COVID theories - part 3

April 2022

COVID theories part III - The origin of Covid-19 better explained

A year on from the start of the pandemic there was still, by all accounts, a near-consensus view among scientists that the causative agent of Covid-19 lay in natural animals, but some free-thinkers were beginning to explore the unfashionable alternative: the laboratory-escape hypothesis.

Further analysis of the Covid-19 virus structure revealed "multiple peculiar characteristics" (Segret et al.). For example:

• The Covid-19 virus is poorly adapted for infecting bats or pangolins. Yet it emerged, apparently without any (natural) intermediate evolution, remarkably well adapted for infecting humans.

Point to ponder:

Pangolins lead a solitary life-style. The coronavirus which was isolated from individuals in a batch of confiscated, smuggled, stressed and sickly pangolins in March 2019, was similar, but not identical, to the Covid-19 virus. Yet, this evidence was used to support the 'natural origin' narrative for Covid-19. An interesting possibility is that the pangolin coronavirus came from infected humans handling them.

• Sections of the spike protein don't seem to be coronavirus but, improbably, mimic human and mouse protein structure. This could be explained by the common laboratory procedure of infecting 'humanized' GM mice (i.e. laboratory mice given human genes so that their cells have human characteristics and can be used to study human diseases) with an experimental coronavirus.
• The Covid-19 virus has an excellent ability to infect humans deriving from a large insertion in its genome. This insertion could easily have been achieved using the, now standard, GM technique of site-directed mutagenesis. The natural evolution of such a large, and perfectly functioning, addition to a bat coronavirus is highly unlikely.
• The WIV and associated institutions have an extensive collection of bat viruses any one of which could have been engineered to create the Covid-19 virus. These laboratories have been carrying out gain-of-function experiments for years.

Fast forward to the end of 2021. After two years of extensive searching, the experts haven't found a single animal host harbouring a coronavirus which could have kicked off Covid-19. Perhaps this isn't surprising, because natural viruses don't 'jump' that fast: a shift from one host to a new one takes many years (centuries or millennia) during which time they fester in, and adapt to, an isolated community. Only when there's an abnormal movement of the population harbouring the virus is there a risk of a pandemic.

Harvard gene therapist and cell engineer, Dr Alina Chan, told the UK government that many top virologists consider a GM origin for the Covid-19 virus is reasonable, but that ominously "right now it's not safe for people who know about the origins of the pandemic to come forward".

The key evidence which makes the GM/lab-leak theory plausible is that the Covid-19 virus is perfectly adapted to infect human cells: its spike protein includes an unusual molecular feature for using the enzyme 'furin', present in all human cells, to help it breach the cell membrane and gain entry. Indeed, the year before Covid-19 hit us, leaked information revealed a WIV and EcoHealth proposal to develop a pipeline for inserting novel versions of this very furin-harnessing mechanism into viruses to make them super-infective for humans. As Dr. Chan described the situation, "so, you find these scientists who said in 2018 'I'm going to put horns on horses', and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city".

China has, reportedly, admitted denying the World Health Organisation (WHO) team access to crucial information it needed for its investigation into the cause of the Covid-19 outbreak. Dr. Chan considers this cover-up to be further evidence of a Wuhan laboratory leak.

That the WHO delegates to the WIV failed in their vital fact-finding mission, despite the millions of lives at risk, perhaps is not so surprising. One of the experts on the WHO team was Peter Daszak, who had every reason not to find incriminating evidence in the WIV. The WIV itself had every reason not to find the source of Covid-19 within its own walls. There have been many dark hints that the Chinese military is heavily involved in WIV research which inevitably throws a cloak of secrecy over any evidence there. (A whole stack of conspiracies could be inferrred from that lot.)

However, laboratories are compulsive storers of information and samples. There's no reason why the whole story won't come out eventually, when all the scientists involved, and every one connected to them, stop conspiring to prevent it.

Let's hope so, because as Viscount Ridley (co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid
along with Dr. Chan) said "We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic. We need to know whether we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations related to wildlife markets. As the moment we are really not doing either". There's also the scarey military aspect: "We need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with".

OUR COMMENT

There are some sobering lessons to be learned here:

• GM of any kind is just too fashionable for scientists (and politicians) to admit there's anything wrong with it.
• Scientists are having so much fun with interesting or lucrative or fashionable GM research, they don't want to see the downsides
• No matter how many lives are lost or threatened, GM-based disasters are routinely swept under the carpet
• No one will take responsibility for the consequences of GM
• Finding an excuse to justify how the most dangerous experiments in the world are really for the benefit of humanity is easy

Keep these in mind because it's about time the GM-sceptical public made their feelings and concerns very clear.



SOURCES:

·         Arnjay Banerjee, et al., January 2019, Bats and Coronaviruses, Viruses 11

·         Peng Zhou, et al., March 2020, A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin, Nature 579

·         Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19, The Lancet Correspondence, March 7 2020

·         Peter Daszak, Wikipedia

·         Kristian G. Andersen, et al., April 2020, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, Correspondence, Nature Medicine 26

·         Rossana Segreto, et al., 25 March 2021 Should we discount the laboratory origin of COVID-19? Environmental Chemistry Letters

·         Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin, 2020, The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin, BioEssays

·         Was the COVID-19 virus genetically engineered? GM Watch, 22.04.20

·         Sarah Knapton, Wuhan lab leak 'now the most likely origin of Covid MPs told, The Telegraph 15.12.21

·         Sarah Knapton, Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt 'international harmony', The Telegraph 22.01.22

·         Joe Davis, British scientist took a year to declare links with Chinese lab opposing Covid lab leak theory, The Daily Mail, 03.01.22

·         Professor Paul R. Goddard, A short history of lab-leaks and gain-of-function studies, GM Watch 19.02.22

·         Kangpeng Xiao, et al., July 2020, Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins, Nature 583

·         Ping Liu, et al., May 2020, Are pangolins the intermediate host of the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)? PLOS Pathogens

·         Paolo Barnard, Dr. Steven Quay, Prof. Angus Dalgleish, The Origin of the Virus, 2021 ISBN 978-1-85457-106-9