Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag...
by wrycoder on Sunday February 26, 2023 @04:39PM
(#34949778)
Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
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.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied
for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
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.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/
[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...