Lushington D Brady, writing for the BFD’s Insight Politics, traces the CCP’s “litany of lies” in their unsuccessful attempt to cover up SARS-CoV-2 and its lethal spread of Covid-19. But how did Wuhan get the virus in the first place?
There are two schools of thought on where the virus originated, and neither theory is helped by the CCP’s obfuscating.
Lushington tells us that scientists warned in 2007 of the risk to humans of “the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.”
It is possible that an animal coronavirus found in bats and pangolins sold in the Huanan wet market in Wuhan is the predecessor of the human coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Many of the earlier cases of Covid-29 were around that wet market and a new genome study released just this month looked at possible origins.
“Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-221.
Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues21 (Fig. 1).
This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.
Neither the bat betacoronaviruses nor the pangolin betacoronaviruses sampled thus far have polybasic cleavage sites. Although no animal coronavirus has been identified that is sufficiently similar to have served as the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, the diversity of coronaviruses in bats and other species is massively undersampled.”
Nature.com
For the animal/human transfer theory to hold up, scientists must produce the animal coronavirus that precedes SARS-CoV-2. They suggest it exists and excuse their lack of evidence saying much more testing is required. Perhaps Donald Trump could add this onto the agenda for his next discussion with President Xi?
An important aspect of SARS-CoV-2 arising from the study is that the virus mutates at a very low rate. This means a vaccine can be developed to last longer than, for instance, flu vaccine which must be renewed every year because the flu virus mutates at a much higher rate.
The second theory about the origins of Covid-19 is that it was created in a petri dish by mad scientists. This latest genome study says this theory is improbable for two reasons. First, “SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimized for binding to the human receptor ACE2” (not seen previously) and second, the method of replication is reverse genetic engineering and any evidence of that would have been obvious.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted.
Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used.
However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.
Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”
The only plausible theory scientists will accept is that the virus originated in animals and mutated into humans. They just can’t prove it.
Scientists struggle to trace the path in Wuhan because the CCP does not play fair. By the end of December 2019, Lushy says the Chinese “finally alert the World Health Organization (WHO) China Country Office about pneumonia with an unknown cause affecting people in Wuhan.” Disingenuous to say the least, given the CCP ordered all virus samples be destroyed.
On 5 January “Professor Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center provided the genomic sequence of the virus to Chinese authorities.” The CCP ordered all laboratory samples of SARS-CoV-2 destroyed and gagged the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from daily updates on its spread.
The BFD: Insight Politics
What motivated the CCP to attempt to pass off Covid-19 as pneumonia in the first place and then refuse to release updates on its spread and devastating effect on the rest of the world?
Did the CCP simply want to keep the wet markets open, or are they covering up something more sinister like the development of a bio-weapon where the virus accidentally escaped? I will go with the latter much sexier explanation and assume some clever scientist discovered an unknown virus and replicated it without using known reverse engineering. Feel free to disagree with me.
Although we have no answers, on a positive note scientists have discovered enough about the virus to ascertain that a single vaccine can be developed and that we are close to doing it. We just have to hang in there long enough to use it.
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