We in Malaysia experience similar virus. It is called Nipah Virus 75% fatality.
https://ms.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabak_virus_Nipah_Malaysia_1998–1999.
You should read more before coming out with skewed political view. This is science matter not political.
We are taking on covid not Nipah - I am aware of Nipah; please do not sideswipe the conversation like the CCP bots do.
If you still have challenges in unable to read scientific papers - instead just want to drink Xi Wine.
Read these papers....
Ge, X. Y., Li, J. L., Yang, X. L., Chmura, A. A., Zhu, G., Epstein, J. H., ... & Zhang, Y. J. (2013). Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor. Nature, 503(7477), 535-538. Ge, X. Y., Wang, N., Zhang, W., Hu, B., Li, B., Zhang, Y. Z., ... & Wang, B. (2016). Coexistence of multiple coronaviruses in several bat colonies in an abandoned mineshaft. Virologica Sinica, 31(1), 31-40. Hu, B., Zeng, L. P., Yang, X. L., Ge, X. Y., Zhang, W., Li, B., ... & Luo, D. S. (2017). Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus. PLoS pathogens, 13(11), e1006698.
Your own published papers were playing with covid viruses and infecting human cells.
Li, W., Shi, Z., Yu, M., Ren, W., Smith, C., Epstein, J. H., ... & Zhang, J. (2005). Bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. Science, 310(5748), 676-679.
The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology
(WIV), China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen
security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has been collecting large
numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2003;
including collecting more in 2016 (Hu, et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018).
Led by researcher Zheng-Li Shi, WIV scientists have also published experiments in which live bat
coronaviruses were introduced into human cells (Hu et al., 2017). Moreover, according to an April
14 article in the Washington Post, US Embassy staff visited the WIV in 2018 and “had grave
safety concerns” about biosecurity there. The WIV is just eight miles from the Huanan live animal
market that was initially thought to be the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Wuhan is also home to a lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control
(WCDPC). It is a BSL-2 lab that is just 250 metres away from the Huanan market. Bat
coronaviruses have in the past been kept at the Wuhan WCDPC lab.
Thus the lab escape theory is that researchers from one or both of these labs may have picked up a
Sars-CoV-2-like bat coronavirus on one of their many collecting (aka ‘”virus surveillance”) trips.
Or, alternatively, a virus they were studying, passaging, engineering, or otherwise manipulating,
escaped.
.... smoking gun....
Was the WIV doing experiments that might release PPPs?
Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have been
collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et al., 2005).
Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al., 2013; Ge et al.,
2016; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018).
Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already performed
experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab
reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013).
WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then
testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor
(Ge et al., 2013).
In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored
a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat
coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015).
In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat coronavirus
SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered live virus. The spike
was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway
cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed “notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice
(Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in
which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This
rMA15 was “highly virulent and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to
“overwhelming viral infection”.
In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi
lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the
human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made
recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly
passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017).
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Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an
emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted
passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s laboratory participated in GOF
experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced
recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these
experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors.
The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge
from the wild by creating one in the lab. (For a very informative technical summary of WIV
research into bat coronaviruses and that of their collaborators we recommend this post, written by
biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin).
It also seems that the Shi lab at WIV intended to do more of such research. In 2013 and again in
2017 Zheng-Li Shi (with the assistance of a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance) obtained a
grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most recent such grant proposed that:
“host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics,
pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell
cultures from different species and humanized mice” (NIH project #5R01Al110964-04).
It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of
SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic
engineering or passaging, or both.
Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses the WIV
was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous publications since Sars-CoV-2
first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds with
exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor “at least ten times more tightly” than the
original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Letko
et al., 2020).
This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling studies of
the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates like snakes, civets
and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020). In this preprint these modellers concluded “This indicates that
SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen”.
Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely plausible
that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the human ACE2
receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor.
[On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further. Pointing out
what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of collected coronaviruses,
which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge et al., 2016).]
....
NOTE THE targetting of receptor ACE2 receptor..... They were playing with human cells.
