JoNova

By Jo Nova

Ten years of lies, deception, and dangerous experiments

Imagine if our adversaries were splicing together mutant viruses and testing them on humanized mice for years in order to make them more pathogenic, and our top researchers were helping them, our government was funding them, and we had years of warnings that the experiments were dangerous.

The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly, but it’s in print in a long feature article with plenty of ugly details. The headline is very sedate given the gravity. The world would have reacted very differently in January 2020…

An Act of War or an accident of war?

What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

Johnathon Calvert and George Abuthnott, The Sunday Times

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.

For starters — here’s a map of the places where people were reporting on social media that they had covid in January 2020. While everyone was talking about sea-food markets, the big clue was there all the time.

…

These hot spots were published by the academics at Wuhan University. But they somehow didn’t think to label the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The US Senate investigation years later put that dot on the map (after half a billion people had caught the virus). If any of our government health and intelligence agencies had been remotely competent or interested in our health, and if the CCP had been a good global citizen, this would have been known in the first few months.

From a cave in Yunnan

The story starts in 2012 with the WIV team finding SARS like viruses in the Shitou cave 800 kilometers south of Wuhan. They had American funding and training to help them. The same year, six miners nearby in Moijang Mine fell horribly sick with some unknown coronavirus and three died. The WIV team kept this to themselves, but went back to the Moijang mine to collect 1,300 samples from the bats there over the next few years. They discovered not one or two, but 293 coronaviruses. One of those viruses would emerge as the nearest known relative of Covid-19. (Called RaTG13)

Over the next eight years the WIV would experiment on the SARS-like coronaviruses from the Shitou cave and publish some papers, but in parallel, they were apparently also working on the nasty Moijang mine viruses, which they weren’t talking about.

Thanks to American know-how

The Americans meanwhile have taught the chinese researchers how to work with mice that have “humanized” lung cells. The WIV team infects the mice with a mutated version of the SARS-like virus they found in the cave in 2012. Three quarters of the test mice die, but again, the WIV team keeps it to themselves.

The American who led the way and taught the Chinese was Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He was the one who made the humanized mice — he put human genes into the mice so they grew “human-like” lungs which made them ideal for studying human pathogens.

He knew he was playing with fire:

“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”

By 2012 as many as 30 labs around the world were working with live SARS viruses and a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation called for these experiments to be stopped, pointing out that it was just a matter of time before a virus escaped. Yet grant money continued to flow to China.

Between 2013 and 2015 the Bat lady of Wuhan, Dr Shi Zhengli collaborated with Ralph Baric in the US.  She sent him the genetic sequences from the Shitou Cave SARS like viruses. In 2014 Barak Obama called for a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments, except for the “urgent and safe ones”, of course, and so Ralph Baric got an exemption. He melded the spike from one SARS virus onto another:

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

The Wuhan team were apparently very happy to learn these techniques and kept right on going.

Meanwhile a British bat expert called Peter Daszak was involved in a Wildlife Trust which somehow became the EcoHealth Alliance. He arranged some NIH grants, and provided cover by writing reports that missed a few important details. When 75% of the mice died in one experiment he wrote that they had mild SARS-like symptoms. He later said that this was based on “preliminary results”, but the mice were long dead by a few months before he said that.

At one point in 2018 Daszak applied for $14 million in funding from Darpa (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He and Shi and Baric wanted to find lots of SARS like viruses and fuse them with their favourite deadly Shitou cave varieties. So Darpa said “no thanks” to that. But in the application they said they’d like to insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS virus. When the funding bombed, they claim they didn’t do the experiment, but somehow, by strange coincidence, when SARS-2 appeared it had a furin cleavage site. It was the first SARS-like coronavirus which had a the target site for our furin enzymes to cleave.

[Dr Steven] Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”

The Chinese Military thought they would like to help too?

Around 2016 or so the WIV team became fairly secretive. The Chinese Military allegedly got interested and funded WIV work as well. What a cauldron.

The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

As I’ve said — we’re in a biotech Cold War, or maybe even a hot one:

A vaccine to shift power

The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

There were plenty of red flags — in 2010 China was talking about the threat of biological weapons —  warning with toe-curling detail on potential race-based genetic weapons.  In 2015 Chinese Military Scientists said the Third World War would be fought with biological weapons. And the CCP has a history of helping to spread diseases by hiding the outbreaks: firstly in 1957, then 1968, then with SARS-1, now with SARS-2.

Even as early as mid-April 2020 insiders had told us that the CCP ordered all virus samples at the WIV to be destroyed on January 1st 2020. Our intelligence agencies must have known.

Art: https://www.scientificanimations.com

h/t Ianl