**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.

How to Design and Deploy a Bioweapon and Get Away With It

Part 2: Give your baby wings: how to make an AIRBORNE respiratory virus

SARS-like viruses are enteric in bats, spread via feces. How did SARS-CoV-2 come to be a highly transmissible respiratory virus in humans? 🧵 A recent estimate of SARS-CoV-2 fatalities is nearly 30 million, even though most infections aren't severe. In contrast, severe diseases like Ebola rarely kill more than a few hundred. To a bioterrorist, transmissibility might be more desirable than virulence.

*Lab Leak Schism*

The recent publication by @JamieMetzl @JohnRatcliffe @heritage of a report into China's mismanagement (rather than the origin) of the Covid pandemic has exposed fault lines in the "Lab Leak" community. Some feel their approach puts too much of the blame on China, that the US is equally culpable in providing technology and funding, and permitting dangerous research to be outsourced to China, where safety and oversight is lax.

How to Make and Deploy a Bioweapon and Get Away With It.

Don't try this at home (unless your home is at least BSL-3)

Part 1: Growing a Backbone

Cultivating a live zoonotic virus from a sample is much harder than it is to sequence one from RNA fragments. But there are ways.
🧵 WIV claim to have only ever obtained 3 live bat cov isolates: WIV1, WIV16 & RsSHC014. but I'm not convinced these are from natural samples at all, I suspect they're synthetic chimeras.

WIV claim they cultivated these from bat fecal samples, but this is particularly challenging.

Evolutionary Mysteries of ORF8

ORF8 has no role in attachment or fusion, SARS-CoV-2 can replicate without it. It doesn't form part of a virion, but is secreted by infected cells. It is immunogenic, and prone to mutations. It is a known virulence factor.

vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/odd-struc…


ORF8 only exists in sarbecovs. ORF8 of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2 share just 20% nucleotide identity, compared to 79% average across the genome. But important features defining the protein structure are conserved e.g. cysteine residues forming internal disulfide bonds.

What keeps Peter Hotez awake at night?

ICYMI I once managed to get Hotez to answer a few questions on Twitter about his PLA employees. Interestingly, he seemed relieved once he knew I wasn't asking about vaccines. 👇

https://x.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1589204061446078465

@loofymectin asked me what type of Covid vaccine he made, tbh I hadn't looked into it, being more interested in origins.

It turns out Corbevax is a subunit vaccine based on the RBD of spike, the same type he was researching with his PLA friends Yusen Zhou and Lanying Du.

Is the Middle East Respiratory virus also artificial?

Like SARS, MERS is assumed by most scientists to be zoonotic virus, descended from bat coronaviruses. While I don't dispute this, in both cases, the question of how they evolved to make the species jump is unanswered. In 2005-06 while hunting for SARS-like bat coronaviruses in rural Hong Kong, scientists from HKU discovered two new coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5. These are the first known MERS-like viruses (or merbecovs), although MERS itself was unknown at the time.

The BANALity of Evil

Early sequences supporting a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 all came from WIV and the PLA. In time, concerns about their provenance would inevitably bubble up from the realms of "conspiracy theorists". Independent validation was needed.

Enter the Bat-ANALs. The BANAL viruses were the result of an expedition to bat caves in Laos in July 2020. Pasteur had been part of a group exploring the same caves 3 years earlier, but they never sequenced the >500 bat samples they collected. Pasteur's Marc Eloit didn't respond when I asked why not.

Smelling a RaT - a reminder of WIV's deceit.

When I first posted this long thread yesterday I omitted a very important paper from the timeline h/t @worldwhatisup @Rossana38510044

This part of the story deserves a separate (short) thread...

https://x.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1772766956741132682?s=20

In January 2018, PLA epidemiologists from Nanjing Command and a scientist from Zhejiang University posted some SARS-like bat viruses (ZXC21/ZC45) from Zhoushan, which is on the East Coast near Shanghai, nowhere near the Yunnan province SARS-like viruses were previously found.