Where Did Covid Come From?: New documents bolster the theory that it not only escaped from a laboratory but was developed in one; Scientist Claims ‘smoking gun’ Evidence COVID-19 Intentionally Created by Researchers in Chinese Lab, and other C-Virus related stories
WSJ: Where Did Covid Come From?
New documents bolster the theory that it not only escaped from a laboratory but was developed in one.
In the four years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unleashed on the world, data have steadily accumulated supporting the hypothesis that it emerged from a laboratory. The latest information, released last month, makes a formidable case that the virus is the product of laboratory synthesis, not of nature.
This startling fact will probably take some time to sink into the national consciousness, given the mainstream media’s sustained inability to report the issue objectively. Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis. Science journalists are too beholden to their sources to suspect that virologists would lie to them about the extent of their profession’s responsibility for a catastrophic pandemic.
Here are some salient facts that haven’t been clearly reported to readers of the mainstream press:
In March 2018 a team of American and Chinese virologists applied to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, seeking a $14 million grant to manipulate viruses related to SARS-CoV-1, the bat virus that caused a minor epidemic in 2002. Their goal was to identify bat viruses in Asia with the highest potential for jumping to people and to immunize bats so they wouldn’t infect soldiers in the region.
The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site.
In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process. —>READ MORE HERE
NY POST: Scientist claims ‘smoking gun’ evidence COVID-19 intentionally created by researchers in Chinese lab:
COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday, with another expert claiming that evidence of the likelihood has reached “the level of a smoking gun.”
Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus.
“[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun,” Ebright said in the piece by former New York Times editor Nicholas Wade.
The papers from the lab cited by Ebright contained drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, which sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans.
The proposal was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but Wade suggested that their work could have been carried out by researchers in Wuhan who had secured Chinese government funding.
“Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019,” wrote Wade, a former science editor of the New York Times.
“This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.”
Along with the research notes, Wade claimed the specific genetic structure of the coronavirus that allowed it to infect humans served as another strong indication of “the virus’s laboratory birth.”
“Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol,” Wade wrote. —>READ MORE HERE
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