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The Smoking Genome? Supplement to the “Oswald Institute of Virology” Series UPDATED ON 10/10/2021 AND ON 10/22/2021

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COMMENT: A heav­i­ly “spun” sto­ry about the Eco­Health Alliance and its involve­ment with Pen­ta­gon-linked research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es may well–when freed from the pre­dictably ide­ol­o­gized jour­nal­is­tic shad­ing to which it has been subjected–yield a “smok­ing genome” with regard to the SARS CoV‑2 virus caus­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic.

(The Inter­cept is the spawn of Pierre Omid­yar, deeply involved in the ascent of the Nazi OUN/B milieu in Ukraine and that of the Hin­dut­va fas­cist regime of Naren­dra Modi in India. He has part­nered with U.S. intel­li­gence cutouts such as the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy and USAID. Omid­yar’s pro­tege Glenn Green­wald is to be viewed with a jaun­diced eye as well.)

Key points of infor­ma­tion in the arti­cle:

  • ” . . . . Last month, a grant appli­ca­tion sub­mit­ted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an inter­na­tion­al team of sci­en­tists had planned to mix genet­ic data of sim­i­lar strains to cre­ate a new virus. The grant appli­ca­tion was made in 2018 . . . .”

  • ” . . . . The grant appli­ca­tion pro­pos­al was sub­mit­ted by British zool­o­gist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which includ­ed Daszak Eco­Health Alliance, the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na and Duke NUS in Sin­ga­pore, The Tele­graph report­ed. . . .”
  • ” . . . . ‘We will com­pile sequence/RNAseq data from a pan­el of close­ly relat­ed strains and com­pare full length genomes, scan­ning for unique SNPs rep­re­sent­ing sequenc­ing errors. ‘Con­sen­sus can­di­date genomes will be syn­the­sised com­mer­cial­ly using estab­lished tech­niques and genome-length RNA and elec­tro­po­ra­tion to recov­er recom­bi­nant virus­es,’ the appli­ca­tion states. . . .”

  • ” . . . . The WHO expert told The Tele­graph that the process detailed in the appli­ca­tion would cre­ate ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to any­thing.’ ‘They would then syn­the­sise the viral genome from the com­put­er sequence, thus cre­at­ing a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks nat­ur­al as it is the aver­age of nat­ur­al virus­es. ‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recov­er the virus from it. ‘This cre­ates a virus that has nev­er exist­ed in nature, with a new ‘back­bone’ that did­n’t exist in nature but is very, very sim­i­lar as it’s the aver­age of nat­ur­al back­bones,’ the expert said. . . .”

  • ” . . . . Experts told the paper that cre­at­ing an ‘ide­al’ aver­age virus could have been part of work to cre­ate a vac­cine that works across coro­n­avirus­es. Last month, it emerged that the US had fund­ed sim­i­lar research to that out­lined in the 2018 grant pro­pos­al. . . .”

Key con­sid­er­a­tions in the con­text of which this sto­ry should be viewed:

  • DARPA has been exten­sive­ly involved in research­ing bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es in, and around Chi­na.
  • Note that the pro­pos­al to DARPA involved exten­sive dis­cus­sion of the genome of the virus to be syn­the­sized. Uti­liz­ing con­tem­po­rary tech­nol­o­gy, this would per­mit the syn­the­sis of the virus with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly approv­ing the pro­pos­al!
  • Note that the lat­est inno­va­tions in biotech­nol­o­gy per­mit: ” . . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body. . . .”
  • Those inno­va­tions also per­mit: ” . . . . In the report, the sci­en­tists describe how syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, which gives researchers pre­ci­sion tools to manip­u­late liv­ing organ­isms, ‘enhances and expands’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate bioweapons. . . .”
  • Those inno­va­tions also per­mit: ” . . . . Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sized. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said [Michael] Impe­ri­ale. ‘It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
  • The chief fund­ing sources for the Eco­Health Alliance are the Pen­ta­gon and USAID, a State Depart­ment sub­sidiary that com­mon­ly serves as a cov­er for CIA. 
  • One of Peter Dasza­k’s chief advis­ers is David Franz, the for­mer com­mand­ing offi­cer of Fort Det­rick.
  • In FTR#1191, we not­ed that pro­duc­ing a vac­cine for an exist­ing bio­log­i­cal weapon or one under advanced devel­op­ment might well be seen as an “offen­sive” bio­log­i­cal war­fare maneu­ver.
  • This arti­cle, like many oth­ers, fea­tures com­men­tary from Richard Ebright to the effect that the WIV did, in fact, syn­the­size the virus. Ebright had a long asso­ci­a­tion with the Howard Hugh­es Med­ical Insti­tute, the for­mer own­er of the Hugh­es Air­craft Com­pa­ny, a firm with pro­found nation­al secu­ri­ty con­nec­tions. It is more than a lit­tle inter­est­ing that Ebright, like almost all of the oth­er com­menters quot­ed in the U.S., does not fac­tor in the inno­va­tions in biotech­nol­o­gy high­light­ed above.
  • Of inter­est, as well, is this pas­sage: ” . . . . Experts told the paper that cre­at­ing an ‘ide­al’ aver­age virus could have been part of work to cre­ate a vac­cine that works across coro­n­avirus­es. Last month, it emerged that the US had fund­ed sim­i­lar research to that out­lined in the 2018 grant pro­pos­al. . . .”
  • The Pen­ta­gon has, indeed, been work­ing on such a vac­cine” . . . . The ser­vice is clos­ing in on a ‘pan-coro­n­avirus’ vac­cine and on syn­thet­ic anti­bod­ies that could pro­tect a pop­u­la­tion before spread. . . .”

“Wuhan sci­en­tists and US researchers planned to cre­ate a new coro­n­avirus in 2018: Con­sor­tium led by Brit Peter Daszak asked DARPA to fund research at lab in city where Covid pan­dem­ic began” by Char­lotte Mitchell; Dai­ly Mail [UK]; 10/05/2021.

US and Chi­nese sci­en­tists were plan­ning to cre­ate a new coro­n­avirus before the pan­dem­ic erupt­ed, leaked pro­pos­als show. 

Last month, a grant appli­ca­tion sub­mit­ted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an inter­na­tion­al team of sci­en­tists had planned to mix genet­ic data of sim­i­lar strains to cre­ate a new virus.

The grant appli­ca­tion was made in 2018 and leaked to Dras­tic, the pan­dem­ic ori­gins analy­sis group. 

‘We will com­pile sequence/RNAseq data from a pan­el of close­ly relat­ed strains and com­pare full length genomes, scan­ning for unique SNPs rep­re­sent­ing sequenc­ing errors.

‘Con­sen­sus can­di­date genomes will be syn­the­sised com­mer­cial­ly using estab­lished tech­niques and genome-length RNA and elec­tro­po­ra­tion to recov­er recom­bi­nant virus­es,’ the appli­ca­tion states.

This would result in a virus which had no clear ances­tor in nature, a World Health Orga­ni­za­tion (WHO) expert told The Tele­graph.

The expert, who asked the paper not to pub­lish their name, said that, if such a method had been car­ried out, it could explain why no close match has ever been found in nature for Sars-CoV­‑2.

The clos­est nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring virus is the Banal-52 strain, report­ed in Laos last month. It shares 96.8 per cent of Covid-19’s genome. 

No direct ances­tor, which would be expect­ed share around 99.98 per cent, has been found so far. 

The WHO expert told The Tele­graph that the process detailed in the appli­ca­tion would cre­ate ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to any­thing.’

‘They would then syn­the­sise the viral genome from the com­put­er sequence, thus cre­at­ing a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks nat­ur­al as it is the aver­age of nat­ur­al virus­es.

‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recov­er the virus from it. 

‘This cre­ates a virus that has nev­er exist­ed in nature, with a new ‘back­bone’ that did­n’t exist in nature but is very, very sim­i­lar as it’s the aver­age of nat­ur­al back­bones,’ the expert said.

The pro­pos­al was reject­ed and the data­base of viral strains at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy was tak­en offline some 18 months lat­er, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to check what sci­en­tists there were work­ing on.

The insti­tute’s sci­en­tists have con­sis­tent­ly denied cre­at­ing the coro­n­avirus in their lab.

The grant appli­ca­tion pro­pos­al was sub­mit­ted by British zool­o­gist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which includ­ed Daszak Eco­Health Alliance, the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na and Duke NUS in Sin­ga­pore, The Tele­graph report­ed. 

Experts told the paper that cre­at­ing an ‘ide­al’ aver­age virus could have been part of work to cre­ate a vac­cine that works across coro­n­avirus­es. 

Last month, it emerged that the US had fund­ed sim­i­lar research to that out­lined in the 2018 grant pro­pos­al. 

Files obtained by The Inter­cept as part of an FOI request to drill down the pos­si­ble root of COVID and whether the US had any role in it showed that in 2014, the Nation­al Health Insti­tute (NIH) approved a five-year, year­ly grant of $666,000 a year for five years ($3.3million) for Eco­Health Alliance, a US research orga­ni­za­tion, into bat coro­n­avirus

Eco­Health Alliance, in its pro­pos­al to the NIH, acknowl­edged the risks involved were ‘the high­est risk of expo­sure to SARS or oth­er CoVs’ among staff, who could then car­ry it out of the lab.

The NIH gave them the mon­ey any­way — some­thing Dr Antho­ny Fau­ci was pre­vi­ous­ly forced to admit when tes­ti­fy­ing before Con­gress in May this year. Eco­Health Alliance then gave $599,000 of the mon­ey to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy.

At the time and repeat­ed­ly since, Fau­ci has denied that the research con­sti­tut­ed what’s known as ‘gain-of-func­tion’ research. 

Gain-of-func­tion research is the sci­en­tif­ic term giv­en to research that delib­er­ate­ly changes an organ­ism to make give it new func­tions in order to test a the­o­ry. 

When applies to study­ing human virus­es, it can mean mak­ing the virus more trans­mis­si­ble and or even dead­ly in order to test what can and can’t sur­vive it. 

‘The doc­u­ments make it clear that asser­tions by the NIH Direc­tor, Fran­cis Collins, and the NIAID Direc­tor, Antho­ny Fau­ci, that the NIH did not sup­port gain-of-func­tion research or poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogen enhance­ment at WIV are untruth­ful,’ Richard Ebright, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty, tweet­ed. 

Ebright stud­ied the papers and alleged that the sci­en­tists per­formed ‘the con­struc­tion — in Wuhan — of nov­el chimeric SARS-relat­ed coro­n­avirus­es that com­bined a spike gene from one coro­n­avirus with genet­ic infor­ma­tion from anoth­er coro­n­avirus and con­firmed the result­ing virus­es could infect human cells’. 

Discussion

One comment for “The Smoking Genome? Supplement to the “Oswald Institute of Virology” Series UPDATED ON 10/10/2021 AND ON 10/22/2021”

  1. This Crazy Ship­ping Cri­sis, Explained, Yahoo Finance, by Andy Ser­w­er and Max Zahn, Andy Ser­w­er with Max Zahn
    Sat, Octo­ber 9, 2021 explains the fol­low­ing in detail. It is worth read­ing the whole arti­cle to appre­ci­ate the issues.

    Due to cuts and cor­po­rates effi­cien­cy opti­miza­tion strate­gies from ship­ping and rail road com­pa­nies put in place pri­or to COVID the glob­al sup­ply chain, par­tic­u­lar­ly the part of it that con­nects Asia to the U.S., has been run­ning at full capac­i­ty with no mar­gin for error.

    Ships are lin­ing up for miles wait­ing to deliv­er their prod­ucts to the port in LA. Employ­eed peo­ples have been able to save mon­ey from com­mut­ing, avoid­ing restau­rants due to COVID con­cerns, and avoid­ing crowd­ed enter­tain­ment venues. Thus more mon­ey is avail­able for prod­uct pur­chas­es.

    This increase in prod­uct demand has cre­at­ed a glob­al short­age of ship­ping capac­i­ty. The ship­ping index val­ue (an indus­try met­ric has ranged from approx­i­mate­ly 500 – 1,000 from 2009 – 2020. How­ev­er it is now close to 5,000. Experts say that this could be with us through 2022. Just one, for instance: “Oper­at­ing ships is far more dif­fi­cult now,” says my ship­ping source. “With COVID [pro­to­cols] you’ve got 200 coun­tries with 200 dif­fer­ent rules.”

    This will lead to infla­tion due to increased ship­ping costs, how­ev­er ship­ping delays lead to oth­er delays, stor­age costs and unuti­lized capac­i­ty which also will increase infla­tion­ary pres­sure.

    Anoth­er issue that is not dis­cussed in the arti­cle is that there is slight­ly high unem­ploy­ment, but com­pa­nies are unable to fill job post­ings despite increased wages being offered. This is made worse by efforts to pre­vent ille­gal immi­gra­tion which had less enforce­ment focus pri­or to the elec­tion of Pres­i­dent Trump. This is also infla­tion­ary.

    The cur­rent Fed­er­al deficit is run­ning almost as high as 100% GDP. The inter­est expense on the deficit will increase as infla­tion is real­ized. It will place more bud­getary pres­sure on the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-crazy-shipping-crisis-explained-094340766.html

    Posted by Mary Benton | October 11, 2021, 7:09 am

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