The research group of former PLA scientist Yigang Tong has published a new paper showing a "pangolin" coronavirus (GX_P2V) variant is 100% fatal to hACE2 mice likely due to infection of the brain.
Although previous studies the group did (including a collaboration with WIV) did not show this lethality, they now suggest that mutations gained through passaging in cell culture may have resulted in a far more lethal variant.
But the provenance of this virus is still dubious. Did it really come from pangolins?
Although the paper offers references regarding the identification and isolation of GX_P2V there is no info in these on who isolated it, when and how.
A Tong paper from Feb 2020 suggests Tong's group (though it's written in the passive voice). But it references the Tommy Lam/Eddie Holmes paper as the source. And their paper doesn't say either.
Between 2016-2019 when AMMS isolated the pangolin coronavirus, Tong was working on a major secret research project with a USD 5 million budget.
The main duties of his new recruit include "optimization of coronavirus GX_P2V virus infection system" 😬
Perhaps this new potentially human lethal version indicates the optimization was successful?
Interestingly Yigang Tong has been quite insistent that Racoon Dogs and Huanan market were NOT the source of SARS-CoV-2. This is consistent with George Gao's comments on the subject. Clearly China's official line is still that pangolins are to blame.
It's crucial to realize the extent of WIV's deceit. They didn't start lying in 2020. Every paper since 2003 helped craft a false narrative. Their goal was misattributing the origin of SARS.
What does this say about the intent behind SARS-CoV-2? 🧵
That WIV discovered RaTG13 in the Mojiang mine seems highly unlikely. Other groups before and after found little, and even WIV claim to have found just 1 SARS-related virus from 276 bats sampled.
Why did they persist when they later say the miners had never been seropositive?
The master's thesis published in May 2013, clearly had some input from WIV. But this paragraph was already outdated. WIV uploaded the first bat viruses with human infectious potential just weeks earlier (tho dates don't quite match and location is just "China").
In 1992, scientists infected primates with a neurotropic strain of mouse coronavirus MHV. This caused a demyelinating disease similar to multiple sclerosis.
This was to understand MS, but drew the interest of the likes of Baric and Weiss.
Although the experiment used intracerebral inoculation, a clearly unnatural method of bypassing the blood-brain barrier, the researchers suggested that it may be possible for CNS infection to occur naturally, via the nose or eyes (as had long been known to occur in mice).
A later study showed that primate CNS could indeed be infected via the nasal route (using a primate brain passaged strain of MHV). They also inoculated these monkeys using eye drops.
Most people just assume Banal-52 is real. Institut Pasteur has a high reputation. And may think it doesn't matter: because the FCS is absent, it doesn't rule out a lab origin.
But it can tell us why SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, and by who 🧵
Banal-52 shares many features with SARS-CoV-2 linked to tropism, transmissibility, virulence. The FCS is a rare exception.
If it is genuine, it implies these evolved naturally. Daszak has a point. Caves are teeming with pandemic potential viruses that could spillover any time.
But if it is fake, it implies SARS-CoV-2 has been engineered extensively. It is neither natural, nor an "experiment gone wrong". It isn't just a bat virus into which someone stupid inserted an FCS. It has multiple features intended to harm human health.
Some time ago SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had a common ancestor. Parts of their genomes are similar, but many functionally important regions are very different. These appear to have evolved by a very unusual - or unnatural -
cut-and-paste process🧵
Molecular evolution has well established mechanisms:
•substitution (frequent) a single base changes to another
•deletion (uncommon) usually only a few, and a multiple of 3 is preferred
•inserts (rare) as above
•recombination (very rare)
There's another type of mutation unusually common between SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2: where a new sequence has been grafted in place of another. There's no simple explanation. Perhaps they result from 2 or more separate insert/deletion events?
*How DEFUSE became part of the PLA bioweapon plot*
DEFUSE is seen by some as a "blue-print for SARS-CoV-2" which implicates US scientists and administrators. But it was booby-trapped by WIV from the start.
Never underestimate the CCP's disinformation capabilities...🧵
DEFUSE was submitted on 27th March, 2018.
A few hours later a group of PLA scientists from Nanjing Command published two novel bat viruses to GenBank: ZC45 and ZXC21.
These are the first and *only* SARS-CoV-2 related viruses published before the pandemic.
ZC45/ZXC21 just happen to meet the criteria for DEFUSE group: 20-25% distant from SARS, and potentially human infectious. The subsequent paper showed they were able to infect and cause disease in mice.
Claims are circulating that US agencies (EHA/UNC/NIH/USAID) are responsible for the Covid pandemic. It's true they failed in ways, but they aren't the true culprits.
This misattribution of blame is due to scientific DISINFORMATION🧵
I showed in a previous paper that bat viruses WIV claims are the precursors of SARS-1 are artificial. They made them in a lab and fraudulently claimed they came from bats.
That was in 2013, perhaps they reformed?
What about more recent SARS-CoV-2 related bat virus discoveries?
By 2018, after 15 years of hunting for bat coronaviruses, no virus had been discovered that belong in the SARS-CoV-2 clade.
But within a year or two of the Covid outbreak, they had been found in a range from Thailand to Japan.