New "Smoking Gun" Evidence for C-19 Lab Origin Highlights New Scientific Power Being Deployed in Lab Settings
Scientists were doing far more dangerous work than most understand
“Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
—Isaiah 49:16
Paid subscribers got a news blast last week about the “smoking gun” that showed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created in a lab.
Since then, a new report shows that not only did the virus come from a lab (the author is more cautious about such a definitive statement, but many experts believe this is the last piece of the puzzle), but also that virus “research” methods have given scientists incredible, terrifying power that few in the public or those outside of the discipline understand until now.
First to the game-changing evidence.
Peter Daszak and his organization EcoHealth Alliance submitted the DEFUSE grant proposal to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dept. of Defense) in 2018 that proposed gain of function research on bat coronaviruses to “defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high-zoonotic risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia.” Some of the work was to be done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That grant proposal was rejected. Nevertheless, a coronavirus with odd features emerged just a year later from the very Chinese lab in question. And it looks exactly how a virus would look if the DEFUSE work had been conducted as outlined in the proposal.
We now know this because FOIA documents have been released that show notes and drafts related to the DEFUSE proposal that carefully track with everything we know about the virus itself.
“Specifically, the scientists sought to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein; to assemble synthetic viruses in six segments; to identify coronaviruses up to 25 percent different from SARS; and to select for receptor binding domains adept at infecting human receptors.
“The genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, matches the viruses described in the research proposal…”
What’s of particular note are the molecular scissors called “restriction enzymes” proposed to be used to cut the virus into its six segments.
“These restriction enzymes occur in nature but can also be used in the lab to splice viruses. A trio of scientists estimated in a 2022 analysis that the likelihood of seeing the pattern found in SARS-CoV-2 in nature would be remote. Orders for one of these restriction enzymes, BsmBI, can be found in the documents.”
Several serious experts have called this the smoking gun.
This 2022 paper laid the case for evidence like this being an identifiable “fingerprint” of a lab-originated virus…
EXCERPT
To construct synthetic variants of natural coronaviruses in the lab, researchers often use a method called in vitro genome assembly. This method utilizes special enzymes called restriction enzymes to generate DNA building blocks that then can be “stitched” together [. . .] We found that SARS-CoV has the restriction site fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses. The synthetic fingerprint of SARS-CoV-2 is anomalous in wild coronaviruses, and common in lab-assembled viruses. The type of mutations (synonymous or silent mutations) that differentiate the restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 are characteristic of engineering…
What’s really telling is that we now know the scientists were going a step beyond what was initially thought. They weren’t just inserting spike proteins into known viral backbones. They were generating something new.
“…more candid early drafts of the grant show the researchers planned to test engineered spike proteins in these familiar backbones as an initial test that would help them prioritize genomes for the next step: the generation of synthetic viruses in six pieces.
“The spike proteins identified by the group this way to have “pre-epidemic potential” would be employed in the next step, the generation of “full genome length viable viruses.” The documents show that the scientists behind DEFUSE proposed a strategy to stitch SARS-related viral genomes together using six pieces.”
Officials at the highest level of national health and safety have brushed off concerns about what was going on. But we now know, once again, that scientists who make a lot of money off these dangerous experiments have a bad habit of saying one thing:
“They [the NIH] have argued that this U.S.-China scientific collaboration only planned to engineer viruses starting with viral backbones already in the public literature, and that these viral backbones are too dissimilar to have played a role in the pandemic.
…and doing another:
“The new documents however reveal that the scientists planned to use new reverse genetics systems and test viruses in vivo — in other words, to engineer live viruses with novel backbones.”
So far, the Wuhan Lab has not released the genomes of some of the viruses they had been working on. It’s no wonder Chinese scientists have not been forthcoming. Work was being done in Wuhan that was more dangerous than the biosafety level the lab was prepared to handle. This was to save costs.
If more documents and communications are released through FOIA, who knows how bad this story could get.
Could it be that the global measures taken to deal with the virus weren’t just about money, power, and control, but for some at the very top it was a reaction based on insider knowledge about just how dangerous a virus of this particular lab origin might be? How do we know that the virus we got wasn’t the least lethal they were synthesizing in Wuhan? As many have suggested, until we can get our hands on communications with the Wuhan lab and relevant scientists leading up to and during the pandemic, we may never gain these critical insights.