COVID being a lab experiment gone awry looks more credible by the day. Well, more credible for the liberal media folks who ignored it for months. We knew about it. Others did as well. Donald Trump, some Republican senators, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also pitched this as a theory that was dismissed by the mainstream press. Someone they hated mentioned it so they couldn't be bothered to do their jobs. Now, the intelligence community is investigating it, and the experts say it cannot be ruled out.
Again, this isn't new. The liberal media is trying to act like they played no part in smearing people who mentioned this. How many "debunked" headlines did you read about the Wuhan lab leak theory? Three Wuhan virology lab staffers fell ill in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. In December 2019, lab samples were destroyed. New video showed staffers handling bats without gloves or protective gear. They were covered in blood. Oh, and these bats were biting the technicians. Now, The Wall Street Journal published a recent op-ed by two scientists who have declared that the science points to a Wuhan lab disaster. It's heavy on the scientific language so I'll just let Steven Quay and Richard Muller, the two men who wrote the piece, explain:
… the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.
In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell.
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In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.
In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.
When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been grilled over the NIH's ties to the EcoHealth Alliance which funded the Wuhan lab. He admitted that he couldn't be sure if the Chinese lied about how they allocated the grant money. He did say that messing around with bat viruses was worth risking a pandemic.
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