JUMP TO: UPDATE II – UPDATE III
Jan. 25, 2021 (15:49 minutes long) ‘The Next Revolution’ host breaks down the evidence surrounding the origins of COVID-19.
UPDATE!
AMERICAN GREATNESS has an update:
Over 450 concerned scientists signed a Cambridge Working Group “Consensus Statement on the Creation of Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” which included the following warning:
Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.
For any experiment, the expected net benefits should outweigh the risks. Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches. A modern version of the Asilomar process, which engaged scientists in proposing rules to manage research on recombinant DNA, could be a starting point to identify the best approaches to achieve the global public health goals of defeating pandemic disease and assuring the highest level of safety. Whenever possible, safer approaches should be pursued in preference to any approach that risks an accidental pandemic.
Following a number of “bio-safety incidents” at federal research facilities, the Obama administration placed a moratorium on Gain of Function research, Hilton noted, but the moratorium was lifted in 2017.
Just before the 2014 ban, however, the Fauci-led NIAID funded the Gain of Function research at the Wuhan Lab, Hilton alleged, adding that NIAID continued to fund it for six more years, three of those during the ban.
The funding, according to Hilton, was laundered through a global health and pandemic prevention nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Dr. Peter Daszak, a British zoologist and expert on disease ecology.
Daszak subcontracted the research to Dr Shi Zhengli, head of the infectious disease unit at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak, it should be noted, was behind an early effort to label any reporting on the possibility that COVID-19 could have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab as “conspiracy theories.”
The scientist orchestrated a statement that was published in The Lancet medical journal in February of 2020, condemning “conspiracy theories” that suggest the virus doesn’t have a natural origin.
The statement was cited by numerous news outlets — and by fact check organizations to censor investigative reporting on the true origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Nearly a year later, Daszak admitted through a spokesman that he shot down these inquiries to protect Chinese scientists from online criticism.
“The Lancet letter was written during a time in which Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was intended as a showing of support for them as they were caught between important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online harassment,” Daszak’s spokesman told The Wall Street Journal in January.
Hilton reported that a November 2017 progress report signed by Daszak and Zhengli, among others, and titled, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus,” is tied to the grant, and seems to describe Gain of Function research.
“They made new viruses—man-made—in the lab. They infected human cells with them in the lab. And they then showed that their man-made viruses could replicate as a functional virus,” Hilton explained.
Hilton pointed out that SARS Covid-2 is 96 percent identical to the bat coronavirus the researchers were working on in the Wuhan Lab.
The only difference between that virus and the pandemic virus is how contagious it is. The pandemic virus, as we know, can be passed human-to-human. The original virus could not. And that four percent genetic difference between them is in exactly the places where Gain of Function techniques would be used to make the virus more contagious.
So while we can blame the Chinese regime for allowing the virus to leak, and especially for the cover-up afterwards, the terrifying truth may be that our own government commissioned the experiments that led to the creation of the pandemic virus in the first place.
Hilton said he has contacted the NIAID repeatedly to ask about the 2014 grant, and they have always replied that the grant in question was not for Gain of Function research, and thus not subject to the Obama administration ban……
UPDATE II
GATEWAY PUNDIT notes Judicial Watch’s getting over 300 pages of emails which included NIH, Fauci, and China communiques:
These revelations are puzzling. Why was Fauci’s NIH bending over backwards to accommodate China’s terms for confidentiality in regards to the China coronavirus and what was in the WHO’s ‘strictly confidential’ COVID-19 epidemiological analysis?
Judicial Watch announced today that it and the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) received 301 pages of emails and other records of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showing that National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, “strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020.
Additionally, the emails reveal an independent journalist in China pointing out the inconsistent COVID numbers in China to NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects Cliff Lane.
Judicial Watch continues:
The new emails include a conversation about confidentiality forms on February 14-15, 2020, between Lane and WHO Technical Officer Mansuk Daniel Han. Han writes: “The forms this time are tailored to China’s terms so we cannot use the ones from before.”
A WHO briefing package sent on February 13, 2020, to NIH officials traveling to China as part of the COVID response ask that the officials wait to share information until they have an agreement with China: “IMPORTANT: Please treat this as sensitive and not for public communications until we have agreed communications with China.”
UPDATE III
Wow! JUST THE NEWS has a follow up to this exchange
RAND PAUL vs. FAUCI
POST INTERVIEW
To Wit:
A prominent Columbia University virologist claims that in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic a U.S. nonprofit funded coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, China the results of which were used in “gain-of-function” virology research at the University of North Carolina.
Dr. Vincent Racaniello made the claim amid ongoing controversy over a recently resurfaced interview between himself and Peter Daszak, the president of the U.S. infectious disease nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
Both EcoHealth Alliance and the scientist leading the research at UNC have been heavily funded over the years by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has been directed since 1984 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic under Presidents Trump and Biden.
Fauci categorically and repeatedly denied that NIAID has funded gain-of-function research in a tense exchange Tuesday with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at a Senate hearing.
Racianello’s half-hour interview with Daszak took place in early December 2019 at the Nipah Virus International Conference in Singapore. Significant attention has been given to a segment in which Daszak appears to allude to having participated in “gain-of-function” experiments, a type of procedure in which scientists increase a virus’s pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in order to study its potential for human infection.
“You can manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily,” Daszak says in the interview. “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein — and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this — insert into the backbone of another virus, and do, do some work in the lab.”
Those remarks, when they resurfaced this week, caused considerable controversy due to Daszak’s role in funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars through his EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to bankroll coronavirus experiments there. The Wuhan lab sits just a few miles from where the first detected outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.
[….]
Experiments ‘confer a new property to the original virus’
Racaniello said that Daszak in the December 2019 interview was indeed describing gain-of-function experiments.
“Here is the idea,” he said in an email exchange this week. “You go into caves in China and sample bats for CoVs. You collect bat guano and sequence it to find the viruses. You don’t actually have the viruses, just their genome sequences. You want to know if these viruses have the ability to infect human cells.”
“Since you don’t have the viruses,” he continued, “you just take the spike sequence from all these viruses and put it into a coronavirus that you work with in the lab. Then you see if that recombinant coronavirus can infect human cells. It’s all done under containment to prevent any release. If the spikes of the bat CoV can allow the CoV to infect human cells, then they have the potential to infect humans and we should be making antivirals against them to prevent a pandemic.”
Those kinds of experiments, Racaniello said, “are considered ‘gain of function’ because they would confer a new property to the original virus.”
That research, Racaniello said, “was done in the laboratory of Dr. Ralph Baric in [the University of] North Carolina and was not funded by EcoHealth Alliance.” When pressed, Racaniello revealed that EcoHealth did have an indirect role in the funding of Baric’s work.
“EcoHealth Alliance provided funds to Zengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct bat surveillance for SARS-like CoVs,” he said. “Baric then received the spike sequences from Wuhan to do his experiments independently.”
“Daszak and Baric did not work together on this project,” he added.
Anna Marie Skalka, a professor emerita at the Fox Chase Cancer Center and one of the authors of the bestselling textbook “Principles of Virology,” did not expressly deny that Baric’s research constituted gain-of-function, though she claimed that the overall issue was more complex than that.
“I prefer to describe the research in broader terms, as gain-of-function seems too narrow and has acquired negative connotations,” she said. “The aim of such research is to learn as much as possible about the gene/protein in question so that one can begin to develop possible therapeutic or vaccine-related approaches.”
Queries to Daszak and Baric on Racaniello’s claims went unanswered.
The assertions from Racaniello — a four-decade veteran of academic virology who along with Skalka is also an author of “Principles of Virology” — constitute the sharpest allegations yet that both EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were involved, even if adjacently, with gain-of-function research prior to the pandemic.
Baric’s research, meanwhile, has been the recipient of millions of dollars in funding from the NIAID over the years, much of it focused on coronaviruses, including experiments in the “replication and pathogenesis” of those viruses.
Racaniello himself forcefully defended such research. “There is a very clear reason to do these experiments and if we had done them even more we could have prevented the current pandemic,” he said.
EcoHealth, meanwhile, has been the focus of controversy for the past year due not merely to its alleged association with coronavirus experiments but also to the fact that its work was for years heavily funded by the federal government, specifically the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
EcoHealth routed hundreds of thousands of NIAID dollars to the Wuhan lab in the years leading up to the pandemic to conduct coronavirus research there. Experts and commentators alike have called for a major investigation into the lab to determine if SARS-Cov-2 may have accidentally leaked from the facility and launched the pandemic.
The federal funding for the Wuhan project was pulled last year near the outset of the pandemic. Daszak himself told NPR last year that the Wuhan experiments were “funded entirely through the NIH grant,” as the news service put it. ….
And THE NATIONAL PULSE likewise discusses a letter in SCEINCE MAGAZINE/JOURNAL
Published in Science magazine, the report also slams the recent World Health Organization investigation for basing itself on faulty evidence and not sufficiently debunking the theory that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
“The information, data, and samples for the study’s first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis. Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely.” Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”
“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the letter posits. “Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public,” it continues.
Among the signatories are professors from institutions including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. Dr. Ralph Baric – whose gain-of-function research record and ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were recently discussed in an exchange between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul – also signed the letter…..
LINK IN PIC
