Chinese and US scientists genetically engineered bat coronaviruses in dangerous gain-of-function research stretching back years

Research was omitted from landmark paper claiming natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Report: Claire Robinson

Chinese and US scientists have been collaborating for years in dangerous gain-of-function experiments that involve genetically engineering coronaviruses from bats and other animals, as revealed by a series of scientific publications. The coronaviruses are related to the SARS viruses that cause severe respiratory diseases in humans. The scientists were based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, the lab suspected by some of accidentally releasing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in the US.

Oddly, however, this long and high-profile research history was entirely omitted from the scientific paper, published in Nature in February this year, in which Shi Zhengli and her team at the WIV claimed to have identified a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. The origin, according to the WIV scientists, was a bat virus, RaTG13, that was thought to have jumped from an animal to a human at a Wuhan seafood and wildlife market (the “zoonotic” theory – that is, coming from animals by a natural spillover event).

Why the omission? To understand the possible reason, we need to first understand the nature of the research work that was done by the WIV scientists and their US collaborators.

(Continuing - Excerpt copied directly from the article):

The purported benign aim of this line of research was to investigate the potential of bat coronaviruses to infect humans, to improve scientists’ ability to predict pandemics, and to develop vaccines or other therapies.

However, this is also gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more infective or transmissible. Such research has come under increasing criticism by scientists for many years, due to its tendency to pose huge risks for little benefit.

This fear is borne out by the results of a particularly risky gain-of-function experiment carried out in the US and published in 2015 by scientists from the UNC in collaboration with WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli, dubbed China’s “bat woman” for her work with bat coronaviruses. The work was funded by: * The National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease (NIAID) of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The director of the NIAID is Dr Anthony Fauci, who currently heads up the US COVID-19 response. The NIH’s money was directed through the US-based Eco-Health Alliance, headed by Dr Peter Daszak;
* USAID; and
* Chinese institutions.

In the published paper reporting the risky experiment, the scientists state that they began their work before the 2014 US temporary moratorium on virus gain-of-function studies, which was prompted by several high-profile biosafety failures at US labs. But in spite of the moratorium, as stated in the paper, the NIH gave permission for the study to continue. Dr Fauci of the NIAID “outsourced” the research to the WIV in China, in the words of one media article.

Alarming finding

In the experiment, the scientists took a mouse coronavirus and exchanged its spike protein – the part on the surface of the virus that determines infectivity – for one from a bat coronavirus that was similar to the virus that causes the human epidemic disease SARS. They kept the mouse virus “backbone” – its basic RNA and protein molecular structure. The bat coronavirus, in its natural state, was unable to infect humans as its spike protein was inadequate – it was not able to dock onto the ACE2 receptor on human cells.

Infectivity is supposed to be determined just by the spike protein. So joining the bat spike protein with the mouse virus backbone should have resulted in a virus that was non-infectious to humans.

But the resulting genetically engineered chimeric virus unexpectedly turned out to be highly infectious to humans. In fact, its infectivity, tested in human airway cells, was comparable to the human epidemic-causing virus strain SARS-CoV Urbani.

(end of excerpt, but there is much more...)

Here is a good web search if you want to do your own research.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=gain-of-function+research+on+bat+coronaviruses&ia=web

From 2015

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985/

Author information Affiliations

Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Eric F Donaldson & Ralph S Baric

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

Kari Debbink & Ralph S Baric

National Center for Toxicological Research, Food and Drug Administration, Jefferson, Arkansas, USA

Sudhakar Agnihothram

Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

Xing-Yi Ge & Zhengli-Li Shi

Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

Scott H Randell

Cystic Fibrosis Center, Marsico Lung Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

Scott H Randell

Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology, Zurich, Switzerland

Antonio Lanzavecchia

Department of Cancer Immunology and AIDS, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Wayne A Marasco

Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Wayne A Marasco

From 2016

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

As I recall it was a 3.6 million dollar grant Fauci used to get the research from UNC to Wuhan. Fauci used 3 million of it and it was ok’ed by ozero. When outed Fauci’s only reply was but but Trump oked the other .6 million,in other words he was busted and he knew it.

After reading the entire piece which was extremely well written, wish I could write that well,You just have to think bio-weapon/shi ghenli/CCP all in one sentence.To me this is right up the CCP’s alleyway.They could and did destroy millions of citizens of the world, weaken economies,make people afraid and then turn to big brother govt., build up govt. control which is what the CCP is all about and then lie about what happened.

It's hard for me to believe that once shi zhenli showed gain in her work that the ccp did not have her work her ass off until she did create a bio-weapon.From then on it was just a matter of how they infected the world.There are many theories. I like the one from George Webb but there are many others.

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