China’s Incredible Covid Scrubbing By Brian Simpson
While the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis of the origin of Covid-19 is back on the menu, the delay caused by the Western politically correct establishment not wanting to agree with Trump, but most of all, not critically examining their darling communist China, will lead to a cold case. The CCP has had oozles of time to scrub Covid data. Nothing to see here.
“Detective work by a leading American scientist has revealed early sequences of the coronavirus genome were deleted from a key global database at the request of Chinese researchers.
The sequences, which have been recovered from cloud storage and published in a pre-print, have been described by experts as “the most important data” on the origins of Covid-19 in more than a year.
The recovered data does not support either the “natural origins” or “lab leak” theory over the pandemic’s source, scientists say. However, it suggests the virus was circulating in Wuhan earlier than previously thought, and could perhaps point toward answers on the origins of Sars-CoV-2 - answers that could not only help end this pandemic but prevent the next one.
The emergence of the sequences also suggests there is more data from the early days of the epidemic that China is sitting on, and which may be recoverable by investigators.
The paper was published on the preprint server bioRxiv by Professor Jesse Bloom, an influenza virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the United States.
While researching Sars-CoV-2, Professor Bloom found a project by Wuhan University that sequenced 34 positive coronavirus cases from January 2020, and 16 further cases in early February.
The project looked into diagnosing Sars-Cov-2 infection by a technique called nanopore sequencing. Its results, published in March as a pre-print then in June after peer review, remain publicly available.
However, the genomic sequences obtained as part of the study - which were uploaded to the US-maintained Sequence Read Archive (SRA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - are not.
These sequences - maps of how viruses are built - are critical for scientists studying how the viral genome has changed over time.
But searches for this project on the SRA - detailed in other literature as PRJNA612766 - return messages saying it has been removed, Professor Bloom found, a procedure that only takes place if the SRA staff are asked to take the data down.
The NIH told The Telegraph they had “reviewed the submitting investigator’s request to withdraw the data” in June 2020, and removed it.
“The requestor indicated the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues,” a spokesperson said. “Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data.”
The Telegraph has contacted the paper's authors for comment, but they had not replied at the time of publication. They also did not respond to Professor Bloom.
In the paper, Professor Bloom said he could see "no plausible scientific reason for the deletion".
He added: "It therefore seems likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence... This suggests a less than wholehearted effort to trace early spread of the epidemic."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1
“A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, according to people familiar with the classified document.
The study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and was drawn on by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins during the final months of the Trump administration.
It is attracting fresh interest in Congress now that President Biden has ordered that U.S. intelligence agencies report to him within weeks on how the virus emerged. Mr. Biden said that U.S. intelligence has focused on two scenarios—whether the coronavirus came from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.
People familiar with the study said that it was prepared by Lawrence Livermore’s “Z Division,” which is its intelligence arm. Lawrence Livermore has considerable expertise on biological issues. Its assessment drew on genomic analysis of the SARS-COV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, they said.
Scientists analyze the genetic makeup of viruses to try to determine how they evolved and spread in the population. Proponents on both sides of the debate over the origins of Covid-19 have cited such analysis to try to make their case.”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-23-report-finds-covid-lab-leak-theory-plausible.html
“The Lawrence Livermore report dated May 27, 2020, was important because it came from a respected national laboratory and differed from the dominant view in spring 2020 that the virus almost certainly was first transmitted to humans via an infected animal, a former official involved in the DOS inquiry said. The report’s existence was reported by the Sinclair Broadcast Group last month and was noted in a recent article by Vanity Fair.
Days before Biden was sworn in, the DOS issued a fact sheet saying that several researchers at WIV had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms before the first publicly known case. It also said that the institute had worked secretly with the Chinese military. The fact sheet was vetted by the country’s intelligence agencies.
On June 6, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed discussing the possibility that the pandemic started with a virus escaping from the WIV.
Steven Quay, who holds both a master’s and a doctorate degree from the University of Michigan, and Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that there are two factors suggesting a lab origin of the outbreak that has infected close to 175 million people worldwide.
“The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory,” the pair wrote.
Presence of double CGG sequence suggests SARS-CoV-2 came from lab.
A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words” that represent the 20 different amino acids. Quay and Muller noted that in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally.
But the double CGG sequence appeared in SARS-CoV-2.
According to Quay and Muller, the insertion sequence of choice in laboratory works is the double CGG because it is readily available and convenient and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. The double CGG sequence also creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
“Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?” they wrote.
“At the minimum, this fact – that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers – implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”
SARS-CoV-2’s lack of diversity suggests gain-of-function of acceleration
The difference in the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 compared with the coronaviruses responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) also suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab.
Both SARS and MERS were confirmed to have a natural origin – the viruses evolved as they spread through the human population until the most contagious forms dominated.
On the other hand, COVID-19 appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral improvement took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.
Such early optimization is unprecedented, suggesting a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread.
“Science knows of only one way that could be achieved and that is through simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved,” Quay and Muller wrote. “That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research.”
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