This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis who helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, and a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain meant for defensive immunotherapy protocols that was released into the public, most likely by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s – the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
This mistake may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkin’s Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well. This is unlikely to be a plot twist in one of the novels Tom Clancy wrote after he started mailing it in.
Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, and fate once again reaping the once unimaginably tragic toll.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people to begin with, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as 2019-nCoV, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus meant for defensive immunotherapy research from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
– In 2002, Stony Brook first assembled a virus from scratch, building a polio-virus, and providing proof-of-concept for the creation, alteration, and manipulation of viral genomes.
– By 2015, conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious. This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly gain-of-function research – experimentation that seeks to increase a pathogen’s virulence, creating a more effective double-edged sword to counter – a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus. Looking at UNC’s gain-of-function research on coronavirus spike-proteins, which received its funding just before the ban was implemented and was only allowed to go forward following a special review, a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,”
– Scientists have expressed concern about China’s ability to safely monitor this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan since it opened in 2017: “an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. ‘Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.'” This lab is at most 20 miles from the wet market where the virus had been assumed to have jumped from animal to human. However the idea that a Chinese lab could have a viral sample escape is well-documented – as mentioned, one lab in Beijing has had four separate incidents of the SARS virus leaking out accidentally.
– Notably, the first three known cases from early December had no contact with that market, and roughly one-third of the initial exposed cohort had no direct ties to Wusan’s wild meat market, the original presumptive source of the virus.
– Since its discovery, scientists have been unable to fully determine the zoological origins of 2019-nCoV, it was initially thought to have passed through snakes, but now all that’s agreed upon is that it’s mostly bat in origin. This inability to derive an exact zoological source is exactly what would be expected if the virus had been artificially engineered to target humans as UNC already has, this doesn’t prove an artificial nature – but it is consistent with one.
– A full-genome evolutionary analysis of 2019-nCoV published in The Lancet concluded, “recombination is probably not the reason for emergence of this virus” since it seems that the Wuhan Strain isn’t a mosaic of previously known coronaviruses, but instead draws from distant, discrete parts of the coronavirus family tree – not how these viruses naturally evolve. Because even mixing and matching coronavirus genomes from every known mammal, scientists couldn’t find any possible combination that would explain those regions of the Wuhan Strain’s genome. The Lancet muses that a mysterious animal host could still be out there, however since they’ve already searched through every known possibility and been unable to find a match, another obvious explanation is that bio-engineering accounts for the inexplicable regions of the Wuhan Strain’s genome
– Perhaps most notably, a genetic analysis of the spike-protein genes – the exact region that was bio-engineered by the UNC lab in 2015, where Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge previously isolated a batty coronavirus that targets the ACE2 receptor just like this 2019-nCoV strain of the coronavirus does – indicates an artificial and unnatural origins of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genes when they are compared to the genomes of wild relatives. Instead of appearing similar and homologous to its wild relatives, an important section of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein region shares the most genetic similarity with a bio-engineered commercially available gene sequence that’s designed to help with immunotherapy research. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense.
– Early research found that 2019-nCoV targets the ACE2 receptor, which is found in Asians at roughly five-times the rate of other global populations, indicating that the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCoV was likely developed as part of a gain-of-function defensive project possibly linked to immunotherapy or vaccinations – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against, not as an offensive weapon since the virus is likely wired to be much more virulent among Asian populations. Further support for this is the fact that the Wuhan BSL-4 virology lab was already actively looking into the risks posed from bat coronaviruses, and actively researching coronavirus treatments – by definition both of these projects would require live virulent strains of coronavirus.
– The Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, appears to be transmissible even before its host shows any symptoms at all, making temperature-scanning at airports ineffective since hosts appear to be contagious for about a week before any symptoms emerge. This is in stark contrast with SARS, whose hosts weren’t contagious until they were symptomatic, allowing for its relatively quick containment. This chart is not from a peer-reviewed source but was claims to capture the comparative rates of infections between recent outbreaks. A recent pre-print now gives 2019-nCoV a rating of R4, meaning each host passes the virus on to four new victims, a rate significantly higher than any past global viral outbreak.
– Following the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, in the paper from UNC eventually published the next year that describing their successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” attached to the “Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.”
– Zhengli Shi seems to have returned to Wuhan at some point since 2016, since she then appears in this September 2019 paper on the human behaviors most likely to lead to bat-borne coronavirus exposure in southern China, and in this pending preprint on the current outbreak of 2019-nCoV – just a sample of the dozens of coronavirus-related papers she’s published over a three decade career. And not only does she provide a direct chain of expertise tying the already successful bio-engineering of a virulent bat-based coronavirus at UNC directly to the BSL-4 virology lab in Wuhan, but back in January 2014 she’d received a $665,000 grant from NIH for a study titled The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and the Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence (NIAID R01 AI1 10964) as well as $559,500 more from USAID for a study titled Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT_2China (Project No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102). Beyond this American funding specifically into viral diseases zoonotically transferring from animals to humans which would slipped in just before the ban, over the years she’s also received around $3 million in grants to study these zoonotic viruses from China and other countries, and has served on the editorial board of several virological research magazines. More of her research into the intersection of coronaviruses like the Wuhan Strain and their epidemic potential was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate of the Naval Medical Research Center.
– And so a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of an outbreak involved a coronavirus that’s escaping zoological classification and whose novel spike-protein region shares more in common with a commercial genetic vector than any of its wild relatives, and has other unnatural characteristics that will be discussed below.
– Another Chinese virologist, Xing-Yi Ge, appears as an author on the 2016 UNC paper and is also attached to the lab in Wuhan. Previously in 2013, he’d successfully isolated a SARS-like coronavirus from bats which targets the ACE2 receptor, just like our present virus, the Wuhan Coronavirus 2019-nCoV. And it turns out that the Wuhan Strain’s ACE2 receptor’s genes are quite unique: they’re almost identical to SARS’s spike-protein genes – despite the fact that almost none of the two coronavirus’s genomes are similar anywhere else at all. Beyond that, although the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome differs from SARS in four out of the five most important genomic spots that determine binding to the ACE2 receptor, they surprisingly don’t effect the protein-spike’s shape. And in an even bigger coincidence, these four spots also code for the outside region of the spike that allows entry into cells, and do not effect it either – allowing the Wuhan Strain to still use the ACE2 receptor to unlock cells while possibly gaining additional capabilities. The odds that this concordance was bio-engineered into the virus are several orders of magnitude more likely than for this to randomly have evolved in nature.
– Numerous videos purportedly from inside hospitals in Wuhan depict a crisis that is far greater than the numbers released by China to date. There is widespread but unverified online reporting that Wuhan crematoriums have been running 24/7, which is consistent with a recent peer-reviewed study that claims that as of January 25, Wuhan had over 75,000 infections – when the official number was just 761. Chinese language social media also reflects a sense of panic and desperation that is highly discordant with the numbers being released by the Chinese government. Who, notably, are refusing any direct assistance from the American CDC. (Evidence that China is vastly downplaying this pandemic’s severity: Example 1. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Example 5. Example 6.)
– Additionally, although another since-retracted pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in 2019-nCoV’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – critics quickly pointed out that the shared homology didn’t reach statistical significance. However a closer look at the data reveals that there were a few small shared genomic segments that, despite being physically separated from each other along each strand of DNA, all worked together to code for the Wuhan Strain’s protein-spike’s crucial receptor binding site. Something that is highly unlikely to have happened by chance. And despite most of its protein-spike being shared with SARS, these substituted segments weren’t shared at all – nor were they found in any other coronavirus.
– Critics have brushed off the Wuhan Strain’s shared homology with HIV as statistically insignificant, however clinical reporting indicates that the Wuhan Strain may be using this shared HIV homology to attack CD4 immune cells just like HIV does, as an unusually high percentage of patients are showing low white blood cell counts, especially the sickest ones. This is despite the fact that SARS – much ballyhooed as a close relative to the Wuhan Strain – didn’t notable effect white blood cell counts. Additionally, clinical treatment guides published online in late January by established Chinese medical sources note the progressive reduction of white blood cells, as well as the importance of monitoring this decline. And reporting from Thailand indicates that adding a cocktail of two different anti-HIV drugs to the typical treatment regime seemed to cure the Wuhan Strain.
– In a highly concerning turn, scientists have noted that the Wuhan Strain can have a “striking” short term rate of mutation which doesn’t indicate an artificial origin but captures the unique threat posed by this coronavirus regardless of its providence, since a faster mutation rates makes it more likely this virus can dodge testing and neutralize vaccines. Something there is already early evidence for.
– Giving further credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusual behavior as discussed above.
Given the above facts, either:
– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells appears most like a bio-engineered commercial product, that somehow managed to infect its first three and roughly one-third of its initial victims despite them not being connected to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history.
– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to stop the full story about what’s going on are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.
Medium user @siradrianbond provided all information regarding Dr. Zheng-li’s extensive grant funding.
What I wanted to hear, to dispel my paranoid speculation of bio warfare inaction! you may have the gender of one of the Chinese scientists wrong, from my reading elsewhere. Which source also claimed (with before and after screenshots) to have caught google maps relocating the virology institute from eight and a half miles to the twenty you mention, during the time of his research.
View at Medium.com
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no way these altered sequences can confer a conformation allowing binding to cd8/cd4 t cell epitopes, right?
Dan: protein folding that determines binding is extremely hard to predict – so a small set of amino acids (a peptide) might unexpectedly drive folding/binding
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More contrast makes for easier reading. Gray text on a white background is not the best combination. Black on white is.
Dan: Great point thank you much, trying to tweak it now…
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Dan: I haven’t been attached to the NSA for years. And most Western articles, most notoriously Zero Hedge, are accusing China of making a weapon.
I very specifically am not. This virus looks most like it was part of a defensive immunotherapy program.
Your labs have leaked SARS four times. Why not the Wuhan Strain as well?
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You know something isnt right when this and many western articles are speculating that “due to the busy new year China must have accidentally leaked their own virus” (this seems to be the prevaling narrative being pushed by western media at the moment)
Its reasonably to question the motive for spinning something fictional like this….
Who stands to gain the most from this event?
Also, even playing devils advocate and assuming the Western assumption may have some element of possibilty in that a virus in the Wuhan lab was accidentally released to China own detriment, a reasonable person may also wonder about the timing, in that China’s supposedly first known incident of accidental release of virus causing harm of any magnitude just so happens to be right around signing of historic trade deal and right before the lunar new year mass migration, hence they attack the element of timing by preemptively suggesting that due to the new year rush it must have made operations that much more error prone etc,
Now if you were a hostile power wanting to screw with China wouldnt this be consistent with being a plausible cover story to deflect suspicion?
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502/amp
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/the-concern-for-the-secretive-bio-geopolitics-201910110327
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/the-mystery-of-the-african-swine-fever-in-china-and-asia-201908260134
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-13/the-u-s-is-purging-chinese-americans-from-top-cancer-research
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
The guy who wrote the above article has ties to the NSA…..
Whats more likely, Chinese accidentally release their own virus that was designed to somehow only target their own peoples Chinese DNA and it just so happened to coincide with the absolute worst timing for China; or some hostile superpower took advantage of this for plausible deniability and then deflects suspicion away from them by spinning up this bs story? Who stands to win the most from this event and who stands to lose the most?
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The guys over there at Sinodefence seem to think this is “Case CLOSED!” as they claim “THE” most authoritative scientific journal in the world stated there wasn’t a chance that this was man-made; when I posted a link to your article I immediately got banned by them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200203231912/https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/coronavirus-2019-2020-thread-no-unsubstantiated-rumours.t8679/page-69
https://web.archive.org/web/20200203072915/https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/mining-coronavirus-genomes-clues-outbreak-s-origins
“Every time there’s an emerging disease, a new virus, the same story comes out: This is a spillover or the release of an agent or a bioengineered virus,” Daszak says. “It’s just a shame. It seems humans can’t resist controversy and these myths, yet it’s staring us right in the face. There’s this incredible diversity of viruses in wildlife and we’ve just scratched the surface. Within that diversity, there will be some that can infect people and within that group will be some that cause illness.”
So what gives? Well some of the Chinese guys at “Sinodefence” have overinflated egos and think they somehow represent the image of China and I believe they take the posture of not daring to speculate because admitting that China was the victim of a foreign biological warfare attack is showing weakness, and they may even believe if there was hard evidence it would still be in China’s favor to keep quiet to “bid time” and not directly confront and risk further escalating the issue, since this Wuhan virus is at most something that will make a big dent in China’s GDP growth over the next year or two, but nothing like a zombie virus or civilization ender, yet. Better to take a hit to economic grow and regress a few months/years than to expose those behind this attack and risk further alienation on the world scene etc…
As for your position, I think it runs contrary to the science establishment official story simply because you don’t disagree that this virus was indeed designer engineered to target Chinese/Asians, to be asymptomatic at first and with a convinently long incubation period, it just seems you admit the half truth that its man-made but argue the origin or rather the attribution as your point of contention. Anyone who worked in intel knows its the results, ends rather than the means that count. Some of the ignornant fools at Sinodefence even stated nuclear war was prefered to biological attack, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows tracking missile trajectories are a lot easier than ascertaining attribution in terms of finding the actual nation responsible for a sophisticated designed and cleverly released bio-weapon.
It is about asymmetric warfare to gain advantage, the timing (right before Chinese lunar new year), location (Wuhan being central transportation hub of China and a city that had been projected for 8% GDP growth in 2020 before the outbreak) and characteristics of the virus (targeting Chinese/Asian) are just too coincidental for this to be anything random or by chance circumstantial. Just way too fortuitous for there to be any other reasonable explanation.
Graham Allison often said that it would take some imaginative creative thinking to overcome the Thucydides Trap between China and the United States. The rising power doesn’t want to kowtow and suffer the fate of Japan’s four lost decade after acquiescing to the Plaza Accord ‘trade deal’, and the declining incumbent ruling power doesn’t want to give up its status and position and even the mere thought of détente is out the window as the American way of life is “nonnegotiable”. So what is left is the realization in Washington that time is on China’s side, and that if a military confrontation is inevitable anyway, then it would be advantageous for the US to strike first while it still retained the edge and initiative. But abscent an immediate kinetic force what other options are there to slow China down? Perhaps this is the creative imaginative solution illuded to by Allison, we have seen this virus cause the closing of borders, the pulling out of international companies and the re-routing of global supply chains to bypass China, and physical isolation of China without so much as a single bullet fired or sanction applied, it at once accomplished all the political objectives with none of the traditional political costs associated, no certain attribution, thus no blowback or retribution.
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As an American I know the military mind all to well. I will also never know the mind of God. So the powers that be that play God will always lose.
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The whole idea is to provoke China into responding and in the process having China make the mistake of giving the US the excuse needed to further exponentially escalate. America knows China prefers non-confrontation as the Chinese strategy is simply to build, to trade, to bid time and to focus on its own development and economic growth instead of worrying about confronting US directly.
Every nation simply does what’s in their own best interest, maximizing optimization strategies conducive to bettering its advantages. For the US it means taking an early and provocative challenge direct to China in the form of trade war, tariffs, tech bans, coercing allies to switch supply chains, kidnapping Huawei CFO, and surgical bioweapons tailored to Chinese DNA and deployed at the timing and location of max impact.
It would seem US is counting on the fact that China won’t respond to this attack in order to essentially score a big goal and earn major points for free. Even a total nonresponse is still a reply in the form of China believing it still benefits the most by ignoring this attack (and indeed not even publicly acknowledging it at all) and strictly focusing on growth path after it has recovered. Is this intended to merely knock China down a few steps off the development ladder in lieu of war in the South China Sea — since that could end up costly for US interests as well — or is it really a prelude to war, intended to severely weaken China so that an American initiated war later on would be on US terms and US timing and would be much less costly for America and the rest of the world after China had already been sufficiently decoupled and isolated from the world.
I think Chinese leadership miscalculated and mistakenly believed America would never go down the biological warfare route, just like they miscalculated and never thought the US would arrest Huawei CFO, or that the Trump administration would not put Huawei on the US entity list and then lower the 25% IP rule down to 10% essentially with intent to kill Huawei by choking off its supply chain rather than just playing nice by slowing it down but still giving it room to live. Even Huawei’s recent UK “win” is capped at 35% market share restrictions, Trump had personally begged Boris to outright ban Huawei completely, so the idea that America would adopt any stance of shared prosperity or mutual win-win propositions with the number two power in the world are naïve and misguided at best.
One wonders what would have happened had MacArthur not been capped and was allowed to use nukes to win the Korean War and capture the entire peninsula? The landscape would surely be very different today. But it would have crossed a Rubicon and set a precedent that would have sent the world down a different path. The world’s number one superpower using a biological warfare attack on the people of the world’s number two power for better or worse has also achieved the effect of crossing such a Rubicon of no return. But in the long term would this turn out to be an overplay?
Would it actually serve to prolong / restore American hegemony or would it inadvertently accomplish the opposite? Hard to tell but hindsight is always 20/20 and it would seem by America initiating the recent decoupling with China that it has already tacitly admitted that its opening up with China with the Nixon approachment was a strategic blunder of a mistake. The Soviet Union was going to collapse on its own sooner or later, but America’s warming up to China to further isolate the USSR was indeed an overplay in retrospect. America at the time believed opening up China would force it to be Westernized and made more democratic and ultimately serve American interests by bolstering US hegemony. Instead, China grew up and had other plans for itself. Taking out Mao Zedong’s son in Korea with napalms was probably on the whole detrimental to US interests’ long term, although it seemed like a great win at the time. Had Mao handed the country to his son its very likely China would have opened up to the world many decades later than what had been achieved by Deng Xiaoping. And today America would still be the sole unipolar hyperpower instead of Pompeo running around the world telling everyone that China is the “central threat of our times”.
War is merely the continuation of politics by other means. And you can never get more at the negotiation table than what you could possibly get in the battlefield with a dominant fighting force. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the next 30 years.
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