| Blogs > cajunjoe > My Blog |
|
Likely U.S. engaged in ‘dangerous’ research in China, COVID escaped lab THIS IS A LONG READ. IT SHOWS THE NEGLIGENCE OF CHINA N MAYBE USA , REGARDING THE CONTROL OF THE VIRUS IT WOULD APPEAR US INTELLIGENCE KNEW ABOUT THIS AS WELL AS MR KNOW IT ALL FAUCI'S INVOLVEMENT. IF THE INFO IS CORRECT CHINA KNEW IN 2019 THEY HAD LEAKS AND CASES OF THE SLANT EYE VIRUS Nunes cites "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" of lab leak, asks U.S. intel reveal what it knew, and when. House Intelligence Committee Republicans reported Wednesday evening they believe the U.S. government has engaged in "dangerous scientific research with China" that lends increasing credibility the theory that COVID-19 may have accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan as early as October 2019. Led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the committee's ranking member, Republicans on the panel issued a 21-page report laying out "overwhelming" open-source evidence supporting the theory that the coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including: A U.S. State Department memo from January revealing that "several researchers at the Wuhan lab were sickened with COVID-19-like symptoms in fall 2019." Media reports that there was no cell phone activity inside the WIV between Oct. 7, 2019 and Oct. 24, 2019, suggesting a possible shutdown or blackout at the facility. Warnings from U.S. diplomats in China in 2017 that the Wuhan lab was "conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses without following necessary safety protocols, risking the accidental outbreak of a pandemic." A recent scientific study concluding that COVID-19 has "several characteristics that, when taken together, are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis." China has a history of viral leaks from its research labs, including one in 2004 in Beijing tied to an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, an earlier coronavirus known as SARs. "Significant circumstantial evidence raises serious concerns that the COVID19 outbreak may have been a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology," the GOP report stated, adding it was "crucial for health experts and the U.S. Government to understand how the COVID-19 virus originated." File COVID-19_and_the_Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology_18_May_FINAL_ (1).pdf The report also cited work funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that appeared to directly or indirectly involve controversial "gain of function" research in which coronaviruses were made "more infectious in humans." The report confirmed earlier reporting by Just the News. "Committee Republicans are concerned that the U.S. Government directly or indirectly engaged in dangerous scientific research with China despite knowing of the Chinese military's participation," the Nunes report said. "The Committee must determine what role, if any, the Intelligence Community (IC) had in monitoring or evaluating U.S. policy risks related to these efforts." Under questioning in the Senate last week, Fauci emphatically denied funding gain of function research in China. But the report cited a specific example, saying an NIAID-backed vendor called EcoHealth Alliance jointly funded with China in 2015 a project to create "a hybrid virus that combined elements from bat-borne coronaviruses, including the one that caused SARS in 2002." "The mutated virus created by the researchers could more easily infect human cells, which was a noteworthy and unnatural modification because almost all coronaviruses from bats have not been able bind the key human receptor," the report said. "This study is an example of a Gain of Function research experiment, which enhance a pathogen's natural traits." The theory that COVID-19 did not evolve in nature as the Chinese claimed and came from a lab leak, emerged early in the pandemic but was downplayed by global health leaders, including U.S. researchers and the World Health Organization and even some Democrats. But the Trump administration steadfastly maintained it was a strong possibility, especially as China denied access to world leaders to data and facilities. Before leaving office, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared there was "a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan." Biden administration officials' assessments now align with the Trump administration, with current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines saying earlier this month the most plausible theories for where COVID-19 originated are a natural occurrence or a lab accident. The House GOP report said Wednesday it was more important than ever for U.S. intelligence agencies re-evaluate and reveal what they knew about WIV and the virus leak theory and what security posture the agencies took on Chinese research because a 2018 intelligence community threat assessment specifically warned of the risk of a coronavirus jumping to humans. "Based on the information above, the threads of circumstantial information suggest the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 pandemic could have been the result of an accidental leak from the WIV, particularly given the absence of credible information that supports a zoonotic transmission," the GOP report said. "A recent scientific paper indicates that the virus has several characteristics that, when taken together, are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. "Unfortunately, Beijing has hindered the conduct of a full, credible investigation. There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence, however, to support a lab leak as the origination of COVID-19, while there is no substantive evidence supporting the natural zoonosis hypothesis."  BLUE LIVES MATTER |
|||
5/19/2021 6:29 pm |
 BLUE LIVES MATTER
| ||
5/19/2021 6:41 pm |
Fig. 1 figure1 Possible routes of SARS-CoV-2′s transmission to humans. a Direct infection from bats to humans either natural or due to virus sampling. b Infection of humans via an intermediate host such as pangolins or other mammals. c Laboratory hypothesis: sampling from wild bats followed by different laboratory steps such as RNA extraction and sequencing, virus isolation or synthesis from a given sequence, growth in cell culture and infection assays, genetic engineering, passage in humanized mice or other animal models. Human infection may be caused by accidental escape of the virus from the laboratory environment Full size image Here we address the main arguments in support of a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 and outline the various points which support the alternative, that a laboratory origin is still a valid possibility that should not be discounted. To help prevent future viral pandemics, it is of pivotal importance to identify the source of the virus, and this is only possible with an unbiased analysis of all data available. We couple this work with calls from recent opinion pieces and comparative studies questioning a zoonotic origin (Sousa 2020; Sirotkin and Sirotkin 2020; Relman 2020; Segreto and Deigin 2020; Butler 2020; Sallard et al. 2021) via a review of the latest literature and propose an alternative to the natural zoonosis hypothesis. Early outbreak and the search of an intermediate host The earliest detected cases of COVID-19 were located in Wuhan, China. The Huanan seafood market in Wuhan had at first been posited as a possible location of initial zoonotic transfer from wild animals to humans (Huang et al. 2020a, b). However, three of the four patients with the earliest recorded onset of COVID-19 symptoms had no association with the seafood market (Huang et al. 2020a), and the ancestral T8782 and C28144 genotype was not associated with the seafood market (Chen et al. 2021). Phyloepidemiologic analysis of early cases also discounted this theory (Yu et al. 2020). Although the exact zoonotic agent of the original severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) has not been identified, Chiroptera are considered to be the natural reservoir of SARS-r CoVs (Li et al. 2005). Initially, palm civets and raccoon dogs were proposed as zoonotic agents (Chinese SARS Molecular Epidemiology Consortium 2004) or intermediate hosts (Tang et al. 2006), but it remains possible that they were infected by humans (Janies et al. 200  .For SARS-CoV-2, several authors have proposed pangolins, Manis javanica, as an intermediate host due to the similarity of the receptor binding domain (RBD) for pangolin coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2 RBD (Xiao et al. 2020; Lam et al. 2020; Zhang et al. 2020b). Pangolins are, however, unlikely to be the intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2. Although two pangolin coronaviruses (Xiao et al. 2020; Liu et al. 2020a) exhibited strong binding to human ACE2 (hACE2), binding to pangolin ACE2 was approximately tenfold weaker and binding to bat Rhinolophus ferremequinum ACE2 was very weak, with similar relative binding relationships exhibited by SARS-CoV-2 (Wrobel et al. 2021). This indicates that neither pangolin coronavirus had adapted well to pangolins and that more research is required to validate the viability of coronaviruses to spread naturally between pangolins. Because of a 10–15% divergence throughout the entire spike protein with the exclusion of the N-terminal domain, Boni et al. (2020) concluded that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be a recombinant of an ancestor of pangolin coronavirus and the closest SARS-CoV-2 relative, RaTG13. All published pangolin coronavirus genome sequences with a nearly identical spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2 were sourced from a single batch of smuggled pangolins (Chan and Zhan 2020), raising the question whether pangolins may have been infected from another host species or from humans during trafficking (Choo et al. 2020; Wenzel 2020). Unlike other species demonstrated to be vectors for coronaviruses, pangolins are not trafficked together live caged in large groups for extended periods of time, making this an unlikely scenario for viral enhancement. Also, pangolins are critically endangered (Choo et al. 2020), exhibit a solitary nature, potentially have limited infection resistance (Choo et al. 2016), and a recent screening of 334 pangolins revealed a lack of coronavirus infections of pangolins in the wild (Lee et al. 2020). Finally, the discovery of synthetic DNA sequences in pangolin coronavirus metagenomic raw sequence reads by Zhang (2020) and the interpretation that the pangolin coronavirus genomes were generated from a synthetic construct, requires further investigation. After outbreaks reported in several mink farms in Europe (Hammer et al. 2021) and the USA (Zhou and Shi 2021) from a human source with back-transmission to humans, minks, Neovison vison, have been suggested to be a potential intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 (Zhou and Shi 2021). Studies on ferrets, closely related mustelids to minks, have demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 binds to ferret ACE2 albeit at a lower efficiency than to human ACE2 (Huang et al. 2020b; Conceicao et al. 2020). Furthermore, SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission among ferrets has been experimentally determined (Kim et al. 2020b; Schlottau et al. 2020; Richard et al. 2020b) with the animals exhibiting mild effects and limited or no detectable lower respiratory tract involvement (Kim et al. 2020b; Shi et al. 2020). However, several observations indicate mustelids to be an unlikely intermediary host: no outbreaks in mink farms are known in China or surrounding countries; mink farms in China are located in north-eastern regions, while the closest related coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, was sampled by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from bats in Yunnan in south-western China (Zhou et al. 2020c); that ferrets are not affected by the severe disease characteristics exhibited by humans (Johansen et al. 2020) indicates that for ferrets to be an intermediate host, significant adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to humans would have occurred after zoonotic transfer from mustelids, which has not been observed. Finally, the identification of several SARS-CoV-2′s variants in minks, some of which characterized by mutations previously unseen in humans (Schlottau et al. 2020; Hammer et al. 2021), suggests that minks are not likely to be a natural reservoir for the virus but rather new hosts which require adaptation. BLUE LIVES MATTER
| ||
5/19/2021 6:46 pm |
THE FIGURE OF PICTURE SHOWS THE POSSIBILITIES HOW THE VIRUS WAS CAUGHT AN OR CREATED THEN RELEASE NS BLUE LIVES MATTER
|
×
×