WUHAN, May 5, 2020 -- The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, was shut on January 1, 2020 by Chinese authorities. The common narrative told to us by the WHO, who got their information from Chinese authorities, is that the market was “ground zero”, or origin, of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The story has been told that the virus jumped from bats to humans, with the “patient zero” being identified as a shrimp vendor in that wet market. Chinese scholars saw otherwise. Here's a Q&A, with answers based on available, published papers: Q: What triggered Dr Wain-Hobson's warning? Dr Wain-Hobson gave a stark warning: “If transposable to humans, this would constitute a novel virus with a case fatality rate ~30 greater than that of Spanish flu.” "The controversial experiments confer aerosol transmission on avian influenza virus strains that can infect humans, but which are not naturally transmitted between humans. Some of the newer strains are clearly highly pathogenic for man.
"It will be shown here that the benefits of the work are erroneous and overstated while the risk of an accident is finite, if small. The consequence of any accident would be anywhere from a handful of infections to a catastrophic pandemic." Q: Who funded those GOF studies? US and European tax-payers, among others, as well as China, among others. Dr Wain-Hobson decried this fact: "Despite US and EU government funding, no risk-benefit analysis has been published, which again is surprising. This research can be duplicated readily in many labs and requires little high tech. It falls under the definition of DURC without the slightest shadow of a doubt and constitutes the most important challenge facing contemporary biology." Dr. Wain-Hobson decried the fact that "there has (only) been a single open international meeting in this period, which is surprising given that openness and discussion are essential to good science." Q: Did anyone listen to Dr Wain-Hobson's warning? Sort of. In 2014 the administration of US President Barack Obama called for a “pause” on funding (and relevant research with existing US Government funding) of GOF experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in particular. With this pause, the US Government also launched a “deliberative process” regarding risks and benefits of GOF research to inform future funding decisions. It tasked the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to make recommendations to the US Government on this matter. The ban was lifted on December 19 2017, according to Science. Q: What is the risk of directly infecting humans with a chimera virus? The same warning, authored by Felix Rey, Olivier Schwartz, Simon Wain-Hobson was also published by the journal Science in October 2013. They said the risks were "unknown". Q: Is SARS-CoV-2, which is causing such deadly run around the world, a chimera virus? It's hard to say. The jury is still out. It could very well be result of an accident of nature, human error, or an unintended result of a lab work that stretched for years. Q: Are chimeric viruses used as a bioweapon? Combining two pathogenic viruses increases the lethality of the new virus. which is why there have been cases where chimeric viruses have been considered a number of times for use as a bioweapon. For example, the Soviet Union's Chimera Project attempted to combine DNA from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, smallpox and Ebola virus in the late 1980s. A combination smallpox and monkeypox virus has also been studied. That's the downside. Q: What's the upside? On the upside, the 21st century is the so-called "Golden Age" of genetic engineering. It's a sort of a gold rush powered by cheaper, better sequencing technology. Many hope this would help alleviate various types of genetic disorders or cure genetically-triggered diseases. As the technology has improved exponentially, the cost to sequence a genome has fallen dramatically. For example, the first human genome (declared complete in April 2003) took $2.7 billion and almost 15 years to complete. Then cost of genome sequencing and analysis started falling drastically around 2008, from about $10 million. Based on data collected from genome-sequencing groups funded by the Maryland-based National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the cost to generate a high-quality 'draft' whole human genome sequence in mid-2015 was just above $4,000; by late in 2015, that figure had fallen below $1,500. In a 2019 report, NHGRI stated that the cost to generate a "whole-exome sequence was generally below $1,000". Q: Can chimeric viruses be used for medical treatment? Yes. Studies have shown that chimeric viruses can also be developed to have medical benefits. For example, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved the use of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to treat relapsed non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. By introducing a chimeric antigen receptor into T cells, the T cells become more efficient at identifying and attacking the tumor cells. Studies are also in progress to create a chimeric vaccine against four types of Dengue virus, however this has not been successful yet. Q: What is the similarity between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the HIV 'exoprotein'? Researchers have used public-domain genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It was first published by Chinese researchers from the Shanghai lab on January 11. That lab, was shut down on January 12, 2020. The same genetic sequence, however, was used by researchers in different countries to develop a test kit to identify the virus using a highly-reliable reverse transcription PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Indian researchers have compared the S (spike) Protein sequence between SARS-CoV-2 (or 2019-nCoV, or Wuhan coronavirus), and SARS. What they found is startling: An uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag. Gag, or group specific antigen, is the major structural protein (of HIV-1 and all other retroviruses) and comprises about 50 per cent of the mass of a viral particle. The Indians discovered the 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV-2) had 2 new sequences inserted — all of which can be found in HIV genetic sequences. This similarity was found through a simple search in GenBank (a genetic sequence database run by the US National Institutes of Health, NIH). The GenBank sequence database is an open-access, annotated collection of all publicly- available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information as part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.) The supposed HIV genetic insertions on SARS-CoV-2 gene are:
Q: The Wuhan coronavirus, does it have HIV genes that make it highly transmissible? In 2009, Dr. Frank Ruscetti, one of the founders of the field of human retrovirology, and Dr. Judy Anne Mikovits' labs isolated for the first time a new family of human retroviruses then identified as XMRV strongly associated with neuroimmune disease and cancer (a family of pathogenic human retroviruses is now called HGRV). For her part, Dr. Mikovits has co-authored more than 50 peer reviewed-publications and wrote the book Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autism, and Other Diseases. Dr. Mikovits told The Epoch Times that an analysis and comparison of the virus of the SARS-Cov-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19): “(it) apparently has genes that come from other human and other species including some envelope—the one from HIV." Q: What is the HIV’s gp41? Gp41 (transmembrane glycoprotein, composed on 345 amino acids) is known to virologists as a sub-unit of the envelope (or spike) protein complex of retroviruses, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Among HIV researchers, this spike made of protein is well-known as the “key” to infecting human cells, resulting in the functional failure of the immune system. Gp41, on the other hand, is a transmembrane protein that contains several sites within its ectodomain (parts of proteins that initiate contact with surfaces) that are required for infection of, and rapid replication within, host cells.
Among HIV researchers, these gp120 and pp41 has received much attention as a potential target for HIV-zapping vaccines. Q: Why is the HIV gp120 important for researchers? HIV is highly transmissible in humans. The functions of both Gp120 and Gp41 had been sliced and diced by virologists for years. For example, in a breakthrough study in 1990, Philip Berman and colleagues reported in Nature the development of a vaccine based on the HIV glycoprotein gp120, which binds CD4 and chemokine receptors on target cells, but protected lab chimpanzees from HIV-1 infection. The work eventually led to tests of recombinant-gp120-based vaccines in HIV-infected humans. If the observation by Dr Judy Mikovits is validated, it would mean something damning: the mechanism of infection, or “shedding”, of the deadly coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is quite deadly. It's now a well understood mechanism in cell biollogy: The key to its virulence is the S Protein (also known as "viral key”), which unlocks the ACE-2 receptor in human lung cells, that results in a deadly infection. But one research can disprove another, before another one disproves it. One claim can follow another. Q: What's the takeaway? The jury is still out on this story. If it's proven that SARS-CoV-2 is indeed a product of franken-virus that tinkered with life at the cellular level, a kind of science for its own sake, or a DURC gone horribly wrong, then the full course of the affliction it has brought upon humanity is indeed "unknown". Then it would prove that fears which prompted the warnings about its potential pandemic virulence were spot on. The current picture is pretty murky: Members of the elite scientific community around the world don't always see each other eye to eye. And we all know science can be a force for good or bad — the fire generated by nuclear energy can either power an entire country for years, or toast entire cities in a flash. In the global viral sweepstakes now emerging, there's a complex web of big egos, big pharma and big powers with conflicting ethos and motives at play.
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