COVID ORIGIN Theories - one by one and where this leads us...

Here I am cheating... copying straight from someone else's work! AND THEN changing the topic to include intentional Bioweapons research

Having followed the COVID science for over 4 years now, I have slowly come to build many understandings involving ACE-2 receptors, furin cleavage sites etc., etc., in my brain, but these are not sitting securely enough for me to re-explain them to anyone else.

Now we have an article in which Dr. Yuhong Dong provides very clear explanations and clear illustrations of these matters.

Dr. Yuhong Dong, The Epoch Times’ senior medical columnist, is an award-winning senior medical scientific expert in infectious disease and neuroscience who is currently dedicated to researching solid modern scientific evidence of the profound connection between the mind, body, and spirit at the cellular, genetic, and systemic levels.

Dr. Dong, an M.D. and Ph.D., previously served as a medical adviser and pharmacovigilance leader at Novartis headquarters in Switzerland for seven years….

Dr. Dong earned her medical degree from Beijing Medical University in 1996 and Ph.D. from Beijing University in 2002. Then, as a doctor of internal medicine, she specialized in infectious diseases and immunology.

Dr. Dong outlines WHY the Wuhan wet market cannot be used to explain the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And she explains the markers that point straight to human-caused alterations of the virus. However, as not all questions are answered, leaving more detective work still to be done, she leaves the door open to “the unicorn effect” — stating that COVID-19 might end up recognized as simply being “something rare and extraordinary”. Despite scientists’ best efforts, people realize that “science doesn’t explain everything”. The question of COVID origins might eventually be added to the world’s list of unexplained mysteries published in the journal Science in 2021: 125 questions.

Using a Question/Answer format, I am copying out certain sections of her article posted here, possibly only accessible by Epoch Times subscribers.

HOW is the virus behind COVID-19 DIFFERENT from other viruses?

The COVID-19 virus’s unprecedented features—pathogenicity and transmissibility—are beyond what any virologist or doctor has previously encountered.

The original Wuhan COVID-19 virus could spread widely throughout the body, starting in the lungs and affecting various vital organs, including the brain, heart, blood vessels, liver, kidneys, and intestines.

Other viruses, such as the SARS virus, can also affect multiple organs, though not as broadly or severely as COVID-19. Most SARS complications have been self-limiting or reversible, although serious illness can sometimes result. In contrast, lethal complications such as heart failure, acute cardiac injury, and pulmonary embolism have been more commonly reported in COVID-19 patients. The flu virus infects far fewer organs and is much less severe than the original Wuhan COVID-19 virus.

What unique features lets this virus attack so many different parts of the body?

COVID-19 can attack almost every part of the body due to several key factors:

• ACE2 receptor binding: The virus has used its key—or spike protein—to bind to the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, which is the gatekeeper of our cells, allowing the virus entrance.

• Inflammation and cytokine storm: Once inside, the spike protein triggers inflammation, which can cause an extreme immune response (cytokine storm) that can lead to multiple organ failure.

• Blood vessel damage: The spike protein can damage blood vessels, causing blood clots in vital organs that can lead to severe complications such as heart attack, stroke, and sudden death.

What evidence disproves the “natural origin” theory?

Here, Dr. Dong outlines 2 key points:

a) there is no natural host

b) there are too many unique features in this virus, that to have all of them develop naturally would defy all odds

No Confirmed Natural Host

Despite extensive investigative efforts, no animals have been confirmed as the natural host of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 virus cannot infect bat cells directly, suggesting that bats are unlikely to be its natural host.

Peter Daszak’s publication has indicated that the COVID-19 virus was not found in pangolins (scale-covered mammals) in the wild or trade markets, so they are unlikely to be the intermediate host of the COVID-19 virus. Furthermore, pangolins live remotely from humans and are, therefore, unlikely to serve as intermediate hosts.

Uncommon animals traded at the Huanan Seafood Market, where most of the initial human cases were centered around, were initially assumed to be potential hosts of the virus. Some environmental swab samples from the market tested positive. However, no samples collected from those animals were found to carry the virus.

Unlike SARS and MERS, no animals have been confirmed as the natural host of the COVID-19 virus, despite extensive investigative efforts. Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

Furthermore, the so-called “patient zero” and one-third to half of the first batch of reported patients had no exposure to the Huanan Seafood Market. This fact suggests that the virus may have circulated in the community before being detected at the market.

Looking back, Jesse D. Bloom from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, identified a deleted dataset containing COVID-19 virus sequences from even earlier Wuhan epidemic patients, which he recovered from the National Institutes of Health’s archived database. Bloom conducted a genomic analysis, reaffirming that the Huanan Seafood Market was not the initial source of the virus outbreak.

Even though the virus’s spike protein can infect ferrets and cats, there is no convincing epidemiological or genomic evidence that these animals contributed to the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Unique Features Defy Odds

All coronaviruses have a spiky crown composed of spike proteins. The spike protein is divided into two parts: S1 and S2.

• S1 is the binding component analogous to the biting of a door key, which inserts into the lock. It allows for the virus to attach to host cells.

• S2 acts as the key’s base, or bow, supporting S1 and facilitating the unlocking process.

The “keys” of the COVID-19 virus—specifically, its spike protein—can be inserted into the lock via ACE2 receptors in our bodies more easily and quickly than those of other close relatives. This contributes to its high transmissibility and widespread impact.

After the COVID-19 virus initially attaches to the ACE2 receptor, a “scissor” enzyme called FURIN in the human body cuts between the S1 and S2 of the spike protein. This cleavage allows the virus to bind to ACE2 more seamlessly. The S2 subunit then fuses with the human cell membrane, stabilizing the binding of the S1 subunit with ACE2.

Scissors function like keys with sawtooth patterns that fit perfectly into locks. Strikingly, the COVID-19 virus has precisely the required human scissor-cut point—12 additional nucleotides—in the location between the S1 and S2 subunits of its spike protein. This insertion is perfectly positioned for human enzymes to cleave the spike protein efficiently, which helps the virus enter human cells.

Among the betacoronavirus family, only the COVID-19 virus has the unique FURIN cleavage sequence. Illustratioin by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

“SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 800 known SARS-related coronaviruses that possesses an FCS [FURIN cleavage site],” stated Richard H. Ebright, Board of Governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, during a June 18 congressional hearing.

“Mathematically, this finding—by itself—implies that the probability of encountering a natural SARS-related coronavirus possessing an FCS is less than one in 800,” he added.

Other unique genetic codes of the COVID-19 virus have further reduced the odds of natural evolution.

“Based on these features,” the probability of it having naturally evolved from its natural ancestor virus is “less than one in 1.2 billion,” according to Dr. Steven Quay, a former faculty member at Stanford University School of Medicine, who testified at the hearing, supported by his analytical report. 

This number is roughly calculated based on the phylogenetic tree theory. Even the genes of its closest relative virus, RaTG13—claimed to be the ancestor of COVID-19 by virologists from Wuhan—are only 96 percent identical to the COVID-19 virus, with more than 1,000 nucleotide differences.

According to molecular clock theory, it would take a long time—potentially several hundred thousand years—for the virus RaTG13 to naturally evolve into COVID-19, and there is no evidence to support such a lengthy evolutionary period. Consequently, scientists do not convincingly regard RaTG13 as the ancestor virus of COVID-19.

To put it simply, virologists cannot identify a reasonable ancestor virus for the COVID-19 virus based on current scientific theories. Nevertheless, there is some debate over these calculations, and not all experts rule out natural evolution.

Meanwhile, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was located in the same city where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. WIV has a long history of researching bat-related coronaviruses and SARS-like viruses. The institute has also done a significant amount of gain-of-function (GOF) research, which involves enhancing a virus’s functions.

The WIV naturally drew the world’s attention and became the focal point of the origin debate for the COVID-19 pandemic.

What research projects has the Wuhan Institute of Virology previously undertaken?

(http://english.whiov.cas.cn; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)

In the Wuhan lab, virologists have used bat coronaviruses to manipulate SARS-like viruses for at least a decade.

In 2010, for the first time, Wuhan virologists discovered that coronaviruses use the spike protein as a key to bind to ACE2 receptors, which are widely distributed on the surface of the cells of the body’s vital organs.

In 2013, they isolated a specific bat coronavirus (WIV1) that bore a type of spike protein that can bind to human ACE2.

In 2015, they edited the genes of natural viruses and engineered a new SARS-like virus that can infect human cells and jump from animals to humans.

A leaked NIH report reported that WIV created novel SARS-like viruses that can reproduce up to 10,000 times more copies of the original virus in genetically engineered mice expressing human ACE2 receptors, mimicking the human infection.

Apart from the naturally occurring bat virus (WIV1), the other coronaviruses found to bind to human ACE2 receptors are the SARS virus, COVID-19 virus, and the purported four created by the WIV through GOF studies—the three viruses mentioned in the above leaked NIH report and the SHC014-MA15 virus reported in the 2015 Nature Medicine study.

In 2021, The Intercept released a leaked research proposal called DEFUSE, submitted in 2018. This proposal contained a gain-of-function research plan to insert the specific cleavage site—FURIN—into the virus genes.

Though the viruses engineered by WIV have not been proven to be the same as those of COVID-19 viruses, WIV intends to alter and enhance the functions of bat coronaviruses.

Some argue that research conducted by WIV was done to better understand natural coronaviruses and their transmission with no surreptitious motives.

Can you walk us through the timeline of what was happening at the Lab and how COVID could have spread from there in late 2019, as per the “lab leak” theory

Eventful Period: October Through November 2019

[The Chinese Communist Party] reported that the first case of COVID-19 occurred on Dec. 1, 2019, with the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market as ground zero.

Multiple investigative reports have revealed that a severe, mysterious infection had already silently emerged in Wuhan at least two months before.

1. A group of U.S. scientific researchers, mainly from the University of California San Diego, examined the genomic data from the first cases of COVID-19 and used a scientific model to determine when the virus started infecting people. Their study suggests infection began between mid-October and mid-November 2019 in Hubei Province, China.

It should be noted that this and other genomic studies were retrospective and can’t definitively confirm transmission, although these findings point to the possibility.

2. According to the China surveillance data of Wuhan influenza-like-illness (ILI) presented to the World Health Organization (WHO), a steep increase (Fig. 1) appeared in the last week of November 2019 (Nov. 24–30), rapidly exceeding the trend across 2016–2018.

If that week’s ILI cases were caused by COVID-19 infection, considering an incubation period of two to 14 days, the infection-occurring period would fall into the week of Nov. 16 or earlier—the same time frame as reported by the above-mentioned U.S. genomic study report.

Moreover, the WHO report also highlighted an unexplained increase (Fig. 2C) in lab test-negative ILI cases in Wuhan in mid-November 2019. Meanwhile, a 2022 published study indicates that those influenza-negative ILI cases may have served as potential COVID-19 transmission.

3. Diplomats stationed at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan attested valuable first-hand experience of an unusual, mysterious outbreak in Wuhan in October 2019. Subsequently, U.S. personnel decamped from China.

The deputy consular chief at the U.S. Consulate in China, Russell J. Westergard, later wrote in State Magazine:

“By mid-October 2019, the dedicated team at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season. The disease worsened in November. When city officials began to close public schools in mid-December to control the spread of the disease, the team passed the word to Embassy Beijing and continued monitoring.”

4. A surveillance report on sewage by the Italian Department of Environment, Health, and Nutrition, and Veterinary Public Health indicates that traces of the COVID-19 virus had been found in wastewater samples from Italy as early as Dec. 18, 2019.

There is a potential answer for how COVID-19 cases could have come to Europe so early:

The 2019 Military World Games—a kind of Olympics for soldiers—was held in Wuhan starting Oct. 18 and lasted nine days. Nearly 10,000 military athletes from more than 100 countries, including those from major European countries, participated.It is reported that athletes from Germany, Italy, France, and Sweden became ill after their trip to Wuhan. Notably, these countries were the hardest hit early in the pandemic.

What questions are still not answered in this lab leak theory?

…one question is overlooked: Were the WIV virologists even capable of creating the COVID-19 virus, the virus that infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide, paralyzing the world’s economy and causing the biggest pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1918?

There is no smoking gun-level evidence that WIV created the same virus as COVID-19. The viruses produced from the GOF research found in WIV are still very different from the COVID-19 virus, though they have similar features.

The odds of fabricating the unique composition of the COVID-19 virus gene is around 1 in 1 billion. Could WIV virologists have beaten the odds? Do virologists have such skill to control their GOF research outcome completely?

Having a goal and experimenting in the lab doesn’t necessarily result in the desired outcome. WIV may wish to increase the function of the bat-derived coronavirus, but they might neither have been able to design the virus that caused a global pandemic nor control the outcome of their GOF research process.

Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a professor in environmental health and engineering, and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, commented in a Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health article, “If I was able to ‘reasonably anticipate’ what happened in the lab, I would have gotten my PhD in six months instead of four years.”

On the one hand, manipulating viruses could result in the creation of something extremely harmful; on the other hand, it may also lead to a virus that is less potent than COVID-19.

Though many scientists have leaned toward the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, the lab-created coronaviruses were very different from the COVID-19 virus. Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

Here now, I am going beyond the article written by Dr. Dong to point to further debates on this matter — debates coming our way through other sources:

What is China’s response to the “Wuhan lab leak” theory?

Writing in March 2023, the BBC reported that China strongly rejects this theory:

China has hit back at suggestions the virus may have escaped from a laboratory by calling it a smear. State media have consistently accused the US government and Western media of spreading rumours about the source of the pandemic. Responding to Mr Wray's remarks, China's foreign ministry spokesperson accused US intelligence agencies of politicising the investigation into the origins of the virus.

The US intelligence community had a history of "misdeeds" involving "fraud and deception", Mao Ning told a press briefing. As such, she said, their conclusions regarding the origins of Covid-19 had no credibility.

China has pushed another theory, suggesting the coronavirus may have entered Wuhan in food shipments of frozen meat from elsewhere in China or South-East Asia. …

A World Health Organization (WHO) investigation was supposed to get to the bottom of it, but many experts believed it produced more questions than answers.

A team of WHO-appointed scientists flew to Wuhan in early 2021 on a mission to investigate the source of the pandemic. After spending 12 days there, which included a visit to the laboratory, the team concluded the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely”.

But many have since questioned their findings.

A prominent group of scientists criticised the WHO report for not taking the lab-leak theory seriously enough - it was dismissed in a few pages of a several-hundred-page report.

"We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data," the scientists wrote in Science Magazine.

They're not the only experts who called for the laboratory leak to be looked at more closely.

Even the WHO's own director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called for a new investigation, saying: "All hypotheses remain open and require further study."

And Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111

The plot thickens…

What do we know about previous instances of human caused pandemic-related viruses?

Dr. Gregory Lewis of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, along with US risk analyst David Manheim, has published an list of 71 instances of “biological risks from anthropic sources”(biowarfare related “lab leaks”) from 1975 to 2016.

Here are just a few “highlights” including a one from Canada’s National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg in 2016.

Dr. Bary Samore served for four years as President Obama's White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). He reminds everyone that all of this research directly contravenes the 1972 UN Biological Weapons Convention

All of this has aptly been summarized and presented to the public by US bioweapons expert (and recently delicensed physician, Dr. Meryl Nass.

See the recording of the first of her two presentations given at a WHO focussed conference held in Italy in April of this year, complete with a downloadable slide show: https://cmsindipendente.it/seminario20240419

What do we know about the Fauci/Daszak/Baric/NIH/Wuhan bioweapons funding connection?

First of all, there is the published record of patent applications related to components of the SARS-CoV-2 virus AND components of the COVID-19 vaccines. These were filed coming from organizations connected to the former head of the US National Institute for Allergies and Infections Diseases (NAIAD) Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Essentially, already in 2002, people connected to major US health institutions sought to CREATE more infectious versions of coronavirus even before SARS-CoV-1.

https://archive.org/details/the-fauci-covid-19-dossier_202109

On April 19, 2002 – the Spring before the first SARS outbreak in Asia – Christopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, and Ralph Baric filed an application for U.S. Patent 7,279,372 for a method of producing recombinant coronavirus. In the first public record of the claims, they sought to patent a means of producing, “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus.” This work was supported by the NIH grant referenced above and GM63228. In short, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was involved in the funding of amplifying the infectious nature of coronavirus between 1999 and 2002 before SARS was ever detected in humans.

Against this backdrop, we noted the unusual patent prosecution efforts of the CDC, when on April 25, 2003 they sought to patent the SARS coronavirus isolated from humans that had reportedly transferred to humans during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. 35 U.S.C. §101 prohibits patenting nature. This legality did not deter CDC in their efforts. Their application, updated in 2007, ultimately issued as U.S. Patent 7,220,852 and constrained anyone not licensed by their patent from manipulating SARS CoV, developing tests or kits to measure SARS coronavirus in humans or working with their patented virus for therapeutic use. Work associated with this virus by their select collaborators included considerable amounts of chimeric engineering, gain-of-function studies, viral characterization, detection, treatment (both vaccine and therapeutic intervention), and weaponization inquiries.

Against this backdrop, we noted the unusual patent prosecution efforts of the CDC, when on April 25, 2003 they sought to patent the SARS coronavirus isolated from humans that had reportedly transferred to humans during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. 35 U.S.C. §101 prohibits patenting nature. This legality did not deter CDC in their efforts. Their application, updated in 2007, ultimately issued as U.S. Patent 7,220,852 and constrained anyone not licensed by their patent from manipulating SARS CoV, developing tests or kits to measure SARS coronavirus in humans or working with their patented virus for therapeutic use. Work associated with this virus by their select collaborators included considerable amounts of chimeric engineering, gain-of-function studies, viral characterization, detection, treatment (both vaccine and therapeutic intervention), and weaponization inquiries.

In short, with Baric’s U.S. Patent 6,593,111 (Claims 1 and 5) and CDC’s ‘852 patent (Claim 1), no research in the United States could be conducted without permission or infringement.

We noted that gain-of-function specialist, Dr. Ralph Baric, was both the recipient of millions of dollars of U.S. research grants from several federal agencies but also sat on the World Health Organization’s International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and the Coronaviridae Study Group (CSG). In this capacity, he was both responsible for determining “novelty” of clades of virus species but directly benefitted from determining declarations of novelty in the form of new research funding authorizations and associated patenting and commercial collaboration. Together with CDC, NIAID, WHO, academic and commercial parties (including Johnson & Johnson; Sanofi and their several coronavirus patent holding biotech companies; Moderna; Ridgeback; Gilead; Sherlock Biosciences; and, others), a powerful group of interests constituted what we would suggest are “interlocking directorates” under U.S. anti-trust laws.

These entities also were affiliated with the WHO’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) whose members were instrumental in the Open Philanthropy-funded global coronavirus pandemic “desk-top” exercise EVENT 201 in October 2019. This event, funded by the principal investor in Sherlock Biosciences and linking interlocking funding partner, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into the GPMB mandate for a respiratory disease global preparedness exercise to be completed by September 2020 alerted us to anticipate an “epidemic” scenario. We expected to see such a scenario emerge from Wuhan or Guangdong China, northern Italy, Seattle, New York or a combination thereof, as Dr. Zhengli Shi and Dr. Baric’s work on zoonotic transmission of coronavirus identified overlapping mutations in coronavirus in bat populations located in these areas.

https://www.corona-ausschuss.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FauciDossierWordFileText.pdf

All of this was outlined by medical patent researcher Dr. David Martin in his as he was interviewed in July 2021 by the head of the then Germany based Corona Investigative Committee, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich.

With such explosive evidence being made public already three years ago, what has happened since?

—> Reclaim the Net reports on the US State Department’s extensive censorship efforts

—> “Fact Checkers” like those at the official media partner of the World Economic Forum (in which CEOs from pharmaceutical companies have influential positions) claim to “debunk” the work of Dr. David Martin. Similar dismissive statements were made in 2023 after Dr. Martin was invited to present his sleuthing to a committee of the European Parliament. (Question: Do the “Fact Checkers ever provide relevant facts upon which they base their claim that someone else is supposedly providing a falsehood? No! For more on the fact-checking industry, please see Exhibit F here.)

And…

—> Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, the German American corporate lawyer who was previously influential in suing Volkswagen for their emissions scandal, and has sued other major corporate or financial institutions, is now being held in prison and sits in shackles in what by all accounts seems to be a kangaroo court in Germany.

Help Free Dr Reiner Fuelmich