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COMMENT: Before delv­ing into anoth­er use­ful arti­cle that high­lights impor­tant aspects of what we have termed “The Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy,” we briefly review some key infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed in past pro­grams and posts about this con­cept.

In FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159, we high­light­ed very dis­turb­ing con­nec­tions between Peter Daszak and his Eco­Health Alliance and the Pen­ta­gon and USAID, a State Depart­ment sub­sidiary that serves as a fre­quent cov­er for CIA.

The Eco­Health Alliance–financed by USAID–partnered with the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy and Dr. Ralph Bar­ic of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill to research bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es. A “chimeric” virus was cre­at­ed by Bar­ic under this pro­gram in 2015, and Bar­ic was sub­se­quent­ly select­ed to cre­ate the SARS Cov‑2 virus from scratch.

It is our con­sid­ered view that the WIV was set up for the blame for Covid-19, in a man­ner not unlike the “Paint­ing of Oswald Red” dis­cussed in–among oth­er pro­grams–FTR #‘s 925 and 926, as well as our series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio.

We have also not­ed the pro­found links between ele­ments of the mil­i­tary and treat­ment reg­i­mens (vac­cines and med­i­cines) for Covid-19.

We explored Dasza­k’s mil­i­tary and USAID fund­ing in FTR#1170.

A bril­liant, insight­ful arti­cle by Sam Hus­sei­ni on Inde­pen­dent Sci­ence News pro­vides crit­i­cal depth to our pre­vi­ous cov­er­age of Cit­i­zen Daszak.

Hus­sei­ni notes that:

  1.  The Pen­ta­gon and USAID (a State Depart­ment sub­sidiary that has fre­quent­ly front­ed for CIA) are the largest fun­ders of Eco­Health Alliance, which obscures this fact: “ . . . . Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance obscures its Pen­ta­gon fund­ing. . . . Only buried under their ‘Pri­va­cy Pol­i­cy,’ under a sec­tion titled ‘Eco­Health Alliance Pol­i­cy Regard­ing Con­flict of Inter­est in Research,’ does the Eco­Health Alliance con­cede it is the ‘recip­i­ent of var­i­ous grant awards from fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing . . . . the US Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment and the Depart­ment of Defense.’ . . . Even this list­ing is decep­tive. It obscures that its two largest fun­ders are the Pen­ta­gon and the State Depart­ment (USAID) . . . . These two sources thus total over $103 mil­lion. . . .”
  2. One of the prin­ci­pal advis­ers to Eco­Health Alliance is David Franz: ” . . . . The mil­i­tary links of the Eco­Health Alliance are not lim­it­ed to mon­ey and mind­set. One note­wor­thy ‘pol­i­cy advi­sor’ to the Eco­Health Alliance is David Franz. Franz is for­mer com­man­der of Fort Det­rick, which is the prin­ci­pal U.S. gov­ern­ment biowarfare/biodefense facil­i­ty. . . .”
  3. Peter Daszak has high regards for Don­ald Rums­feld, whom he enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly quotes. (Rums­feld was Chair­man of the Board of Gilead Sci­ences for many years, leav­ing that posi­tion to become Sec­re­tary of Defense for George W. Bush. Rums­feld made mil­lions on his sale of Gilead stock, which soared in val­ue fol­low­ing the Pen­tagon’s pur­chase of Gilead­’s Tam­i­flu to com­bat a feared break­out of H5N1 influen­za. Gildead Sci­ences makes remde­sivir, which was being test­ed on rhe­sus macaques at the U.S. Army’s Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Dis­eases at Fort Det­rick in the spring of 2019. The USAAMRIID was shut down by the CDC in ear­ly August of 2019, in part for the improp­er dis­pos­al of waste from “non-human pri­mates” infect­ed with a “select agent” which has not been dis­closed for nation­al secu­ri­ty rea­sons.) ” . . . . ‘It’s an awe­some quote! And yes, it’s Don­ald Rums­feld, Jeff, and I know he’s a Repub­li­can, but — what a genius!’ . . .”
  4. This invalu­able arti­cle by Hus­sei­ni notes the close asso­ci­a­tion of Jef­frey Sachs and Daszak: ” . . . . In Sep­tem­ber, Sachs’ com­mis­sion [on the Lancet–D.I.] named Daszak to head up its com­mit­tee on the pandemic’s ori­gins. Daszak is also on the WHO’s com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate the pandemic’s ori­gin. He is the only indi­vid­ual on both com­mit­tees. . . .”

Cen­tered pri­mar­i­ly on the work of respect­ed Chi­nese sci­en­tist Shi Zhengli and her gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments on bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es, this arti­cle does point out that her work is inex­tri­ca­bly-linked with the Pen­ta­gon, USAID-fund­ed Eco­health Alliance.

Although Ms. Baden-May­er’s arti­cle uncrit­i­cal­ly presents mate­r­i­al from dubi­ous sources such as The Nation­al Review, it does not shirk on cov­er­age of the impor­tance of Dasza­k’s orga­ni­za­tion and the many mil­i­tary and nation­al secu­ri­ty links to the work at the WIV per­formed by Shi Zhengli and her col­leagues.

NB: A major–albeit understandable–flaw in Ms. Baden-May­er’s research is the fact that nei­ther she, nor many of the peo­ple she quotes, takes stock of the fact that ANY VIRUS CAN BE SYNTHESIZED OR ALTERED IN A LABORATORY USING CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY!

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: 

  1. A Nation­al Insti­tute of Health query of the work at WIV, the ques­tions in which were pre­sent­ed to Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance! ” . . . . The let­ter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to Eco­Health Alliance, a U.S.-based non-prof­it fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing [pri­mar­i­ly] the U.S. mil­i­tary, to sup­port sci­en­tists work­ing in 30 coun­tries. Eco­Health Alliance is list­ed as a fund­ing source on some of Shi’s most con­tro­ver­sial papers. And Eco­Health Alliance sci­en­tists, includ­ing its pres­i­dent Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, pub­lished papers. . . .”
  2. Review of the oper­a­tional rela­tion­ship between Dasza­k’s orga­ni­za­tion, and Shi Zhengli’s coop­er­a­tion with Ralph Bar­ic: ” . . . . Shi’s most infa­mous Eco­Health Alliance-fund­ed paper is, ‘A SARS-Like Clus­ter of Cir­cu­lat­ing Bat Coro­n­avirus­es Shows Poten­tial for Human Emer­gence.’ In this con­tro­ver­sial gain-of-func­tion research col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. sci­en­tist Ralph Bar­ic of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, Shi and Bar­ic used genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to weaponize a bat coro­n­avirus, max­i­miz­ing its poten­tial human infec­tiv­i­ty. . . .”
  3. Review of the USAID fund­ing of the Eco­Health Alliance/Shi/Baric col­lab­o­ra­tion (USAID is a State Depart­ment sub­sidiary which serves as one of CIA’s most com­mon and insid­i­ous front orga­ni­za­tions. ) ” . . . . Shi’s fund­ing for this study came through a USAID Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats-PRE­DICT grant to Eco­Health Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s data­base. . . .”
  4. Review of the obfus­ca­tion of the USAID fund­ing for the Eco­Health Alliance for this peri­od. “. . . . Eco­Health Alliance was a PREDICT part­ner dur­ing the 2009–2014 fund­ing cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to Eco­Health Alliance for this time peri­od among the $100.9 mil­lion in grants it has received from the U.S. gov­ern­ment since 2003. . . .”
  5. Dis­cus­sion of Shi/Daszak col­lab­o­ra­tion on a key sequence–the RsSh­Co14-CoV Sequence: ” . . . . Shi’s con­tri­bu­tion to the work she did with Bar­ic was the ‘RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Iso­lat­ed from Chi­nese Horse­shoe Bats.’ . . . . Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their dis­cov­ery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, ‘Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,’ and stat­ed that it was found dur­ing ‘a 12-month lon­gi­tu­di­nal sur­vey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhi­nolo­phus sini­cus at a sin­gle loca­tion in Kun­ming, Yun­nan Province, Chi­na.’ . . . .”
  6. Fund­ing for the Kun­ming virus research came from a num­ber of insti­tu­tions, includ­ing the NIH and USAID, which both have col­lab­o­rat­ed with Pen­ta­gon and CIA in the past.
  7. Eco­Health Alliance helped finance Shi’s research in Mojiang: ” . . . . Shi’s paper, ‘Coex­is­tence of Mul­ti­ple Coro­n­avirus­es in Sev­er­al Bat Colonies in an Aban­doned Mine­shaft,’ was writ­ten by a team of sci­en­tists who were all Chi­nese nation­als work­ing at Chi­nese insti­tu­tions. Nev­er­the­less, in addi­tion to fund­ing from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, the authors acknowl­edged sup­port from the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gies and Infec­tious Dis­ease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for ‘Under­stand­ing the Risk of Bat Coro­n­avirus Emer­gence,’ (2014–2025). . . .”
  8. Fur­ther review of Shi’s research fund­ing from the Pen­ta­gon, via Eco­Health Alliance: ” . . . . Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months. . . .”
  9. More about mil­i­tary col­lab­o­ra­tion with Shi: ” . . . . In addi­tion to mil­i­tary fund­ing through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, Christo­pher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uni­formed Ser­vices Uni­ver­si­ty of the Health Sci­ences, Depart­ment of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy and Immunol­o­gy. . . .”
  10. The Peo­ple’s Lib­er­a­tion Army assumed con­trol of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy on Jan­u­ary 26, 2020 at the time that the genome for the SARS Cov‑2 was pub­lished: ” . . . . The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy is China’s only biosafe­ty lev­el 4 lab. While it has always been under the con­trol of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, since Jan­u­ary 26, 2020, it has been under the com­mand of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, specif­i­cal­ly its top bio­log­i­cal-weapons spe­cial­ist, a major gen­er­al named Chen Wei. . . .”

A stun­ning­ly impor­tant por­tion of the paper mer­its high­light­ing at length: ” . . . . A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der.

To see how the first paper, ‘Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,’ is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty.

As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe.

This was the sub­ject of a paper, ‘The Egypt­ian Rousette Genome Reveals Unex­pect­ed Fea­tures of Bat Antivi­ral Immu­ni­ty,’ that he pub­lished with mil­i­tary sci­en­tists and DTRA fund­ing.

‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.’

The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism.

The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. Accord­ing to Web­MD:

‘Cer­tain kinds of cytokines trig­ger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tis­sue can die. In COVID-19, that tis­sue is most­ly in the lung. As the tis­sue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with flu­id, caus­ing pneu­mo­nia and starv­ing the blood of oxy­gen.’

Kepler says the mil­i­tary is using its exper­i­ments on bat immu­ni­ty to ‘devel­op drugs that damp­en down inflam­ma­tion and arrest the virus by depriv­ing it of what it needs to grow rather than try­ing to kill it out­right.’ But, it clear­ly has anoth­er objec­tive, as well: to make virus­es more dead­ly by ‘pas­sag­ing’ them through bats. . . .”

“Shi Zhengli: Weaponiz­ing Coro­n­avirus­es with Pen­ta­gon Fund­ing, at a Chi­nese Mil­i­tary Lab” by Alex­is Baden-May­er; Organ­ic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion; 09/24/2020.

She’s known as China’s “Bat Woman.” Shi Zhengli is a virus hunter and micro­bi­ol­o­gist, and direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases at the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ences’ Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV).

She also plays a cen­tral role in a who­dun­nit that may ulti­mate­ly prove impos­si­ble to solve.

Shi’s work involves col­lect­ing bat virus­es and using tech­niques of genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to enable these virus­es to infect human beings.

Since the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion took effect, what sci­en­tists like Shi do has been called “gain-of-func­tion” research or “dual-use research of con­cern” (DURC).

In oth­er words, Shi, and oth­er sci­en­tists like her, are in the busi­ness of weaponiz­ing virus­es by genet­i­cal­ly engi­neer­ing or oth­er­wise alter­ing them to make them more lethal, and more eas­i­ly trans­mit­ted, to humans.

Did Shi have a hand in cre­at­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus caus­ing the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic?

The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health is inves­ti­gat­ing. 

On July 8, Michael Lauer, NIH deputy direc­tor for extra­mur­al research, sent a let­ter, lat­er viewed by the Wall Street Jour­nal and Sci­ence Mag­a­zine in which he asked:

  • For an inspec­tion of the WIV by an out­side team that would exam­ine the facility’s lab and records “with spe­cif­ic atten­tion to address­ing the ques­tion of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV­‑2 in their pos­ses­sion pri­or to Decem­ber 2019.”
  • For a sam­ple of the new coro­n­avirus that Shi and her col­leagues at WIV used to iso­late its genet­ic sequencedur­ing the first week of Jan­u­ary.
  • Why WIV “failed to note that the RaTG13virus, the bat-derived coro­n­avirus in its col­lec­tion with great­est sim­i­lar­i­tyto SARS-CoV­‑2, was actu­al­ly iso­lat­ed from an aban­doned mine where three men died in 2012 with an ill­ness remark­ably sim­i­lar to Covid-19.”
  • To “explain the appar­ent dis­ap­pear­ance” of Huang Yan­ling, a sci­en­tist who worked in the Wuhan lab and who is sus­pect­ed to be patient zero, the first to be diag­nosed with the dis­ease.
  • To explain evi­denceindi­cat­ing that WIV may have been shut down tem­porar­i­ly last fall, includ­ing “dimin­ished cell-phone traf­fic in Octo­ber 2019, and the evi­dence that there may have been road­blocks sur­round­ing the facil­i­ty from Octo­ber 14–19, 2019.”
  • To pro­vide a response to the safe­ty con­cerns described in a 2018 State Depart­ment cable. Between Jan­u­ary and March 2018, U.S. sci­ence diplo­mats repeat­ed­ly met with Shi at WIV. The cable on the vis­its “warned about safe­ty and man­age­ment weak­ness­es at the WIV lab” and “also warns that the lab’s work on bat coro­n­avirus­es and their poten­tial human trans­mis­sion rep­re­sent­ed a risk of a new SARS-like pan­dem­ic.”

The let­ter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to Eco­Health Alliance, a U.S.-based non-prof­it fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary, to sup­port sci­en­tists work­ing in 30 coun­tries. Eco­Health Alliance is list­ed as a fund­ing source on some of Shi’s most con­tro­ver­sial papers. And Eco­Health Alliance sci­en­tists, includ­ing its pres­i­dent Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, pub­lished papers.

Shi’s most infa­mous Eco­Health Alliance-fund­ed paper is, “A SARS-Like Clus­ter of Cir­cu­lat­ing Bat Coro­n­avirus­es Shows Poten­tial for Human Emer­gence.” In this con­tro­ver­sial gain-of-func­tion research col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. sci­en­tist Ralph Bar­ic of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, Shi and Bar­ic used genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to weaponize a bat coro­n­avirus, max­i­miz­ing its poten­tial human infec­tiv­i­ty.

Shi’s fund­ing for this study came through a USAID Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats-PRE­DICT grant to Eco­Health Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s data­base.

Eco­Health Alliance was a PREDICT part­ner dur­ing the 2009–2014 fund­ing cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to Eco­Health Alliance for this time peri­od among the $100.9 mil­lion in grants it has received from the U.S. gov­ern­ment since 2003.

Shi’s con­tri­bu­tion to the work she did with Bar­ic was the “RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Iso­lat­ed from Chi­nese Horse­shoe Bats.”

Where did RsSHC014 come from?

Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their dis­cov­ery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, “Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,” and stat­ed that it was found dur­ing “a 12-month lon­gi­tu­di­nal sur­vey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhi­nolo­phus sini­cus at a sin­gle loca­tion in Kun­ming, Yun­nan Province, Chi­na.”

What they don’t men­tion in their paper is that, in Kun­ming dur­ing this same peri­od (April and May of 2012), six men were hos­pi­tal­ized after remov­ing bat feces from a cave, and that the WIV was involved in their treat­ment, test­ing the patients for Serum IgM, the first anti­body the body makes when it fights a new infec­tion.

These details come from the abstract of a master’s the­sis that was arranged to be trans­lat­ed this year by sci­en­tists Jonathan Lath­am and Ali­son Wil­son, “The Analy­sis of 6 Patients With Severe Pneu­mo­nia Caused by Unknown Virus­es”:

There were 6 patients with unknown pneu­mo­nia caused by unknown virus­es sent to Dep. Emer­gency, the first affil­i­at­ed hos­pi­tal of Kun­ming med­ical uni­ver­si­ty in April, May, 2012. They were all work­ers at the same mine where had a lot of bats and bats feces. After the treat­ment, 3 patients died and three patients sur­vived.

Accord­ing to the appraisal of the Kun­ming insti­tute of zool­o­gy, Chi­nese acad­e­my of sci­ences, the type of the bat in mine where 6 patients worked is Rhi­nolo­phus sini­cus, from which was extract­ed SARS-like-CoV when Sci­en­tists in Chi­na were in the process of look­ing for SARS pathogen.

Lath­am and Wil­son have been inves­ti­gat­ing the ori­gin of COVID-19 and have come to the con­clu­sion that “a lab ori­gin has at least as much cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to sup­port it as does any nat­ur­al zoonot­ic ori­gin the­o­ry.”

Sum­ma­riz­ing the facts laid out in the master’s the­sis, Lath­am and Wil­son con­clude that:

  • Sam­ples were tak­en from patients and sent to WIV.
  • The thy­mus, an immune organ that could have con­tained large quan­ti­ties of virus, was removed from one patient.
  • Any virus­es recov­er­able from the min­ers would like­ly have been viewed by WIV researchers as a unique nat­ur­al exper­i­ment in human pas­sag­ing offer­ing unprece­dent­ed and oth­er­wise-impos­si­ble-to-obtain insights into how bat coro­n­avirus­es can adapt to humans.
  • The log­i­cal course of such research would be to sequence viral RNA extract­ed direct­ly from unfrozen tis­sue or blood sam­ples and/or to gen­er­ate live infec­tious clones for which it would be use­ful (if not imper­a­tive) to ampli­fy the virus by plac­ing it in human cell cul­ture. Either tech­nique could have led to acci­den­tal infec­tion of a lab researcher.

Lath­am and Wil­son don’t con­nect the master’s the­sis on the men who were hos­pi­tal­ized in Kun­ming with the paper Shi and Daszak pub­lished about the bat coro­n­avirus­es they col­lect­ed in Kun­ming at the same time, but it seems obvi­ous to do so.

Who sent the min­ers into the cave to col­lect guano? Could it have been Shi and Daszak? They were in Kun­ming col­lect­ing bat virus­es at the time.

Shi Zhengli told her ver­sion of the sto­ry about the min­ers to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can:

“[In 2012] Shi’s team had been called in to inves­ti­gate the virus pro­file of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s moun­tain­ous Mojiang County—famous for its fer­ment­ed Pu’er tea—where six min­ers suf­fered from pneu­mo­nia like dis­eases and two died. After sam­pling the cave for a year, the researchers dis­cov­ered a diverse group of coro­n­avirus­es in six bat species. “In many cas­es, mul­ti­ple viral strains had infect­ed a sin­gle ani­mal, turn­ing it into a fly­ing fac­to­ry for new virus­es.

“‘The mine shaft stunk like hell,’ says Shi, who, like her col­leagues, went in wear­ing a pro­tec­tive mask and cloth­ing. ‘Bat guano, cov­ered in fun­gus, lit­tered the cave.’ Although the fun­gus turned out to be the pathogen that had sick­ened the min­ers, she says it would have been only a mat­ter of time before they caught the coro­n­avirus­es if the mine had not been prompt­ly shut.”

This incon­sis­ten­cy between Shi’s sto­ry and the master’s the­sis is hard to rec­on­cile. Con­sid­er­ing WIV’s involve­ment in the treat­ment of the min­ers, how could Shi have not known that the min­ers died of a SARS-like virus, and not a fun­gal infec­tion, as she told Scien­tif­ic Amer­i­can?

The virus Shi says she found in Mojiang was RaTG13. In a paper pub­lished on Feb­ru­ary 3, 2020, Shi announced that RaTG13 was 96 per­cent iden­ti­cal to the genom­ic sequence of the nov­el coro­n­avirus, even­tu­al­ly named SARS-CoV­‑2.

Here’s anoth­er trou­bling incon­sis­ten­cy: Accord­ing to the Genome Sequence Archive, RaTG13 was “was extract­ed from bron­choalve­o­lar lavage flu­id,” which sug­gests that the virus was tak­en from a sick per­son, but RaTG13 is sup­pos­ed­ly an RNA sequence tak­en from a bat fecal swab.

Daszak has his own ver­sion of the sto­ry of the dis­cov­ery of RaTG13. Daszak claims they took the virus back to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy and left it in a freez­er for sev­en years untouched. But, as Boston Mag­a­zine report­ed, this claim was dis­cov­ered to be untrue by “sci­en­tist turned detec­tive” Ali­na Chan, who fact-checked him on Twit­ter:

Even though that virus had killed three min­ers, Daszak said it wasn’t con­sid­ered a pri­or­i­ty to study at the time. “We were look­ing for SARS-relat­ed virus­es, and this one was 20 per­cent dif­fer­ent. We thought it was inter­est­ing, but not high risk. So we didn’t do any­thing about it and put it in the freez­er,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, he main­tained, that they start­ed look­ing into it once they real­ized its sim­i­lar­i­ty to COVID-19. But Chan point­ed to an online data­base show­ing that the WIV had been genet­i­cal­ly sequenc­ing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, ana­lyz­ing it in a way they had done in the past with oth­er virus­es in prepa­ra­tion for run­ning exper­i­ments with them. Diplo­mat­ic yet dead­pan, she wrote, “I think Daszak was mis­in­formed.”

Why the lies? Why won’t Shi and Daszak admit that WIV took sam­ples from the hos­pi­tal­ized min­ers for diag­no­sis and study, know­ing that the patients died from a SARS-like bat coro­n­avirus? Why do they deny that the bat coro­n­avirus most like SARS-CoV­‑2 was col­lect­ed in the mine where the work­ers were exposed? Why don’t they acknowl­edge that this is a virus that was active­ly sequenced, ana­lyzed and exper­i­ment­ed on, not one that had been for­got­ten in a freez­er for sev­en years?

Are they afraid to admit that the first SARS-like coro­n­avirus­es that use the ACE2 recep­tor was dis­cov­ered in humans in a hos­pi­tal, not bats in a cave?

Do they fear the public’s reac­tion to the idea of gain-of-func­tion researchers tak­ing advan­tage of the min­ers’ grue­some deaths to har­vest a pathogen unique­ly primed to infect human cells? . . . .

. . . . Who fund­ed the Kun­ming virus hunt?

In addi­tion to fund­ing from Chi­na and Aus­tralia, the Kun­ming virus hunt report­ed in “Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,” was sup­port­ed by:

  • Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases (NIAID) award num­ber R01AI079231, a $2.6‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for “Risk of Viral Emer­gence from Bats,” (2008–2013).
  • NIH and Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) “Ecol­o­gy and Evo­lu­tion of Infec­tious Dis­eases” $3.7‑million award from the NIH Fog­a­r­ty Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter (R01TW005869) to Eco­Health Alliance for “The Ecol­o­gy, Emer­gence and Pan­dem­ic Poten­tial of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh,” (2002–2013).
  • A $300,000 award from the NIH Fog­a­r­ty Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter sup­port­ed by Inter­na­tion­al Influen­za Funds from the Office of the Sec­re­tary of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices (R56TW009502) to Eco­Health Alliance for “Com­par­a­tive Spillover Dynam­ics of Avian Influen­za in Endem­ic Coun­tries,” (2012–2017).
  • Unit­ed States Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID) Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats PREDICT, amount unknown.

Who fund­ed Shi’s virus hunt­ing in Mojiang?

Shi’s paper, “Coex­is­tence of Mul­ti­ple Coro­n­avirus­es in Sev­er­al Bat Colonies in an Aban­doned Mine­shaft,” was writ­ten by a team of sci­en­tists who were all Chi­nese nation­als work­ing at Chi­nese insti­tu­tions. Nev­er­the­less, in addi­tion to fund­ing from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, the authors acknowl­edged sup­port from the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gies and Infec­tious Dis­ease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for “Under­stand­ing the Risk of Bat Coro­n­avirus Emer­gence,” (2014–2025).

Shi’s Pen­ta­gon fund­ing

Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months.

A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der.

To see how the first paper, “Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,” is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty.

As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe.

This was the sub­ject of a paper, “The Egypt­ian Rousette Genome Reveals Unex­pect­ed Fea­tures of Bat Antivi­ral Immu­ni­ty,” that he pub­lished with mil­i­tary sci­en­tists and DTRA fund­ing.

“A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,” Kepler said. “That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.”

The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism.

The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. Accord­ing to Web­MD:

“Cer­tain kinds of cytokines trig­ger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tis­sue can die. In COVID-19, that tis­sue is most­ly in the lung. As the tis­sue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with flu­id, caus­ing pneu­mo­nia and starv­ing the blood of oxy­gen.”

Kepler says the mil­i­tary is using its exper­i­ments on bat immu­ni­ty to “devel­op drugs that damp­en down inflam­ma­tion and arrest the virus by depriv­ing it of what it needs to grow rather than try­ing to kill it out­right.” But, it clear­ly has anoth­er objec­tive, as well: to make virus­es more dead­ly by “pas­sag­ing” them through bats.

With­out stricter enforce­ment of the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion, it is impos­si­ble to pre­vent so-called “defen­sive” pro­grams from pro­duc­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the stealth and plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty with which bio­log­i­cal weapons can be used, and how vul­ner­a­ble labs are to acci­dents and “miss­ing” agents.

The reg­u­la­to­ry chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with try­ing to pre­vent defen­sive bio­log­i­cal weapons research from being used offen­sive­ly were high­light­ed recent­ly in India’s reac­tion to Shi’s oth­er DTRA fund­ed paper, “Filovirus-reac­tive anti­bod­ies in humans and bats in North­east India imply zoonot­ic spillover,” pub­lished in 2019.

The study alarmed the pub­lic by find­ing “the pres­ence of filovirus (e.g. ebolavirus, mar­burgvirus and dianlovirus) reac­tive anti­bod­ies in both human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat pop­u­la­tions in North­east India, a region with no his­tor­i­cal record of Ebo­la virus dis­ease.”

The Hin­du report­ed that for­eign enti­ties oper­at­ing the study should have been required to seek spe­cial per­mis­sion to access live sam­ples of bats and human bat hunters, but they did not do so. The Indi­an Coun­cil of Med­ical Research cre­at­ed a five-mem­ber com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate.

In addi­tion to mil­i­tary fund­ing through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, Christo­pher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uni­formed Ser­vices Uni­ver­si­ty of the Health Sci­ences, Depart­ment of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy and Immunol­o­gy.

China’s People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army con­trols the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy

The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy is China’s only biosafe­ty lev­el 4 lab. While it has always been under the con­trol of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, since Jan­u­ary 26, 2020, it has been under the com­mand of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, specif­i­cal­ly its top bio­log­i­cal-weapons spe­cial­ist, a major gen­er­al named Chen Wei.

. . . . Shi Zhengli may work at a Chi­nese lab that is now con­trolled by the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, but through­out her career, her work has been fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary, with which she has active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed. . . .

Chi­na says the U.S. released the virus in Octo­ber at the World Mil­i­tary Games in Wuhan. The U.S. is inves­ti­gat­ing whether WIV was the source of the virus.

Shi’s cen­tral role in this who­dun­nit makes it near­ly impos­si­ble to fig­ure out.

When you have a Chi­nese sci­en­tist weaponiz­ing coro­n­avirus­es with Pen­ta­gon fund­ing at a lab con­trolled by the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, and a virus escapes, which coun­try is to blame?

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