The murky, patchwork trail of evidence of the origins of the Covid pandemic have so far exposed several certainties. The first is that it truly, as Donald Trump famously said, “came from China”. The wild viruses which became Covid in all its variants were retrieved from a remote mine in China and taken to the Wuhan Insitute of Virology. The likely Patients 0 of the outbreak were all scientists at the WIV.
The second certainty is that the WIV collaborated not just with American-funded researchers, but – under a suffocating veil of secrecy – with the Chinese military, who were deeply interested in weaponising the coronaviruses found by the WIV.
A third certainty is that the WIV was conducting terrifyingly dangerous research known as “gain of function”.
Gain of function involves deliberately mutating wild viruses in order to make them both more virulent and deadlier to humans. The theory is that by creating likely pandemic viruses in the lab, scientists can pre-emptively engineer vaccines and jump the gun on the next pandemic. Such work was pioneered in the early 2000s by virologist Ralph Baric at the University of Carolina.
Baric was aware this type of “gain of function” work, so-called because it can enhance virus potency, was controversial and could have a sinister application.
“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”
Other scientists were even more alarmed. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, argued that such research did nothing but create “a new, non-natural risk”. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, argued in Nature in 2015 that, if such a virus escaped a lab, “nobody could predict the trajectory”. Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, in Washington, said that “the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high”.
Such was the alarm over this perilous research that, in October 2014, the Obama administration banned it in the US.
It was already too late.
The year before, Shi Zhengli at the WIV contacted Baric, and he duly loaned his expertise to their research. In May 2014, Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health awarded $3.7m to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the close collaborator with Shi and the WIV. Half a million of that money was funneled to Wuhan to pay for lab equipment, while another $130 went personally to Shi and her assistant.
Even after the ban on GoF in the US, Baric successfully lobbied the NIH to approve a loophole to allow the collaboration with Wuhan.
The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined SARS copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for SARS. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.
But Shi and her team, working on their secretive shadow project, were far from done. So, it embarked on what Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. They selected three mutant viruses, created at the lab by mixing one of the wild viruses found in the cave, named WIV1, with other SARS-like viruses, which had all been known to infect human cells. The mutant viruses were then injected into the noses of mice who had been engineered to have human-like lungs.
The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.
The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 [a second SARS-like virus] killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.
The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked […]
The researchers’ tests also showed vaccines and other treatments developed to combat SARS were not effective against the new virus.
The Times
In keeping with the new veil of secrecy, the results of that experiment were never published openly in any scientific journal or paper.
And, even after the “most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken”, they still weren’t anywhere near finished.
