Science draws closer to the origins of Covid

Based on the experience with SARS-1 in 2003 and MERS in 2012, we know that many people are infected with an animal host long before a coronavirus mutates to the point that it can pass from human to human. . A large set of end-2019 data – more than 9,000 hospital samples – is available on people with flu-like (and therefore Covid-like) symptoms in the Chinese provinces of Hubei and Shaanxi before the start of the epidemic. Based on SARS-1 and MERS, natural zoonotic theory predicts that 100 to 400 Covid infections would be found in these samples. The lab leak hypothesis, of course, predicts zero. If the new coronavirus were engineered by scientists pursuing gain-of-function research, there would be no case of community infection until it escapes the lab. The World Health Organization investigation analyzed these stored samples and found no pre-pandemic infections. This is powerful evidence in favor of the theory of laboratory leaks.

A few months after the SARS-1 and MERS epidemics, scientists found animals that harbored the viruses before moving on to humans. More than 80% of the animals in the affected markets were infected with coronavirus. In an influential March 2020 article in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and his co-authors hinted that an animal host for SARS-CoV-2 would be found soon. If the virus had been concocted in a lab, of course, there wouldn’t be a host animal to be found.

The WHO team searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals of 209 species, including wild, domestic and commercial animals. Not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found. This discovery strongly favors the theory of laboratory leaks. One can only wonder if the results would have been different if the animals tested had included the humanized mice kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A coronavirus adapts to its host animal. It takes time to perfect to infect humans. But a pathogen engineered through accelerated evolution in a laboratory using humanized mice would not need additional time after escape to optimize human infection. In their article on Nature Medicine, Andersen and his colleagues highlighted what they saw as a misconception of SARS-CoV-2 as evidence of zoonotic origin. But a team of American scientists mutated the coronavirus genome stem in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process, they actually stumbled upon the Delta variant. Ultimately, they determined that the original pathogen of SARS-CoV-2 was 99.5% optimized for human infection – strong confirmation of the laboratory leak hypothesis.

SARS-CoV-2 contains a key mutation: the “furin cleavage site” or FCS. This mutation is complex enough that it could not have been the result of spontaneous changes triggered, for example, by a mutagen or radiation. However, it could have been inserted by nature or by man. In nature, the process is called recombination: a virus exchanges fragments of itself with another closely related virus when both infect the same cell. The National Institutes of Health database shows no FCS in more than 1,200 viruses that can exchange with SARS-CoV-2.

As the Interception recently reported, a 2018 grant proposal – written by the EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based nonprofit, and submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa – contained a description of proposed experiments that would involve splicing FCS sequences into bats so that a research team can look for changes in infectivity. Darpa chose not to fund the grant, but the absence of FCS in related coronaviruses, along with the scientists’ apparent desire and ability to make such an insertion, strongly supports the lab’s original thesis. .

Based on scientific evidence alone, an impartial jury would be convinced that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaped after being created in a laboratory using accelerated evolution (gain of function) and gene splicing on the body. backbone of a bat coronavirus. Using standard statistical methods, we can quantify the likelihood of the laboratory leak hypothesis versus that of zoonosis. The odds favor a lab leak hugely, far more than the 99% confidence usually required for a breakthrough scientific discovery.

WHO launches new investigation. Why? The studies have been done. The research is there. As in “The Stolen Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe, the crucial evidence is already in sight, if only it looked. Let China keep its firewall secret; a suspect who refuses to testify can still be convicted. We have an eyewitness, a whistleblower who escaped Wuhan and brought details of the origin of the pandemic that the Chinese Communist Party cannot hide. The name of the whistleblower is SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Muller is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley and former Principal Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr Quay is founder of Atossa Therapeutics and co-author of “The Origin of the Virus: The Truths Behind the Microbe That Killed Millions”.