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Having had a frenemy dub me the Celery Queen of Conspiracy theorists, I decided to don my dear stalker hat and engage in a little interrwebs defective detective work for to see the latest offerings. And with the Sole Superpower's (what a laughable appellation that has become) Corona-in-Chief' broadcasting one pathetically lame accusation against China after the other from his bully pulpit on an almost daily basis, I thought I would puzzle together one of my own from the single source that has become one of my favorite go-to blogs since this nightmare began, namely Moon of Alabama, whose comment section is one of those rare species wherein the contributors actually demonstrate critical thinking instead of high-school-level name-calling so prevalent on such blogs as zerohedge, where they quickly descend into the mud-slinging muck of sophomoric shouting matches.
Engineering immune evasion:
A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence:
2015:
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs (same gene/protein in different species) of the SARS receptor human Angiotensin Converting Enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.
The emergence of SARS-CoV heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalization leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact3,4. Since then, several strains—including influenza A strains H5N1, H1N1 and H7N9 and MERS-CoV—have emerged from animal populations, causing considerable disease, mortality and economic hardship for the afflicted regions5. Although public health measures were able to stop the SARS-CoV outbreak4, recent metagenomics studies have identified sequences of closely related SARS-like viruses circulating in Chinese bat populations that may pose a future threat.
Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV.
Together, the results demonstrate that broadly neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV may only have marginal efficacy against emergent SARS-like CoV strains.
However, the vaccine failed to protect aged animals in which augmented immune pathology was also observed, indicating the possibility that the animals were harmed because of the vaccination.
Similar results showing protection against challenge with a lethal dose of SARS-CoV were observed in aged BALB/c mice with respect to weight loss and viral replication.
Having established that the SHC014 spike has the ability to mediate infection of human cells and cause disease in mice, we next synthesized a full-length SHC014-CoV infectious clone (clones are man-made) based on the approach used for SARS-CoV, which suggest that further adaptation is required for its replication to be equivalent to that of epidemic SARS-CoV in human respiratory cells and in mice.
March 2020 Editors’ note: "We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."
Note that these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, as an animal could well be the most likely source of the coronavirus, but an animal could also be the most likely source of a novel coronavirus that was engineered and then injected into that animal, thereby causing COVID-19.
Then:
There is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
"Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach." (Civets, a favored treat of crazy-rich Chinese, are often used in such experiments as described above because they have ACE2 receptors remarkably similar to our own).
So just because an animal, "is the most likely source of the coronavirus", in no way negates the possibility that said virus was engineered in a lab. That's why the Editors’ note above is so carefully worded. They have no wish for the public to realize that it was the push for a highly-profitable vaccine that spurred the genesis and accidental (I still hope) release of the highly contagious microbe itself.
Born in the USA:
Feb 29, 1919
Some of the work of U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID was shut down last year over safety lapses, shortfalls that were mirrored to some extent at other military research labs, and is still under a cloud:
"Just this week, David Franz, a former deputy commander of the lab, co-wrote a piece about USAMRIID for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “A Biosecurity Failure.” The article blamed the facility’s troubles on both mismanagement and its being treated as a “backwater” by the Pentagon."
Furthermore:
"A 2016 audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general on the entire military biological research enterprise said that “the health and safety of the public was put at risk” because those labs had “used protocols that were not validated for their intended use, been inspected irregularly or not at all, and had significant deficiencies and vulnerabilities that were not corrected by DoD management.”"
Published July 17, 2019:
Fairfax County ( 46 miles (or minutes) from Fort Detrick). The outbreak was in June 2019 and the lab shutdown was July. Health officials said they don't yet have a cause of the respiratory illness that sicked more than 60 residents at a Northern Virginia senior living community:
The outbreak at Greenspring Retirement Community in Springfield began June 30, 2019. Sick residents had symptoms such as coughs, fevers and pneumonia.
Three people have also died, but Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of the Fairfax County Health Department said Wednesday afternoon that those who died were "older" and had complex health problems (Sound familiar?). Officials don't yet know the extent to which the respiratory illness contributed to their deaths, he said.
The community has implemented infection-prevention measures including cancelling group activities, increasing cleaning, isolating infected patients in their rooms and restricting visitors, Schwartz said.
"The facility has done an excellent job implementing those infection-prevention measures," he said.
The outbreak was reported in the assisted living and skilled nursing areas of the community, where about 263 people live. The outbreak has now affected 63 of those residents. At least 20 were taken to a hospital.
The health department has sent several samples from infected patients to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing, but no cause for the outbreak has been identified, Schwartz said.
The health department is continuing to work with the facility on the investigation, he said. Testing for Legionnaires disease was negative, he said.
Schwartz said there were also reports of a respiratory illness outbreak at an assisted living facility several miles away in Burke, Virginia. About 25 people were ill there, including two with pneumonia.
August 5, 2019
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick citing, "Problems with disposal of dangerous materials."
In Oct, 2019:
Wuhan Military Games: 10,000 athletes from around the world were present in what has proven to be the starting point of the pandemic which has affected the whole world for several months. Some USA participants came from Fort Bragg, located about 350 miles from Fort Detrick.
Published on 05/06/2020 at 12:03:
Several French athletes have revealed in recent days that they suffered from the symptoms of Covid-19 following the Military Games which took place last October, 2019. This competition, in which more than 400 sportsmen took part, took place in Wuhan, the Chinese epicenter of the pandemic. Olympic medalist Elodie Clouvel unequivocally believes that she has "already had the coronavirus", as does her partner, the pentathlete Valentin Belaud.
November 17, 2019:
The virus infects its first victim in China.
None of which proves anything, of course, the point being that none of the Administration's accusations against China do either. The man who sat on David Letterman decrying the export of American jobs to China while sporting a necktie sold by one of his own companies that was made in China, never referred to his product as Chinese Ties.
The current American president is in the throes of a full-on campaign to poison the air, water, and ground of his own country. He made sure it wouldn't impact the profits of the insurance giants by first waging a battle to wrest access to health insurance away from those most likely to be thereby sickened. It started as part of a well drawn-out plan of 100 actionable items, to implement policies to boost profits by deliberately destroying the health and well-being of his fellow Americans, a fact that need be documented by nothing more than public statements from his own administration's official announcements or his own personal tweets. And the NYT's has kindly gathered them together in a list of regulations to be eliminated so as to allow increases in the amounts of arsenic and mercury, benzene and other VOC's, and a slew of other respiratory tract irritants from automobile tailpipes, all of which are known to kill. There is no need to list them all (they're in the article cited), as those last two alone will needlessly cause the premature deaths and rob the vitality of millions of children across the country, all of which explains why the specter of a virus adding a few hundred thousand to that death toll is a simple rounding number to him. Move on . Nothing to see here.
What does that prove? Not a thing.
But an administration that has opened the lab that was shutdown for its lack of security and questionable procedures, long before, like the economy itself, it was ready to be opened, and then sent research dollars to a lab his administration, per Josh Rogin, one of his own neo-conservative that:
"Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world (so that would mean in 2018), U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington (which they ignored) about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats".
That is, US-funded research that couldn't be carried out in the US because US labs aren't safe enough, and neither was the research, which is why it was shutdown during the Obama administration. The Fort Detrick lab was flooded and its sterilization system destroyed from climate-change-amped flooding. But in order to enable the increase in the releases of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, the current administration's hired hands and anyone else who wishes to retain their job must never mention the fact that their facilities are in danger from the extremely-amped weather generated by the changes taking place in our climate. So flood protection, or other precautions, even those as easily accomplished as temporary removal of multi-billion-dollar aircraft in the face of the most violent hurricane to ever ply the Gulf of Mexico's waters, can't even be suggested. No matter how avoidable nor expensive the resulting damage might be:
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| Climate-change denial's Collateral Damage. We'll just build more, we have unlimited Defense Funds. |
A lab posing as biodefense is, in US parlance (as evidenced by the real nature of the "Defense" Dept), is easily seen to be a bio-weapons lab.
There is nothing the US can bring to bear in its case against the Chinese that can't be far more easily conjectured, and proven, against the US itself. Not the least of which is the publicly announced desire to destroy the globalized trade system the US President has set out from day one to dismantle via trade wars, currency wars and now biological warfare against his own country:
A Texas company offered in January to make additional N95 masks. The head of Prestige Ameritech, Michael Bowen, offered to use four of their dormant production lines to produce as many as seven million masks per month.
But The US President preferred to used absconded defense dollars to instead build a wall his minority of followers wants erected to protect them from a Phantom Menace rather than use them to protect US health workers from being exposed to an actual threat they face every day while attempting to save lives from a virus his administration did nothing in the face of. Although the Bush administration also ignored warnings and allowed a known warned-against threat to materialize, this GOP-installed President has taken it a step further and, far from napping, as the VP Cheney admitted he was doing, assured the American public, still assures the American public, that this threat will just dry up and buh-low away. Much the same thing he told Prestige Ameritech to do when they offered to help.
The President of the United States has downplayed calls for greater testing, suggesting they're motivated by politics, then ordered more testing for himself and his staff.
White House issues memo requiring staff to wear masks in West Wing, having spent months decrying their inefficacy. "We don't need no stinkin' Masks!"
You can't, except in the Blighted State of America, accuse another country of responsibility for a pandemic your own fecklessness has caused to rampage through your own country while you simply shrug your shoulders and say, "Hey, it is what it is" (actual quote), and expect anyone outside of your benighted purview to take such accusations seriously. They are not worth the breath expelled to make them. They are a sad reflection of the sorry state of your own weak, flabby reaction to adversity.
More than that, they're just downright embarrassing.
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