Long, dense, and pretty technical, but for folks who don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s one juicy part:
“The proposal to search for something never before documented and swap it around other viruses in hypothesized recombination events is not the direction evidence flows in wildlife virology. Wildlife virologists look at what we find in wildlife, and study what we find in wildlife; we don’t use our imaginations to make unnatural chimeric innovations not found in wildlife and then conjure these horrors into existence.
“SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with a furin cleavage site never before seen in a sarbecovirus. It needs to be emphasized that, to the best of our global knowledge, “sarbecovirus with furin cleavage site” did not exist in nature before 2020, but it did exist in a grant proposal to make something not found in nature, and that biological novelty was proposed to be made in Wuhan. The exact furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 is found in another protein, a protein called alpha-ENaC found in humans and studied heavily at the same university (UNC) as one of the PI’s of DEFUSE.”
There’s lots, lots more in the article; the author makes a strong case that the wet market origin theory is almost certainly bogus, and presents as well much additional evidence for the Wuhan virology institute as its source, based on funding by DARPA from the US. And he concludes with a scathing presentation of US scientists and officials in covering up the whole fiasco.
” Wildlife virologists look at what we find in wildlife, and study what we find in wildlife; we don’t use our imaginations to make unnatural chimeric innovations not found in wildlife and then conjure these horrors into existence.”
Years ago I coined a term for this type of work, “Stupid virology tricks”. Out of all the branches of Microbiology, virologists seem to have a unique inability to correctly assess the risks involved in their work. The Wuhan debacle is only the latest, especially when it was revealed that this highly dangerous work was done under substandard biosafety protocols. It was almost inevitable that the horror they created would escape.