Category: Gain of Function

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Claws of the Panda Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 8 Comments

Where IS the Wuhan virus researcher who was named as Patient Zero?

The US government’s leading health research body has raised a series of bombshell concerns over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the activities of a secretive Chinese laboratory that was investigating bat diseases.
 
The National Institutes of Health has asked if Covid-19 was linked to the deaths of three miners eight years ago and questioned whether the high-security laboratory in Wuhan possessed samples of the virus prior to the pandemic’s outbreak late last year.
 
The agency also demanded to know more about the ‘apparent disappearance’ of a scientist at the lab rumoured to be Patient Zero, and questioned if roadblocks were placed around the Wuhan Institute of Virology between October 14 and 19 last year.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 8 Comments

WIV is Wuhan Institute of Virology. If you poke around in the replies and links, you’ll find a morning’s coffee worth of discussion, including this thread by Alita Chan. As a reminder, Yuri Deigin is the author of this Medium post of April, which if you haven’t read yet I recommend. But be warned, that will take a morning pot’s worth of coffee.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Claws of the Panda Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 38 Comments

Zerohedge;

One day after a report that a respected Chinese virologist fled Hong Kong to accuse Beijing of a COVID cover-up, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the Daily Mail that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs have defected to the West and are “turning over evidence” against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their role in the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed over 560,000 lives worldwide since last December. […]
 
The 66-year-old then said that defectors are cooperating with intelligence agencies in America, Europe and the UK, which have been assembling evidence to challenge the CCP claim that the pandemic originated in a wet market – not in a lab home to scientists who have come under fire for manipulating bat coronavirus to be more transmissible to humans.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 9 Comments

From well known conspiracy site, the BBC;

Despite the wide acceptance of the conclusions reached by the Nature Medicine Paper, there are still some scientists who refuse to see it as conclusive proof that the virus wasn’t manipulated in some way.
 
Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide and Chairman and Research Director of Vaxine, a company leading Australia’s search for a Covid-19 vaccine, believes that laboratory manipulation has to remain under consideration for being behind as a possible explanation for Sars-CoV-2’s “surprising” ability to bind to human cells.
 
And he rejects the argument that if it wasn’t pre-planned by a computer model, it didn’t happen.
 
“In science a lot of things are done on the basis of give-it-a-go, and a lot of things happen completely by accident,” he tells me. “You know, a lot of Nobel prizes have been won on the basis of accidents.”
 
Others refer to Wuhan’s past experiments in which genome segments from different viruses have been stitched together to investigate how spike proteins bind to human cells.
 
And they point out that there is no way of knowing whether or not Wuhan does in fact have, among the hundreds of coronaviruses it has collected, anything closer in genetic make-up to Sars-CoV-2 than RaTG13.
 
What’s more, RaTG13 is itself the subject of some speculation.
 
The BBC has had it confirmed, from the researchers running a respected Chinese database, that it is the same virus as one that the WIV previously referred to as RaBatCov/4991in this paper.
 
There is no explanation for the change of name, but that 2016 paper makes it clear that the virus appears to be a new strain of Sars-type coronavirus.
 
Professor Petrovsky says it would be odd if the WIV, given its interest in such viruses, hadn’t continued to work on it. But there is no more mention of it all until this year, when RaBatCov/4991 re-emerged under its new name RaTG13 as the closest known relative of Sars-CoV-2.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 22 Comments

This is one creepy little bug.

Most of us have already absorbed the idea that the coronavirus does some weird and sinister things to the human body that are unlike most other respiratory viruses known to man. But now a new study finds yet another unsettling thing that the virus appears to do to help spread from cell to cell.
 
A new study by an international team led by UC San Francisco finds that cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 quickly begin to grow new arms or dendrites — referred to clinically as filopodia — which are themselves studded with fresh virus particles. These filopodia then seek to reach into and through the walls of neighboring cells, thereby infecting them. And this appears to be a second mode that the virus has for replicating and spreading itself in the body. […]
 
Krogan says that while other viruses — including HIV and the family of viruses that cause smallpox — also use filopedia as mechanisms of spreading infection, the way this virus so rapidly prompts the growth of these tentacles is highly unusual. And the shape of them, branching off the cell and each other like trees, is also apparently strange. Other infectious diseases like HIV don’t cause these kinds of prolific, mutant growths.

It almost sounds like something cooked up in a lab. The good news: it may lead to new treatment options.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 15 Comments

“How’s your computer?”

On April 26th, I directed you to a lengthy Medium article titled Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research and have been following the story through Deigin’s twitter account.

If you didn’t read it the first time around, I recommend you set an hour aside because the case he made is gaining support with every passing week.

Yuri Diegin was interviewed today by Bret Weinstein on Darkhorse. It gets off to a bit of a shaky start. Deigin is Russian, with the natural reluctance of Russians to venture into controversy, but he loosens up as the interview develops. Stick with it through the technical discussions, it’s not that difficult and the conversation moves on to the broader implications of what has been going on in virology research labs, along with efforts to suppress the increasing number of hands going up, saying “hey, wait a second…”

The video begins a the 42 minute mark to picque interest, but I recommend you watch from the beginning.

I’ll repost the inteview on Saturday for those who find it difficult to make time on weekdays.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 7 Comments

The complete thread is here.

Update: China says Wuhan wet market was site of ‘superspreader’ event, not ground zero

Every “fact” that comes out of China has an expiry date.

Wuhan Flu

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 30 Comments

It’s probably nothing: Monkeys ‘escape with COVID-19 samples’ after attacking lab assistant

Without fossil fuels, we’d be drowning in lung juice.

China keeps giving the West new reasons to decouple.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest: So they kept returning to the Tongguan mine, the source of RaTG13, collecting more and more samples. Here’s a 2018 paper in Chinese. “Uninteresting”, riiiight.

Related items are invited in the comments.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 7 Comments

Via Yuri Deigin.

Good catch:

Shi’s holy grail was to find a direct bat to human SARS virus. Here she had the signal of fatal pneumonia in the miners & antibodies in the locals. In 2 years of surveillance of the site she found only 1 beta corona virus candidate 4991, yet she didn’t sequence it or publish?

Related: A leaked database from a Chinese military-run university suggests the country may have at least 640,000 COVID-19 cases — a figure substantially higher than Beijing’s dubious claim that it has seen just 80,000 coronavirus infections.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 35 Comments

Chinese Hackers Are Targeting Virus Research

Hackers working for the Chinese government are trying to steal valuable research on coronavirus vaccines and treatments from U.S. health care, pharmaceutical and research organizations, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned Wednesday.
 
“China’s efforts to target these sectors pose a significant threat to our nation’s response to Covid-19,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement.
 
“The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective and efficient treatment options,” the agencies said.
 
The announcement represents an escalation in U.S. efforts to combat Chinese espionage and cyber-attacks. It comes as President Donald Trump attempts to blame the Chinese government for not doing more to prevent the global spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 80,000 people in the U.S. and ravaged the economy.

“attempts to blame”…

Related:

China’s People’s Liberation Army has been involved in scientific research, co-funded by the Australian government, into the origins of the coronavirus which has been published in esteemed medical journals.
 
In an explosive revelation, a study co-funded by the Australian Research Council and the Chinese government, and trumpeted by The University of Sydney as helping to solve the puzzle of how COVID-19 transferred from animals to humans, relied on a key laboratory in an institute in the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences to conduct its “genetic sequencing” and “virus isolation”.

Also…

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