I think that Brian's link to the Marketwatch article above has a very reasonable basis. I'll explain why but before let me just level set my background about what I will post below. I retired only two years ago, but I spent my career working in Biotech as a professional molecular biologist with a background in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, developing molecular diagnostics and molecular genetics tests. I'm also one of the inventors of PCR, which is the basic technology that underpins all current COVID-19 diagnostic testing.
I'm reading some interesting papers I've found on Net...
One of them, entitled, "
SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus pose threat for human emergence" has some disturbing content. The reference for this publication is:
Nat. Med. 2015 December; 21(12): 1508–1513.
This is as group of scientists working at Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. UNC Chapel Hill is a known and documented site for bioweapons research.
The abstract of the paper begins...
"In this study, we examine the disease potential for SARS-like CoVs currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations."
This is where it starts to get strange:
"Utilizing the SARS-CoV infectious clone, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse adapted SARS-CoV backbone."
Now...here's where it gets scary:
"The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild type backbone can efficiently utilize multiple ACE2 receptor orthologs, replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells, and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV."
So, gang...here's what I find alarming...these guys
purposely engineered this virus.
The original SARS-like Coronavirus that can only infect bats
cannot infect humans because a protein domain on the viral spike protein
cannot bind to the ACE receptor on human airway epithelial cells.
Well...these guys at UNC Chapel Hill engineered one with a Coronavirus spike protein that
CAN bind to human airway epithelial cells.
Now here's the kicker:
"Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from CoVs utilizing the novel spike protein."
In other words, our previous SARS based therapies based on monoclonal antibodies and vaccines developed for original SARS coronavirus
failed to protect this new, genetically-engineered, I might add, coronavirus from using the "novel" spike protein. In other words, what we developed as therapies for SARS..don't work.
If that doesn't sound like bioweapons development, I don't know what does..
Now...for the kicker of all kickers: One of the scientists on this publication, a certain Zhengli Shi, woh was working as a post-doc at UNC Chapel Hill. Guess where he actually works? At the "Key Laboratory of
Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Wuhan, China
The laboratory that the Marketwatch article references above is the SAME laboratory that Zhengli Shi works at.
Think about that...
