Playing with viruses

A beautiful house with a view over the lake was destroyed years ago by the grandchildren playing with matches under the deck, right out of a parent’s nightmare. But what if the grandchildren are adults, scientists, virologists, playing with deadly viruses, with no goal in mind other than seeing what they can do with genetic recombinatory technologies?

Well folks, that appears to be exactly what happened with COVID.

According to an article in  the National Post this morning,

 

Wuhan and U.S. scientists were planning to create entirely new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic code of other viruses, proposals show.

Documents leaked last month of a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), reveal that the international team of scientists was planning to mix genetic data of closely related strains, and grow new viruses.

A genetics expert working with the World Health Organization who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match in nature has never been found.So far, the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was found in Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Scientists expect a direct ancestor to be about a 99.98 per cent match, and none has been found so far.
The DARPA proposals, which were leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group, show that the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence, which was an average of all the strains.Explaining the proposal, a WHO collaborator who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said that the team planned to “take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them… They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural – as it is the average of natural viruses.”The proposal, which was not funded, was submitted by the British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a consortium including Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore.The WHO source said: “If Sars-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 per cent similarity to each other… I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing. The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more… Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation.”

Daszak, a member of the WHO team investigating the pandemic origins, was also behind a letter published in The Lancet, which dismissed suggestions that COVID-19 did not have a natural origin as a conspiracy theory.

So the guy behind the claims that COVID has a natural origin was also the lead in the proposal to create the frankenvirus. There is more to come in this tale of conflicts of interest, bad faith, and cosmic arrogance.

Unfortunately, as I am not the Master of the Universe, I cannot have Daszak hanged for crimes against humanity.

 

Peter Daszak, virologist, and possible author of COVID-19

 

Watch Daszak assert that there is no evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, which he claimed was “well built, well designed and well run.” The whole CNN piece is carefully designed to make you believe COVID came from an animal market. But Daszak was interested in not finding the truth if it meant the virology lab leaked COVID, or if evidence led back to his possible involvement in the viral research that created the COVID blend.