“Sunday Times” Bombshell: Yes, Covid a CCP Bioweapon! By Richard Miller (London)

I am willing to bet that the Australian press did not give front page coverage to this story. The Sunday Times has concluded its investigation of the origins of Covid, and concludes that communist Chinese scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of virology were working on gain-of-function genetic engineering, to make a new mutant coronavirus at the same time as the pandemic, so called, began. A lab leak occurred, but there is not enough information to determine if this was accidental or deliberate. The smoking gun is that the communist Chinese virologists were working on a vaccine at the same time. As well, China deliberately was secretive about the outbreaks, which allowed the virus to spread to the West. It does not take much imagination, I believe to see much, if not all of the story as intended by the CCP.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-pandemic-china-america-qhjwwwvm0

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential reports reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report

“Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.

 

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.

However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.

They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

Separate analysis shows the centre of the initial outbreak of Covid-19, which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the institute’s laboratory, rather than at the city’s “wet” wildlife market as had been thought.

The US investigators also revealed how they had been given evidence indicating the institute had been working on a vaccine before the pandemic. “I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the source said. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”

Foreign experts who have sought to identify the source of the pandemic have been blocked from investigating by the Chinese state.

A team led by British bat expert Alice Hughes, who was an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which oversees the Wuhan institute, had been working in the mines. Hughes said she was barred from speaking to the media about her research and was being watched by China’s security service. The restrictions forced her to leave China and move to Hong Kong.

The microbiologist Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, is a long-standing opponent of the type of high-risk work undertaken at Wuhan.

He reviewed some of the experiments and describes them as “by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses — or indeed on any viruses — known to have been undertaken at any time in any location”.

Experiment that diced with death: inside the Wuhan lab

In November 2002, farmers and food workers in the Chinese province of Guangdong began to fall ill with severe respiratory symptoms. Medical staff soon followed suit. The Sars virus spread rapidly through 29 countries, infecting 8,000 people and killing 774. It was the first serious epidemic of the new century — and a wake-up call to scientists.

Sars was identified as a coronavirus, which until then had mostly caused mild symptoms, such as a common cold. If it could mutate like this, so could other viruses. A vaccine was needed.

The job of finding out how Sars had emerged was taken on by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its most famous scientist, 39-year-old Dr Shi Zhengli. She and her team zoned in on bats, which had been linked to other deadly viruses, such as rabies, nipah and marburg. She began searching for bat colonies in caves in southern China in 2004, earning her the nickname “Batwoman”. Faecal samples were sent back to Wuhan to be tested for viruses.

They began conducting experiments with Sars and other viruses. Shi was joined by a British bat expert, Dr Peter Daszak, who would become a close friend and collaborator. Born in Dukinfield, near Manchester, he obtained a degree in zoology at Bangor University and later moved to New York, where he took a management position in the Wildlife Trust, a non-profit organisation. I

Its work protecting pets and endangered species did not attract substantial funding. But after the September 11 terror attacks and the Sars outbreak, the US began to see the importance of funding work combatting bioterrorism and pandemics. The trust began to focus on how viruses might cross from animals to people and spark a pandemic.

Shi’s team provided the fieldwork for the trust’s campaign and the laboratories to test and experiment on the viruses. In 2009, the trust was given $18 million over five years from a new programme, called Predict, to identify pandemic viruses. Shortly afterwards, the trust was rebranded as the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak assumed the role of president. The Chinese collaborators who helped put him on the map were also rewarded: $1 million of the Predict grant was redirected to the Wuhan institute.

 

Tests on humanised mice

The truly cutting-edge experiments were being done in the US by the veteran virologist Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He used a technique to fuse together different pathogens by mixing their genes. To test the effect of these lab-created mutant viruses on people, he created “humanised” mice by injecting them with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours. His ultimate aim was to create a universal vaccine against Sars-type viruses — an objective still not achieved.

Baric was aware this type of “gain of function” work, so-called because it can enhance virus potency, was controversial and could have a sinister application.

“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”

By 2012, campaigners and scientists were starting to wake up to the profound risks inherent in coronavirus work. Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, in Washington, called for research on live Sars coronaviruses to be stopped.

“About 30 labs now are working with live Sars virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high,” Klotz wrote in a co-authored article. “Would one in ten escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high.”

 

Bioweapons warnings

In 2012, in a cave called Shitou in the remote mountains of Yunnan province, southern China, Shi’s team made a breakthrough. They recovered a virus that was the closest match to Sars of those found at the time. They labelled it WIV1, using the initials of the institute, and demonstrated through laboratory work that it was able to infect human cells.

But they were unable to grow sufficient quantities of a second Sars-like virus found in the cave, labelled SHC014, to do similar tests.

Shi needed Baric’s expertise. She contacted him in 2013 and he agreed to help. The Wuhan Institute provided Baric’s team with the genetic sequence for SHC014 so he could recreate the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides. The American scientists then inserted SHC014’s “spike gene” into a copy of the original Sars virus Baric had created in his lab and tested the new mutant on his humanised mice.

In May 2014, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded a $3.7 million publicly funded grant by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). More than $500,000 of it went to the Wuhan lab for equipment and a further $130,000 was spent chiefly on pay and benefits for Shi and her assistant.

Pressure was being exerted on the lab work, however. That year, Barack Obama announced a moratorium on all gain-of-function experiments that would be “reasonably anticipated” to increase a pathogen’s infectiousness or lethality. This included Sars-related work.

It could have been the end of the Wuhan-North Carolina collaboration, but a loophole allowed gain-of-function work to proceed if deemed urgent and safe. Baric made the argument to the NIH, which gave approval.

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Safety fear at Wuhan labs

The Wuhan institute began stepping up its own lab work using Baric’s techniques. It created two new mutants by fusing viruses with the WIV1 pathogen it had found in the Shitou cave. These experiments were mentioned in Daszak’s progress report for the year to May 2016, which he submitted to the US government funders. The same report disclosed the institute planned to create an infectious version of the camel pathogen Mers by combining it with bat viruses. Mers had killed 35 per cent of people infected during a 2012 outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

This triggered alarm bells for the US government because it would have involved the type of gain-of-function experiments that were still barred. According to documents obtained by freedom of information campaigners, Daszak argued the Mers experiment was not gain of function because it was unlikely to make the virus more pathogenic. A compromise was reached whereby the scientists would stop work and report to US officials if they created a new mutant virus that grew ten times faster than the natural virus it was created from.

That same year, Daszak announced to a New York conference that Shi was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people”.

By 2017, according to a paper published by Shi, her scientists had sought to create eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses found in the Shitou cave. Two of the mutant viruses were found to infect human cells. Most of this work was carried out in the institute’s biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) laboratories, which took only light precautions that have been compared to those used in a dental surgery.

By contrast, the US guidelines require level 3 (BSL-3) precautions for similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.

The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post. They observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”.

Creating a mutant virus

Around the same time, the Wuhan institute took another perilous leap forward with its work on the Shitou viruses. It began what Professor Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.

The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked.

The Sars epidemic had proved how lethal these types of virus were, and Sars itself was ten times as deadly as Covid-19. But Sars had been brought under control by quarantining, because the people who were infected exhibited symptoms a day or so before they could pass it on.

The experiment’s results suggested the new lab-made virus would be more difficult to stop if it leaked into the population, according to Ebright. It appeared to be highly infectious early in the illness.

The researchers’ tests also showed vaccines and other treatments developed to combat Sars were not effective against the new virus. The results of the experiment were not shared with other scientists in any scientific journal or paper.

The experiment was part-funded by EcoHealth’s grant money, but the FOI documents show that, while the Wuhan institute’s experiments were described in Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, he did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.

There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.

Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement.”