Reading this, I find myself astonished by your lack of critical inquiry. It was quite obvious from the beginning that it was a lab leak. I wrote a short book, Conspiranoia, exploring this topic. Here is the most relevant section: "The mainstream narrative of the origin of Coronavirus-19 involves cross-species transmission of the virus from a bat to a human at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people, 650 miles from Beijing. What makes this story highly dubious is that Professor Zhengli Shi, the world’s leading research scientist into exactly these types of coronaviruses, ran the Wuhan Institute of Virology, just a few miles away from the market where the transmission purportedly occurred. The Institute was “China’s only P4-Level Biosafety Laboratory capable of storing, studying, or engineering Pathogen Level 4 microbes such as other coronaviruses, Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue.”
For years, Professor Shi — or “bat lady,” as she is known — and her team have not just been studying, but actively creating, new, novel Coronaviruses from bats, tinkering with them so they can cross over to human populations more easily. This research has been partly funded by the US Government, which gave $7.5 million in grants to Shi’s work at the Wuhan Virology Institute during 2014–2017. According to The Diplomat, the purpose of the grants “appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.” With hindsight, it is clear that this gain-of-function research should never have been done.
Shi was part of an international research team that took a Coronavirus from a horseshoe bat, combining it with material taken from HIV to make it more easily transmissible to humans. In a research paper co-authored by Shi, ‘Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin’ (2008), the researchers describe how, in technical terms, they were seeking to engineer a bat coronavirus so it can be transmitted to humans:
“From crystal-structural analysis of the S-ACE2 complex, it was predicted that the S protein of SL-CoV is unlikely to use huACE2 as an entry receptor, although this has never been experimentally proven due to the lack of live SL-CoV isolates. Whether it is possible to construct an ACE2-binding SL-CoV S protein by replacing the RBD with that from SARS-CoV S proteins is also unknown. In this study, a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudo-virus system was employed to address these issues. Our results indicated that the SL-CoV S protein is unable to use ACE2 proteins of different species for cell entry and that SARS-CoV S protein also failed to bind the ACE2 molecule of the horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pearsonii. However, when the RBD of SL-CoV S was replaced with that from the SARS-CoV S, the hybrid S protein was able to use the huACE2 for cell entry, implying that the SL-CoV S proteins are structurally and functionally very similar to the SARS-CoV S. These results suggest that although the SL-CoVs discovered in bats so far are unlikely to infect humans using ACE2 as a receptor, it remains to be seen whether they are able to use other surface molecules of certain human cell types to gain entry. It is also conceivable that these viruses may become infectious to humans if they undergo N-terminal sequence variation, for example, through recombination with other CoVs, which in turn might lead to a productive interaction with ACE2 or other surface proteins on human cells.”
The language is dense, but as one wades through it, the meaning becomes clear: The scientists in Wuhan “employed” “a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudovirus system” to make their novel coronavirus potentially transmissible to humans. Success!
Then eight years later, as Nature Magazine reported in 2015, Professor Shi’s team investigated “a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China… The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.” Success yet again!
The danger of Professor’s Shi’s gain of function research deeply concerned many virologists. Simon Wain-Hobson from the Pasteur Institute in Paris noted presciently, “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, fretted: “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.” In fact, in 2014, the National Institute of Health in the US prohibited this kind of research. Then, in 2017, it permitted this research again. It is telling that the mainstream media has done very little reporting on this."
Gain of function is the way the military was able to continue research into bioweapons despite the conventions forbidding this research. What isn't clear about this for you?
