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As we’ve seen in the earlier instalments of the latest investigations into the origins of Covid, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing all sorts of research on SARS-like coronaviruses between 2012 and 2019. It was helped along by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, which funnelled millions of dollars of American money via Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health. Including dangerous “gain-of-function” research, then banned in the US.
But the WIV was also clandestinely working with the Chinese military, which was deeply interested in developing bio-weapons. This ‘shadow project’ was kept strictly secret from its overseas collaborators.
The WIV also conducted what one scientist calls the “most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken”: engineering mutant coronaviruses and injecting them into mice engineered to have human-like lungs. Three-quarters of the mice died and testing showed that the virus was impervious to existing SARS vaccines and treatments. The results of the experiment were never published openly in any scientific journal or paper.
Daszak, despite part-funding the experiment with the money from the NIH, only vaguely described the experiment in his April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH. He did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild SARS-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.
Daszak only came clean to US authorities after the pandemic broke.
He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results – even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement.
Daszak still denies the experiments were dangerous, or that they constituted “gain of function”. The NIH also denies ever approving “any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans”.
But despite this ‘most dangerous’ experiment and its terrifying results, the WIV and its collaborators were neither humbled – nor finished.
In March 2018, Daszak pitched for another $14m in funding, from the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The application proposed that WIV find large numbers of new SARS viruses and throw them in the already deadly mix of viruses from the caves.
DARPA declined.
But these were not the only dangerous gain-of-function experiments the WIV was playing with. In 2016, it was also planning to create a more infectious version of the camel pathogen MERS, by combining it with bat viruses. MERS had already killed 35 per cent of the people it infected during a 2012 outbreak in Saudi Arabia. In 2016, Daszak announced to a New York conference that Shi Zhengli was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people”. (This, even as he was denying that it was conducting gain-of-function research.)
Yet, despite all this, most of the work was carried out in the institute’s biosafety level-two (BSL-2) laboratories. The ‘precautions’ at such a laboratory are no more stringent than your dentist uses. US guidelines require at least level-three (BSL-3) precautions for similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.
Leaked photos appear to show badly degraded seals on refrigerators and researchers handling live bats with barely any precautions. US diplomats with scientific expertise, who inspected the WIV in January 2018, reported “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”.
And don’t forget that a “wet market”, where a menagerie of wild animals are slaughtered in revoltingly unhygienic conditions, is only a short drive away from where all this was happening.
In this toxic soup of conditions, the WIV in 2018 appears to have embarked on an insanely dangerous experiment, which very likely led directly to the pandemic outbreak in Wuhan.
As noted earlier, DARPA had refused Daszak millions more in funding for more research at Wuhan. But one of the proposed experiments in Daszak’s failed application is of particular interest, post-pandemic.
It involved inserting what is called a “furin-cleavage site”, a tiny section of a virus’s genetic order that makes it more infectious, into the pathogenic viruses.
When Covid-19 erupted a year later, it was the first SARS-like coronavirus ever seen with a furin-cleavage site.
Other researchers at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the WIV in 2019 state that the Wuhan indeed inserted furin-cleavage sites exactly as proposed in the rejected DARPA funding application.
The investigators also saw evidence that the institute was conducting “serial passaging” experiments on at least one of the mine viruses. This is a process in which lab animals are infected with viruses and monitored to see which strain is harmful to their health. The most damaging strain is selected for repeat experiments to encourage the pathogens to mutate into something more deadly.
The investigators spoke to a Wuhan institute insider who alleged serial passaging experiments were being carried out on RaTG13 [the closest known relative to Covid-19]. “Humanised mice with the serial passaging is a toxic combination,” said a source. “It speeds up the natural mutation process. So instead of taking years to mutate, it can take weeks or months. It guarantees that you accelerate the natural process.”
The Times
Another American scientist, Dr Steven Quay, believes Covid-19 was indeed created by inserting a furin-cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice.
This would explain a remarkable fact about Covid: “There has never been an example of a bat virus directly infecting humans and killing,” Quay says. SARS, for instance, infected people via an intermediary animal. If the miners who died in the cave died from a bat virus, “that was the first time in the history of human science that that happened. And the Chinese didn’t publish it.”
But engineering a new virus by inserting a furin-cleavage site into a bat virus and serial passaging it through humanised mice would explain why Covid-19 was so incredibly well adapted to infect humans.
