMC Fort Detrick was a Research area managed usually by a Major and a Captain, both microbiologists and experienced. Two people. There were 5 research area Directorates so a total of 10 program managers and a couple administrative colonels. This managed the entire DoD biothreat research programs and did it well. However, someone decided we needed an Agency to manage this stuff and DTRA which was funded by the Nunn-Lugar Act was already involved in the disassembly of Soviet nuclear capabilities so they wanted a bigger piece of the pie so absorbed the Research Directorates. The BDRP program at DTRA (basically identical as before) was now managed by over 400 contractors. The money came out of the research money we were supposed to be allocated.
After DTRA took over the funding was no longer Command Directed and we were all required to go out and fu-ind whatever funding we could hence why we made “deals” with DHS and the CIA. We went to an annual funding cycle instead of 5 years and never ending Gantt charts and reports. This was the age of 6 Sigma and the end of Management by Objective. We were also charged rent and had to pay for every service at our Institute including the security and even the library. Even our higher command MRMC stole 6% off the top to pay for pet projects unfunded by anyone with a brain. So, this became the age of entrepreneurial research and the end of productive research. Our commander, as an example, had no idea what we were doing at all and was shocked at all the “cool” stuff we were doing. This is the new breed of commander who manages by committee and never goes out walking the floors to visit labs. What the old school commanders call management by walking around and poking your nose into everything. But now these guys sit in their office and are fed whatever the REMFs decide they should hear. This is management in the US government as a whole and there are so many hidden agendas and internal conflicts between programs it is difficult to describe just how awful it is to try and do research in that environment. A lot of the worst of those commanders or research Division Directors went on to be current heads of HHS, CDC, and their undersecretaries, etc. which explains why those agencies are so screwed up and why there is such a horrible response to this virus.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Posted on January 31, 2020 by harvard2thebighouse
This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in mid February the Chinese Ministry of Science sent out a directive to all its labs emphasizing the important of carefully handling bio-infectious agents and alluding to slack oversight and past lapses, even mentioning coronaviruses specifically.
Mistakes may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkins’ Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well. This is unlikely to be a plot twist in one of the novels Tom Clancy wrote after he started mailing it in.
Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which had already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
UPDATE 2/14, 3:02am EST: A probable smoking pre-print has been released, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China:
“In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
In a predictable turn, that article has been removed and both researchers have since deleted their profiles off of the ResearchGate site completely. Furthering the appearance of a cover-up, back on January 2nd, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s director sent out a memo forbidding discussion of an “unknown pneumonia in Wuhan” after ordering the destruction of all related lab materials a day earlier, making it abundantly clear that the Chinese government knew about this outbreak long before they took any steps to contain it, or made any public announcement.
These propaganda efforts have been bolstered by possible collusion from American scientists, some of which is detailed below – but also most notably by one Peter Daszak, who had been publishing papers on coronaviruses alongside the primary Chinese person-of-interest, Zhengli Shi, for years. Perhaps most notably, Daszak is listed as a co-author in the paper first documenting the isolation of a coronavirus from a bat that targets the ACE2 receptor – just like COVID-19 – research done in Wuhan’s virology lab and supervised by Zhengli Shi, and led by a second suspect Chinese researcher who you’ll meet below. At best, Daszak is perhaps acting as an unwitting agent of the Chinese government, but regardless holds an enormous conflict-of-interest. And if nothing else, it is wildly irresponsible to speak-out against the possibility that the virus got out of a lab when a natural origin has not been conclusively demonstrated. Daszak’s statement in The Lancet is either incompetence, or is meant to be a smokescreen for the wanton hubris and greed that have fueled the gain-of-function research detailed below: As one possible related project which may have overlapped with this one, coronaviruses have been seen as a viable vector for an HIV vaccine for years – a project with hundreds of millions of dollars dangling over it.
And unfortunately Daszak is far from alone, there are countless “journalists” mindlessly regurgitating statements from the Chinese government and the WHO with no effort to fact-check whatsoever, as well as “scientists” whose real job is running PR for pharmaceutical and research companies who have spent weeks serving China by making extraordinarily misleading and overconfident statements to the public about the origins and capabilities of this virus. And it should be noted that in 2018, the esteemed scientific journal Nature – which has published numerous articles speciously claiming this virus is definitely natural – was revealed to have buckled to censorship demands from the Chinese government, killing over 1,000 articles to placate their Chinese partners.
Many involved in this dissimulation are effectively acting as agents of a foreign government, and they have left most Americans entirely unprepared for the tragedy that’s beginning to occur in our nursing homes and hospitals. If the idea that just maybe this thing came from a lab had been part of the national dialogue from the start – wouldn’t everyone have been much more cautious and open to social distancing and other limitations once the need arose?
And so being an offshoot of this sort of vaccine program, possibly as a Red Team designed to build defenses and therapeutics against, is just one possible gain-of-function pursuit that would fit some of the unusual genomic and logistical picture below. Whether or not it was the exact target of the Wuhan lab’s genomic tinkering – the reality is millions of dollars of funding from multiple world governments have poured into this research, funding that’s dangled over these scientists as they’ve chased it like Icarus, this time not just risking their own lives – but hundreds of millions of others as well.
Subsequently, we are calling for an immediate end to dual-use gain-of-function research.
– In 2002, Stony Brook first assembled a DNA virus from scratch, building a polio-virus, and providing proof-of-concept for the creation, alteration, and manipulation of DNA-virus genomes. Two years prior, a separate team had already built an simpler RNA-virus from scratch – choosing to engineer a coronavirus from the ground up, and even swapping out its vital spike-protein genes to make it more infectious. And a generation earlier, artificially enhancing selection by intentionally infecting countless series of lab animals with different viruses is understood to have created the H1N1 Swine Flu. Its Franken-genome has a mysterious untraceable genetic parentage and a “clear unnatural origin,” and H1N1 became the poster-child for a moratorium against gain-of-function research – experimentation that seeks to increase a pathogen’s virulence, creating a more effective double-edged sword to counter and learn from. A ban that was in place for years, but was recently lifted by the American government. In the case of H1N1, it wasn’t a question of if it’d escaped from a research laboratory, only whether it’d been designed as part of a weapons system, or been part of a vaccine trial.
– When a virus manages to infect a new species of host it’s known as a zoonotic jump, a process that generally takes months or even years to complete. The first stage is when a virus infects one individual in a new host species, which is typically a dead-end the first time it happens since there’s no way for the virus to be adapted to a different species’ biology. The second stage of a zoonotic jump is when the virus manages to move from the first new host into more hosts of the new species, which results in some temporary transmission in a localized area – these are known as endemics and generally fizzle out the first few times they happen as the virus adapts to its new host species, and mutations win or lose the survival battle. The final stage, the only time a zoonotic jump is considered complete, is when there’s sustained host-to-host transmission in the new species. These zoonotic jumps have some predictable characteristics, the primary one is that adapting to a new host inevitably requires mutations that weren’t optimal in the old host. And so the virus gets weakened as its initially attempting to jump into a new host species, which is why the above sequence of steps – one new host, a few new hosts that pass it among themselves temporarily, and then finally sustained transmission – takes at least several months if not years to play out, since a good bit of time is required for all three steps to occur. Viral trial-and-error is required for the virus to find the right mutations that will allow it to prosper in a new host species, it’s never been known to just happen magically all at once.
– And so assuming that COVID-19 emerged naturally in a matter of weeks in the middle of a massive urban metropolis the size of New York City, when the host population of bats was hibernating anyways, requires completely ignoring everything we know about how viruses transfer between species. Not only was Wuhan’s population not interacting with bats since they hardly interact with humans in urban situations to begin with, but any possible host bats were sleeping in their caves anyways. And not only would the circumstances of this transfer require rewriting the textbooks on zoonotic jumps if it occurred it all, but beyond that: supposedly not only did a zoonotic jump happen instantly without the necessary steps, but when it hit humans it was extraordinarily virulent from the start, something that’s supposed to take an extensive amount of time to ever happen as mutations go through selective trial-and-error. This trial-and-error takes time and is why viruses have never made a zoonotic jump and been instantly virulent in a new host species like COVID-19 has been in humans. Nothing we know about how viruses naturally make zoonotic jumps point to that happening here.
– Tinkering with viral genomes is not anything new, but is not something that has ever been fully embraced by the scientific community at large. About a decade ago, two separate research teams successful tweaked the genome of the H5N1 Bird Flu in just two spots and then passed it through ferrets until it became both airborne and pathogenic to mammals, creating a virus that “could make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.” This involved selecting for a mutation that allowed the virus to access a receptor that’s found in ferret lungs, and was alarming enough that the research was urged to be published without revealing the specific methods involved and data collected – however it appears that only the most technical details were left out, and most of the research is freely available.
– By 2015, conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious. This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly gain-of-function research, a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus. Looking at UNC’s gain-of-function research on coronavirus spike-proteins, which received its funding just before the ban was implemented and was only allowed to go forward following a special review, a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.”
– But then oddly, in late January right as the pandemic was blooming, Dr. Ralph Baric claimed in an interview that people should be more concerned with the seasonal flu – despite having personally overseen the controversial engineering of a hyper-virulent strain of batty coronavirus just a few years back. Immediately discounting the burgeoning outbreak of an unknown coronavirus as a non-event seems particularly troubling for someone who’d trained two Chinese scientists on how to make hyper-virulent coronaviruses, especially when it’s hard to imagine that Dr. Baric was unaware his past colleagues were now working at the Wuhan Virology Lab, the epicenter of the outbreak. Highlighting the dissembling absurdity of this statement, based on reporting from Who: the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 appears to be thirty-four times more lethal than the seasonal flu.
– Scientists have expressed concern about China’s ability to safely monitor this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan since it opened in 2017: “an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. ‘Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.'” This lab is at most 20 miles from the wet market where the virus had been assumed to have jumped from animal to human. However the idea that a Chinese lab could have a viral sample escape is well-documented – as mentioned, one lab in Beijing has had four separate incidents of the SARS virus leaking out accidentally.
– Notably, the first three known cases from early December had no contact with that market, and roughly one-third of the initial exposed cohort had no direct ties to Wusan’s wild meat wet-market, the original presumptive source of the virus. And in mid February, reporting indicated that COVID-19’s patient zero in fact had no connection at all with the wet-market. This is reinforced by the fact Chinese research has also concluded that COVID-19 “may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”
– Since its discovery, scientists have been unable to fully determine the zoological origins of COVID-19, it was initially thought to have passed through snakes, but now all that’s agreed upon is that it’s mostly bat in origin. This inability to derive an exact zoological source is exactly what would be expected if the virus had been artificially engineered to target humans as UNC already has, this doesn’t prove an artificial nature – but it is consistent with one. Although there has been speculation that pangolins may have been the missing vector, the only data about the pangolin virome wasn’t entered into NCBI’s system until late January, and couldn’t possibly have been collected any earlier than late September 2019, and doesn’t fully answer the vector question anyways. And further research indicated it was “very unlikely” that similarities between their spike-protein genomes of COVID-19 and pangolins, where they share the most similarities, was due to the virus passing through pangolins at all.
– As explained in Nature, COVID-19’s Franken-genome combines a cornucopia of distinct genetic markers from each of the three other distinct branches of the coronavirus family tree, but is distinct enough from all of them that it in fact forms its own clade. Along those same lines, a full-genome evolutionary analysis of COVID-19 published in The Lancet concluded, “recombination is probably not the reason for emergence of this virus” since it seems that the Wuhan Strain isn’t a mosaic of previously known coronaviruses, but instead draws from distant, discrete parts of the coronavirus family tree – not how these viruses naturally evolve. Because even mixing and matching coronavirus genomes from every known zoological virus, scientists couldn’t find any possible combination that would explain those regions of the Wuhan Strain’s genome. The Lancet muses that a mysterious animal host could still be out there, however since they’ve already searched through every known possibility and been unable to find a match, another obvious explanation is that bio-engineering accounts for the inexplicable nucleotide signature of the Wuhan Strain’s genome
– Early research found that COVID-19 targets the ACE2 receptor, which seems to be distributed in roughly equal proportions across global populations, indicating that the Wuhan Strain was likely developed as part of a defensive gain-of-function project possibly linked to immunotherapy or vaccinations – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against, not as an offensive weapon targeting one specific global population. But counter-intuitively, researchers have pointed out that the most critical sections of the COVID-19’s protein-spike genome don’t match the previously reported pattern that would be expected for optimal binding to the specific ACE2 receptors found only in humans and ferrets, which indicates that these particular segments wouldn’t have been directly genetically engineered to increase virulence.
– And yet this is exactly what researchers looking for a “safe” vaccine candidate would engineer, and doesn’t rule out a scenario where the virus was passed through a series of ferrets. The research team in fact notes that its spike “appears to be the result of selection on human or human-like ACE2 permitting another optimal binding solution to arise,” failing to directly mention that the only other human-like receptors are found in ferrets – which have frequently been used for years in vaccine trials for viruses with this sort of protein-spike, and is exactly how the H5N1 Bird Flu virus was altered to make it airborne. And so the Wuhan Strain’s unique affinity for the human ACE2 receptor, which a pre-print reports to be 10 to 20 times greater than SARS, may be the exact type of vaccine-related accident that led to the moratorium on gain-of-function research in the first place and caused scientists to unsuccessfully call for the research around H5N1 to be partially sealed-off.
– The Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, appears to be transmissible even before its host shows any symptoms at all, making temperature-scanning at airports ineffective since hosts appear to be contagious for about a week before any symptoms emerge. This is in stark contrast with SARS, whose hosts weren’t contagious until they were symptomatic, allowing for its relatively quick containment. This chart is not from a peer-reviewed source but was claims to capture the comparative rates of infections between recent outbreaks. A recent pre-print now gives COVID-19 a rating of R4, meaning each host passes the virus on to four new victims, a rate significantly higher than any past global viral outbreak.
– The successful end results of the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research at UNC that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, was published the following year and described the successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats which was achieved by tinkering with its spike-protein genes. In this paper, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” who’s listed as being attached to the “Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.”
– Zhengli Shi seems to have returned to Wuhan at some point since 2016, specifically to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center, since she then appears in this September 2019 paper on the human behaviors most likely to lead to bat-borne coronavirus exposure in southern China, and also in the paper claiming that this coronavirus was bat in origin, which was peculiarly submitted in coordination with the announcement of the outbreak. Very, very peculiarly. She also appears in this pending preprint on the current outbreak of COVID-19, just a small sample of the dozens of coronavirus-related papers she’s published over a three decade career.
– Not only does Zhengli Shi provide a direct chain of expertise tying the already successful bio-engineering of a virulent bat-based coronavirus at UNC directly to the BSL-4 virology lab in Wuhan, but back in January 2014 she’d received a $665,000 grant from NIH for a study titled The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and the Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence (NIAID R01 AI1 10964) as well as $559,500 more from USAID for a study titled Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT_2China (Project No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102). Beyond this American funding specifically into viral diseases zoonotically transferring from animals to humans which would slipped in just before the ban, over the years she’s also received around $3 million in grants to study these zoonotic viruses from China and other countries, and has served on the editorial board of several virological research magazines. More of her research into the intersection of coronaviruses like the Wuhan Strain and their epidemic potential was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate of the Naval Medical Research Center.
– And so a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of an outbreak involved a coronavirus that’s escaping zoological classification, and has other unnatural characteristics that will be discussed below.
– Another Chinese virologist, Xing-Yi Ge, appears as an author on the 2016 UNC paper and is also attached to the lab in Wuhan. Previously in 2013, he’d successfully isolated a SARS-like coronavirus from bats which targets the ACE2 receptor, just like our present virus, the Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19 uses. And it turns out that sections of the Wuhan Strain’s ACE2 receptor’s genes are unique: they’re almost identical to SARS’s spike-protein genes – despite the fact that almost none of the two coronavirus’s genomes are similar anywhere else at all. Beyond that, although the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome differs from SARS in four out of the five most important genomic spots that determine binding to the ACE2 receptor, they surprisingly don’t effect the protein-spike’s shape. And in an even bigger coincidence, these four spots also code for the outside region of the spike that allows entry into cells, and do not effect it either – allowing the Wuhan Strain to still use the ACE2 receptor to unlock cells while possibly gaining additional capabilities. The odds that this concordance was bio-engineered into the virus are several orders of magnitude more likely than for this to randomly have evolved in nature, and is exactly the sort of process used to make the H5N1 Bird Flu airborne and highly pathogenic.
– Numerous videos purportedly from inside hospitals in Wuhan depict a crisis that is far greater than the numbers released by China to date. There is widespread but unverified online reporting that Wuhan crematoriums have been running 24/7, which is consistent with a recent peer-reviewed study that claims that as of January 25, Wuhan had over 75,000 infections – when the official number was just 761. Chinese language social media also reflects a sense of panic and desperation that is highly discordant with the numbers being released by the Chinese government. Who, notably, are refusing any direct assistance from the American CDC. (Evidence that China is vastly downplaying this pandemic’s severity: Example 1. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Example 5. Example 6.)
– Some of the dystopian carnage creeping across China may be due to the fact that much of China’s population may have already been exposed to coronavirus infection via SARS or other less notorious strains, which would allow the Wuhan Stain COVID-19 to use antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) to much more efficiently enter into cells, and then become much more virulent since this enhancement hijacks the body’s preexisting immune response to coronavirus infections and allows easier entry. However whether or not people have been exposed to a coronavirus infection before, once it’s been circulating in a population for long enough the Wuhan Strain may be able to reinfect its own past hosts and use this molecular hijacking on antibodies left from its own previous infection to become far more virulent, regardless of whether or not someone has been exposed to other coronaviruses before COVID-19. And early reporting from Chinese doctors indicates that re-infections of the Wuhan Strain are far more lethal than the first. More evidence that ADE is occurring is its much higher affinity for the ACE2 receptor and far higher viral loads compared to SARS – both of these may be due at least in part to ADE allowing COVID-19 to much more efficiently bind to and enter cells. And another hint that the Wuhan Strain may be using ADE to more effectively attack its host is the fact that it seems to be targeting its host’s neurological systems, which is explored in depth below. A final clue is the fact that children seem to be far less effected by the Wuhan Strain COVID-19, a phenomenon that’s found in Dengue Fever, which is one of the classic examples for ADE.
– Another peculiar characteristic is COVID-19’s similarities to HIV. And so although another since-retracted pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in COVID-19’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – critics quickly pointed out that the shared homology didn’t reach statistical significance. However a closer look at the data reveals that there were a few small shared genomic segments that, despite being physically separated from each other along each strand of DNA, all worked together to code for the Wuhan Strain’s protein-spike’s crucial receptor binding site. Something that is highly unlikely to have happened by chance. And despite most of its protein-spike being shared with SARS, these substituted segments weren’t shared at all – nor were they found in any other coronavirus. One possible but likely reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target – meaning the Wuhan Strain was built as a monster for a specific vaccine to hunt. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, this pattern could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets with a bespoke coronavirus and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.
– Critics have brushed off the Wuhan Strain’s shared homology with HIV as statistically insignificant, however clinical reporting indicates that the Wuhan Strain may be using this shared HIV homology to attack CD4 immune cells just like HIV does, as an unusually high percentage of patients are showing low white blood cell counts, especially the sickest ones. This pathogenicity may well be due to the unique HIV-live genomics of the Wuhan Strain, as one white-paper by LSU’s professor emeritus of Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology who’s also a Harvard-educated virologist with a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics notes: “This is the first description of a possible immunosuppressive domain in coronaviruses… The three key [mutations] common to the known immunosuppressive domains are also in common with the sequence from [the spike-protein]. While coronaviruses are not known for general immunosuppression of the style shown by HIV-1, this does not rule out immunosuppression at the site of active infection in the lung, which would prolong and potentially worsen infection at that site.” And early research has indicated that this unique region may make COVID-19 up to 1,000 times more likely to bind to human cells than SARS, which could be due to either this homology or to ADE, or some combination of these or other factors.
– Even more troubling, a peer-reviewed study noted that one particular part of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome also wasn’t found in any of its relatives, “and may provide a gain-of-function to [COVID-19] for efficient spreading in the human population.” And according to that paper, this particular type of furin cleavage site makes similar viruses both more pathogenic and more neurotoxic. Additionally, this particular type of cleavage site is a hallmark of being passed through a series of animal hosts in a lab. Evidence for the Wuhan Strain’s neurotoxicity arrived in late February, in a published paper which notes that “the most characteristic symptom of COVID‐19 patients is respiratory distress, and most of the patients admitted to the intensive care could not breathe spontaneously.” Combined with the observation that “some COVID‐19 patients also showed neurologic signs such as headache, nausea and vomiting,” this paper asserts that since SARS was found heavily concentrated in the brainstems of its autopsied victims, COVID-19 is also probably crossing the blood-brain barrier and killing its victims not just via pneumonia, but also by causing neurological respiratory failure. Indicating that ADE may be occurring, but at a much faster rate than nature allows since reinfections of Dengue Fever that use ADE typically have years pass between them.
– And it should be noted that SARS – much ballyhooed as a close relative to the Wuhan Strain – didn’t notable effect white blood cell counts. Additionally, clinical treatment guides published online in late January by established Chinese medical sources note the progressive reduction of white blood cells, as well as the importance of monitoring this decline. And reporting from Thailand indicates that adding a cocktail of two different anti-HIV drugs to the typical flu treatment regime seemed to effectively knock back the Wuhan Strain. Additionally, one of the only autopsies performed outside of China to date found that the deceased had a severely depleted white blood cell count. These lowered counts may come from this shared similarity with HIV, or it could also be the result of ADE as well, since this phenomenon primarily targets white blood cells for its hijackings and may help explain why consecutive infections are so lethal.
– In a highly concerning turn, scientists have noted that the Wuhan Strain can have a “striking” short term rate of mutation which doesn’t indicate an artificial origin but captures the unique threat posed by this coronavirus regardless of its providence, since a faster mutation rates makes it more likely this virus can dodge testing and neutralize vaccines. Something there is already early evidence for. Further concerning are reports out of China that even patients who appear cured still harbor COVID-19 in their system, and although the full implications of this are not yet known – none of them are good.
– One of the worst possible scenarios for COVID-19’s mutation rate would be if it falls into the Goldilocks range that would allow it to form mutant viral swarms: too many mutations will cause a virus to eventually implode, not enough allows host immune systems to catch-up, but if things are just right mutant swarms can form and spread across host populations, burrowing into host nervous systems and causing permanent neurological damage. Mutant swarms form when a virus produces mutationally-damaged copies of itself inside a host, some of which aren’t infectious but find their way into the nervous system where they burrow in causing damage, and others that combine with complimentary broken copies inside host cells to produce working infectious copies of the virus. So a host can not only become crippled with neurological issues, but also still be producing infectious copies of the virus. And it seems as if COVID-19 has many characteristics that indicate the potential to form mutant swarms: the “striking” mutation rate mentioned above and the fact a second widespread mutated strain seems to have already emerged in Washington State with many other isolated strains reported elsewhere, crossing between species is another factor and a dog in Hong Kong appears to have tested positive, the fact that the Wuhan Strain can infect not only the respiratory tract but feces as well – multi-organ involvement is an important contributor to viral swarms, and finally the markedly viral load rate of COVID-19 compared to SARS – SARS produced a viral load several times lower which decreased over time, while COVID-19 produces a “very high” viral load that appears to increase over time and can peak several orders of magnitude higher than SARS was measured to reach. And alarming evidence that this phenomenon is occurring emerged from a Chinese pre-print which noted that over one-third of the roughly 200 patients studied has some neurological symptoms, with nearly half of the most severe patients exhibiting neurological issues. And further evidence for the possibility of both mutant swarms and ADE is witnessed by a study published in Lancet, which notes that the case fatality rate in Wuhan could actually be as high as 20% – the outbreak’s epicenter would be expected to have the highest rates of both phenomena as different variants of the Wuhan Strain infected and reinfected overlapping hosts.
– Another exceptional and atypical trait of the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 is that not only does it form its own clade, it’s calculated to have diverged from SARS and its other sister coronaviruses some 260 years ago. And yet in all that time, while it every other branch of the coronavirus tree was busy branching-off into countless variants, if it emerged naturally, COVID-19 somehow spent a quarter of a millennium as the lone known example of its clade, somehow not mutating into related lineages in all that time. Another simpler explanation is that this apparent hereditary distance and genetic uniqueness is the just the result of being altered in a lab. And although two distinct strains of COVID-19 have been identified, there’s no reason to believe this mutational differentiation happened before contact with humans in the winter of 2019. Additionally, when neutral sites, the specific points in the genome which most reliably show evolutionary change, were examined: COVID-19 looks even more evolutionarily distant from any of its possible relatives, which would make sense if all that evolutionary distance was gained by artificially accelerated generational turn-over in a lab.
– Also giving credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application registered to a scientist from Wuhan that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusual behavior as discussed above.
– And curiously, the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Dr. Charles Lieber, was arrested in the midst of this outbreak on charges that he’d been accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Chinese government. According to his charging documents, Dr. Lieber first went to the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT), in November 2011 to participate in a nanotechnology forum, which was when he was recruited into a bribery scheme that would net him several million dollars to “establish a research lab and conduct research at WUT,” which became known as ” Joint Nano Key Laboratory,” as well as mentor and advocate for graduate students. By 2015, Dr. Lieber appeared to be fairly intimately involved with what seemed to begin as simply a nanotechnology lab, but now had shifted to involve biology as well, since he described visiting the lab multiple times per year “as we try to build up the nano-bio part of the lab.” Whether or not this nano-bio part of the Nano Key Laboratory is related to Wuhan’s BSL-4 virology lab isn’t clear, however if the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered, technology classified as “nano-bio” would’ve almost certainly played a role.
Given the above facts, either:
– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, that may be as much as twenty-times more contagious than SARS and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells holds an unique HIV-like signature with the concomitant clinical response, that somehow managed to infect its patient zero who had no connection to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history and Russia to ban Chinese citizens from entry into their country.
– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush leading up to an international virological conference and during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to prevent the full story about what’s going on from getting out are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.
An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.
Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile.
This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in mid February the Chinese Ministry of Science sent out a directive to all its labs emphasizing the important of carefully handling bio-infectious agents and alluding to slack oversight and past lapses, even mentioning coronaviruses specifically.
Mistakes may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkins’ Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well. This is unlikely to be a plot twist in one of the novels Tom Clancy wrote after he started mailing it in.
Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which had already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
UPDATE 2/14, 3:02am EST: A probable smoking pre-print has been released, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China:
“In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
In a predictable turn, that article has been removed and both researchers have since deleted their profiles off of the ResearchGate site completely. Furthering the appearance of a cover-up, back on January 2nd, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s director sent out a memo forbidding discussion of an “unknown pneumonia in Wuhan” after ordering the destruction of all related lab materials a day earlier, making it abundantly clear that the Chinese government knew about this outbreak long before they took any steps to contain it, or made any public announcement.
These propaganda efforts have been bolstered by possible collusion from American scientists, some of which is detailed below – but also most notably by one Peter Daszak, who had been publishing papers on coronaviruses alongside the primary Chinese person-of-interest, Zhengli Shi, for years. Perhaps most notably, Daszak is listed as a co-author in the paper first documenting the isolation of a coronavirus from a bat that targets the ACE2 receptor – just like COVID-19 – research done in Wuhan’s virology lab and supervised by Zhengli Shi, and led by a second suspect Chinese researcher who you’ll meet below. At best, Daszak is perhaps acting as an unwitting agent of the Chinese government, but regardless holds an enormous conflict-of-interest. And if nothing else, it is wildly irresponsible to speak-out against the possibility that the virus got out of a lab when a natural origin has not been conclusively demonstrated. Daszak’s statement in The Lancet is either incompetence, or is meant to be a smokescreen for the wanton hubris and greed that have fueled the gain-of-function research detailed below: As one possible related project which may have overlapped with this one, coronaviruses have been seen as a viable vector for an HIV vaccine for years – a project with hundreds of millions of dollars dangling over it.
And unfortunately Daszak is far from alone, there are countless “journalists” mindlessly regurgitating statements from the Chinese government and the WHO with no effort to fact-check whatsoever, as well as “scientists” whose real job is running PR for pharmaceutical and research companies who have spent weeks serving China by making extraordinarily misleading and overconfident statements to the public about the origins and capabilities of this virus. And it should be noted that in 2018, the esteemed scientific journal Nature – which has published numerous articles speciously claiming this virus is definitely natural – was revealed to have buckled to censorship demands from the Chinese government, killing over 1,000 articles to placate their Chinese partners.
Many involved in this dissimulation are effectively acting as agents of a foreign government, and they have left most Americans entirely unprepared for the tragedy that’s beginning to occur in our nursing homes and hospitals. If the idea that just maybe this thing came from a lab had been part of the national dialogue from the start – wouldn’t everyone have been much more cautious and open to social distancing and other limitations once the need arose?
And so being an offshoot of this sort of vaccine program, possibly as a Red Team designed to build defenses and therapeutics against, is just one possible gain-of-function pursuit that would fit some of the unusual genomic and logistical picture below. Whether or not it was the exact target of the Wuhan lab’s genomic tinkering – the reality is millions of dollars of funding from multiple world governments have poured into this research, funding that’s dangled over these scientists as they’ve chased it like Icarus, this time not just risking their own lives – but hundreds of millions of others as well.
Subsequently, we are calling for an immediate end to dual-use gain-of-function research.
– In 2002, Stony Brook first assembled a DNA virus from scratch, building a polio-virus, and providing proof-of-concept for the creation, alteration, and manipulation of DNA-virus genomes. Two years prior, a separate team had already built an simpler RNA-virus from scratch – choosing to engineer a coronavirus from the ground up, and even swapping out its vital spike-protein genes to make it more infectious. And a generation earlier, artificially enhancing selection by intentionally infecting countless series of lab animals with different viruses is understood to have created the H1N1 Swine Flu. Its Franken-genome has a mysterious untraceable genetic parentage and a “clear unnatural origin,” and H1N1 became the poster-child for a moratorium against gain-of-function research – experimentation that seeks to increase a pathogen’s virulence, creating a more effective double-edged sword to counter and learn from. A ban that was in place for years, but was recently lifted by the American government. In the case of H1N1, it wasn’t a question of if it’d escaped from a research laboratory, only whether it’d been designed as part of a weapons system, or been part of a vaccine trial.
– When a virus manages to infect a new species of host it’s known as a zoonotic jump, a process that generally takes months or even years to complete. The first stage is when a virus infects one individual in a new host species, which is typically a dead-end the first time it happens since there’s no way for the virus to be adapted to a different species’ biology. The second stage of a zoonotic jump is when the virus manages to move from the first new host into more hosts of the new species, which results in some temporary transmission in a localized area – these are known as endemics and generally fizzle out the first few times they happen as the virus adapts to its new host species, and mutations win or lose the survival battle. The final stage, the only time a zoonotic jump is considered complete, is when there’s sustained host-to-host transmission in the new species. These zoonotic jumps have some predictable characteristics, the primary one is that adapting to a new host inevitably requires mutations that weren’t optimal in the old host. And so the virus gets weakened as its initially attempting to jump into a new host species, which is why the above sequence of steps – one new host, a few new hosts that pass it among themselves temporarily, and then finally sustained transmission – takes at least several months if not years to play out, since a good bit of time is required for all three steps to occur. Viral trial-and-error is required for the virus to find the right mutations that will allow it to prosper in a new host species, it’s never been known to just happen magically all at once.
– And so assuming that COVID-19 emerged naturally in a matter of weeks in the middle of a massive urban metropolis the size of New York City, when the host population of bats was hibernating anyways, requires completely ignoring everything we know about how viruses transfer between species. Not only was Wuhan’s population not interacting with bats since they hardly interact with humans in urban situations to begin with, but any possible host bats were sleeping in their caves anyways. And not only would the circumstances of this transfer require rewriting the textbooks on zoonotic jumps if it occurred it all, but beyond that: supposedly not only did a zoonotic jump happen instantly without the necessary steps, but when it hit humans it was extraordinarily virulent from the start, something that’s supposed to take an extensive amount of time to ever happen as mutations go through selective trial-and-error. This trial-and-error takes time and is why viruses have never made a zoonotic jump and been instantly virulent in a new host species like COVID-19 has been in humans. Nothing we know about how viruses naturally make zoonotic jumps point to that happening here.
– Tinkering with viral genomes is not anything new, but is not something that has ever been fully embraced by the scientific community at large. About a decade ago, two separate research teams successful tweaked the genome of the H5N1 Bird Flu in just two spots and then passed it through ferrets until it became both airborne and pathogenic to mammals, creating a virus that “could make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.” This involved selecting for a mutation that allowed the virus to access a receptor that’s found in ferret lungs, and was alarming enough that the research was urged to be published without revealing the specific methods involved and data collected – however it appears that only the most technical details were left out, and most of the research is freely available.
– By 2015, conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious. This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly gain-of-function research, a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus. Looking at UNC’s gain-of-function research on coronavirus spike-proteins, which received its funding just before the ban was implemented and was only allowed to go forward following a special review, a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.”
– But then oddly, in late January right as the pandemic was blooming, Dr. Ralph Baric claimed in an interview that people should be more concerned with the seasonal flu – despite having personally overseen the controversial engineering of a hyper-virulent strain of batty coronavirus just a few years back. Immediately discounting the burgeoning outbreak of an unknown coronavirus as a non-event seems particularly troubling for someone who’d trained two Chinese scientists on how to make hyper-virulent coronaviruses, especially when it’s hard to imagine that Dr. Baric was unaware his past colleagues were now working at the Wuhan Virology Lab, the epicenter of the outbreak. Highlighting the dissembling absurdity of this statement, based on reporting from Who: the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 appears to be thirty-four times more lethal than the seasonal flu.
– Scientists have expressed concern about China’s ability to safely monitor this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan since it opened in 2017: “an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. ‘Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.'” This lab is at most 20 miles from the wet market where the virus had been assumed to have jumped from animal to human. However the idea that a Chinese lab could have a viral sample escape is well-documented – as mentioned, one lab in Beijing has had four separate incidents of the SARS virus leaking out accidentally.
– Notably, the first three known cases from early December had no contact with that market, and roughly one-third of the initial exposed cohort had no direct ties to Wusan’s wild meat wet-market, the original presumptive source of the virus. And in mid February, reporting indicated that COVID-19’s patient zero in fact had no connection at all with the wet-market. This is reinforced by the fact Chinese research has also concluded that COVID-19 “may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”
– Since its discovery, scientists have been unable to fully determine the zoological origins of COVID-19, it was initially thought to have passed through snakes, but now all that’s agreed upon is that it’s mostly bat in origin. This inability to derive an exact zoological source is exactly what would be expected if the virus had been artificially engineered to target humans as UNC already has, this doesn’t prove an artificial nature – but it is consistent with one. Although there has been speculation that pangolins may have been the missing vector, the only data about the pangolin virome wasn’t entered into NCBI’s system until late January, and couldn’t possibly have been collected any earlier than late September 2019, and doesn’t fully answer the vector question anyways. And further research indicated it was “very unlikely” that similarities between their spike-protein genomes of COVID-19 and pangolins, where they share the most similarities, was due to the virus passing through pangolins at all.
– As explained in Nature, COVID-19’s Franken-genome combines a cornucopia of distinct genetic markers from each of the three other distinct branches of the coronavirus family tree, but is distinct enough from all of them that it in fact forms its own clade. Along those same lines, a full-genome evolutionary analysis of COVID-19 published in The Lancet concluded, “recombination is probably not the reason for emergence of this virus” since it seems that the Wuhan Strain isn’t a mosaic of previously known coronaviruses, but instead draws from distant, discrete parts of the coronavirus family tree – not how these viruses naturally evolve. Because even mixing and matching coronavirus genomes from every known zoological virus, scientists couldn’t find any possible combination that would explain those regions of the Wuhan Strain’s genome. The Lancet muses that a mysterious animal host could still be out there, however since they’ve already searched through every known possibility and been unable to find a match, another obvious explanation is that bio-engineering accounts for the inexplicable nucleotide signature of the Wuhan Strain’s genome
– Early research found that COVID-19 targets the ACE2 receptor, which seems to be distributed in roughly equal proportions across global populations, indicating that the Wuhan Strain was likely developed as part of a defensive gain-of-function project possibly linked to immunotherapy or vaccinations – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against, not as an offensive weapon targeting one specific global population. But counter-intuitively, researchers have pointed out that the most critical sections of the COVID-19’s protein-spike genome don’t match the previously reported pattern that would be expected for optimal binding to the specific ACE2 receptors found only in humans and ferrets, which indicates that these particular segments wouldn’t have been directly genetically engineered to increase virulence.
– And yet this is exactly what researchers looking for a “safe” vaccine candidate would engineer, and doesn’t rule out a scenario where the virus was passed through a series of ferrets. The research team in fact notes that its spike “appears to be the result of selection on human or human-like ACE2 permitting another optimal binding solution to arise,” failing to directly mention that the only other human-like receptors are found in ferrets – which have frequently been used for years in vaccine trials for viruses with this sort of protein-spike, and is exactly how the H5N1 Bird Flu virus was altered to make it airborne. And so the Wuhan Strain’s unique affinity for the human ACE2 receptor, which a pre-print reports to be 10 to 20 times greater than SARS, may be the exact type of vaccine-related accident that led to the moratorium on gain-of-function research in the first place and caused scientists to unsuccessfully call for the research around H5N1 to be partially sealed-off.
– The Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, appears to be transmissible even before its host shows any symptoms at all, making temperature-scanning at airports ineffective since hosts appear to be contagious for about a week before any symptoms emerge. This is in stark contrast with SARS, whose hosts weren’t contagious until they were symptomatic, allowing for its relatively quick containment. This chart is not from a peer-reviewed source but was claims to capture the comparative rates of infections between recent outbreaks. A recent pre-print now gives COVID-19 a rating of R4, meaning each host passes the virus on to four new victims, a rate significantly higher than any past global viral outbreak.
– The successful end results of the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research at UNC that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, was published the following year and described the successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats which was achieved by tinkering with its spike-protein genes. In this paper, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” who’s listed as being attached to the “Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.”
– Zhengli Shi seems to have returned to Wuhan at some point since 2016, specifically to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center, since she then appears in this September 2019 paper on the human behaviors most likely to lead to bat-borne coronavirus exposure in southern China, and also in the paper claiming that this coronavirus was bat in origin, which was peculiarly submitted in coordination with the announcement of the outbreak. Very, very peculiarly. She also appears in this pending preprint on the current outbreak of COVID-19, just a small sample of the dozens of coronavirus-related papers she’s published over a three decade career.
– Not only does Zhengli Shi provide a direct chain of expertise tying the already successful bio-engineering of a virulent bat-based coronavirus at UNC directly to the BSL-4 virology lab in Wuhan, but back in January 2014 she’d received a $665,000 grant from NIH for a study titled The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and the Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence (NIAID R01 AI1 10964) as well as $559,500 more from USAID for a study titled Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT_2China (Project No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102). Beyond this American funding specifically into viral diseases zoonotically transferring from animals to humans which would slipped in just before the ban, over the years she’s also received around $3 million in grants to study these zoonotic viruses from China and other countries, and has served on the editorial board of several virological research magazines. More of her research into the intersection of coronaviruses like the Wuhan Strain and their epidemic potential was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate of the Naval Medical Research Center.
– And so a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of an outbreak involved a coronavirus that’s escaping zoological classification, and has other unnatural characteristics that will be discussed below.
– Another Chinese virologist, Xing-Yi Ge, appears as an author on the 2016 UNC paper and is also attached to the lab in Wuhan. Previously in 2013, he’d successfully isolated a SARS-like coronavirus from bats which targets the ACE2 receptor, just like our present virus, the Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19 uses. And it turns out that sections of the Wuhan Strain’s ACE2 receptor’s genes are unique: they’re almost identical to SARS’s spike-protein genes – despite the fact that almost none of the two coronavirus’s genomes are similar anywhere else at all. Beyond that, although the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome differs from SARS in four out of the five most important genomic spots that determine binding to the ACE2 receptor, they surprisingly don’t effect the protein-spike’s shape. And in an even bigger coincidence, these four spots also code for the outside region of the spike that allows entry into cells, and do not effect it either – allowing the Wuhan Strain to still use the ACE2 receptor to unlock cells while possibly gaining additional capabilities. The odds that this concordance was bio-engineered into the virus are several orders of magnitude more likely than for this to randomly have evolved in nature, and is exactly the sort of process used to make the H5N1 Bird Flu airborne and highly pathogenic.
– Numerous videos purportedly from inside hospitals in Wuhan depict a crisis that is far greater than the numbers released by China to date. There is widespread but unverified online reporting that Wuhan crematoriums have been running 24/7, which is consistent with a recent peer-reviewed study that claims that as of January 25, Wuhan had over 75,000 infections – when the official number was just 761. Chinese language social media also reflects a sense of panic and desperation that is highly discordant with the numbers being released by the Chinese government. Who, notably, are refusing any direct assistance from the American CDC. (Evidence that China is vastly downplaying this pandemic’s severity: Example 1. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Example 5. Example 6.)
– Some of the dystopian carnage creeping across China may be due to the fact that much of China’s population may have already been exposed to coronavirus infection via SARS or other less notorious strains, which would allow the Wuhan Stain COVID-19 to use antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) to much more efficiently enter into cells, and then become much more virulent since this enhancement hijacks the body’s preexisting immune response to coronavirus infections and allows easier entry. However whether or not people have been exposed to a coronavirus infection before, once it’s been circulating in a population for long enough the Wuhan Strain may be able to reinfect its own past hosts and use this molecular hijacking on antibodies left from its own previous infection to become far more virulent, regardless of whether or not someone has been exposed to other coronaviruses before COVID-19. And early reporting from Chinese doctors indicates that re-infections of the Wuhan Strain are far more lethal than the first. More evidence that ADE is occurring is its much higher affinity for the ACE2 receptor and far higher viral loads compared to SARS – both of these may be due at least in part to ADE allowing COVID-19 to much more efficiently bind to and enter cells. And another hint that the Wuhan Strain may be using ADE to more effectively attack its host is the fact that it seems to be targeting its host’s neurological systems, which is explored in depth below. A final clue is the fact that children seem to be far less effected by the Wuhan Strain COVID-19, a phenomenon that’s found in Dengue Fever, which is one of the classic examples for ADE.
– Another peculiar characteristic is COVID-19’s similarities to HIV. And so although another since-retracted pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in COVID-19’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – critics quickly pointed out that the shared homology didn’t reach statistical significance. However a closer look at the data reveals that there were a few small shared genomic segments that, despite being physically separated from each other along each strand of DNA, all worked together to code for the Wuhan Strain’s protein-spike’s crucial receptor binding site. Something that is highly unlikely to have happened by chance. And despite most of its protein-spike being shared with SARS, these substituted segments weren’t shared at all – nor were they found in any other coronavirus. One possible but likely reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target – meaning the Wuhan Strain was built as a monster for a specific vaccine to hunt. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, this pattern could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets with a bespoke coronavirus and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.
– Critics have brushed off the Wuhan Strain’s shared homology with HIV as statistically insignificant, however clinical reporting indicates that the Wuhan Strain may be using this shared HIV homology to attack CD4 immune cells just like HIV does, as an unusually high percentage of patients are showing low white blood cell counts, especially the sickest ones. This pathogenicity may well be due to the unique HIV-live genomics of the Wuhan Strain, as one white-paper by LSU’s professor emeritus of Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology who’s also a Harvard-educated virologist with a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics notes: “This is the first description of a possible immunosuppressive domain in coronaviruses… The three key [mutations] common to the known immunosuppressive domains are also in common with the sequence from [the spike-protein]. While coronaviruses are not known for general immunosuppression of the style shown by HIV-1, this does not rule out immunosuppression at the site of active infection in the lung, which would prolong and potentially worsen infection at that site.” And early research has indicated that this unique region may make COVID-19 up to 1,000 times more likely to bind to human cells than SARS, which could be due to either this homology or to ADE, or some combination of these or other factors.
– Even more troubling, a peer-reviewed study noted that one particular part of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome also wasn’t found in any of its relatives, “and may provide a gain-of-function to [COVID-19] for efficient spreading in the human population.” And according to that paper, this particular type of furin cleavage site makes similar viruses both more pathogenic and more neurotoxic. Additionally, this particular type of cleavage site is a hallmark of being passed through a series of animal hosts in a lab. Evidence for the Wuhan Strain’s neurotoxicity arrived in late February, in a published paper which notes that “the most characteristic symptom of COVID‐19 patients is respiratory distress, and most of the patients admitted to the intensive care could not breathe spontaneously.” Combined with the observation that “some COVID‐19 patients also showed neurologic signs such as headache, nausea and vomiting,” this paper asserts that since SARS was found heavily concentrated in the brainstems of its autopsied victims, COVID-19 is also probably crossing the blood-brain barrier and killing its victims not just via pneumonia, but also by causing neurological respiratory failure. Indicating that ADE may be occurring, but at a much faster rate than nature allows since reinfections of Dengue Fever that use ADE typically have years pass between them.
– And it should be noted that SARS – much ballyhooed as a close relative to the Wuhan Strain – didn’t notable effect white blood cell counts. Additionally, clinical treatment guides published online in late January by established Chinese medical sources note the progressive reduction of white blood cells, as well as the importance of monitoring this decline. And reporting from Thailand indicates that adding a cocktail of two different anti-HIV drugs to the typical flu treatment regime seemed to effectively knock back the Wuhan Strain. Additionally, one of the only autopsies performed outside of China to date found that the deceased had a severely depleted white blood cell count. These lowered counts may come from this shared similarity with HIV, or it could also be the result of ADE as well, since this phenomenon primarily targets white blood cells for its hijackings and may help explain why consecutive infections are so lethal.
– In a highly concerning turn, scientists have noted that the Wuhan Strain can have a “striking” short term rate of mutation which doesn’t indicate an artificial origin but captures the unique threat posed by this coronavirus regardless of its providence, since a faster mutation rates makes it more likely this virus can dodge testing and neutralize vaccines. Something there is already early evidence for. Further concerning are reports out of China that even patients who appear cured still harbor COVID-19 in their system, and although the full implications of this are not yet known – none of them are good.
– One of the worst possible scenarios for COVID-19’s mutation rate would be if it falls into the Goldilocks range that would allow it to form mutant viral swarms: too many mutations will cause a virus to eventually implode, not enough allows host immune systems to catch-up, but if things are just right mutant swarms can form and spread across host populations, burrowing into host nervous systems and causing permanent neurological damage. Mutant swarms form when a virus produces mutationally-damaged copies of itself inside a host, some of which aren’t infectious but find their way into the nervous system where they burrow in causing damage, and others that combine with complimentary broken copies inside host cells to produce working infectious copies of the virus. So a host can not only become crippled with neurological issues, but also still be producing infectious copies of the virus. And it seems as if COVID-19 has many characteristics that indicate the potential to form mutant swarms: the “striking” mutation rate mentioned above and the fact a second widespread mutated strain seems to have already emerged in Washington State with many other isolated strains reported elsewhere, crossing between species is another factor and a dog in Hong Kong appears to have tested positive, the fact that the Wuhan Strain can infect not only the respiratory tract but feces as well – multi-organ involvement is an important contributor to viral swarms, and finally the markedly viral load rate of COVID-19 compared to SARS – SARS produced a viral load several times lower which decreased over time, while COVID-19 produces a “very high” viral load that appears to increase over time and can peak several orders of magnitude higher than SARS was measured to reach. And alarming evidence that this phenomenon is occurring emerged from a Chinese pre-print which noted that over one-third of the roughly 200 patients studied has some neurological symptoms, with nearly half of the most severe patients exhibiting neurological issues. And further evidence for the possibility of both mutant swarms and ADE is witnessed by a study published in Lancet, which notes that the case fatality rate in Wuhan could actually be as high as 20% – the outbreak’s epicenter would be expected to have the highest rates of both phenomena as different variants of the Wuhan Strain infected and reinfected overlapping hosts.
– Another exceptional and atypical trait of the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 is that not only does it form its own clade, it’s calculated to have diverged from SARS and its other sister coronaviruses some 260 years ago. And yet in all that time, while it every other branch of the coronavirus tree was busy branching-off into countless variants, if it emerged naturally, COVID-19 somehow spent a quarter of a millennium as the lone known example of its clade, somehow not mutating into related lineages in all that time. Another simpler explanation is that this apparent hereditary distance and genetic uniqueness is the just the result of being altered in a lab. And although two distinct strains of COVID-19 have been identified, there’s no reason to believe this mutational differentiation happened before contact with humans in the winter of 2019. Additionally, when neutral sites, the specific points in the genome which most reliably show evolutionary change, were examined: COVID-19 looks even more evolutionarily distant from any of its possible relatives, which would make sense if all that evolutionary distance was gained by artificially accelerated generational turn-over in a lab.
– Also giving credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application registered to a scientist from Wuhan that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusual behavior as discussed above.
– And curiously, the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Dr. Charles Lieber, was arrested in the midst of this outbreak on charges that he’d been accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Chinese government. According to his charging documents, Dr. Lieber first went to the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT), in November 2011 to participate in a nanotechnology forum, which was when he was recruited into a bribery scheme that would net him several million dollars to “establish a research lab and conduct research at WUT,” which became known as ” Joint Nano Key Laboratory,” as well as mentor and advocate for graduate students. By 2015, Dr. Lieber appeared to be fairly intimately involved with what seemed to begin as simply a nanotechnology lab, but now had shifted to involve biology as well, since he described visiting the lab multiple times per year “as we try to build up the nano-bio part of the lab.” Whether or not this nano-bio part of the Nano Key Laboratory is related to Wuhan’s BSL-4 virology lab isn’t clear, however if the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered, technology classified as “nano-bio” would’ve almost certainly played a role.
Given the above facts, either:
– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, that may be as much as twenty-times more contagious than SARS and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells holds an unique HIV-like signature with the concomitant clinical response, that somehow managed to infect its patient zero who had no connection to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history and Russia to ban Chinese citizens from entry into their country.
– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush leading up to an international virological conference and during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to prevent the full story about what’s going on from getting out are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.
An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.
Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile.
Debunking Nature Magazine's "COVID-19 Definitely Didn't Come From A Lab" China Propaganda
Maybe you shouldn’t blindly believe everything you read? Even if the source has a pretty solid reputation?
Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence.
China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.
And while the mainstream corporate media mindlessly regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic – sites like ZeroHedge, that have been at the forefront of keeping the lines of investigation open, have been banished from Twitter and marginalized.
Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.
Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.
As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS. That process would leave a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. However the addition of artificial generations produced by this process of passing through ferrets in the lab would create a lot of genetic distance from any possible relatives – precisely what is seen in COVID-19: it forms its own clade and appears very distant from all other bat coronaviruses. So this is lazy research, they’re either unaware of the Bird Flu study or are willfully ignoring it.
Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.
This seems like pretty intentional dissimulation. It’s “likely” that other viruses with this cleavage site will be found? What? How likely? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 million? Is it likely that if my aunt grew balls she’d become my uncle? Is it “likely” that a natural intermediate animal vector will be found? Well… likely or not, until it happens it seems incredibly disingenuous to state that “likely” means a damn thing here.
The functional consequence of the polybasic cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and it will be important to determine its impact on transmissibility and pathogenesis in animal models. Experiments with SARS-CoV have shown that insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion without affecting viral entry14.
This doesn’t seem to address the virus’s provenance at all, but just as an aside it seems like a lot of the viruses with furin cleavage sites engage in ADE, which COVID-19 appears to be doing from a clinical perspective: neurological damage, the second infection is worse, and areas like Wuhan with extended infections have much higher CFRs as infections overlap.
The acquisition of polybasic cleavage sites by HA has also been observed after repeated passage in cell culture or through animals17.
Exactly. Passage through a series of ferret hosts in a lab would have given COVID-19 this distinct cleavage site.
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11.
Yes, again we aren’t arguing that this thing was built nucleotide-by-nucleotide as the perfect bespoke bio-weapon. This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through ferrets in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.
Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19
This is an utterly vacuous statement. Probably doesn’t mean a damn thing in science. “Okay folks, we probably won’t get an earthquake anytime soon, so no reason to prepare for one or try and detect one coming!” Seriously?
Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.
As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t matter how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.
Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-221. Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues21 (Fig. 1). This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.
The most recent study, covered in our article, that examines the neutral sites that are assumed to best show heritage found that pangolins are “very unlikely” to have served as a host at all. Their assertion that natural natural selection is clearly shown is raw steamy bullshit. Serial passage through ferrets fits the overall big picture far better than this pangolin crap.
For a precursor virus to acquire both the polybasic cleavage site and mutations in the spike protein suitable for binding to human ACE2, an animal host would probably have to have a high population density (to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently) and an ACE2-encoding gene that is similar to the human ortholog.
WAIT WAIT WAIT!! You mean exactly like a bunch of ferrets, which have the same ACE2 receptor as humans, all jammed into a bunch of cages together and then infected over and over again in a lab?! That’s crazy talk!! Other than the fact it was exactly the process used to make the Bird Flu into something that “could make the 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.”
It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.
Hence, this scenario presumes a period of unrecognized transmission in humans between the initial zoonotic event and the acquisition of the polybasic cleavage site. Sufficient opportunity could have arisen if there had been many prior zoonotic events that produced short chains of human-to-human transmission over an extended period.
Sure this would be plausible… other than the fact that, as we cover in our report, that statistical analysis shows that this thing didn’t hit humans until November of 2019, which this article agrees with. But zoonotic jumps only occur after a genomic trial-and-error process where the virus jumps to one host, spreads to a few new hosts, and then fizzles out. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere of this occurring. Every single data points to this thing hitting humans in November and being immediately adapted and dangerous. There is no trace whatsoever of it creating small clusters of infections and dying out – stating there could have been doesn’t mean it’s been seen. It hasn’t. And as our report covers, this would require sustained interaction with the intermediate host – how does that happen in the middle of a massive modern urban metropolis the size of NYC? And where is this intermediate host anyways? If an intermediate host isn’t needed, is it some magical sleep-flying bat that decided not to hibernate and fight crime in Wuhan when it’s buddies were all hibernating, creating the sustained interactions with humans as it fought for Justice? Because that’s about as plausible as what’s being proposed here.
The presence in pangolins of an RBD very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.
Again, analysis of the neutral sites shows that pangolins were almost certainly not in play.
Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described
This means nothing. There is no open-source shared database of viruses. No one has any idea what viruses are in China’s BSL-4 lab, where they’ve been collecting these viruses for years. As mentioned, one of our persons-of-interest was the very first person to isolate a coronavirus from a bat that uses the ACE2 receptor. He also worked at UNC in Baric’s lab making the hyper-virulent bat coronavirus in 2015.
Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described.
The fuck it hasn’t.
Retrospective serological studies could also be informative, and a few such studies have been conducted showing low-level exposures to SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in certain areas of China26. Further serological studies should be conducted to determine the extent of prior human exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Beyond the statistical analysis that indicates it only hit humans in November in 2019, is the fact that the version of COVID-19 found in the first few dozen hosts was exactly the same – there aren’t any variants whatsoever, just one version. This is not what would be found with the genomic trial-and-error of a full zoonotic jump, which requires sustained human-to-human transmission as different variants of the virus try and fail to adapt to human biology. Here, only one variant was found in all the initial infected humans, instead of the multiple variants that would be expected. But does fit what would happen if a virus that already had high affinity to the ACE2 receptor, which is the same in human and ferrets, leaked out of a lab. But addressing this point in particular, oh weird, the study they cite from March of 2018 was done mostly on people who live in villages barely a kilometer away from bat caves. A far cry from a massive urban city bout the size of NYC. Oh, and how many of these villagers, who live about a kilometer or less from bat caves, had antibodies indicating exposure to bat coronaviruses? Two-point-seven percent. (There is hand-waving about how long antibodies persist in humans, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than long enough.) That study actually sampled people living in Wuhan too and found… no evidence whatsoever of exposure to “SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses.” So are these peer-reviewers just straight chugging lead paint, or are they on the take too?
The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation1
Again, just demonstrably false.
Get the real story here.
Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence.
China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.
And while the mainstream corporate media mindlessly regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic – sites like ZeroHedge, that have been at the forefront of keeping the lines of investigation open, have been banished from Twitter and marginalized.
Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.
Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.
As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS. That process would leave a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. However the addition of artificial generations produced by this process of passing through ferrets in the lab would create a lot of genetic distance from any possible relatives – precisely what is seen in COVID-19: it forms its own clade and appears very distant from all other bat coronaviruses. So this is lazy research, they’re either unaware of the Bird Flu study or are willfully ignoring it.
Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.
This seems like pretty intentional dissimulation. It’s “likely” that other viruses with this cleavage site will be found? What? How likely? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 million? Is it likely that if my aunt grew balls she’d become my uncle? Is it “likely” that a natural intermediate animal vector will be found? Well… likely or not, until it happens it seems incredibly disingenuous to state that “likely” means a damn thing here.
The functional consequence of the polybasic cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and it will be important to determine its impact on transmissibility and pathogenesis in animal models. Experiments with SARS-CoV have shown that insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion without affecting viral entry14.
This doesn’t seem to address the virus’s provenance at all, but just as an aside it seems like a lot of the viruses with furin cleavage sites engage in ADE, which COVID-19 appears to be doing from a clinical perspective: neurological damage, the second infection is worse, and areas like Wuhan with extended infections have much higher CFRs as infections overlap.
The acquisition of polybasic cleavage sites by HA has also been observed after repeated passage in cell culture or through animals17.
Exactly. Passage through a series of ferret hosts in a lab would have given COVID-19 this distinct cleavage site.
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11.
Yes, again we aren’t arguing that this thing was built nucleotide-by-nucleotide as the perfect bespoke bio-weapon. This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through ferrets in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.
Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19
This is an utterly vacuous statement. Probably doesn’t mean a damn thing in science. “Okay folks, we probably won’t get an earthquake anytime soon, so no reason to prepare for one or try and detect one coming!” Seriously?
Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.
As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t matter how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.
Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-221. Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues21 (Fig. 1). This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.
The most recent study, covered in our article, that examines the neutral sites that are assumed to best show heritage found that pangolins are “very unlikely” to have served as a host at all. Their assertion that natural natural selection is clearly shown is raw steamy bullshit. Serial passage through ferrets fits the overall big picture far better than this pangolin crap.
For a precursor virus to acquire both the polybasic cleavage site and mutations in the spike protein suitable for binding to human ACE2, an animal host would probably have to have a high population density (to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently) and an ACE2-encoding gene that is similar to the human ortholog.
WAIT WAIT WAIT!! You mean exactly like a bunch of ferrets, which have the same ACE2 receptor as humans, all jammed into a bunch of cages together and then infected over and over again in a lab?! That’s crazy talk!! Other than the fact it was exactly the process used to make the Bird Flu into something that “could make the 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.”
It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.
Hence, this scenario presumes a period of unrecognized transmission in humans between the initial zoonotic event and the acquisition of the polybasic cleavage site. Sufficient opportunity could have arisen if there had been many prior zoonotic events that produced short chains of human-to-human transmission over an extended period.
Sure this would be plausible… other than the fact that, as we cover in our report, that statistical analysis shows that this thing didn’t hit humans until November of 2019, which this article agrees with. But zoonotic jumps only occur after a genomic trial-and-error process where the virus jumps to one host, spreads to a few new hosts, and then fizzles out. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere of this occurring. Every single data points to this thing hitting humans in November and being immediately adapted and dangerous. There is no trace whatsoever of it creating small clusters of infections and dying out – stating there could have been doesn’t mean it’s been seen. It hasn’t. And as our report covers, this would require sustained interaction with the intermediate host – how does that happen in the middle of a massive modern urban metropolis the size of NYC? And where is this intermediate host anyways? If an intermediate host isn’t needed, is it some magical sleep-flying bat that decided not to hibernate and fight crime in Wuhan when it’s buddies were all hibernating, creating the sustained interactions with humans as it fought for Justice? Because that’s about as plausible as what’s being proposed here.
The presence in pangolins of an RBD very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.
Again, analysis of the neutral sites shows that pangolins were almost certainly not in play.
Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described
This means nothing. There is no open-source shared database of viruses. No one has any idea what viruses are in China’s BSL-4 lab, where they’ve been collecting these viruses for years. As mentioned, one of our persons-of-interest was the very first person to isolate a coronavirus from a bat that uses the ACE2 receptor. He also worked at UNC in Baric’s lab making the hyper-virulent bat coronavirus in 2015.
Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described.
The fuck it hasn’t.
Retrospective serological studies could also be informative, and a few such studies have been conducted showing low-level exposures to SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in certain areas of China26. Further serological studies should be conducted to determine the extent of prior human exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Beyond the statistical analysis that indicates it only hit humans in November in 2019, is the fact that the version of COVID-19 found in the first few dozen hosts was exactly the same – there aren’t any variants whatsoever, just one version. This is not what would be found with the genomic trial-and-error of a full zoonotic jump, which requires sustained human-to-human transmission as different variants of the virus try and fail to adapt to human biology. Here, only one variant was found in all the initial infected humans, instead of the multiple variants that would be expected. But does fit what would happen if a virus that already had high affinity to the ACE2 receptor, which is the same in human and ferrets, leaked out of a lab. But addressing this point in particular, oh weird, the study they cite from March of 2018 was done mostly on people who live in villages barely a kilometer away from bat caves. A far cry from a massive urban city bout the size of NYC. Oh, and how many of these villagers, who live about a kilometer or less from bat caves, had antibodies indicating exposure to bat coronaviruses? Two-point-seven percent. (There is hand-waving about how long antibodies persist in humans, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than long enough.) That study actually sampled people living in Wuhan too and found… no evidence whatsoever of exposure to “SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses.” So are these peer-reviewers just straight chugging lead paint, or are they on the take too?
The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation1
Again, just demonstrably false.
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