Posted on 05/05/2020 2:43:46 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The World Health Organization said Monday that Washington had provided no evidence to support "speculative" claims by the US president that the new coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab.
"We have not received any data or specific evidence from the United States government relating to the purported origin of the virus – so from our perspective, this remains speculative," WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a virtual briefing.
Scientists believe the killer virus jumped from animals to humans, emerging in China late last year, possibly from a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.
Top US epidemiologist Anthony Fauci echoed the WHO's statement in an interview published Monday evening by National Geographic.
"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, (the scientific evidence) is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," Fauci told the magazine.
"Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that (this virus) evolved in nature and then jumped species," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
Five intel agencies say otherwise. Napalm the WHO HQ!!
So it jumped species...doesn't mean it didn't happen in the Wuhan lab.
Ted Ghebreyesus should go back and squat on whatever jungle mountaintop he come from, and take his cadre of flying monkeys with him.
We should give our intel to Fauci and WHO.....BS.
France24 is state-owned.
Nuff said
And take Michael Ryan, too.
He’s one of the cadre of flying monkeys I was referring to.
Who are you going to believe? President Trump, or the Ethiopian Communist head of WHO and their Chinese Communist partners?
WHO lies.
In the pockets of the ChiComs.
That’s what Xi Jin Ping says , too, so it must be true.
DR. FAUCI BACKED CONTROVERSIAL WUHAN LAB WITH MILLIONS OF U.S. DOLLARS FOR RISKY CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH
Newsweek 4/28/20
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
Dr. Anthony Fauci is an adviser to President Donald Trump and something of an American folk hero for his steady, calm leadership during the pandemic crisis. At least one poll shows that Americans trust Fauci more than Trump on the coronavirus pandemic—and few scientists are portrayed on TV by Brad Pitt.
But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
SARS-CoV-2 , the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. (At this point most scientists say it’s possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.)
Dr. Fauci did not respond to Newsweek’s requests for comment. NIH responded with a statement that said in part: “Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current COVID-19 pandemic.... scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”
The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.
A second phase of the project, beginning that year, included additional surveillance work but also gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat coronaviruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The project proposal states: “We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
In layman’s terms, “spillover potential” refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans, which requires that the virus be able to attach to receptors in the cells of humans. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is adept at binding to the ACE2 receptor in human lungs and other organs.
According to Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University, the project description refers to experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering. In the wake of the pandemic, that is a noteworthy detail.
Ebright, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of gain-of-function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab.
Dr. Fauci is renowned for his work on the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated first in his class from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. As head of NIAID since 1984, he has served as an adviser to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan.
A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.
The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn’t been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
Dr. Fauci defended the work. “[D]etermining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” wrote Fauci and two co-authors in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011. “Decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
Nevertheless, in 2014, under pressure from the Obama administration, the National of Institutes of Health instituted a moratorium on the work, suspending 21 studies.
Three years later, though—in December 2017—the NIH ended the moratorium and the second phase of the NIAID project, which included the gain-of-function research, began. The NIH established a framework for determining how the research would go forward: scientists have to get approval from a panel of experts, who would decide whether the risks were justified.
The reviews were indeed conducted—but in secret, for which the NIH has drawn criticism. In early 2019, after a reporter for Science magazine discovered that the NIH had approved two influenza research projects that used gain of function methods, scientists who oppose this kind of research excoriated the NIH in an editorial in the Washington Post.
“We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all,” wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. “[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process.”
Love the WHO circus semantics. The carefully pieced together words to make a default and desired narrative appear in simpleton skulls that are too lazy to dissect the meanings of words.
What else would a WHOlly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party say?
I’m glad the WHO and Fauci have come out so strongly with these statements. They have now thoroughly convinced me they intended to kill millions in humanity and are still in a fantasy world thinking they will never be held accountable either for their actions or their continuing crimes against humanity. Nazi death camp Commanders had a more plausible justification for their behavior,... following orders to commit crimes against humanity.
The WHO and Fauci have occupied positions which should have been occupied by far worthier professionals who actually are truthful and give a damn about their fellow man.
Check your spelling...it's M-A-S-T-E-R-S.
How US expertise may have inadvertently contributed to COVID-19
May 04, 2020, Written By: Lawrence Sellin
(Sellin cites Ralph Baric, UNC virologist. Baric knows where all the bodies are buried in the Wuhan lab. He worked there. His patent may have been manipulated, as Sellin’s article suggests.)
There are only three possible origins for the COVID-19 pandemic:
(1) It is a naturally-occurring disease, where coronaviruses circulating in a bat population mutated and acquired the ability to infect humans, which was then transmitted to people either visiting or working in the Wuhan Seafood Market;
(2) A yet unknown and undescribed coronavirus of natural origin, now named COVID-19, was one of the many bat coronaviruses isolated from bat populations by Chinese scientists and leaked from a Wuhan laboratory;
(3) COVID-19 was man-made and leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
The Chinese government, the media and some scientists are desperately trying to convince the public that COVID-19 is a naturally-occurring disease because certain vested interests may be affected, including the potentially devastating political and economic consequences for China, global corporate and private investment in China and an effect on ongoing scientific collaboration and research funding.
Viruses, which can undergo frequent mutation, do “jump” from animals to humans after acquiring an ability to infect humans. That may prove to be the case for COVID-19.
Arguing against that conclusion are the facts that the initial patients hospitalised between December 1-10, 2019 had not visited the Wuhan Seafood Market, there were no bats in that market and there is no clear evolutionary pathway yet identified that explains the unique features of COVID-19.
The claim that COVID-19 is naturally-occurring is based nearly entirely on a single, but widely-cited Nature Medicine article entitled “The Proximal Origin of SAR-CoV-2,” which compares the structure of COVID-19 to what the authors consider its closest relatives found in animal populations, specifically, the bat coronavirus RaTG13 and a coronavirus from the scaly anteater, called pangolins.
There are, however, inconsistencies that do not fully support that claim.
Although COVID-19 bears a striking structural similarity to the bat coronavirus RaTG13, the critical receptor binding domain, which initiates attachment to human cells, is closer to that of pangolins.
In addition, there is no explanation for the origin of the furin polybasic cleavage site as represented by the proline-arginine-arginine-alanine (PRRA) amino acid insertion, which does not exist in any of the bat or pangolin close relatives yet identified, a structure that is known to enhance pathogenicity and transmissibility in coronaviruses.
Alternatively, the inconsistencies of the naturally-occurring argument could be resolved if one assumes that COVID-19 was bioengineered.
There are two US patents related to that type of bioengineering, “Methods and Compositions for Chimeric Coronavirus Spike Proteins” and “Insertion of Furin Protease Cleavage Sites in Membrane Proteins and Uses Thereof,” patent numbers US9884895B2 and US7223390, respectively.
Viruses rely on the biochemical mechanisms of the host cell they invade to bind and fuse with the host cell membrane and replicate inside the cell.
The binding and membrane-fusing capability of COVID-19 resides in a structure called the spike protein, specifically sections of the “S” protein, which contain the receptor-binding domain and the furin polybasic cleavage site.
The bioengineering capabilities to “splice” the receptor-binding domain from one virus to another and to insert a furin polybasic cleavage site are both well-established laboratory techniques for which I provide the following specific examples.
In 2015, Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, co-patent holder of US9884895B2, and Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology jointly published a scientific article describing the combination of the receptor-binding spike protein from a newly isolated coronavirus (SHC014) and the “backbone” from SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the 2002-2003 pandemic.
The above experiment produced a novel virus, chimera SHC014-MA15, which showed “robust viral replication both in vitro [cell cultures] and in vivo [animals],” using models adapted to test human infectivity.
In 2013, Chinese scientists demonstrated the capability to insert a furin polybasic cleavage site, similar to that of COVID-19, into a protein, an article which cited US patent “Insertion of Furin Protease Cleavage Sites in Membrane Proteins and Uses Thereof.”
One of the authors of that 2013 article, Chinese scientist Shibo Jiang, has a joint appointment at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute in New York and Fudan University in Shanghai and is a long-time collaborator of Zheng-Li Shi and Ralph Baric in coronavirus research.
All of the above is not meant to assign complicity or culpability in any way, but to demonstrate that the bioengineering capability to manufacture COVID-19 clearly exists and should be investigated as its possible origin.
Not one more stinkin dime, he is just as guilty a xi
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