The French Enlightenment

Recently French state media broadcast a documentary skeptical of a natural origin of Covid-19.

This is a watershed in European coverage, and follows tantalizing rumors from German and Italian IC sources.

How sincere is this new openness? 🧵
The media coverage appeared to trigger further action - the French Academy of Medicine declared a lab accident possible, and a group of scientists is calling for a parliamentary commission.

Some French scientists have long been open to an artificial origin - but nuance matters.

Batsh|t Betsy

@quay_dr recently posted a preprint showing the sequence for bat coronavirus BtSY2 can't be assembled from the raw sequencing data. This is a serious issue.

But there's a Nature paper with Eddie Holmes' name on it.

It got past peer review, so who's right?

🧵 BtSY2 is very important as it's one of only zoonotic viruses 6 with an RBM very close to SARS-CoV-2 - potentially human infectious. It was published in 2023 by Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, with Eddie Holmes along for the ride.

Mojiang Mythbusting Part 2

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?

Was SARS-CoV-2 targeted at our brains?

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.

https://twitter.com/Engineer2The/status/1900280768469033185

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).

Is Banal-52 fake, and does it matter?

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.

How did the coronavirus get its RBM?

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)

*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.

How China *FRAMED* the US for its Bioweapon

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?

**SARS was Bioterrorism: Summary **🧵

Spread of SARS

SARS spread to 31 countries, caused 800 deaths. But there were only ~8500 reported infections, and the epidemic was over in a few months. How is this possible?

SARS was nowhere near as infectious as SARS-CoV-2. Transmission was by fomite and large respiratory droplets from symptomatic patients. SARS was not airborne Most transmissions were between family members, or between patients and carers. Almost all large clusters were in hospitals and due to poor infection control when a patient with unknown respiratory disease presented.

But there are 3 important exceptions: mysterious super-spreading events that resulted in lasting confusion over the nature of SARS. These have defied any attempts by scientists and authorities to explain, but may have more readily if bioterrorism had been considered... 1) The Hotel Metropole.

This event spread SARS to Canada, Singapore and Vietnam and elsewhere in Hong Kong. The vast majority of all confirmed cases emanate from this event. A purported index patient managed to infect 20 other people in 13 rooms on the one floor. But no-one else in the hotel was infected, including any of the ~250 staff.

The index case was a visitor from Guangdong, said to be a doctor traveling with his wife. He checked in at 5pm and stayed in Room 911. He took himself to a hospital the next morning, was taken straight to ICU and intubated. He died two weeks later. His wife returned to Guangdong.

A WHO team from Canada later conducted a forensic examination of the hotel. They found traces of SARS genetic material on the carpet outside Room 911, and in an air conditioning inlet above the elevator lobby, but found no traces in any of the rooms. The rooms were positively pressurized, suggesting transmission must have occurred in the hallway.

Official explanation: There isn't one. HK Health Director Margaret Chan suggested everyone stood in front of the elevator together and someone coughed. Presumably this was intended as a joke.

Proposed explanation: The room number wasn't a 1 in 500 coincidence, but a reference to the 9/11 attacks. The anthrax letters a year earlier had also referred to 9/11. This was not only an act of bioterrorism but *intended* to be seen as part of a series, and so generate terror of future incidents. To disseminate the virus some kind of basic aerosolization device was used. It may have been as simple as spilling it on the hallway carpet and dispersing it with a fan or blow-dryer.

SARS was Bioterrorism Part 2: Amoy Gardens

I recently posted a thread about the Metropole Hotel incident which started the SARS epidemic when 20 people were infected by an index case staying in room 911. Most think the room number is just a coincidence - I don't. 🧵 For one, there are nearly 500 rooms in the hotel, so it's a very unlikely co-incidence. Secondly, it came soon after another bioterrorism incident - the anthrax killings - in which 911 was referenced by the terrorist/s to assert a link, genuine or not.

Some more context...

How SARS exploded around the world: Mystery of the Hotel Metropole

Almost all SARS cases globally stemmed from a single super-spreader event which happened at Hong Kong's Hotel Metropole.

How it happened remains a mystery. Was this an act of bioterrorism? The index case was Dr Liu Jianlun a doctor from the mainland who worked at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen hospital. For weeks there had been rumors of an atypical pneumonia circulating in Guangdong. PRC authorities suppressed discussion of it claimed it was treatable with antibiotics.

There are interesting parallels between this incident and earlier incidents in France and Canada, and I suspect it's an act of Chinese espionage. Though we don't know much detail but it is said to have happened after a freezer broke down. In 2014 when Institut Pasteur "lost" 2400 SARS samples, it also happened after a freezer broke down. The samples were moved to a temporary freezer in a less secure area many groups had access to. Boxes of vials started to go missing, eventually the entire freezer. No paperwork.

Ebola, SADS and the Death of Frank Plummer

On Feb 4, 2020 the former head of Canada's National Microbiology Lab collapsed and died while at a conference in Kenya. His death attracted little interest from "conspiracy theorists". Timing aside, links to SARS-CoV-2 seemed tenuous🧵 @RealAndyLeeShow Plummer was head of CNML from 2000 until 2014, when he retired at 60. He was an alcoholic, a habit acquired while doing HIV work in Africa.

Xiangguo Qiu, the scientist at the center of recent allegations of espionage, joined CNML in 2003, her husband Keding Cheng in 2006.

Barefoot Doctor to B-52

Chen Zhu personifies the narrative of China's rise. Sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution he taught himself medicine, becoming a "barefoot doctor". Eventually he rose to become Health Minister.

Is Zhu central to the Covid cover-up?
🧵 Zhu is fluent in English and French. A Francophile, he did his PhD in France, supervised by a doctor who was a close friend of Jacques Chirac. During SARS he was Vice President of CAS (WIV's parent). When Institut Pasteur sent a scientific team to help, he saw an opportunity.

Australia's CSIRO worked with WIV for years on SARS origin. Why do they hold no documents?

Recently I've been researching a paper that shows WIV/CSIRO work on SARS bat origin - is fraud. I came across a strange cyber-security incident, which caught my eye because of the date. November 2013 is the same time the WIV/CSIRO paper (Ge et al) and sequences (WIV1, RsSHC014, Rs3367) were published. CSIRO still proudly promote the work as "the proof bats are the origin of SARS".

But - I found out recently - all their documents related to it have vanished.

The Origin of SARS

There is understandably far more interest in the origin of SARS-CoV-2 than SARS-1, but what if they are related? I've found interesting parallels that point to a common origin, and I don't mean the same bogus claims of spillover in a live animal market. I recently posted a paper showing WIV's "proof" SARS is natural is a fraud. The PLA's Academy of Military Medical Science (AMMS) were also involved, publishing sequences to add links to the evolutionary chain. AMMS sequences seem a higher standard of forgery.

A Brief History of Timebombs

In 2000, there were 2 coronaviruses known to infect humans. Both are endemic with mild symptoms, having been with us since ancient times.

Today there are 7 human coronaviruses. Some inflict severe symptoms, most emerged recently.

But how - and why? "One Health" dogma says that it's due to humans/livestock/wildlife being in more frequent contact. But this makes little sense. Urbanization and industrial agriculture mean there's less contact than ever before, while the reduction in poverty mean less consumption of wildlife.

WIV14 poliovirus

This has been discussed as a lab leak (progress!). But why was just one infection detected worldwide, a child in Anhui who was vaccinated?

There's another possibility - that the claim it was sampled from a child was fraudulent.

But why? In 2014, Institut Pasteur reluctantly confessed they had *lost* 2400 vials of SARS samples, including the freezer they were stored in. This article by French independent press Mediapart has a detailed description of events.

Censorship of Science

My recent preprint was rejected by bioRxiv. So what, some may ask, maybe it was no good? Perhaps😜. It certainly will be unpopular with some, it suggests FRAUD in past WIV work. But bioRxiv isn't a publisher, it isn't supposed to judge or moderate content. BioRxiv has become a critical part of the bioscience publishing pipeline. It has a near monopoly distributing preprints in its field. It connects authors to 177 publishers and has built a community of scientists discussing and posting reviews.

In an attempt to reach scientists, I wrote a lengthy analysis of WIV's earlier sarbecov sequences which I believe are fraudulent (though I refrained from overtly claiming this in the paper).

My paper was rejected at first base by @biorxivpreprint on a technicality. 😕 @biorxivpreprint say my paper is inappropriate because my data/analysis aren't new, but a "perspective on existing knowledge". This is false. The data aren't new, but the analysis is. I found important features that WIV overlooked, probably deliberately.

Why would they do that?

ReCOMBiNation aBOMiNation

In 2002 there were 2 known human coronaviruses (OC43 and 229E). These diverged from zoonotic ancestors long ago (est. 150-1m years ago). Today there are 5 more (SARS, HKU1, NL63, MERS, SARS-CoV-2). Most are thought to have resulted from recombination.🧵 Recombination mimics designs scientists might use for artificial chimeras (or vice versa?). At least that seems the way with many SARS-like coronaviruses. Rather than incremental mutations, these apparently evolved by instantaneous exchange of chunks of RNA with other viruses.