Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
As speculation mounts about exactly what Chinese virologists were doing in that sinister Wuhan laboratory, it might be a good time to ask, what is the difference between legitimate virology research and nasty secret military projects? The answer is less than you might think.
Australians Create a Deadly Mouse Virus
By William J. Broad
Jan. 23, 2001Australian scientists have accidentally created a virus that kills mice by crippling their immune systems, and warn that the technique may threaten to produce deadlier forms of human viruses and new kinds of biological weapons.
…
The Australian scientists inserted into the mousepox virus a mouse gene that controls the making of interleukin-4, chemical that plays a starring role in the immune system’s responses to foreign invaders. The aim was to enhance the making of interleukin-4 and thus the immune response so that even mice eggs would be rejected as foreign, blocking mouse reproduction.
But the female mice instead died, as did many of those vaccinated to resist mousepox. The scientists say the designer virus unexpectedly crippled the immune system to such an extent that the microbe reproduced wildly, killing most of the mice and making the rest permanently disabled.
The mousepox virus, they added, was used simply because it was well studied and convenient. If successful, the experiment would have progressed to inserting the interleukin-4 gene into a benign microbe of rodents, the murine cytomegalo virus.
The bodies of people, like those of mice, use interleukin-4 to control immune responses. Its signals are one of the main ways biological reactions to infection are orchestrated. That similarity is one reason the new finding worries experts.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/23/world/australians-create-a-deadly-mouse-virus.html
It is possible Wuhan scientists were doing something naughty. Ill advised Chinese resistance to open investigation is fanning the flames of suspicion.
But the theory that Covid-19 is a biological warfare virus is weak. A serious attempt to create a biological warfare virus should have included public knowledge enhancements like the lethal interleukin-4 hack, and who knows what other less well known immune system hacks. A real biological warfare virus, with minimal effort, would have been far worse than Covid-19.
One thing we do know is there was a Chinese study which claimed that isolation procedures at the Wuhan laboratory were deficient. That alone is justification for further investigation – likely some careless worker walked out of the lab one night, carrying a bat virus which had somehow managed to infect a human.
We have all see examples of what appeared at first to be malice, which on investigation turned out to be mindless incompetence.
and yet malice still exists
Seems to me that the arrogance and hubris inherent in high tech scientific research is all that is needed to explain the origin of the Wuhan. Its escape into the real world is just Murphy’s Law in action. A wet market origin is highly unlikely for many reasons, not the least of which being the CCP promotion of the hypothesis, but insectivorous bat hosts are not menu items (fruit bats are much larger and tasty), the bats occur nowhere near Wuhan, and it was winter there – not when bats are flying around to accidentally infect. Pangolins were just another red herring with a not very similar virus. Research on these bat viruses was a long term project at the virology lab, aided by funds from overseas, and probably seemed a good idea at the time. A population with antibodies to the bat virus was already known and studied (living around the caves that house the bats), so it probably seemed very relevant to human health and wellbeing. So much for good intentions. Add a paranoid totalitarian regime with a less than competent leader and you have our current pandemic.
You’re probably right. It did occur to me that it might be easier to harvest bats when they are hibernating but if the virus is linked to an insectivore species versus one that is more typically sold as food then that may very well be relevant. Unfortunately, we ignorant Westerners are left to puzzle it all out for ourselves due to the complete lack of cooperation from the Chinese. Presumably still trying to pretend it didn’t come from there. The old, “WHO me?”
The covid19 outbreak started in Yunnan, not Wuhan.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
The covid19 virus was first found in a cave in Yunnan in 2013. It’s a natural zoonosis (animal to human transmission) from bats and nothing to do with the yellow peril in their doctor evil laboratories.
Reality break over, tin foil helmets back on.
You cite the paper as though it proves your point but you made up your own conclusions and apparently did not even read the paper. Nowhere does that paper conclude or suggest what you are saying. You made it up yourself.
BatCoVRaTG13 was found to be on 96.2% similar to the human sars-cov-2 samples ie very DIS-similar in genetic terms. If you look at the graph you linked of the network analysis the bat virus is an outlier off on a spur, not at the central origin of the network.
That proves that it was NOT the natural zoonotic origin of the human virus.
If you wish to remain in denial about the dangerous work going in these P4 labs, worldwide, by all means go back to your safe little bubble of “reality”. But don’t insult others with your delusional C.T. comments.
You will find many papers supporting the Chinese government position and very few questioning it because any university that dared to question them would find that the supply of fee paying Chinese students would dry up, companies with Chinese interests would no longer support them. Any researcher who ignored this warning would find themselves out work at the end of their contract and would be blacklisted for other work given the short contracts for research students and the competition for places it would be a very courageous person (or someone near retirement) who chose to ignore this pressure. The Chinese government has also used overt pressure on the EU, the Australian Government and of course their friends in the WHO.
Inside China of course the pressure would be much more direct. They are not playing by our rules.
Adamsson many of these ‘students’ had never learned to speak English. And they were given special dispensation for this and there were circumstances where one student represented a group and supposedly translated the notes and acted as an intermediary.
The universities don’t care who passes what they just wanted the fees. In the early stages of the Wuhan virus, students were informed not to come to Australia from China. There were universities paying students to travel to Australia via other countries and spend 14 days in isolation in hotels.
Many of these students never return to China once they ‘finish’ their studies. Many of them choose to live in Chinese communities and have no intention of integrating with the mainstream Australian community.
The WIV started with a bat virus from Yunnan, but manipulated it by directed evolutionary processes in ferrets to gain the function of easier entry to human lung cells.
Same thing Bat Woman Shi was doing at UNC before the US government temporarily stopped funding insanely risky, worse than worthless GoF research.
The Peril has nothing to do with Yellow, and all to do with Red.
That has the ring of truth to it.
IMO, has the most evidentiary support. But can’t rule out the absoljute worst option with such a hideous, antihuman regime.
Phil,
Sorry, not evidence and certainly not proof. More like closing your eyes and wishing it would go away. You didn’t read your CCP talking points carefully.
“UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DID THE VIRUS ORIGINATE IN CHINA”
Coulda been anywhere else, as long as it’s not China. The CCP has decided that it didn’t come from China. We don’t need no stinking bat-cheese!
“The aim was to enhance the making of interleukin-4 and thus the immune response so that even mice eggs would be rejected as foreign, blocking mouse reproduction.”
I am really missing something here, it does not compute in any way I can see. If reproduction is blocked, any genetic modification would not be not be passed on from treated mice to effect the general population.
If it were possible and practical to modify all the mice at once, then no reproduction would still mean that the treated mice were a dead end – but there would also be no untreated mice to carry on the species.
However, if that were possible, it would also be possible, and much cheaper, to just brain each mouse with a rock or a hammer. Same result, much less money spent.
The truth is they just like playing God and any half-arsed excuse to play at sorcerer’s apprentice games is good enough to justify what they do.
Y’all are missing the Mad Scientist Effect. Why fool around with viruses? Because we (or at least some people with the right competence and experience) can, and they want because it’s cool, because it piques their interest and because they get lost into it.
Why many chemistry students used to dab with “energetic materials” (probably not anymore, I think they’d have NSA unleashed upon them these days)? Because it’s fun, and stuff like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWVw-j8eYSk
This is why
Yes, the leaked Wuhan Covid19 virus – a ‘gain-of-function’ virus by definition, was most likely being used to try developing a HIV vaccine. However, latest analyses of the Covid19 genome and functionality of the ‘spike’ confirmed by France, India and the USA separately, confirms the presence of 4 strains of HIV 1, V1,V2,V3,V4 along with gp-41and gp-120 human genes -all found in the zcovid spike….
Go figure….
My guess is that COVID was essentially natural, it may have been accidentally spread from a lab though. But the Chinese government were really fearful that something else had escaped for a while. I can’t believe the Chinese military are not experimenting with viruses and if they though one had escaped they would lie, weld people in their homes, spray the streets continually, lie some more, build new hospitals and morgue, provide thousands of funerary urns disappear doctors.
And once they understand bits not a scary leak, they might – might – even let a bunch of people infected with the mundane virus travel to Italy, France and elsewhere to spread it so that the picture is very muddied.
Biological warfare is more likely to be used by totalitarian states, but would probably be done in a way where all residents of the state were first immunised by stealth, except for a selected group that would be used to spread the disease to the rest of the world before dying.
I suppose the Chinese could have spread this “lower fatality” virus in the knowledge that it would cripple the rest of the world economically and allow an easier global takeover whilst avoiding the requirement of a mass immunisation in their own country that might raise a red flag. I guess we will know in a year or two.
Well, I have read this whole Epistemological Trespass thread. Now I eagerly await 1600 when I can bleach a bit of my mind with ingested ethanol. They eat Tide Pods don’t they? Let them wash it down with Clorox.
” … Accidentally Created an Unstoppable Mouse Pathogen”
—
As you do.
If there are “unstoppable mice’, I certainly hope they have a pathogen. Did I see this on a MIghty Mouse episode in 1966?
Can someone explain what this Wuhan related research was about back 2015 and why are almost all the authors from the USA?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26552008
“On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”
Gain of function research was a thing in recent years, despite many scientists and governments worried about the obvious severe risks. It’s not an American thing, but the whole developed world went nuts, buying into the excuses and false promises of the GoF experimenters. lame
“But the theory that Covid-19 is a biological warfare virus is weak”
Complete strawman. And an irrelevant diversion from reality.
For years China and the US have collaborated in creating Gain of Function Chimeric viruses (“franken” viruses) . Top Wuhan BSL-4 scientists were part of the research team at UNC that created a “franken” virus of this sort on 2015, work which had been banned by the NIH becasue it was so dangerous. This was basic science and vaccine development research, not biowarfare per se.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
“we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone”
Ralph Baric- UNC- microbiologist- his lab
Co-authors are Wuhan BSL-4 researchers Shi Zhengli and Xing-Yi Ge
Would it be accurate to say that we’ve possibly infected ourselves with a super virus that was specifically created for the purpose of studying how to fight super viruses?
I seem to recall a Star Trek episode that … never mind.
At this point it looks more likely than not that the manipulated virus escaped from a GoF lab at the Wuhan Institute. In that case, yes, people did infect other people with a virus made more infectious on purpose. Many virologists had objected to risky GoF research from fear of such a development, and the US temporarily shut down funding for it in 2014. So Bat Woman Shi just went home to China to work at the brand new BSL-4 facility built in Wuhan by France.
I wouldn’t rate it a super virus. It is more infectious than flu, but not much more lethal, if at all. Without testing a large random sample of people around the world, we can’t determine its infection fatality rate.
It won’t hold a candle to Spanish flu, of course. It may however prove comparable to the Asian (1957-58) and Hong Kong (1968-69) flus, both over one million deaths and estimates up to four million for the former. Presently, 232,000 deaths have been attributed to COVID worldwide.
In certain circumstances COVID-19 was far, far more letal and transmissible than “seasonal flu” eg Wuhan, NYC, N. Italy where there has been a large number of casualties and “surplus deaths”
Before distancing, masks and isolation, the virus ravaged nursing homes in crowded, big cities, and spread in NYC via the subway system. Under those conditions it apparently k!lled more than seasonal flu, although flu deaths were way down in the US this year, so we’ll see.
But in any case, a viral disease without a vaccine would be expected to k!ll more than one with a vaccine. The flu vaccine isn’t always of the right strain, but still better than none at all.
The terrible 2017-18 flu season was the worst since 1976, when the swine flu vaccine program was rushed.
“expected”, by whom?
What suggests that the flu vaccines does help anyone anywhere?