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Source: EcoHealth Alliance
Building Early Warning Systems Against Pandemic Threats
August 27, 2020
NEW YORK – Perhaps one of the greatest lessons from COVID is that we're not nearly prepared enough to fight emerging infectious diseases. Pandemics leave in their wake loss of life, major economic devastation, mental health crises, and many other unprecedented societal disruptions. By targeting the critical inflection points where novel pathogens make the jump from animals to humans, we can avoid the catastrophe altogether.
EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit working at the intersection of animal, environmental, and human health on a global scale, is proud to announce its latest program: The Emerging Infectious Diseases Southeast Asia Research Collaboration Hub (EID-SEARCH). This is one of a new group of Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health, with a grant of $7.5 million over 5 years.
"NIAID's investment in centers to tackle emerging diseases internationally is a great step in the right direction to preventing the next COVID. As we've seen, an outbreak anywhere can easily become a pandemic everywhere. Focusing research on emerging disease hotspots around the world protects every one of us," EcoHealth Alliance president and EID-SEARCH Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Daszak said.
The high biodiversity and rapid rate of land-use change in Southeast Asia makes it a prime location for new and emerging diseases, but it also presents an opportunity to design solutions for stamping out viral threats at their source.
Collaborators on this project include Conservation Medicine and government partners in Malaysia, Chulalongkorn Hospital in Thailand, Duke - National University of Singapore, Uniformed Services University in the USA, [connected to the Department of Defense] and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the USA.
"Duke-NUS brings the highest standards of research and laboratory capacity into a region that has seen a number of emerging disease outbreaks. Our work on EID-SEARCH will allow us to bring the latest molecular and serological techniques to identify and stop diseases before they have a chance to emerge," Lin-Fa Wang, Duke-NUS, Singapore, said.
"Thailand’s partnership in this Center will continue to build international collaboration with the USA on research capacity for emerging disease threats in Thailand and throughout southeast Asia," Dr. Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, said.
"This research will advance our understanding of the ability of zoonotic viruses to spill over into high-risk human populations and cause illnesses that may have been previously unreported, or undiagnosed. The results will be scientifically important, and have great public health value in the region, and globally, by identifying key pandemic threats in an EID hotspot," Tom Hughes, Director Conservation Medicine, Malaysia, said.
"With this Center, we will gain a better understanding of what viruses are out there in reservoir species and whether or not they have the potential to spill over into humans. The goal is to be better prepared for the next emerging viral pandemic," Dr. Timothy Sheahan, University of North Carolina's Gillings School of Global Public Health said.
Please go to EcoHealth Alliance to read the entire article.
The high biodiversity and rapid rate of land-use change in Southeast Asia makes it a prime location for new and emerging diseases, but it also presents an opportunity to design solutions for stamping out viral threats at their source.
Collaborators on this project include Conservation Medicine and government partners in Malaysia, Chulalongkorn Hospital in Thailand, Duke - National University of Singapore, Uniformed Services University in the USA, [connected to the Department of Defense] and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the USA.
"Duke-NUS brings the highest standards of research and laboratory capacity into a region that has seen a number of emerging disease outbreaks. Our work on EID-SEARCH will allow us to bring the latest molecular and serological techniques to identify and stop diseases before they have a chance to emerge," Lin-Fa Wang, Duke-NUS, Singapore, said.
"Thailand’s partnership in this Center will continue to build international collaboration with the USA on research capacity for emerging disease threats in Thailand and throughout southeast Asia," Dr. Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, said.
"This research will advance our understanding of the ability of zoonotic viruses to spill over into high-risk human populations and cause illnesses that may have been previously unreported, or undiagnosed. The results will be scientifically important, and have great public health value in the region, and globally, by identifying key pandemic threats in an EID hotspot," Tom Hughes, Director Conservation Medicine, Malaysia, said.
"With this Center, we will gain a better understanding of what viruses are out there in reservoir species and whether or not they have the potential to spill over into humans. The goal is to be better prepared for the next emerging viral pandemic," Dr. Timothy Sheahan, University of North Carolina's Gillings School of Global Public Health said.
Please go to EcoHealth Alliance to read the entire article.
The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora's box at Wuhan?
By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021
Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3. (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.
In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.
By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.
The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.
I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.
A tale of two theories. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.
The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the major point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.
Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.
From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.
"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife," they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.
Contrary to the letter writers' assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet's readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, "We declare no competing interests."
Peter Daszak, a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, talks on his cellphone at the Hilton Wuhan Optics Valley in Wuhan. (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called "no-see-um" or "seamless" approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.
The discussion part of their letter begins, "It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus." But wait, didn't the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors' degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.
The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.
First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.
If this argument seems hard to grasp, it's because it's so strained. The authors' basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can't have been manipulated.
But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus's progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper's speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.
The authors' second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA's close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.
Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus "would probably" have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.
And that's it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.
Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other's work. So why didn't other virologists point out that the Andersen group's argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today's universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community's declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.
The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.
Doubts about natural emergence. Natural emergence was the media's preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission's composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.
This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.
And as long as that remains the case, it's logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.
Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus's genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.
With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.
These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.
The spike proteins on the coronavirus's surface determine which animal it can infect. Image credit: CDC.gov
Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus's spike proteins before it could infect people.
Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China's leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or "Bat Lady," mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.
Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to "examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses]." In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.
The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Shi's lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.
"If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory," said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Baric and Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, "may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue." Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at "a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved."
That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.
Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Baric had developed, and taught Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.
Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. How can we be so sure?
end...
Editor's note: We aren't going to republish all of Nicolas Wade's material here so if readers want to continue reading this article, please go to Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences to continue reading, or go to Nicholas Wade's website. We would however, like to republish a paragraph from the very end of this article because it could be connected to the events that took place in Italy just after the Covid "pandemic" outbreak. There are thousands of Chinese immigrants working in the two northern Italian cities of Lombardy and Bergamo who work in Italy's fashion industry.
It is plausible some of these Chinese immigrants departed Wuhan during this time to work in Italy. These two Italian cities have large elderly retired populations who because of weakened health conditions were likely susceptible to the initial Covid virus infection. The question is was the tweaked virus brought into Italy back around October, 2019?
"Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus's origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe."The prestigious - not anymore - Lancet was the source of an article that was published recommending that Hydroxychloroquine not be used as an alternative to help relieve the symptoms of this Covid virus. This material has since been retracted. The Chinese virologist Shi Zheng-Li discussed in Nicolas Wade's article above, attempted to obtain a patent on Chloroquine in February, 2020 just after the outbreak as did an an American pharmaceutical firm. Chloroquine was shown to inhibit the virus in vitro. Shi Zheng-Li has received a lot of support from the news source the South China Morning Post. This Hong Kong-based news source has been shown to be sympathetic to the CCP.
Edited in news update for 6 June 2021:
The British Peter Daszak who heads the EcoHealth Alliance received $7.5 million form the NIH where Anthony Fauci heads. Daszak's zoonotic (an infectious disease caused by a pathogen [an infectious agent, such as a bacterium, virus, parasite or prion] that has jumped from an animal [usually a vertebrate] to a human) included six 1-year projects that received a total of $3,748,715 from the Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Interestingly enough, Daszak as head of EcoHealth Alliance was the only U.S.-based organization researching coronavirus evolution and transmission in China. This is when President Trump (Facebook doesn't want President Trump talking about Covid) stated that he thought the pandemic virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory supported by the NIH grant, and vowed to end the funding. Now we are seeing this possibility being discussed all over the internet with articles like Nicolas Wade's article. The USAID stepped in with a grant of $2.26 million to the EcoHealth program for a six-month emergency extension. There is so much information available on USAID's connections to the CIA may as well call USAID an "extension of the CIA."
"EcoHealth Alliance partners with USAID on the PREDICT subset of USAID's EPT (Emerging Pandemic Threats) program.[13] PREDICT seeks to identify which emerging infectious diseases are of the greatest risk to human health. Many of EcoHealth Alliance's international collaborations with in-country organizations and institutions fall under the PREDICT umbrella."
Peter Daszak worked with the Chinese virologist Shi Zheng-Li and are colleagues. Considering the British Daszak and Shi Zheng-Li are colleagues, it wasn't surprising to find the BBC running cover for Shi Zheng-Li and the Wuhan lab. The BBC is also now running cover for Anthony Fauci. Shi Zheng-Li received her PhD at the Montpellier 2 University in France in 2000, where she gained fluency in French. This might be one reason why France apparently assisted in funding the Wuhan lab in China including France's present involvement. In 2014, Shi Zhengli collaborated on additional gain-of-function experiments led by Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The money flowing into Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance doesn't stop with Fauci's NIH, it is also pouring in from the Pentagon.
NIH awards $7.5 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, months after uproar over political interference
Before going to the three video clips listed below of EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak, Wuhan lab virologist Shi Zengh-Li and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Professor Ralph S. Baric, please listen to this important discussion between the Highwire and Dr. Richard Flemming:
Zero Hedge released this material on 1 June 2021:
As more information and further investigation continues the level of deception is going to be ramped up tenfold:
During the initial outbreak the South China Morning Star was quick to point out the virus did not originate in China:
Coronavirus: 'strange pneumonia' seen in Lombardy in November, leading Italian doctor says
Coronavirus: 'strange pneumonia' seen in Lombardy in November, leading Italian doctor says
The political fallout here is going to get very nasty and people should be alerted to the possibility of a false flag attack to redirect anger. Keep in mind while listening to Tucker Carlson at Fox News, is that Hugh Auchincloss Jr. is the principal deputy director under Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Hugh Auchincloss comes out of the powerful and influential east coast Bundy family of bankers and lawyers through his mother.
Related:
Whatever it is the term "media" is incorrect:
Readers might want to scroll down to the first image that sort of looks like a "virus" at this post:
In the mean time, keep the Covid injections coming:
Nuclear war with China anyone?
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