"Two new caches of documents have added considerable substance..to the idea that the SARS2 epidemic may have originated in a lab accident."
Nicolas Wade: New Routes to Making Covid-19 in the Lab
link.medium.com/O1xv2MomNjb
Nicolas Wade: New Routes to Making Covid-19 in the Lab
link.medium.com/O1xv2MomNjb
"One is a grant proposal written by EcoHealth in March 2018 to DARPA, a research agency in the Department of Defense."
"A prominent feature of the proposal is to 'introduce..human-specific cleavage sites' into SARS-like viruses. Such a procedure is eye-catching, if not jaw-dropping, because the distinctive feature of the SARS2 virus is a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site.
"The element greatly enhances the virus’s ability to infect human cells. The furin cleavage site attracted attention from the start because SARS2 is the only member of its family — a group known as Sarbecoviruses — to possess one."
"This led to the suggestion that the furin cleavage site had been genetically engineered into..a SARS-like virus, creating SARS2."
"The..grant proposal..now puts beyond doubt that engineering cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was a technique to be explored at..Wuhan"
"The..grant proposal..now puts beyond doubt that engineering cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was a technique to be explored at..Wuhan"
"A second remarkable document..was..grant proposal and progress reports submitted by EcoHealth to..National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases..in support of..research at..Wuhan..2014 to 2019. It was obtained by the Intercept after..FOIA request, followed by.a lawsuit."
"[I]t’s now clear..the Wuhan researchers were..creating..novel viruses, which they..tested on humanized mice..The novel viruses caused the mice to lose more weight than the parent virus.., and generated far more viral particles..The..enhancements represent a gain of function."
"In a letter of July 7, 2016 [from the NIH]..Ecohealth Alliance..was told that its experiments at the Wuhan institute must stop immediately if any novel virus started growing 10 times faster than its parent virus."
"In fact the novel viruses attained growth rates up to 10,000 times faster than that of their parent virus, the new documents show. But there’s no evidence that the Wuhan researchers stopped the experiments."
"The traffic stop turned flashing red and they just drove straight through it. All that..[NIAID Director] Fauci and..[NIH Director] Collins did was award them another grant."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
