The world needs to know what happened at the Wuhan lab



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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not allowed to visit Wuhan City, China or the Wuhan Institute of Virology in early 2020. Since then, we’ve been trying to find out why. If we had encountered transparency rather than obstruction, it would not have been necessary to put the circumstantial pieces of the puzzle together ourselves.

On September 12, 2019, coronavirus bat sequences were deleted from the institute’s database. Why? He changed the laboratory security protocols. Why? He has filed claims for more than $ 600 million for a new ventilation system. What motivated this new need?

In January 2020, two hypotheses emerged about the origin of the new coronavirus: that it started in a bat, then infected another animal before spreading to humans in a “wet market” in Wuhan, where the wild animals are sold for meat; or that it emerged from the Wuhan lab. The story of the wet market has been encouraged by the Chinese CDC and the World Health Organization. Public health officials have argued that Covid-19 is like SARS and MERS, earlier coronaviruses that emerged from bats and spread through an intermediate animal.

But none of these viruses has ever evolved to the point that they can be transmitted effectively from human to human. There have been less than 10,000 cases of each virus in the world since the discovery of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. Which virus comes out of a bat cave and infects humans by the millions? It is not biologically plausible. If on the contrary, it evolved slowly over many years in nature, how come no one knows?

One of the theories in the lab hypothesizes that SARS-CoV-2 has been manipulated or “taught” to infect humans. Imagine several viruses passed through humanized mice (transplanted with human tissue and immune cells) to test their ability to infect human tissue. Notably, SARS-CoV-2 includes a sort of cleavage site that allows its spike protein to change orientation and more easily attach to a human cell.

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