Category: Gain of Function

Fryer Ferret, In The Fridge, With A Furin Cleavage Site

Gain of Function 16 Comments

World experts condemn WHO inquiry as a ‘charade’

The World Health Organisation’s inquiry into the source of the pandemic is a ‘charade’ to appease China, leading experts on biosecurity and infectious diseases have told The Mail on Sunday.
 
Instead of seeking the truth, last week’s initial findings, they say, were a political stunt that help the Beijing government in its desperation to be exonerated.
 
The scientists accuse the UN body of brushing aside concerns over a possible lab leak in Wuhan to push ‘fanciful’ theories that Covid-19 emerged outside China and could have been imported into the city on frozen food.

Peter Daszak — again.

Yuri Deigin has captured an enlightening exchange on the cozy relationship between investigators and investigatees.

Flashback: WHO waits for China to approve pandemic origins investigators

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Claws of the Panda Gain of Function 28 Comments

National Pulse;

A high-profile member of the World Health Organization’s recent “investigative” trip to Wuhan to uncover the origins of COVID-19 has accepted research grants from the Chinese Communist Party and runs a controversial U.S.-based organization which collaborates with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Peter Daszak’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party call into question the validity of his and the World Health Organization (WHO) investigative team which concluded that it is “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 came from a Chinese Communist Party lab. Their claims echo Chinese Communist Party narratives, and Daszak himself implored the world to not “rely” on U.S. intelligence for it is “wrong on many aspects” and “politically charged.”

More than that.

From November;

Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that a statement in The Lancet authored by 27 prominent public health scientists condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
 
The emails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 26 Comments

The media are always the last to know.

Do you get the idea of scary viruses being created in a lab may seem a little sci-fi?
 
It may feel like sci-fi to people but what’s happening is sci. There is a field of study called “gain of function” research, which is highly controversial in which some scientists amplify the virility of viruses. We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in gain of function research on bat coronaviruses.
 
Is it because this specifically started in China that we still don’t know how COVID-19 started?
 
If there had been an outbreak in Congo or some country in Africa and that country, in the earliest days of the pandemic, prevented World Health Organization investigators from going onto the scene of the outbreak, for nearly a month, the world would have gone berserk.

I’ve collected these posts into a new category: Gain of Function

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 21 Comments

You may have already heard about Alina Chan, but there are many other people, out of the spotlight, who deserve credit. They have been working tirelessly this year: reading academic papers, exploring barely known databases, sifting through Chinese media outlets. Their work place is Twitter. Some of them are professional scientists, others have different backgrounds, many use pseudonyms. They have a tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, and probably for this reason they are often blocked by other scientists and accused of promoting conspiracy theories. You may disagree with their unconvential approach, but the truth is that these people behave, to all intents and purposes, like a small scientific community: they search and analyze data, they share and discuss their findings and, more importantly, they make discoveries.

Yes, they do.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function 11 Comments

Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that a statement in The Lancet authored by 27 prominent public health scientists condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
 
The emails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.
 
The scientists’ letter appeared in The Lancet on February 18, just one week after the World Health Organization announced that the disease caused by the novel coronavirus would be named COVID-19.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Claws of the Panda Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 29 Comments

A Chinese virologist who has reportedly been in hiding over fear for her safety has stepped out into the public eye again to make the explosive claim that she has scientific evidence to prove that COVID-19 was human-made in a lab in China. […]
 
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who says she did some of the earliest research into COVID-19 last year, made the comments Friday during an interview on the British talk show “Loose Women.”
 
When asked where the deadly virus that has killed more than 900,000 around the globe comes from, Yan — speaking via video chat from a secret location — replied, “It comes from the lab — the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.”
 
She insisted that widespread reports that the virus originated last year from a wet market in Wuhan are “a smoke screen.”
 
“The first thing is the [meat] market in Wuhan … is a smoke screen and this virus is not from nature,” Yan claimed, explaining that she got “her intelligence from the CDC in China, from the local doctors.”

She appeared on Tucker Carlson tonight.

Twitter has already suspended her account. An expanded discussion at Zerohedge.

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.

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