Coronavirus: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Tue Sep 6 19:51:30 PDT 2022


COVID "Much More Easily Explained" By Lab Leak: Harvard PhD & Rutgers
Chem Professor

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/covid-much-more-easily-explained

Over the weekend, Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University laid out
what I can only describe as a damning chronology of circumstantial
evidence supporting the case for Covid-19 emerging from a lab in
Wuhan, instead of via natural origins.

Dr. Richard Ebright is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry
and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at
the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. Ebright received an A.B. summa
cum laude in biology from Harvard University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in
Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University in 1987.
You can find more on Dr. Ebright’s resume here and can follow him on
Twitter here.

I had previously interviewed Dr. Richard Ebright back in September
2021, where he said that Dr. Anthony Fauci had lied “knowingly,
willfully and brazenly” about gain-of-function research. In my
opinion, Ebright has been someone who has concerned himself with the
facts from day one when commenting about Covid. He isn’t an
anti-vaxxer (he called vaccines the “only way to end the pandemic” in
2021) and is hardly a conspiracy theorist.

Upon reviewing the thread laid out by Ebright, Justin B. Kinney, an
Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Princeton PhD
commented that the thread was “much more compelling" than the evidence
recently published by Worobey et al. and Pekar et al. in Science,”
referring to a July 2022 study that concluded the virus came from the
Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (and was riddled, in my opinion, with
conflicts of interest and ties to the CDC and WHO).

“This evidence is not dispositive, but were the lab leak hypothesis
incorrect, it would represent a staggering set of coincidences,”
Kinney wrote on Monday.

Ebright’s chronology, which can be found in its entirety here, lays
out the following.

A “Pandemic caused by a bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan - a
city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses,
but that contains labs conducting world's largest research program on
bat SARS-like coronaviruses.”

He then noted that in 2015 to 2017 “scientists and science-policy
specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
(WIV) was conducting and contemplating research that posed an
unacceptable risk of lab accident and pandemic.”

“In 2017-2018, [The Wuhan Institute of Virology] constructed a novel
chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate
in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and
4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on
cells,” he writes, citing two sources (here and here).

Then he points out how an NIH grant proposal focused on novel spike
genes with higher binding affinities:

    “In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, [The Wuhan Institute of
Virology] and collaborators proposed to construct more novel chimeric
SARS-like coronaviruses, targeting chimeras that replace natural spike
gene with novel spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding
affinities to human cells.”.

He also noted a DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to construct bat
SARS-like coronaviruses:

    “Also in 2018, in a DARPA grant proposal, WIV and collaborators
proposed to construct novel "consensus" bat SARS-like coronaviruses,
and to insert furin cleavage site (FCS) sequences at the spike gene
S1-S2 border of bat SARS-like coronaviruses.”

>From 2017 to 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was then
constructing and characterizing viruses at a biosafety level that was
“patently inadequate”, he says:

    “In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like
coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently
inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and
patently inadequate to contain a virus having transmission properties
of SARS-CoV-2”

And then, all of a sudden, Covid pops up - with the same
characteristics referenced in both grants, Ebright notes:

    “In 2019 a novel SARS-like coronavirus having a spike with high
binding affinity for human cells, and having an FCS at the spike S1-S2
border - a virus having the properties set forth in the 2018 WIV NIH
and DARPA grant proposals - emerges on the doorstep of WIV.”

Common sense dictates that the most reasonable explanation is that the
virus came from the lab, though natural origins can’t be ruled out, he
says: “SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 100 known SARS-like
coronaviruses that contains an FCS. This is a feature that does not
rule out a natural origin, but that is more easily explained by a lab
origin. Especially since insertion of FCS had been explicitly proposed
in 2018.”

“The FCS of SARS-CoV-2 has codon usage unusual for bat SARS-related
coronaviruses and has an 8-of-8 amino-acid-sequence identity to the
FCS of human ENaCa. These are features that do not rule out a natural
origin, but that are more - much more - easily explained by a lab
origin,” he says.

“In 2020-present, WIV and its funders/collaborators at EcoHealth
Alliance have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and
obstructed investigation...even though, if not connected to origin,
they most easily could clear their name though cooperation with
investigation,” he concludes.


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