China Economy: News & Discussion

johnq

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Chinese Whistleblower Li-Meng Yan Claims Coronavirus Lab Release Was in 'No Way an Accident' Amid Strict P3 and P4 Surveillance

Chinese Whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan has been making headlines for alleging that the coronavirus actually came from a laboratory in Wuhan as opposed to the previous belief that the virus came from a wet market. Li-Meng Yan alleged that the virus was manufactured inside a laboratory and that her seniors all knew about the virus but chose to keep it a secret.
Li-Meng Yan's allegations
According to her reports, the virus could have been stopped if they did not keep the information a secret when there were only five positive cases to begin with. She alleged that the deadly virus was already released but they only acknowledged it when it was too late.

Dr. Yan announced that she has been treated harshly by the Chinese Communist Party and has even experienced cyber attacks. Dr. Yan's original social media account was previously deleted but she has been able to make a new Twitter account that has not yet been taken down.
Click to expand...
Just recently, Dr. Yan also alleged that her mother back in China was arrested by the Chinese Communist Party in an attempt to threaten and silence her. However, the Chinese virologist is still very firm about sharing her story in hopes that the truth will be revealed.
The virus could not have been released by accident?
In another recent video that went out just last week regarding Dr. Yan's coronavirus story, she revealed even more information about the events surrounding its release. According to her, the virus was intentionally released due to how strict the laboratory was and how impossible a mistake could have happened.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan described the working environment saying that the P3 lab, where she worked, as well as the P4 lab, was under strict protocols and they were all put under strict surveillance and that only employees have passes. It would have been impossible to sneak out the virus without being detected unless it was an inside job.
She stated that they all have 24 hour 7 days a week surveillance cameras within the lab so if someone were to smuggle the virus outside of the lab, they would have been caught. There was supposedly an exam that was taken and that all of the researchers supposedly went through strict training in order to make sure the team was filtered. She then stated that "there is no way for these kinds of accidents to be released."
 

johnq

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COVID-19 AN ‘UNRESTRICTED BIOWEAPON’
Li-Meng Yan, A Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who worked in a WHO reference lab and fled her position at the University of Hong Kong, has published a second co-authored report, alleging that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was not only created in a Wuhan lab, it’s an “unrestricted bioweapon” which was intentionally released.
BY TYLER DURDEN FOR ZERO HEDGE


“We used biological evidence and in-depth analyses to show that SARS-CoV-2 must be a laboratory product, which was created by using a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government,” reads the paper.

SARS-CoV2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV 2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.
The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health.
As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both tot he reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.

The report also claims that the RaTG13 virus which Wuhan “Batwoman” Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues say they obtained in bat feces in 2013 (and which is 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2), is fraudulent and also man made.

Since its publication, the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 must have a natural origin. However, no live virus or an intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been isolated or recovered. Therefore, the only proof for the “existence” of RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank.

The report goes on to say that the RaTG13 genome could easily be fabricated, and that “an entry on GenBank, which in this case is equivalent to the existence of an assembled viral genomic sequence and its associated sequencing reads, is not a definitive proof that this viral genome is correct or real,” and that the process for sequencing DNA itself “leaves room for potential fraud.”

If one intends to fabricate an RNA viral genome on GenBank, he or she could do so by following these steps: create its genomic sequence on a computer, have segments of the genome synthesized based on the sequence, amplify each DNA segment through PCR, and then send the PCR products (may also be mixed with genetic material derived from the alleged host of the virus to mimic an authentic sequencing sample) for sequencing.The resulted raw sequencing reads would be used, together with the created genomic sequence, for establishing an entry on GenBank. Once accomplished, this entry would be accepted as the evidence for the natural existence of the corresponding virus. Clearly, a viral genomic sequence and its GenBank entry can be fabricated if well-planned.



RaTG13 has ‘multiple abnormal features,’ according to the report. For starters, it’s claimed that it was a fecal sample – yet just 1.7% of the raw sequencing reads are bacterial, when fecal swab samples are typically 70-90% bacterial. Second, the genomic sequence for RaTG13 contains segments of non-bat origin, including fox, flying fox, squirrels and other animals.

What’s more, China destroyed all evidence of RaTG13. “No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because, according to Dr. Zhengli Shi,the raw sample has been exhausted and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered. Notably, this information was known to a core circle of virologists early on and apparently accepted by them.”

Meanwhile, another coronavirus which shares a ‘100% nucleotide sequence identity with RaTG13’ – RaBtCoV/4991 – on a ‘short, 440-bp RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene segment.’

RaBtCoV/4991 was allegedly discovered by Shi and colleagues in 2012 and published in 2016, and colleagues have been asking if it’s the same virus as RaTG13.

Given the 100% identity on this short gene segment between RaBtCoV/4991 and RaTG13,the field has demanded clarification of whether or not these two names refer to the same virus. However,Dr. Shi did not respond to the requestor address this question for months. The answer finally came from Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and long-term collaborator of Shi, who claimed that RaBtCoV/4991 was RaTG1327.

Three suspicious facts

First, it makes no sense that ‘Batwoman’ Shi and her team wouldn’t have conducted whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991 before 2020, as it was suspected in the deaths of miners who suffered from severe pneumonia after clearing out bat droppings in a Chinese mineshaft.

Given the Shi group’s consistent interests in studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses and the fact that RaBtCoV/4991 is a SARS-like coronavirus with a possible connection to the deaths of the miners, it is highly unlikely that the Shi group would be content with sequencing only a 440-bp segment of RdRpand not pursue the sequencing of the receptor-binding motif (RBM)-encoding region of the spike gene. In fact, sequencing of the spike gene is routinely attempted by the Shi group once the presence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus is confirmed by the sequencing of the 440-bp RdRpsegment25,32, although the success of such efforts is often hindered by the poor quality of the sample.

“Clearly, the perceivable motivation of the Shi group to study this RaBtCoV/4991 virus and the fact that no genome sequencing of it was done for a period of seven years (2013-2020) are hard to reconcile and explain.

Meanwhile, genomic sequencing of RaTG13 was conducted in 2018.

Second, why did Shi delay publication on RaTG13 until 2020 when it’s got a Spike protein that can bind with human ACE2 receptors?

…if the genomic sequence of RaTG13 had been available since 2018, it is unlikely that this virus, which has a possible connection to miners’ deaths in 2012 and has an alarming SARS-like RBM, would be shelfed for two years without publication. Consistent with this analysis, a recent study indeed proved that the RBD of RaTG13(produced via gene synthesis based on its published sequence) was capable of binding hACE2

Third, there has been no follow-up work on RaTG13 by Shi’s group.

Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been shown repeatedly. However, such a pattern is not seen here despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2

Direct genetic evidence proving RaTG13 is fraudulent

Yan’s group closely examined the sequences of specific spike proteins for relevant viruses – specifically comparing mutations, and found that the spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 do not contain evidence of natural evolution when compared to other coronaviruses which naturally evolved.

A logical interpretation of this observation is that SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could not relate to each other through natural evolution and at least one must be artificial.If one is a product of natural evolution, then the other one must be not. It is also possible that neither of them exists naturally. If RaTG13 is a real virus that truly exists in nature, then SARS-CoV-2 must be artificial.

More:

It is highly likely that the sequence of the RaTG13 genome was fabricated by lightly modifying the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to achieve an overall 96.2% sequence identity. During this process, much editing must have been done for the RBM region of the S1/spike because the encoded RBM determines the interaction with ACE2 and therefore would be heavily scrutinized by others.

The paper concludes: All fabricated coronaviruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45 and ZXC21

Evidence herein clearly indicates that the novel coronaviruses recently published by the CCP-controlled laboratories are all fraudulent and do not exist in nature. One final proof of this conclusion is the fact that all of these viruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21, which, as revealed in our earlier report1, should be the template/backbone used for the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Despite its conserved function in the viral replication cycle, the E protein is tolerant and permissive of amino acid mutations. It is therefore impossible for the amino acid sequence of the E protein to remain unchanged when the virus has allegedly crossed species barrier multiple times (between different bat species, from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans). The 100% identity observed here, therefore, further proves that the sequences of these recently published novel coronaviruses have been fabricated.

Unrestricted bioweapon?

Yan notes that while it’s not easy for the public to accept that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, it indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon.

In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:



  1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
  2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
  3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.
All of the above have been met bySARS-CoV-2: it has taken hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).

What’s more, COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, which “renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging.”

“In addition, the transmissibility, morbidity, and mortality of SARS-CoV-2 also resulted in panic in the global community, disruption of social orders, and decimation of the world’s economy. The range and destructive power of SARS-CoV-2 are both unprecedented.

“Clearly,SARS-CoV-2 not only meets but also surpasses the standards of a traditional bioweapon. Therefore, it should be defined as an Unrestricted Bioweapon.”
 

Mikesingh

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Under the veil - China's forgotten poor! What they show is the glitz of Shanghai to portray China as an economic powerhouse, but the truth is elsewhere.

 

SexyChineseLady

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China's economy is the envy of the world
By Charles Riley, CNN Business

Updated 9:24 AM ET, Mon October 19, 202

London (CNN Business)China's economy expanded by 4.9% in the third quartercompared to the previous year, according to government data published Monday, showing the rest of the world what's possible when Covid-19 is brought under control.
The pace of growth was a tad slower than economists had expected. But there were plenty of signs of strength, with the services and construction sectors performing especially well.
China's economy has now recovered from its historically bad first quarter, when the coronavirus forced the country to shut down. GDP grew a cumulative 0.7% through the first nine months of 2020, the data show.
"China's economy continued its rapid rebound last quarter, with the recovery broadening out and becoming less reliant on investment-led stimulus," said Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist for Capital Economics.

 

johnq

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I am posting the newest article by Dr. Li-Meng Yan proving that Covid-19 virus is a bioweapon created in a Chinese military lab, and intentionally leaked out to the world. I am not including the referenced figures and citations (due to format limitations); the full report (in pdf format) with all figures and citations can be accessed via this link:
SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud
Li-Meng Yan (MD, PhD), Shu Kang (PhD), Jie Guan (PhD), Shanchang Hu (PhD)
Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation, New York, NY, USA.

Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract

Two possibilities should be considered for the origin of SARS-CoV-2: natural evolution or laboratory creation. In our earlier report titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route”, we disproved the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 arising naturally through evolution and instead proved that SARS-CoV-2 must have been a product of laboratory modification. Despite this and similar efforts, the laboratory creation theory continues to be downplayed or even diminished. This is fundamentally because the natural origin theory remains supported by several novel coronaviruses published after the start of the outbreak. These viruses (the RaTG13 bat coronavirus, a series of pangolin coronaviruses, and the RmYN02 bat coronavirus) reportedly share high sequence homology with SARSCoV- 2 and have altogether constructed a seemingly plausible pathway for the natural evolution of SARSCoV-2. Here, however, we use in-depth analyses of the available data and literature to prove that these novel animal coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their sequences have been fabricated. In addition, we also offer our insights on the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated naturally from a coronavirus that infected the Mojiang miners.

Revelation of these virus fabrications renders the natural origin theory unfounded. It also strengthens our earlier assertion that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.

The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health. As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both to the reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.

Importantly, while SARS-CoV-2 meets the criteria of a bioweapon specified by the PLA, its impact is well beyond what is conceived for a typical bioweapon. In addition, records indicate that the unleashing of this weaponized pathogen should have been intentional rather than accidental. We therefore define SARS-CoV-2 as an Unrestricted Bioweapon and the current pandemic a result of Unrestricted Biowarfare.

We further suggest that investigations should be carried out on the suspected government and individuals and the responsible ones be held accountable for this brutal attack on the global community.

Introduction

SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus and the causative agent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its tremendous impact, the origin of SARS-CoV-2, however, has been a topic of great controversy. In our first report titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route”, we used biological evidence and in-depth analyses to show that SARS-CoV-2 must be a laboratory product, which was created by using a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government. In addition, resources and expertise are all in place in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and related, other CCP-controlled institutions allowing the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in approximately six months.

What have not been fully described in our earlier analyses are details of the novel animal coronaviruses published by the CCP-controlled laboratories after the outbreak1. While no coronaviruses reported prior to 2020 share more than 90% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2, these recently published, novel animal coronaviruses (the RaTG13 bat coronavirus, a series of pangolin coronaviruses, and the RmYN02 bat coronavirus9) all share over 90% sequence identities with SARS-CoV-2. As a result, these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have filled an evolutionary gap and served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin. In this report, we provide genetic and other analyses, which, when combined with recent findings, prove that these novel animal coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their genomic sequences are results of fabrication.

1. Evidence proving that the RaTG13 virus is fraudulent and does not exist in nature

On February 3rd, 2020, Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues published an article in Nature titled “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin” (manuscript submitted on January 20th), which was one of the first publications to identify SARS-CoV-2 as the pathogen causing the disease now widely known as COVID-19. Also reported in this article was a novel bat coronavirus named RaTG13, the genomic sequence of which was shown to be 96.2% identical to that of SARS-CoV-2. The close evolutionary relationship between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 as suggested by the high sequence identity had led to a conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin. These striking findings have consequently made this article one of the most cited publications in the currently overwhelmed field of coronavirus research. Interestingly, an article published by Dr. Yong-Zhen Zhang and colleagues on the same issue of Nature, which also discovered SARS-CoV-2 as the responsible pathogen for COVID-19, received much less citations. This latter article made no mention of RaTG13. Instead, Zhang and colleagues showed that, evolutionarily, SARS-CoV-2 was closest to two bat coronaviruses, ZC45 and ZXC21, both of which were discovered and characterized by military research laboratories under the control of the CCP government. Immediately after the publication of this article, Dr. Zhang’s laboratory was shut down by the CCP government with no explanations offered.

Since its publication, the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARSCoV-2 must have a natural origin. However, no live virus or an intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been isolated or recovered. Therefore, the only proof for the “existence” of RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank.

1.1 The sequence of RaTG13 uploaded at GenBank can be fabricated

In order to have the sequence of a viral genome successfully uploaded onto GenBank, submitters have to provide both the assembled genomic sequence (text only) and raw sequencing reads. The latter is used for quality control and verification purposes. However, due to the huge amount of work involved in assembling raw reads into complete genomes, no sufficient curation is in place to ensure the correctness or truthfulness of the uploaded viral genomes. Therefore, an entry on GenBank, which in this case is equivalent to the existence of an assembled viral genomic sequence and its associated sequencing reads, is not a definitive proof that this viral genome is correct or real.

Sequencing of a viral RNA genome requires amplifying segments of it using reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) as the first step. The products of the RT-PCR, which are double-stranded DNA, would subsequently be sent for sequencing. The resulted sequencing reads, each ideally revealing the sequence of a segment of the genome, are then used to assemble the genome of the virus under study (Figure 1A).

Typically, some segments of the genome may not be covered by the initial round of sequencing. Therefore, gap filling will be carried out, where these missing segments will be amplified specifically and the DNA products subsequently sequenced. These steps are repeated until a complete genome can be assembled, ideally with a proper depth to ensure accuracy.

However, this process leaves room for potential fraud. If one intends to fabricate an RNA viral genome on GenBank, he or she could do so by following these steps: create its genomic sequence on a computer, have segments of the genome synthesized based on the sequence, amplify each DNA segment through PCR, and then send the PCR products (may also be mixed with genetic material derived from the alleged host of the virus to mimic an authentic sequencing sample) for sequencing (Figure 1B). The resulted raw sequencing reads would be used, together with the created genomic sequence, for establishing an entry on GenBank. Once accomplished, this entry would be accepted as the evidence for the natural existence of the corresponding virus. Clearly, a viral genomic sequence and its GenBank entry can be fabricated if well-planned.

The complete genomic sequence of RaTG13 was first submitted to GenBank on January 27th, 2020. The raw sequencing reads were made available on February 13th, 2020 (NCBI SRA: SRP249482).

However, the sequencing data for gap filling, which is indispensable in assembling a complete genome, was only made available on May 19th, 2020 (NCBI SRA: SRX8357956). The timing and the reversed order of events here are strange and suspicious.

The raw sequencing reads of RaTG13 have multiple abnormal features. Despite the sample being described as a fecal swab, only 0.7% of the raw sequencing reads are bacterial reads while the bacterial abundance is typically 70~90% when other fecal swab samples were sequenced. In addition, in the identifiable region of certain sequencing reads, a vast majority of reads are eukaryotic sequences, which is also highly unusual in the sequencing of fecal swap-derived samples. Within these eukaryotic reads, 30% of the sequences are of non-bat origin and instead shown to be from many different types of animals including fox, flying fox, squirrels, etc. These abnormal features are significant and indicate that the raw sequencing reads should have been obtained via a route that is different from the normal one (Figure 1).

No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because, according to Dr. Zhengli Shi, the raw sample has been exhausted and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered. Notably, this information was known to a core circle of virologists early on and apparently accepted by them. It was then made public, months later, by Dr. Yanyi Wang, director general of the WIV, in an TV interview on May 23rd, 2020. Dr. Shi also confirmed this publicly in her email interview with Science in July 2020.

However, judging from Shi’s published protocol, exhaustion of the fecal swap sample is highly unlikely. According to this protocol, the fecal swab sample would be mixed with 1 ml of viral transport medium and the supernatant collected. Every 140 ul of the supernatant would then yield 60 ul of extracted RNA. For the subsequent step, RT-PCR, 5 ul of this RNA-containing solution is required per reaction.

Therefore, from one fecal swab sample, at least 80 RT-PCR reactions could be carried out ([1000/140] x 60/5=86). Such an amount is sufficient to support both the initial round of sequencing and the subsequent gap filling PCR. It would be sufficient to also allow reasonable attempts to isolate live viruses, although Dr. Shi claimed that no virus isolation was attempted.

Therefore, the RaTG13 virus and its published sequence are suspicious and show signs of fabrication.

1.2 Other suspicions associated with RaTG13

RaTG13 was reported by Dr. Zhengli Shi from the WIV. Dr. Shi is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and one of the most accomplished Chinese virologists. A peer-reviewed article authored by her and published on the top journal Nature, therefore, brought a great level of comfort for the coronavirus research community in accepting RaTG13 as a true, nature-born bat coronavirus. As a result, RaTG13, upon its timely publication, served as the founding evidence for the natural origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.

However, as revealed in section 1.1, the reported sequence of RaTG13, which is the only proof of the virus’ existence in nature, is problematic and shows signs of fabrication.
Intriguingly, despite the pivotal role of RaTG13 in revealing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the
information provided for its discovery was surprisingly scarce with key points missing (location and date of sample collection, previous knowledge and publication of this virus, etc):

We then found that a short region of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) from a bat coronavirus (BatCoV RaTG13)—which was previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan province—showed high sequence identity to 2019-nCoV. We carried out full-length sequencing on this RNA sample (GISAID accession number EPI_ISL_402131). Simplot analysis showed that 2019-nCoV was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with an overall genome sequence identity of 96.2%.

Only in the source section of the NCBI entry for RaTG13 (GenBank accession code: MN996532.1), one could find that the original sample was a “fecal swab” collected on “July 24th, 2013”. A closer look at the sequence reveals that RaTG13 shares a 100% nucleotide sequence identity with a bat coronavirus RaBtCoV/4991 on a short, 440-bp RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene (RdRp) segment.

RaBtCoV/4991 was discovered by Shi and colleagues and published in 2016. As described in the 2016 publication, only a short 440-bp segment of RdRp of the RaBtCoV/4991 virus was sequenced then. Given the 100% identity on this short gene segment between RaBtCoV/4991 and RaTG13, the field has demanded clarification of whether or not these two names refer to the same virus. However, Dr. Shi did not respond to the request or address this question for months. The answer finally came from Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and long-term collaborator of Shi, who claimed that RaBtCoV/4991 was RaTG13.

RaBtCoV/4991 was discovered in the Yunnan province, China. In 2012, six miners suffered from severe pneumonia after clearing out bat droppings in a mineshaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, and three of them died soon afterwards. Although it was initially suspected that a SARS-like bat coronavirus may be responsible for the deaths, no coronavirus was either isolated or detected from the clinical samples. Also, first-hand record indicates failure of biopsy and no attempt of autopsy, which are the gold standards in the diagnosis of coronavirus infections. The pathogen responsible for the miners’ deaths therefore remained an unsolved case. (Detailed analyses of the Mojiang Miner Passage hypothesis, which was based on the miners’ case, are provided in section 1.6.) Despite the failed diagnosis, this unknown pathogen nonetheless triggered immense interests in the virologists in China. Three independent teams, including that of Dr. Shi’s, made a total of six visits to this mineshaft. The Shi group particularly looked for the presence of bat coronaviruses by amplifying and then sequencing a 440-bp RdRp segment, which is a routine procedure the Shi group follows in their surveillance studies. (As shown in section 2.1 of our first report, this RdRp segment is also frequently used for phylogenetic analyses and is an attractive target for antiviral drug discovery, which may have contributed to the design of incorporating a unique RdRp into the genome of SARS-CoV-2.) Out of the many coronaviruses detected, only RaBtCoV/4991 seemed to belong to the group of SARS-related, lineage B β coronaviruses.

The reporting of RaTG13 is suspicious in three aspects.

First, the whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991 should not have been delayed until 2020. Given the Shi group’s consistent interests in studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses and the fact that RaBtCoV/4991 is a SARS-like coronavirus with a possible connection to the deaths of the miners, it is highly unlikely that the Shi group would be content with sequencing only a 440-bp segment of RdRp and not pursue the sequencing of the receptor-binding motif (RBM)-encoding region of the spike gene. In fact, sequencing of the spike gene is routinely attempted by the Shi group once the presence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus is confirmed by the sequencing of the 440-bp RdRp segment, although the success of such efforts is often hindered by the poor quality of the sample.

As quoted above, in the 2020 Nature publication, Shi and colleagues strongly suggested that the sequencing of the full genome was done in 2020 after they discovered the resemblance between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 on the short RdRp segment4. This, if true, suggests that the quality of the sample should not be poor. Therefore, there is no technical obstacle for the whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991.

Clearly, the perceivable motivation of the Shi group to study this RaBtCoV/4991 virus and the fact that no genome sequencing of it was done for a period of seven years (2013-2020) are hard to reconcile and explain.

However, an intriguing revelation took place in June 2020. Specifically, filenames of the raw sequencing reads for RaTG13 uploaded on the database were found, which indicate that these sequencing experiments were done in 2017 and 2018. Likely responding to this revelation, in her email interview with Science, Dr. Shi contradicted her own description in the Nature publication and admitted that the sequencing of the full genome of RaTG13 was done in 2018.

Second, RaTG13 has a remarkable RBM as suggested by its reported sequence, and the Shi group have no reason to delay its publication until 2020. The most critical segment of a SARS-like β coronavirus is the RBM in the Spike protein as it is fully responsible for binding the host ACE2 receptor and therefore determines the virus’ potential in infecting humans. The RBM is also the most variable region because it is under strong positive selection when the virus jumps over to a new host. Sequence alignment on this crucial RBM motif reveals that the RaTG13 virus rivals with the most highly regarded bat coronaviruses in terms of resemblance to SARS (Figure 2). RaTG13’s RBM not only is complete in reference to that of SARS but also is outstanding in its preservation of five residues perceived by Dr. Shi as key in binding human ACE2 (hACE2) (Figure 2, residues labeled with red texts). At position 472, RaTG13 is the only bat coronavirus that shares a leucine (L) residue with SARS, while the other four key residues are also largely conserved between the two viruses. Importantly, similar conservation patterns revealed in related bat coronaviruses, Rs3367 and SHC014, had led to their publication in Nature in 2013. Furthermore, viruses with less “attractive” RBM sequences (having large gaps and poor in the preservation of key residues, bottom half of the sequences in Figure 2) were also published by Dr. Shi in other top virology journals between 2013 and 2018. Therefore, if the genomic sequence of RaTG13 had been available since 2018, it is unlikely that this virus, which has a possible connection to miners’ deaths in 2012 and has an alarming SARS-like RBM, would be shelfed for two years without publication. Consistent with this analysis, a recent study indeed proved that the RBD of RaTG13 (produced via gene synthesis based on its published sequence) was capable of binding hACE2.

Third, no follow-up work on RaTG13 has been reported by the Shi group. Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been shown repeatedly.

However, such a pattern is not seen here despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2.

Clearly, these three aspects deviate from normal research activities and logical thinking, which are difficult to reconcile or explain. They should have contributed to the intentional omission of key information in the reporting of RaTG13.

For publications of biological research, it is unethical for authors to change the name of a previously published virus without any notice or description. It is also unethical for authors to not cite their own

publication where they had characterized and reported the same virus. The violations here by Shi and colleagues on the reporting of RaTG13 are especially aggravating as the discovery of RaTG13 was central to uncovering the origin of SARS-CoV-2. By the time of the publication, SARS-CoV-2 had already led to many deaths in the city of Wuhan and had shown an alarming potential of causing a pandemic. In her much-delayed response to Science published on July 31st, 2020, Dr. Shi finally commented on the name change and stated that changing the name to RaTG13 was meant to better reflect the time and location of sample collection (TG = Tongguan; 13 = 2013). However, such an intention does not seem to justify why the previous name of RaBtCoV/4991 was never mentioned in the 2020 article and why they did not cite their own 2016 publication where RaBtCoV/4991 was first reported. Dr. Shi’s recent clarification did not alter the fact that they have violated the reporting norms of biological research.

In summary, a range of suspicions were associated with the reporting of RaTG13, including the violations of scientific publication principles, the inconsistency in the descriptions of the sequencing dates, and the contradiction between the sequencing of its genome in 2018 and the publication of it in 2020 when this virus has a striking RBM and a possible connection to pneumonia-associated deaths. Adding to these suspicions are the exquisite timing of its publication, the problematic nature of its reported sequence and raw sequencing reads, and the claim that no sample is left for independent verification. Collectively, these facts justify and legitimate the concern over the true existence of the RaTG13 virus in nature and the truthfulness of its reported genomic sequence. They also question the claim that the RaBtCoV/4991 virus and RaTG13 are equivalent.

1.3 Genetic evidence proving the fraudulent nature of RaTG13

This evidence was revealed after a close examination of the sequences of specific genes, especially spike, of relevant viruses. Specifically, we compared two viruses for the synonymous and nonsynonymous mutations on each gene, and we did so for two pairs of viruses. The first pair are bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21. The second pair are SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13. The rationale for comparing these two pairs with each other is the following. First, ZC45 and ZXC21, each sharing an 89% genomic sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2, are the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.

Second, ZC45 and ZXC21 are 97% identical to each other, while SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are 96% identical. Not only the sequence identity in each case is comparable, but also the high sequence identity indicates that, within each pair, the sequence difference should be a result of random mutations during evolution, which ensures that synonymous and non-synonymous analyses here are appropriate and not complicated by abrupt evolutionary events (e.g. recombination). Indeed, sequence alignment confirms such a scenario – in both cases, the curve is smooth and the high sequence identity is maintained
throughout (Figure 3).

Detailed synonymous (syn, green curve) and non-synonymous (non-syn, red curve) analyses are shown in Figure 4. For each gene, the accumulations of syn and non-syn mutations, respectively, are illustrated when the codons are analyzed in a sequential order. For the spike genes, between ZC45 and ZXC21, the syn/non-syn ratio is 5.5:1 (Figure 4A left, 94 syn mutations and 17 non-syn mutations). Notably, the two curves progress along in a roughly synchronized manner. These features reflect, to a certain extent, the evolutionary traits resulted from random mutations during evolution in this sub-group of lineage B β coronaviruses.

The same analysis on the spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13, however, revealed a different scenario (Figure 4B right). Although the overall syn/non-syn ratio is a similar 5.4:1 (221 syn mutations and 41 non-syn mutations), the synchronization between the two curves is non-existent. In the second half of the sequence, which is over 700 codons (2,100 nucleotides) wide, the non-syn curve stays flat when the syn curve climbs continuously and significantly.

Counting the syn and non-syn mutations of the S2 region (corresponding to residues 684-1273 of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike) reveals that, between ZC45 and ZXC21, there are a total of 27 syn mutations and 5 non-syn mutations, yielding a syn/non-syn ratio of 5.4:1. In contrast, for the same S2 region, between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13, there are a total of 88 syn mutations and 2 non-syn mutations, yielding a syn/non-syn ratio of 44:1. The syn/non-syn ratios for S2, whole Spike, and other large viral proteins (Orf1a, Orf1b, and Nucleocapsid) are summarized in Table 1. While the ratios are comparable between the two groups for all other proteins, the ratios for the S2 protein are significantly different.

The detailed syn/non-syn analyses for Orf1a, Orf1b, and N are shown in Figure 4B-D. It is also noteworthy that, similar to that of Spike, the approximate synchronization between two curves is observed for the Orf1a protein in the ZC45 and ZXC21 comparison (Figure 4B left) but not in the SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 comparison (Figure 4B right).

The S2 protein maintains trimmer formation of the Spike and, upon successive cleavages to expose the fusion peptide, mediates membrane fusion and cell entry. Although the S2 protein is more conserved evolutionarily than S1, the extremely high purifying pressure on S2 as suggested by the very high syn/nonsyn ratio is abnormal. In fact, Orf1b is known to be the most conserved protein in coronaviruses and yet the syn/non-syn ratio for it is only 10.8:1 when SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are compared, much lower than the ratio of 44:1 observed for S2 (Table 1). Furthermore, since RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 infect different species, no high purifying selection on S2 should be expected when these two viruses are compared against each other.

Consistent with the above notion, a syn/non-syn analysis done for the Spike protein of twenty randomly selected SARS-CoV-2 sequences showed that S2 was under positive selection, not purifying selection, during the past eight months of human-to-human transmission (Figure 5). For the twenty SARS-CoV-2 isolates, amino acid mutations are observed at five different locations in S2 (Figure 6). In addition, a recent study analyzing 2,954 genomes of SARS-CoV-2 revealed that mutations have been observed at 25 different locations in the S2 protein41, further proving that amino acid mutations are tolerated in S2 and no high purifying pressure should be observed for S2. Evidently, the syn/non-syn ratio of 44:1 revealed between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 on the S2 region is abnormal (Table 1) and a violation of the principles of natural evolution.

A logical interpretation of this observation is that SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could not relate to each other through natural evolution and at least one must be artificial. If one is a product of natural evolution, then the other one must be not. It is also possible that neither of them exists naturally.

If RaTG13 is a real virus that truly exists in nature, then SARS-CoV-2 must be artificial.

However, the reality is that SARS-CoV-2 is physically present and has first appeared prior to the reporting of RaTG13. This would then lead to the conclusion that RaTG13 is artificial, a scenario consistent with the overwhelming suspicion that this virus does not exist in nature and its sequence has been fabricated.

The remaining possibility is, of course, that both SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are artificial: one has been created physically and the other one exists only in the form of a fabricated sequence.

It is highly likely that the sequence of the RaTG13 genome was fabricated by lightly modifying the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to achieve an overall 96.2% sequence identity. During this process, much editing must have been done for the RBM region of the S1/spike because the encoded RBM determines the interaction with ACE2 and therefore would be heavily scrutinized by others. An RBM too similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 would be troublesome because: 1) RaTG13 could be conceived as a product of gain-of-function research; 2) it would leave no room for an intermediate host and yet such a host is believed to exist as the Spike/RBM needs to first adapt in an environment where the ACE2 receptor is homologous to hACE2. In addition, modifying the sequence of the RBM is also beneficial as RaTG13 would otherwise appear to be able to infect humans as efficiently as SARS-CoV-2 does, escalating the concern of a laboratory leak. To eliminate such concerns, many non-syn mutations were introduced into the RBM region.

Importantly, syn/non-syn analysis is frequently used, often at the ORF/protein level, to characterize the

evolutionary history of a virus. While editing the RBM, the expert(s) carrying out this operation must be conscious of the need to maintain a reasonable syn/non-syn ratio for the whole Spike protein. To achieve so, however, the expert(s) must have then strictly limited the number of non-syn mutations in the S2 half of Spike, which ended up flattening the curve (Figure 4A right).

1.4 The receptor-binding domain (RBD) of RaTG13 does not bind ACE2 of horseshoe bats

Consistent with the above conclusion that RaTG13 does not exist in nature and its sequence was fabricated, a recent study showed that the RBD of RaTG13 could not bind the ACE2 receptors of two different kinds of horseshoe bats, Rhinolophus macrotis and Rhinolophus pusillus. Although the ACE2 receptor of Rhinolophus affinis (the alleged host of RaTG13) was not tested, it is unlikely that ACE2 of R. affinis would differ significantly from those of its close relatives and be able to bind the RaTG13 RBD.

This result therefore implicates that RaTG13 would not be able to infect horseshoe bats, contradicting the claim made by Shi and colleagues that the virus was detected and discovered from horseshoe bats. This is also consistent with the above conclusion that the genomic sequence of RaTG13 is fabricated and presumably computer-edited, which entails that the RBM/RBD suggested by the corresponding gene sequence may not be functional in binding the ACE2 receptor of the claimed host.

1.5 Conclusion and postulation of the fabrication process

In conclusion, the evidence presented both here and from recent literature collectively prove that RaTG13 does not exist in nature and its sequence has been fabricated.
If the RaBtCov/4991 virus is equivalent to RaTG13, then RaBtCoV/4991 must be fraudulent as well.

Apparently, in the actual process of sequence fabrication, the published sequence of the short RdRp segment of RaBtCoV/4991 was completely inherited for RaTG13. This way, they could claim that RaTG13 was RaBtCoV/4991, which, according to the record, was discovered in 2013. If RaTG13 had been described as being discovered right around the time of the COVID-19 outbreak, greater suspicions would result as tracing the evolutionary origin of a zoonotic virus is difficult and usually takes years or
decades. As described in section 2.1 of our earlier report1, the fabrication of RaTG13 should have been planned and executed in coordination with the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2.

Such an approach is also safe because, except for the 440-bp RdRp segment, no other sequence information has ever been published for the rest of the RaBtCoV/4991 genome.

It is worth noting that, due to reasons detailed in section 1.2, they still preferred to obscure the history of RaTG13. However, they must have also anticipated that their violations of the publication norms would invite inquiries or requests for clarifications, the number of which, however, should be limited and manageable. RaBtCoV/4991 would then function as an additional layer of security for them in facing such inquiries and/or requests.

Building upon the 440-bp RdRp sequence inherited from RaBtCoV/4991, the rest of the RaTG13 genome was likely fabricated by lightly editing the sequence of SARS-CoV-2. Once the genomic sequence was finalized, DNA fragments could be synthesized individually according to the fabricated and edited sequence and then used as templates for PCR. Amplified DNA would then be mixed with certain raw material to give the sample a natural look (mimicking what is present in an actual RT-PCR, which is done using RNA extracted from fecal swabs as templates). Subsequently, this sample would be sent for sequencing. The resulted raw sequencing reads could then be uploaded together with the made-up genomic sequence onto GenBank to create an entry for the RaTG13 genome.

1.6 The Mojiang Miner Passage (MMP) hypothesis is fatally flawed

Recently, a theory has emerged, which proposed that SARS-CoV-2 was derived from viral passaging in the lungs of the infected Mojiang miners back in 2012. Specifically, authors believe that the RaBtCoV/4991 virus was indeed RaTG13 and was the virus causing pneumonia in the miners in 2012.

While inside the lungs of the miners, the RaTG13 virus had evolved extensively, mimicking a viral passage process, and eventually became SARS-CoV-2. In this process, the RBD of the virus experienced strong positive selection, through which it became optimal in binding hACE2. Furthermore, the furin cleavage site at the S1/2 junction region of Spike had been acquired through recombination between the viral spike gene and the gene encoding the human ENaC protein, which has a furin-cleavage sequence closely resembling that of SARS-CoV-2. The end product of this passage was SARS-CoV-2, which the researchers isolated from the miners’ samples and brought back to the WIV. The authors have named this hypothesis as the Mojiang Miner Passage (MMP) hypothesis.

However, this MMP hypothesis has fatal flaws.

First, the viral pathogen that caused the disease in the miners could not be defined or confirmed.

According to the record, which was well documented in a Master’s Thesis written by the doctor in charge, samples from two patients (throat swabs and blood) were tested at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the Chengdu Military Region between May 15th and May 20th, 2012, and yet none of the suspected viruses, including SARS, was detected. Furthermore, the gold standard in the clinical diagnosis of coronavirus-caused pneumonia is biopsy and/or autopsy followed by confirmation by either RT-PCR or isolation of the virus. However, three biopsy tests were attempted but failed. Autopsy tests were requested and yet all turned down by families of the deceased miners. Due to such failure, both the Master’s Thesis and later a PhD Dissertation, which also looked into this issue although in an indirect manner, described the cause of the pneumonia as an unsolved case.

Second, antibody tests done for the miners do not support SARS or SARS-like coronavirus infection.

According to the Master’s Thesis, samples from two miners were tested for antibodies against SARS.

The symptoms onset date for one miner (case 3, passed away) was around April 13th, 2012. The other miner (case 4, had severe symptoms and yet recovered) had symptoms onset around April 16th, 2012.

Antibody tests, which were recommended later by Dr. Nanshan Zhong, were done at the WIV on June 19th, 2012. However, the two samples tested were only positive for IgM. No positive IgG or total antibody were reported. No antibody titer was reported either. Importantly, if the severe pneumonia was caused by coronavirus infections, by the time of the antibody tests on June 19th, 2012, both IgM and IgG/total antibody should be detected. In fact, IgG/total antibody should be much more abundant and easier to detect. On the other hand, IgM tests frequently result in false positives. Therefore, the fact
that only IgM, and no IgG/total antibody, was tested positive suggests that the described results were most likely false positives and the infections should not have been caused by SARS or a SARS-like coronavirus.

It is noteworthy that the later PhD Dissertation showed severe discrepancies with the Master’s Thesis in the descriptions of the same clinical tests:

1. The PhD Dissertation described that samples from four miners (throat swab and blood) were sent to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the Chengdu Military Region for nucleic acid tests. However, the Master’s Thesis indicated that samples were only taken from two miners.

2. The PhD Dissertation described samples from four miners were tested for anti-SARS antibodies at the WIV and all were IgG positive. However, the Master’s Thesis indicated that only samples from two miners were tested at the WIV and both were only IgM positive.

Importantly, the Master’s Thesis was written in 2013 in Yunnan by the doctor who was in charge of the six hospitalized miners. The PhD dissertation, however, was written in 2016 in Beijing based only on the clinical record. The author of the Dissertation had no direct involvement in the treatment of the miners or in any of the described tests. It is therefore highly likely that author of the PhD dissertation did not verify the clinical data he presented, which makes this PhD dissertation an unreliable source of information concerning the Mojiang miners’ case.

Third, if SARS-CoV-2 was already present in the miner’s body in 2012, it would have certainly caused an epidemic or even pandemic then. Given the extremely high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, it would be impossible for the doctors, nurses, family members of the miners, etc. to have avoided contracting the virus without the protection of proper PPE. If an epidemic indeed happened in 2012, it could not have gone unnoticed given the high transmissibility and lethality (three out of the six pneumonia patients died despite of intense medical care provided for them).

Fourth, as shown in sections 1.1-1.5, RaTG13’s sequence is clearly fabricated and the virus does not exist in nature. The RaBtCoV/4991 virus, which was detected in 2013, is not the RaTG13 virus that is defined by its reported genomic sequence. No complete genomic sequence of RaBtCoV/4991 has ever been reported likely due to the poor quality of the sample, which happens often as the RNA genome decays easily. It is highly likely that no high homology is shared between the actual RaBtCoV/4991 virus and SARS-CoV-2. This judgement is based on the fact that no viruses reported prior to 2020 share more than 90% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 despite the extensive surveillance studies of coronaviruses for the past two decades. Therefore, even if RaBtCoV/4991 was the pathogen responsible for the pneumonia of the miners, the theory that it has evolved in a single person’s lung into SARS-CoV-2 is far beyond being reasonable.

Fifth, it is impossible for the Spike protein of the virus to obtain a unique furin-cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction through recombination with the gene encoding the ENaC protein of the host cell (ENaC carries a furin cleavage site closely resembling the one seen in SARS-CoV-2). This is because recombination requires a significant level of sequence similarity between the two participating genes and yet no such similarity is present between coronavirus Spike and human ENaC. The molecular basis for recombination is non-existent. (Although recombination between ENaC and coronavirus Spike is impossible, it is suspicious that a viral protein and a host protein would share the same sequence for their furin-cleavage sites. It is possible, though, that the sequence of the furin-cleavage site in ENaC, which is known since 1997, could have been used in the design of the furin-cleavage site in the Spike of SARSCoV-2. Such a design may be considered sophisticated as ENaC co-expresses with ACE2 in many different types of cells.)

Sixth, if SARS-CoV-2 has indeed evolved from RaBtCoV/4991 in the miner’s lungs, it would look, from every aspect, like a naturally occurring virus. In that case, there would be no need to commit sequence fabrication for RaTG13 and for the other novel coronaviruses (parts 2 and 3) to falsify a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.

Finally, as revealed in our earlier report, evidence exists in the genome of SARS-CoV-2, indicating that genetic manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2.

2. Evidence proving that recently published pangolin coronaviruses are fraudulent and do not exist in nature

While RaTG13 was reported to share a high sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 and thereby hinted a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, significant questions remained unanswered:

• No intermediate host has been found although one was believed to exist and function as the reservoir of the virus before it spilled over to humans.

• Despite the overall genomic resemblance of the two viruses, the RBD (particularly the RBM within it) of RaTG13 differs significantly from that of SARS-CoV-2. The evolutionary origin of the SARS-CoV-2 RBD, which is optimal in binding hACE2, remained unclear.

• A critical furin-cleavage site, which is present at the S1/S2 junction of SARS-CoV-2 Spike and responsible for the enhanced viral infectivity and pathogenicity, is absent in RaTG13 (as well as in all known lineage B β coronaviruses). The evolutionary origin of this furin-cleavage site also remained mysterious.

Not long after these questions emerged, several laboratories published novel coronaviruses allegedly found in Malayan pangolins that were smuggled from Malaysia and confiscated by the Chinese custom. Although these novel coronaviruses share relatively lower overall sequence identities (~90%) with SARS-CoV-2 in comparison to RaTG13 (96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2), the RBD of the pangolin coronaviruses resembles greatly the SARS-CoV-2 RBD (97.4% identical). In the most critical RBM
region, all amino acids except one are identical between the pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.

These observations led the authors to conclude 1) that pangolins are the likely intermediate host for the zoonotic transfer of SARS-CoV-2 and 2) that a RaTG13-like ancestor coronavirus might have acquired the RBD from a pangolin coronavirus through recombination to eventually become SARS-CoV-2.

Here, in part 2 of the report, we describe literature evidence and provide genetic analyses to prove that these novel pangolin coronaviruses are results of fabrication.

2.1 A single batch of pangolin samples were used in all studies and the deposited sequencing data showed heavy contamination and signs of fabrication

In October 2019, a team formed by three researchers from two institutions (Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources and Guangzhou Zoo) reported, for the first time, the detection of coronavirus infections in pangolins that were allegedly smuggled from Malaysia and confiscated in the Guangdong province in March 2019. Twenty-one pangolin samples were sequenced and five were positive for coronavirus infections (Table 2: lung 2, 7, 8, 9, and 11), although Sendai virus infection was also reported. However, neither the sequences of the coronaviruses nor raw sequencing data were made available to the public for a period of three months. The raw data (NCBI BioProject PRJNA573298) was finally released on January 22nd, 2020 after the COVID-19 outbreak started, while the article submission date was September 30th, 2019 and the publication date was October 24th, 2019.

Between March and May 2020, four seemingly independent studies were published, all of which reported novel pangolin coronaviruses and their assembled genomic sequences. However, after a closer look, we found that all four studies derived viral sequences from the same set of pangolin samples first reported in the October 2019 publication, which has been confirmed by a recent article.

In one study, Liu et al. (the same authors of the October 2019 publication) re-assembled the genome of a pangolin coronavirus by pooling two samples from the original 2019 study and one sample obtained from another Malayan pangolin rescued in July 2019. However, although the authors stated that the more recent raw sequencing data had been deposited at the NCBI database, we could not find this data using the accession number (2312773) provided. The same difficulty has been reported by others. Therefore, it cannot be verified whether the July 2019 dataset truly exists and has contributed to the assembly of the reported genome.

In two other studies, Lam et al. and Zhang et al. each re-assembled the genome of a pangolin coronavirus using only the published dataset from the October 2019 study. Lam et al. also reported detection of coronaviruses from smuggled Malayan pangolins that were confiscated in the Guangxi province, although these viruses showed lower sequence identities to SARS-CoV-2 both at the whole genome level (~86%) and in the critical RBD region. It is noteworthy that this study was done as a collaboration between Dr. Yi Guan’s group from the University of Hong Kong and Dr. Wuchun Cao’s group from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), Beijing, China. Somehow, all authors affiliated with the AMMS were excluded from the list of authors when the article was first submitted, although their names eventually appeared in the final version of the publication.

In the fourth study, Xiao et al. claimed to have examined tissue samples kept from diseased pangolins and obtained raw sequencing data for the subsequent assembly. However, they did not describe how the samples were acquired. In their Extended Data Table 3, they listed the metagenome sequencing data used in the study, which, surprisingly, do not match with the actual data that they uploaded in the database (Table 2). Samples M1, M5, M6, M10, and Z1 can be found in the data they deposited, but not M2, M3, M4, and M8. Furthermore, Xiao et al. apparently were inconsistent with the reporting of these raw sequencing reads. For samples M1, M6, pangolin3, and pangolin5, they counted paired ends numbers, which reflect the actual number of sequenced DNA fragments in the library. For the rest of samples, the authors counted reads numbers instead (In Illumina sequencing, there are two reads per fragment). For samples M2, M3, M4, and M8 in this latter group, when the reads numbers were converted to paired ends numbers (divided by 2), they each match perfectly with lung07, lung02, lung08, and lung11, respectively, from the October 2019 study (Table 2). Clearly, Xiao et al. used the data published in a previous study but failed to disclose this necessary information in their publication. In fact, they intentionally presented the “number of reads” in a different format to presumably make readers overlook the fact that the same sequencing dataset was used.

It is noteworthy that the study by Xiao et al. was also done in collaboration with the AMMS. Prior to the publication of the manuscript, this work was first publicized in a press conference. As revealed in this conference, four principle investigators contributed to the work and one of them was Dr. Ruifu Yang from the AMMS. However, like what happened to Dr. Cao and his AMMS colleagues in the Lam et al. study, Dr. Yang’s name was excluded in the submitted manuscript of Xiao et al. Yet, unlike the other case, the AMMS researcher’s name did not re-appear in the final publication. It is also noteworthy that the two AMMS principle investigators here, Dr. Yang and Dr. Cao, are long-term collaborators and most of their collaborative work concerned genetic analyses of SARS-CoV.

Among the four studies, only two assembled complete genomes by performing gap filling using PCR.

However, neither group made their gap filling sequences available, rendering independent verification impossible. Notably, the delayed publishing of raw sequencing reads long after the publication of genomic sequences has occurred in the reporting of RaTG13 as well.

Adding to the above problems was the poor quality of the raw sequencing data, which has been described recently. We also analyzed the composition of the sequencing reads of the deposited libraries. By performing taxonomy analysis on the NCBI SRA database, we also found that samples from Liu et al. that are positive for coronavirus reads are all positive for reads that map to human genome (Table 2). In great contrast, the rest of the samples, which are negative for viral reads, also have no human reads detected. The same correlation is found in data presented by Xiao et al. Although samples M5 (pangolin 6) and M6 (pangolin2) are negative for human reads, these two samples have very few viral reads, which would hardly contribute to the viral genome assembly. Clearly, the human contamination should not be due to sample handling as none of the coronavirus-negative samples, which must have been handled similarly, contain such contamination. The consistent co-existence of viral reads and human reads are highly suspicious.

These observations raise red flags not only on the credibility of the assembled sequences but also on the authenticity of these novel pangolin coronaviruses. It is also noteworthy that the manuscript submission dates for all four studies were between February 7th and February 18th, suggesting that their publications might have been coordinated.

2.2 No coronavirus was detected in an extensive surveillance study of Malayan pangolins

While these SARS-CoV-2-like pangolin coronaviruses were described as being detected in smuggled Malayan pangolins, a recent study strongly refuted the presence of such pangolin coronaviruses in nature.

A team led by Dr. Daszak examined 334 pangolin samples, which were collected in Malaysia and Sabah from August 2009 to March 2019. Surprisingly, no coronaviridae, or any of the other families of viruses (filoviridae, flaviviridae, orthomyxoviridae, and paramyxoviridae), were detected in any of these samples.

This is in stark contrast with the October 2019 publication where both coronavirus infection and Sendai virus infection were reportedly detected in the smuggled Malayan pangolins, which eventually led to the discovery and publication of the novel pangolin coronaviruses. The finding of Lee et al. adds significantly to the existing suspicions and substantiates the possibility that these pangolin coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their sequences could have been fabricated.

2.3 The RBD of the reported pangolin coronaviruses binds poorly to pangolin ACE2

If pangolin coronaviruses truly exist and have recently spilled over to infect humans, their Spike protein, especially the RBD within Spike, should bind to pangolin ACE2 (pACE2) more efficiently than to hACE2.

However, recent findings have contradicted this theory. In an in silico study, Piplani et al. calculated, following homology structural modeling, the binding energies involved in the association between SARSCoV-2 Spike and ACE2 from either human or various animals. Interestingly, the most favorable interaction that SARS-CoV-2 Spike makes was shown to be with hACE2, but not with ACE2 from pangolin or any other suspected intermediate host. Furthermore, another study revealed, using a robust in vitro binding assay, that the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 binds much tighter (greater than 9-fold) to hACE2 than to pACE2. Although the RBD of the pangolin coronaviruses is not 100% identical to that of SARSCoV-2, the RBMs of the two viruses, which is the most essential segment responsible for ACE2 interactions, differ only by one amino acid. Therefore, the poor binding efficiency observed between the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 and pACE2 infers that the RBD of the reported pangolin coronaviruses must bind to pACE2 fairly inefficiently. Indeed, a very recent study confirmed the case: the RBD of the pangolin coronavirus binds pACE2 ten-fold weaker than to hACE2. These observations once again refute the claim that pangolins are the probable intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, the latter two studies strongly suggest that these viruses might not be able to establish infections in pangolins, which adds significantly to the suspicion that the published sequences of the pangolin coronaviruses may have been fabricated and these viruses do not exist in nature.

2.4 Genetic evidence proving the fraudulent nature of the pangolin coronaviruses

Evolutionarily, within the coronavirus genome, the RBD of Spike is under the strongest positive selection as it needs to adapt for binding a new receptor whenever the virus crosses the species barrier and enters a new host. In lineage B β coronaviruses, the most essential segment for receptor recognition is the RBM, which fully determines the binding with ACE2. Strikingly, when the RBM sequence of the pangolin virus MP789 is compared to that of SARS-CoV-2, no positive selection is observed (Figure 7A). Instead, the analysis revealed very strong purifying selection with 24 syn mutations and only one non-syn mutation.

In contrast, when two related bat coronaviruses, BM48-31 and BtKY72, are compared in a similar manner, strong positive selection is observed as expected (Figure 7B). Here, while there are 25 syn mutations, which is comparable to that between MP789 and SARS-CoV-2, the number of non-syn mutations is 30 (Figure 7B). Evidently, the species difference between pangolin and human is greater than that between the hosts of BM48-31 and BtKY72, which are two different species of bats. Therefore, greater positive selection should be expected between MP789 and SARS-CoV-2 than that between BM48-31 and BtKY72. The strong purifying selection observed between MP789 and SARS-CoV-2 is, therefore, contradictory to the principles of natural evolution.

We further looked at the syn and non-syn mutations for the RBM in coronaviruses infecting the same species. Here, we compared the closely related coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21, which infect the same species of bats, on their RBM segments (Figure 7C). Here, twelve synonymous mutations and three nonsynonymous mutations are observed, yielding a syn/non-syn ratio of 4:1. Such a value likely represents the approximate upper limit for the purifying selection in the RBM that such coronaviruses could possibly experience (Table 3). In addition, no purifying selection is observed in the RBM for the randomly selected twenty SARS-CoV-2 sequences (Figure 5, codon range 437-507).

Therefore, the extremely high syn/non-syn ratio (24:1) observed between MP789 RBM and
SARSCoV-2 RBM indicates that at least one of the two viruses is artificial.

We believe that, to falsify the natural existence of the unique RBD/RBM of SARS-CoV-2, the amino acid sequence of the pangolin coronavirus RBD/RBM had been fabricated to closely resemble that of SARS-CoV-2. At the same time, the expert(s) carrying out this operation also wanted to create an appropriate level of divergence between the pangolin virus and SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level and thereby introduced a significant amount of syn mutations in the RBM. The abnormality revealed in Figure 7A and Table 3 likely resulted from these fraudulent operations.

Similar syn/non-syn analyses on the overall spike further revealed the fraudulent nature of these novel pangolin coronaviruses. Here we compared two representative pangolin coronaviruses MP789 (a Guangdong isolate) and P4L (a Guangxi isolate) as genomic sequences within each group of isolates share very high sequence identities. As shown in Figure 8A, similar to the abnormal pattern observed between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 4A right), syn and non-syn curves exhibit drastically different trajectories and the non-syn curve abruptly flattens in the S2 half of the sequence.

For comparison, we also analyzed the spike genes of two SARS-like bat coronaviruses, BM48-31 and BtKY72. The two pangolin coronaviruses, MP789 and P4L, are 85.2% identical on the overall genome, while bat coronaviruses BM48-31 and BtKY72 are 82.4% identical. The comparison here is therefore appropriate. Analysis of the two bat viruses show that the two curves grow naturally in a relatively concerted manner with no excessive flattening of the red curve observed (Figure 8B).

Counting the number of syn and non-syn mutations in each pair of comparisons further illustrated the unnatural characteristics associated with the pangolin coronaviruses (Table 4). While the S2 protein is not expected to be more conserved than Orf1b, the syn/non-syn ratio for S2 observed in the comparison between MP789 and P4L is abnormally high (207 syn mutations and 9 non-syn mutations; syn/non-syn = 23:1), which is far exceeding what is observed for Orf1b (7.6:1).

As the two bat coronaviruses here were discovered in nature independently by research groups outside of China, the features displayed in Figure 8B likely represent the approximate evolutionary trait of two coronaviruses at this level of overall divergence. According to the logic described earlier, the great contrast between Figure 8A and 8B and the abnormal syn/non-syn ratio of 23:1 (Table 4) further prove that, between MP789 and P4L, at least one is artificial, although we believe both groups of pangolin coronaviruses represented by MP789 and P4L, respectively, are non-natural and fabricated.

2.5. Summary and discussion

A single source of samples was used for all studies (some spuriously independent7) reporting novel pangolin coronaviruses. The formats of sequencing reads were manipulated with a clear intention to hide the fact that the same dataset was used in different studies. The raw sequencing data is missing for certain critical pieces, poor in quality, and suspicious in terms of the amounts and types of contaminations present.

The RBD encoded by the reported sequence of pangolin coronaviruses could not bind pACE2 efficiently.

As revealed by syn/non-syn analyses, sequences of the RBM and S2 regions of these pangolin coronaviruses exhibit features that are inconsistent with natural evolution. Finally, no coronavirus was detected in a large, decade-long surveillance study of Malayan pangolins. These observations and evidence converge to prove that these recently reported pangolin coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their sequences must have been fabricated.

It is noteworthy that the abnormal syn/non-syn feature revealed for S2 in the comparison between MB789 and P4L (Figure 8A) resembles greatly that exhibited by the comparison between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 4A right). Judging based on this reoccurring pattern, we believe that the sequence fabrications in both cases (RaTG13 and pangolin coronaviruses) were most likely carried out by the same person or group, whose misconception of the spike gene evolution persisted in multiple such practices and resulted in the unnatural look of the syn/non-syn curves and numbers (Figure 4, Table 1, Figure 8, and Table 4).

3. Evidence revealing the fraudulent nature of the novel bat coronavirus RmYN02

While the publications of the fabricated pangolin coronaviruses might have seemingly fulfilled the scientific quests for an intermediate host for the zoonosis of SARS-CoV-2 as well as for an evolutionary origin of its RBD, it had remained suspicious and unexplainable how SARS-CoV-2 could have acquired the furin-cleavage site (-PRRAR/VS-) at the S1/2 junction through natural evolution. It is evident that, although furin-cleavage site has been found in certain other lineages of coronaviruses at the S1/2 junction, lineage B β coronaviruses clearly lack the ability to develop this motif at this location naturally.

In early June, another novel bat coronavirus, RmYN02, was reported9, which shares a 93.3% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 and appears to be the second closest bat coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2 (the closest is allegedly RaTG13). This finding adds yet another member to the rapidly growing sub-lineage of SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses (Figure 9), which has been completely vacant and practically nonexistent prior to the current pandemic. In addition, importantly, RmYN02 carries a unique sequence -PAA at the S1/S2 junction, which remotely resembles the inserted -PRRA- sequence at the same location in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike. Despite the fact that -PAA- in RmYN02 only partially resembles the -PRRA insertion in SARS-CoV-2 and does not appear to be an actual insertion if properly aligned, the authors nonetheless claimed that the natural occurrence of -PAA- in RmYN02 proves that the -PRRA- sequence could very likely be acquired and “inserted” into the same location in SARS-CoV-2 genome through natural evolution.

The fact that a poor alignment was used to make a disproportional, strong argument for an evolutionary origin of the furin-cleavage site, which appeared to be the last missing piece of the puzzle, is suspicious.

Furthermore, despite the significance of the spike sequence of RmYN02 in supporting the central conclusion of the publication, the raw sequencing reads for spike has not been made available although the authors stated otherwise in the article. This is yet another repeat of the pattern that has been exhibited in the reporting of both RaTG13 and pangolin coronaviruses, where the genomic sequence would be published first and the raw sequencing reads would not be made available months afterwards.

Given that the CCP-controlled laboratories have repeatedly engaged in fabrication of coronaviruses to feed the missing pieces for the puzzle, the above suspicion opens up the possibility that the RmYN02 virus could have been fabricated as well. Judging from the fact that its sequence identity to SARS-CoV-2 (93.3%) is lower than that between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 (96.2%), we suspected that the sequence of RmYN02 might have been fabricated by modifying the sequence of RaTG13. Such an approach could easily ensure that the evolutionary distance between RmYN02 and SARS-CoV-2 is greater than that between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2. It also ensures that RmYN02 and RaTG13 would appear to be evolutionarily close, consistent with the claim that they both infect bats although of different species.

We therefore compared the spike genes of RmYN02 and RaTG13 on the quantity and distribution of syn and non-syn mutations. The severe divergence at the S1 portion between the two viral sequences did not allow the S1 sequences to be properly codon-aligned. Therefore, only the S2 half was analyzed (Figure 10). For the beginning 200 codons of S2, both types of mutations accumulate steadily and gradually.

However, for the final 378 codons, once again, the non-syn curve flattens and the concerted growth of the two curves has disappeared. In this region, there are 57 syn mutations and only one non-syn mutation. The syn/non-syn ratio of 57:1 for a region as wide as 378 codons (1,344 nucleotides) is severely inconsistent with what is observed naturally (Figure 4A left and Figure 8B).

Logically, between RaTG13 and RmYN02, at least one must be artificial. Here, however, we are convinced that both viruses are artificial. As shown in part 1, the sequence of RaTG13 must have been fabricated. Therefore, the fact that the last 378 codons of RmYN02’s S2 are identical, with the exception of one, to that of RaTG13 proves that the RmYN02 sequence must be artificial as well. This also proves our earlier suspicion that the RaTG13 sequence should have been used as the template for the fabrication of the RmYN02 sequence. RaTG13 was published in late January, while RmYN02 was published in early June (manuscript submitted in April). Therefore, enough time is in between for the sequence fabrication to be carried out.

While introducing nucleotide changes to create the apparent divergence between the two viruses, the expert(s) may have overly restricted amino acid changes in this part of Spike. Again, the abrupt change of trajectory of the non-syn curve and its excessive flattening later in the sequence likely reflect their overestimation of the purifying selection pressure on S2. The fact that this abnormal pattern has been observed in all three cases (Figure 4A right, 8A, and 10) reiterates the point raised in section 2.5 that all sequence fabrications may have been carried out by the same person or group.

4. Final discussion and remarks

4.1 All fabricated coronaviruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45 and ZXC21


Evidence herein clearly indicates that the novel coronaviruses recently published by the CCP controlled laboratories are all fraudulent and do not exist in nature. One final proof of this conclusion is the fact that all of these viruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21, which, as revealed in our earlier report1, should be the template/backbone used for the creation of SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 11). Despite its conserved function in the viral replication cycle, the E protein is tolerant and permissive of amino acid mutations. It is therefore impossible for the amino acid sequence of the E protein to remain unchanged when the virus has allegedly crossed species barrier multiple times (between different bat species, from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans). The 100% identity observed here, therefore, further proves that the sequences of these recently published novel coronaviruses have been fabricated.

A main goal of these fabrications was to obscure the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21. Therefore, from their perspective, the fabricated viruses should resemble SARS-CoV-2 more than ZC45 and ZXC21 do. Because ZC45 and ZXC21 already share a 100% identity with SARSCoV-2 on the E protein, the fabricated viruses therefore were made to adopt this sequence completely as well.

4.2 Important implications of this large-scale, organized scientific fraud

If SARS-CoV-2 is of a natural origin, no fabrications would be needed to suggest so. The current report, therefore, corroborates our earlier report and further proves that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory product.

As revealed, the creation of SARS-CoV-2 is convenient by following established concepts and techniques, some of which (for example, restriction enzyme digestion) are considered classic and yet still preferred widely including by experts of the field. A key component of the creation, the template virus ZC45/ZXC21, is owned by military research laboratories.

Importantly, as revealed here, multiple research laboratories and institutions have engaged in the fabrication and cover-up. It is clear that this was an operation orchestrated by the CCP government.

In addition, raw sequencing reads for RaTG13, which were integral parts of the fabrication, were obtained in 2017 and 2018. Furthermore, manuscript reporting the falsified coronavirus infections of Malayan pangolins was submitted for publication in September 2019. Evidently, the cover-up had been planned and initiated before the COVID-19 outbreak. Therefore, the unleashing of the virus must be a planned execution rather than an accident.

4.3 SARS-CoV-2 is an Unrestricted Bioweapon

Although it is not easy for the public to accept SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, this virus indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon as described by Dr. Ruifu Yang. Aside from his appointment in the AMMS, Dr. Yang is also a key member of China’s National and Military Bioterrorism Response Consultant Group and had participated in the investigation of the Iraqi bioweapon program as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998. In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:

1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.

2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols.
The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.

3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.

All of the above have been met by SARS-CoV-2: it has taken hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).

Adding to the above properties is its high rate of asymptomatic transmission, which renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging. In addition, the transmissibility, morbidity, and mortality of SARS-CoV-2 also resulted in panic in the global community, disruption of social orders, and decimation of the world’s economy. The range and destructive power of SARS-CoV-2 are both unprecedented.

Clearly, SARS-CoV-2 not only meets but also surpasses the standards of a traditional bioweapon.

Therefore, it should be defined as an Unrestricted Bioweapon.

4.4 The current pandemic is an attack on humanity

The scientific evidence and records indicate that the current pandemic is not a result of accidental release of a gain-of-function product but a planned attack using an Unrestricted Bioweapon. The current pandemic therefore should be correspondingly considered as a result of Unrestricted Biowarfare.

Under such circumstances, the infected population are being used, unconsciously, as the vectors of the disease to facilitate the spread of the infection. The first victims of the attack were the Chinese people, especially those in the city of Wuhan. At the initial stage, the hidden spread in Wuhan could have also served another purpose: the final verification of the bioweapon’s functionality, an important aspect of which is the human-to-human transmission efficiency. Upon the success of this last step, targeted release of the pathogen might have been enabled.

Given the global presence of SARS-CoV-2 and the likelihood of its long-term persistence, it is appropriate to say that this attack was on the humanity as a whole and has put its fate at risk.

4.5 Actions need to be taken to combat the current pandemic and save the future of humanity

Given the CCP’s role here, it is of paramount importance that the CCP is held accountable for its actions.

In addition, the world needs to find out what other variants of SARS-CoV-2 exist in the CCP-controlled laboratories, whether or not SARS-CoV-2 or its variant(s) are still being actively released, whether or not re-infection of SARS-CoV-2 leads to worsened outcomes due to inefficient immunity and/or antibody dependent enhancement (ADE), and whether other weaponized pathogens are owned by the CCP as a result of their excessive, state-stimulated efforts in collecting novel animal pathogens and studying their potentials in zoonosis.

It is also of paramount importance that all the hidden knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 be brought out as soon as possible. As illustrated in our earlier report, although a template virus was used, the creation of SARS-CoV-2 must have involved introducing changes to the template sequence through DNA synthesis (steps 1 and 4 in part 2 of our earlier report)1. Such a practice can be safely guided by multi-sequence alignment of available SARS and SARS-like coronavirus sequences. The process of this practice has been illustrated, and both syn mutations and amino acid (non-syn) mutations at variable positions/regions would be introduced. From the perspective of the responsible scientists, these changes are necessary because, otherwise, the engineered nature of the virus and its connection to its template would be evident.

However, importantly, the introduced changes might have also altered the functions of the various viral components, which could be either by design or unintended. Nonetheless, it remains to be answered whether or how the introduced changes might be responsible for the various lasting complications that many COVID-19 patients experience and what barriers these changes might pose to the development of effective vaccines and other antiviral therapeutics. It is reasonable to believe that the responsible laboratories under the control of the CCP have been engaged in this research for a long period of time and therefore keep in possession a considerable amount of concealed knowledge of SARS-CoV-2. Some of the knowledge may provide answers to questions that need to be addressed urgently in the global combat against COVID-19. Such hidden knowledge ought to be made available to the world immediately.

What also need to be held accountable are the individuals and groups within certain organizations and institutions in the fields of public health and academic research, who knowingly and collaboratively facilitated the CCP’s misinformation campaign and misled the world. On January 18th and 19th, 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, then anonymously, first revealed that SARS-CoV-2 is of a laboratory origin.

Immediately afterwards, on January 20th, Dr. Zhengli Shi submitted her manuscript to Nature and reported the first fabricated virus, RaTG13. Since then, many virus fabrications have taken place and all of them were published as peer-reviewed articles on top scientific journals. Subsequently, based on such reports, influential opinion articles promoting the natural origin theory have then been published by prominent scientists and international organizations on such and other high-profile platforms.

In contrast to the rigorous promotion of the natural origin theory, strict censorship has been placed by these and other journals on manuscripts discussing a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. Our earlier report, which was one of such manuscripts and published as a preprint article, also faced unfounded criticisms dressed as unbiased peer reviews from two groups of scientists led by Drs. Robert Gallo and Nancy Connell, respectively (our point-to-point responses are being prepared and will be published soon). As a result of this collaborative efforts, the public has been largely removed from the truth about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, which has led to misjudgments, delayed actions, and greater sufferings of the global community. It is imperative to investigate the scientists, laboratories, institutions, and relevant collaborators responsible for the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and for the fabrications/cover-up.

It is also imperative to investigate the relevant individuals in the WHO, at the relevant scientific journals, in the relevant funding agencies, and in other relevant bodies, which have facilitated the creation of SARSCoV-2 and the scientific cover-up of its true origin while under full awareness of the nature of these operations. Finally, it also needs to be investigated which ones of the scientists engaged in the promotion of the natural origin theory were purely misled by the scientific fraud and which ones were colluding with the CCP government.

The time has come that the world faces the truth of COVID-19 and takes actions to save the future of humanity.

Acknowledgements

We thank Daoyu Zhang for sharing with us the observation of abnormal distribution of nonsynonymous mutations between RaTG13 Spike and SARS-CoV-2. We thank Francisco de Asis for revealing the filenames of the raw sequencing reads for RaTG13. We also thank other individuals, including anonymous scientists, for uncovering various facts associated with the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
 

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Dr. Li-Meng Yan reveals China’s fake science and the COVID-19 cover-up
WION
Washington
Oct 09, 2020, 05.27 PM(IST)
Written By: Lawrence Sellin

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party supported by some Western scientists and a politically-motivated media have desperately tried to convince the world that the COVID-19 virus originated as a bat beta-coronavirus which underwent a natural mutation process and was then acquired by humans after exposure to infected animals.

Undoubtedly, such subterfuge is meant to protect certain vested interests, including the potentially devastating political and economic consequences for China, global corporate and private investment in China and a negative effect on scientific collaboration and research funding of major Western research laboratories.

In her first article, “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route,” Chinese scientist and whistleblower, Dr. Li-Meng Yan presented the biological evidence demonstrating that the COVID-19 virus was made in a laboratory.

Now, Dr. Yan has published her second scientific article “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud,” which describes the extraordinary lengths the Chinese Communist Party has gone to cover-up the true laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus in order to escape responsibility for the pandemic.

For months after the start of the outbreak, China flooded the scientific literature with subtle and sometimes not so subtle messages supporting its narrative that COVID-19 is a naturally-occurring disease that “jumped” from animals to humans in the Wuhan seafood market.

After endless media reports and scientific studies, the theory that the Wuhan seafood market was the source for animal–human COVID-19 transmission was totally discredited, even by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On February 3, 2020, “batwoman” Dr. Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published an article suggesting that COVID-19 originated in bats and a bat coronavirus named RaTG13 was shown to be 96.2% identical to the COVID-19 virus, thus supporting the naturally-occurring theory.

Since then, literally hundreds of scientific articles have used RaTG13 as a basis for investigating the natural origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that RaTG13 exists only on paper because no live virus or intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been isolated or recovered.
Dr. Yan and her colleagues now make multiple arguments indicating that RaTG13 is a fabricated virus.

One way to determine if a virus is related to or evolved from another virus, in this case, RaTG13 and the COVID-19 virus, is to compare the synonymous and non-synonymous mutations in the genetic code.

The DNA genetic code, which is composed of combinations of the nucleotides guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine (G, A, C and T), determines the structure of proteins. It does so through groups of three nucleotides called codons that correspond to specific amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and that code is redundant.

For example, the amino acid arginine can be produced by codons CGT, CGA, CTC or CGG, meaning the third nucleotide in the codon is redundant or interchangeable and will still code for arginine. Any change in the first or second nucleotide will produce a different amino acid.

So, a viral genetic code can mutate, but still produce the same amino acid or a “synonymous” outcome. A mutation in the first or second nucleotide in a codon will result in different amino acid, a “non-synonymous” outcome.

In the absence of a major natural or artificial recombinant event, viruses that are naturally related or evolve from each other, as claimed for RaTG13 and the COVID-19 virus, have roughly standard ratios comparing synonymous and non-synonymous mutations.

Dr. Yan’s data show that when the ratios of synonymous and non-synonymous mutations between a critical segment of the RaTG13 and COVID-19 viruses are compared, the result “is abnormal and a violation of the principles of natural evolution.”

The interpretation is that RaTG13 and the COVID-19 virus could not be related to each other through natural evolution and that RaTG13 is a likely fabrication.

In addition, a reconstructed RaTG13 receptor binding domain does not bind to the angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptors in two species of horseshoe bats, implying that RaTG13 could not exist in a bat population from which it would mutate and infect humans, completely undermining the naturally-occurring theory.

Dr. Yan also questions the accuracy of China’s pangolin (scaly anteater) coronavirus data upon which dozens of scientific studies examining potential natural coronavirus recombination events are based.

In early June, another novel bat coronavirus, RmYN02, which shares a 93.3% sequence similarity to the COVID-19 virus, was identified and used to support the Communist Chinese Party’s argument that the pandemic was a natural outbreak.

In that weak attempt to buttress the naturally-occurring theory, the Chinese authors of the RmYN02 article claim that a proline-alanine-alanine (PAA) amino acid insertion represents an ancestor to the proline-arginine-arginine-alanine (PRRA) furin polybasic cleavage site found in the COVID-19 virus, but not found in any other related bat coronavirus.

The presence of the furin polybasic cleavage site is a marker for genetic manipulation and, therefore, countering that fact would be an important objective of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda machine.

The RmYN02 hypothesis disintegrates under scrutiny because the PAA sequence is chemically neutral, not basic and it could not cleave anything.

RmYN02 does not even possess the arginine-serine (R-S) cleavage point found in the COVID-19 virus and all related coronaviruses and the published RmYH02 sequence seems to be out of alignment.

Dr. Yan’s second scientific article adds one more nail in the coffin of China’s false theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was naturally-occurring.
 

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Newspaper investigation claims China hoarded face masks in early January

If true this goes to show China knew about human-to-human transmission when denying it to the world

Before the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global pandemic, Chinese consulates in Canada and around the world asked Chinese nationals to stockpile as much personal protective equipment (PPE) as possible for hospitals in China, according to an investigation by Canada's Global News.
In an article titled "United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies," published on Thursday (April 30), investigative reporter Sam Cooper shared his findings with Jorge Guajardo, Mexico's former ambassador to Beijing, and Canadian lawmaker Erin O'Toole.
Guajardo claimed that China had engaged in a "surreptitious" state-level operation to secure global PPE supply at low prices and did so before the deadly virus had made its way to Western countries, in early March. He said a source in the Mexican supply chain had told him in mid-January that factories were receiving large orders to send N95 respirators to China.
According to O'Toole, China had been hoarding face masks and epidemic safety equipment since Jan. 14, back when Beijing claimed there were no cases of human-to-human transmission. However, O'Toole said the Canadian government did not respond to China's acquisition campaign despite it being well-known among military and emergency service circles.
According to Cooper, while Canada was shipping more than 14,500 kilograms of protective clothing, face masks, goggles, and gloves to China, Chinese community organizations and business groups in Canada bought and shipped at least 90,700 kg of medical supplies to China. He added the stockpiling operation was launched by The United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a department in charge of managing potential opposition groups in China and important foreign missions.
Cooper pointed out that China's early suppression of accurate information about the outbreak was the main cause for it becoming a pandemic, a belief shared by international media, including the Associated Press. He said that Beijing's decision to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus has resulted in millions of individuals infected around the world.


The Chinese government allowed the virus to spread around the world by allowing international travel while stocking up on masks and PPE for itself. All the while lying to the world through WHO that there is no human-to-human transmission. But the Chinese government knew there was human-to-human transmission because they were buying up masks and personal protective equipment to protect themselves from human-to-human transmission of the Covid-19 virus they created in a lab, they leaked out, and they allowed to spread around the world (by allowing international travel of infected people).
 

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What’s happening in Xinjiang is genocide

WHAT HAS been known until now about China’s persecution of the Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang province has focused on cultural genocide: concentration camps intended to eradicate their language, traditions and ways of life. This was cruel enough. But new evidence has surfaced that China has also imposed on the Uighurs a form of demographic genocide with forced sterilizations and other measures aimed at reducing the population.

The disclosure comes in an investigative report from the Associated Press and a new research report by scholar Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation. The new evidence shows that China is systematically using pregnancy checks, forced intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion to reduce the population of Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. Moreover, having too many children is being punished by incarceration in the camps. According to a set of leaked data, obtained and corroborated by the AP, of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children, the most common reason for holding them. Detention in camps — which the government claims is vocational education — is written policy in at least three counties for parents with too many children.
The AP reported that authorities have gone hunting for such parents, ripping them away from their families unless they can pay huge fines.

Mr. Zenz found that the Xinjiang authorities planned in 2019 to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in four rural southern prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries, intrauterine devices or sterilizations. Moreover, in 2018, 80 percent of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang — despite the fact that the region makes up only 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.
The campaign to depress the Uighur population appears to be working. Birthrates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birthrates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24 percent last year alone, compared with just 4.2 percent nationwide.
China long employed coercion in family life with its one-child policy, now abandoned. In Xinjiang, it has sought to whitewash the horrors it is inflicting on people. The new disclosures make it even more urgent that China’s leaders be pressed to account for these atrocities. The measures fall within the definition of genocide in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” China is a signatory but rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

President Trump has just signed a new sanctions law against individuals who are found responsible for abuses in Xinjiang. But China’s treatment of the Uighurs is so reprehensible that it calls into serious question whether China should be permitted to proceed as host of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Why should the world sports community honor a country that has committed genocide?
 

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‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims
More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.


Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.


The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.


The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?




They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.”



The question-and-answer script also included a barely concealed threat: Students were to be told that their behavior could either shorten or extend the detention of their relatives.



I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good,” officials were advised to say, “and also for your own good.

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.


Read the Full Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps


The party has rejected international criticism of the camps and described them as job-training centers that use mild methods to fight Islamic extremism. But the documents confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words and orders of the very officials who conceived and orchestrated it.


Even as the government presented its efforts in Xinjiang to the public as benevolent and unexceptional, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in these internal communications. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including the mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.


Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.


The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:


• President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

President Xi Jinping of China visiting a mosque in the city of Urumqi in 2014. Xinhua/Reuters

• Terrorist attacks abroad and the drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan heightened the leadership’s fears and helped shape the crackdown. Officials argued that attacks in Britain resulted from policies that put “human rights above security,” and Mr. Xi urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s “war on terror” after the Sept. 11 attacks.


• The internment camps in Xinjiang expanded rapidly after the appointment in August 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealous new party boss for the region. He distributed Mr. Xi’s speeches to justify the campaign and exhorted officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.”


• The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.


The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.






The documents include 96 pages of internal speeches by

Mr. Xi,



102 pages of internal speeches by other officials,



161 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and

control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang



and 44 pages of material from internal investigations

into local officials.




Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.


The Chinese leadership wraps policymaking in secrecy, especially when it comes to Xinjiang, a resource-rich territory located on the sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. The largest of these groups are the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and have long faced discrimination and restrictions on cultural and religious activities.



A restaurant in the old city of Yarkand in August. Above patrons a propaganda poster is quoting Xi Jinping : "Every ethnic group must tightly bind together like the seeds of a pomegranate." Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.


Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.


Of the 24 documents, the directive on how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017 offers the most detailed discussion of the indoctrination camps — and the clearest illustration of the regimented way the party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.





Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.


Officials in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang, drafted the question-and-answer script after the regional government warned local officials to prepare for the returning students. The agency coordinating efforts to “maintain stability” across Xinjiang then distributed the guide across the region and urged officials to use it as a model.


The government sends Xinjiang’s brightest young Uighurs to universities across China, with the goal of training a new generation of Uighur civil servants and teachers loyal to the party.


The crackdown has been so extensive that it affected even these elite students, the directive shows. And that made the authorities nervous.


“Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country,” the directive noted. “The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”




The document warned that there was a “serious possibility” students might sink into “turmoil” after learning what had happened to their relatives. It recommended that police officers in plain clothes and experienced local officials meet them as soon as they returned “to show humane concern and stress the rules.”



The directive’s question-and-answer guide begins gently, with officials advised to tell the students that they have “absolutely no need to worry” about relatives who have disappeared.



Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs, and the standards are quite high,” officials were told to say, before adding that the authorities were spending more than $3 per day on meals for each detainee, “even better than the living standards that some students have back home.



If you want to see them,” the answer concluded, “we can arrange for you to have a video meeting.

The authorities anticipated, however, that this was unlikely to mollify students and provided replies to a series of other questions: When will my relatives be released? If this is for training, why can’t they come home? Can they request a leave? How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?


The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.


“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”


Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.


“Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” one answer said. “This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”


The authorities appear to be using a scoring system to determine who can be released from the camps: The document instructed officials to tell the students that their behavior could hurt their relatives’ scores, and to assess the daily behavior of the students and record their attendance at training sessions, meetings and other activities.






Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.



If asked about the impact of the detentions on family finances, officials were advised to assure students that “the party and the government will do everything possible to ease your hardships.



The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, “Did they commit a crime?



The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. “It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts,” the script said.



Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.
Secret Speeches

The ideas driving the mass detentions can be traced back to Xi Jinping’s first and only visit to Xinjiang as China’s leader, a tour shadowed by violence.


In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.


Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.


Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.


The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.


“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”


“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”


In free-flowing monologues in Xinjiang and at a subsequent leadership conference on Xinjiang policy in Beijing, Mr. Xi is recorded thinking through what he called a crucial national security issue and laying out his ideas for a “people’s war” in the region.


Although he did not order mass detentions in these speeches, he called on the party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam in Xinjiang.


A watchtower this spring at a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp on the outskirts of Hotan. Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images




Mr. Xi displayed a fixation with the issue that seemed to go well beyond his public remarks on the subject. He likened Islamic extremism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.”


“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Mr. Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to Xinjiang. “People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”


In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.”


“As soon as you believe in it,” he said, “it’s like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.”


In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.


“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”


But Mr. Xi’s main point was unmistakable: He was leading the party in a sharp turn toward greater repression in Xinjiang.


Before Mr. Xi, the party had often described attacks in Xinjiang as the work of a few fanatics inspired and orchestrated by shadowy separatist groups abroad. But Mr. Xi argued that Islamic extremism had taken root across swaths of Uighur society.


In fact, the vast majority of Uighurs adhere to moderate traditions, though some began embracing more conservative and more public religious practices in the 1990s, despite state controls on Islam. Mr. Xi’s remarks suggest he was alarmed by the revival of public piety. He blamed lax controls on religion, suggesting that his predecessors had let down their guard.




Chinese security forces securing an area outside a mosque in Kashgar, China, in 2014. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi said that was not enough. He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities.


“The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Mr. Xi told the leadership conference on Xinjiang policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market.

The Soviet Prism

Mr. Xi is the son of an early Communist Party leader who in the 1980s supported more relaxed policies toward ethnic minority groups, and some analysts had expected he might follow his father’s milder ways when he assumed leadership of the party in November 2012.


But the speeches underscore how Mr. Xi sees risks to China through the prism of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he blamed on ideological laxity and spineless leadership.


Across China, he set about eliminating challenges to party rule; dissidents and human rights lawyers disappeared in waves of arrests. In Xinjiang, he pointed to examples from the former Soviet bloc to argue that economic growth would not immunize a society against ethnic separatism.


The Baltic republics were among the most developed in the Soviet Union but also the first to leave when the country broke up, he told the leadership conference. Yugoslavia’s relative prosperity did not prevent its disintegration either, he added.


“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right,” Mr. Xi said. “But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself.”


In the speeches, Mr. Xi showed a deep familiarity with the history of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule, or at least Beijing’s official version of it, and discussed episodes rarely if ever mentioned by Chinese leaders in public, including brief periods of Uighur self-rule in the first half of the 20th century.


Violence by Uighur militants has never threatened Communist control of the region. Though attacks grew deadlier after 2009, when nearly 200 people died in ethnic riots in Urumqi, they remained relatively small, scattered and unsophisticated.


Even so, Mr. Xi warned that the violence was spilling from Xinjiang into other parts of China and could taint the party’s image of strength. Unless the threat was extinguished, Mr. Xi told the leadership conference, “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected.”


Setting aside diplomatic niceties, he traced the origins of Islamic extremism in Xinjiang to the Middle East, and warned that turmoil in Syria and Afghanistan would magnify the risks for China. Uighurs had traveled to both countries, he said, and could return to China as seasoned fighters seeking an independent homeland, which they called East Turkestan.


“After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia,” Mr. Xi said. “East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”


Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, responded to the 2009 riots in Urumqi with a clampdown but he also stressed economic development as a cure for ethnic discontent — longstanding party policy. But Mr. Xi signaled a break with Mr. Hu’s approach in the speeches.





“In recent years, Xinjiang has grown very quickly and the standard of living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist violence have still been on the rise,” he said. “This goes to show that economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and security.”


Ensuring stability in Xinjiang would require a sweeping campaign of surveillance and intelligence gathering to root out resistance in Uighur society, Mr. Xi argued.


He said new technology must be part of the solution, foreshadowing the party’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in Xinjiang. But he also emphasized old-fashioned methods, such as neighborhood informants, and urged officials to study how Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks.


Like the United States, he said, China “must make the public an important resource in protecting national security.”


“We Communists should be naturals at fighting a people’s war,” he said. “We’re the best at organizing for a task.”


The only suggestion in these speeches that Mr. Xi envisioned the internment camps now at the heart of the crackdown was an endorsement of more intense indoctrination programs in Xinjiang’s prisons.


“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals,” he told officials in southern Xinjiang on the second day of his trip. “And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue.”


Within months, indoctrination sites began opening across Xinjiang — mostly small facilities at first, which held dozens or hundreds of Uighurs at a time for sessions intended to pressure them into disavowing devotion to Islam and professing gratitude for the party.


Then in August 2016, a hard-liner named Chen Quanguo was transferred from Tibet to govern Xinjiang. Within weeks, he called on local officials to “remobilize” around Mr. Xi’s goals and declared that Mr. Xi’s speeches “set the direction for making a success of Xinjiang.”


New security controls and a drastic expansion of the indoctrination camps followed.




The struggle against terror and to safeguard stability is a protracted war, and also a war of offense,” Mr. Chen said in a speech to the regional leadership in October 2017 that was among the leaked papers.



In another document, a record of his remarks in a video conference in August 2017, he cited “vocational skills, education training and transformation centers” as an example of “good practices” for achieving Mr. Xi’s goals for Xinjiang.

The crackdown appears to have smothered violent unrest in Xinjiang, but many experts have warned that the extreme security measures and mass detentions are likely to breed resentment that could eventually inspire worse ethnic clashes.


The camps have been condemned in Washington and other foreign capitals. As early as the May 2014 leadership conference, though, Mr. Xi anticipated international criticism and urged officials behind closed doors to ignore it.


“Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang,” he said.

‘Round Up Everyone’

The documents show there was more resistance to the crackdown inside the party than previously known — and highlight the key role that the new party boss in Xinjiang played in overcoming it.


Mr. Chen led a campaign akin to one of Mao’s turbulent political crusades, in which top-down pressure on local officials encouraged overreach and any expression of doubt was treated as a crime.


In February 2017, he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in a vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a “smashing, obliterating offensive.” In the following weeks, the documents indicate, the leadership settled on plans to detain Uighurs in large numbers.


Mr. Chen issued a sweeping order: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The vague phrase appears repeatedly in internal documents from 2017.



The party boss for the Xinjiang region, Chen Quanguo, right, during a Communist Party Congress in Beijing in 2017. Etienne Oliveau/Getty Images

The party had previously used the phrase — “ying shou jin shou” in Chinese — when demanding that officials be vigilant and comprehensive in collecting taxes or measuring harvests. Now it was being applied to humans in directives that ordered, with no mention of judicial procedures, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or antigovernment views.


The authorities laid out dozens of such signs, including common behavior among devout Uighurs such as wearing long beards, giving up smoking or drinking, studying Arabic and praying outside mosques.


Party leaders reinforced the orders with warnings about terrorism abroad and potential copycat attacks in China.




For example, a 10-page directive in June 2017 signed by Zhu Hailun, then Xinjiang’s top security official, called recent terrorist attacks in Britain “a warning and a lesson for us.” It blamed the British government’s “excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security,’ and inadequate controls on the propagation of extremism on the internet and in society.”



It also complained of security lapses in Xinjiang, including sloppy investigations, malfunctions in surveillance equipment and the failure to hold people accused of suspicious behavior.



Keep up the detentions, it ordered. “Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it said. “If they’re there, round them up.




The number of people swept into the camps remains a closely guarded secret. But one of the leaked documents offers a hint of the scale of the campaign: It instructed officials to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in crowded facilities.

‘I Broke the Rules’

The orders were especially urgent and contentious in Yarkand County, a collection of rural towns and villages in southern Xinjiang where nearly all of the 900,000 residents are Uighur.


In the 2014 speeches, Mr. Xi had singled out southern Xinjiang as the front line in his fight against religious extremism. Uighurs make up close to 90 percent of the population in the south, compared to just under half in Xinjiang over all, and Mr. Xi set a long-term goal of attracting more Han Chinese settlers.


He and other party leaders ordered a quasi-military organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, to accelerate efforts to settle the area with more Han Chinese, the documents show.


A few months later, more than 100 Uighur militants armed with axes and knives attacked a government office and police station in Yarkand, killing 37 people, according to government reports. In the battle, the security forces shot dead 59 assailants, the reports said.


An official named Wang Yongzhi was appointed to run Yarkand soon afterward. With his glasses and crew cut, he looked the picture of a party technocrat. He had grown up and spent his career in southern Xinjiang and was seen as a deft, seasoned official who could deliver on the party’s top priorities in the area: economic development and firm control of the Uighurs.


But among the most revealing documents in the leaked papers are two that describe Mr. Wang’s downfall — an 11-page report summarizing the party’s internal investigation into his actions, and the text of a 15-page confession that he may have given under duress. Both were distributed inside the party as a warning to officials to fall in line behind the crackdown.


Han officials like Mr. Wang serve as the party’s anchors in southern Xinjiang, watching over Uighur officials in more junior positions, and he seemed to enjoy the blessing of top leaders, including Yu Zhengsheng, then China’s most senior official for ethnic issues, who visited the county in 2015.


Mr. Wang set about beefing up security in Yarkand but he also pushed economic development to address ethnic discontent. And he sought to soften the party’s religious policies, declaring that there was nothing wrong with having a Quran at home and encouraging party officials to read it to better understand Uighur traditions.


When the mass detentions began, Mr. Wang did as he was told at first and appeared to embrace the task with zeal.


He built two sprawling new detention facilities, including one as big as 50 basketball courts, and herded 20,000 people into them.


He sharply increased funding for the security forces in 2017, more than doubling spending on outlays such as checkpoints and surveillance to 1.37 billion renminbi, or about $180 million.


And he lined up party members for a rally in a public square and urged them to press the fight against terrorists. “Wipe them out completely,” he said. “Destroy them root and branch.”




Military police at a rally in Hotan, in February 2017. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But privately, Mr. Wang had misgivings, according to the confession that he later signed, which would have been carefully vetted by the party.


He was under intense pressure to prevent an outburst of violence in Yarkand, and worried the crackdown would provoke a backlash.


The authorities set numeric targets for Uighur detentions in parts of Xinjiang, and while it is unclear if they did so in Yarkand, Mr. Wang felt the orders left no room for moderation and would poison ethnic relations in the county.


He also worried that the mass detentions would make it impossible to record the economic progress he needed to earn a promotion.


The leadership had set goals to reduce poverty in Xinjiang. But with so many working-age residents being sent to the camps, Mr. Wang was afraid the targets would be out of reach, along with his hopes for a better job.


His superiors, he wrote, were “overly ambitious and unrealistic.”


“The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with realities on the ground and could not be implemented in full,” he added.


To help enforce the crackdown in southern Xinjiang, Mr. Chen transferred in hundreds of officials from the north. Publicly, Mr. Wang welcomed the 62 assigned to Yarkand. Privately, he seethed that they did not understand how to work with local officials and residents.


The pressure on officials in Xinjiang to detain Uighurs and prevent fresh violence was relentless, and Mr. Wang said in the confession — presumably signed under pressure — that he drank on the job. He described one episode in which he collapsed drunk during a meeting on security.





“While reporting on my work in the afternoon meeting, I rambled incoherently,” he said. “I’d just spoken a few sentences and my head collapsed on the table. It became the biggest joke across the whole prefecture.”


Thousands of officials in Xinjiang were punished for resisting or failing to carry out the crackdown with sufficient zeal. Uighur officials were accused of protecting fellow Uighurs, and Gu Wensheng, the Han leader of another southern county, was jailed for trying to slow the detentions and shield Uighur officials, according to the documents.


Secret teams of investigators traveled across the region identifying those who were not doing enough. In 2017, the party opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in Xinjiang for infractions in the “fight against separatism,” more than 20 times the figure in the previous year, according to official statistics.


Mr. Wang may have gone further than any other official.


Quietly, he ordered the release of more than 7,000 camp inmates — an act of defiance for which he would be detained, stripped of power and prosecuted.




I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” Mr. Wang wrote.



Without approval and on my own initiative,” he added, “I broke the rules.
Brazen Defiance

Mr. Wang quietly disappeared from public view after September 2017.


About six months later, the party made an example of him, announcing that he was being investigated for “gravely disobeying the party central leadership’s strategy for governing Xinjiang.”


The internal report on the investigation was more direct. “He should have given his all to serving the party,” it said. “Instead, he ignored the party central leadership’s strategy for Xinjiang, and he went as far as brazen defiance.”


Both the report and Mr. Wang’s confession were read aloud to officials across Xinjiang. The message was plain: The party would not tolerate any hesitation in carrying out the mass detentions.


Propaganda outlets described Mr. Wang as irredeemably corrupt, and the internal report accused him of taking bribes on construction and mining deals and paying off superiors to win promotions.


The authorities also emphasized he was no friend of Uighurs. To hit poverty-reduction targets, he was said to have forced 1,500 families to move into unheated apartments in the middle of the winter. Some villagers burned wood indoors to keep warm, leading to injuries and deaths, his confession said.


But Mr. Wang’s greatest political sin was not revealed to the public. Instead, the authorities hid it in the internal report.


“He refused,” it said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”



The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 
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Blanked-Out Spots On China's Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang's Camps
In the summer of 2018, as it became even harder for journalists to work effectively in Xinjiang, a far-western region of China, we started to look at how we could use satellite imagery to investigate the camps where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were being detained. At the time we began, it was believed that there were around 1,200 camps in existence, while only several dozen had been found. We wanted to try to find the rest.
Our breakthrough came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satellite imagery tiles loading in the vicinity of one of the known camps while using the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps. The satellite imagery was old, but otherwise fine when zoomed out — but at a certain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp location. They disappeared as you zoomed in further, while the satellite imagery was replaced by the standard gray reference tiles, which showed features such as building outlines and roads.
At that time, Baidu only had satellite imagery at medium resolution in most parts of Xinjiang, which would be replaced by their general reference map tiles when you zoomed in closer. That wasn’t what was happening here — these light gray tiles at the camp location were a different color than the reference map tiles and lacked any drawn information, such as roads. We also knew that this wasn’t a failure to load tiles, or information that was missing from the map. Usually when a map platform can’t display a tile, it serves a standard blank tile, which is watermarked. These blank tiles are also a darker color than the tiles we had noticed over the camps.
Once we found that we could replicate the blank tile phenomenon reliably, we started to look at other camps whose locations were already known to the public to see if we could observe the same thing happening there. Spoiler: We could. Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu, appearing only at this zoom level and disappearing as you zoomed in further. One of the six camps didn’t have the blank tiles — a person who had visited the site in 2019 said it had closed, which could well have explained it. However, we later found that the blank tiles weren’t used in city centers, only toward the edge of cities and in more rural areas. (Baidu did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Having established that we could probably find internment camps in this way, we examined Baidu's satellite tiles for the whole of Xinjiang, including the blank masking tiles, which formed a separate layer on the map. We analyzed the masked locations by comparing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub, and Planet Labs.
In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads.
Prisons and internment camps need to be near infrastructure — you need to get large amounts of building materials and heavy machinery there to build them, for starters. Chinese authorities would have also needed good roads and railways to bring newly detained people there by the thousand, as they did in the early months of the mass internment campaign. Analyzing locations near major infrastructure was therefore a good way to focus our initial search. This left us with around 50,000 locations to look at.
We began to sort through the mask tile locations systematically using a custom web tool that we built to support our investigation and help manage the data. We analyzed the whole of Kashgar prefecture, the Uighur heartland, which is in the south of Xinjiang, as well as parts of the neighboring prefecture, Kizilsu, in this way. After looking at 10,000 mask tile locations and identifying a number of facilities bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, prisons, and camps, we had a good idea of the range of designs of these facilities and also the sorts of locations in which they were likely to be found.
We quickly began to notice how large many of these places are — and how heavily securitized they appear to be, compared to the earlier known camps. In site layout, architecture, and security features, they bear greater resemblance to other prisons across China than to the converted schools and hospitals that formed the earlier camps in Xinjiang. The newer compounds are also built to last, in a way that the earlier conversions weren’t. The perimeter walls are made of thick concrete, for example, which takes much longer to build and perhaps later demolish, than the barbed wire fencing that characterizes the early camps.
In almost every county, we found buildings bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, plus new facilities with the characteristics of large, high-security camps and/or prisons. Typically, there would be an older detention center in the middle of the town, while on the outskirts there would be a new camp and prison, often in recently developed industrial areas. Where we hadn’t yet found these facilities in a given county, this pattern pushed us to keep on looking, especially in areas where there was no recent satellite imagery. Where there was no public high-resolution imagery, we used medium-resolution imagery from Planet Labs and Sentinel to locate likely sites. Planet was then kind enough to give us access to high-resolution imagery for these locations and to task a satellite to capture new imagery of some areas that hadn’t been photographed in high resolution since 2006. In one county, this allowed us to see that the detention center that had previously been identified by other researchers had been demolished and to find the new prison just out of town.


This is Yiwu, Hami prefecture in Google Earth, in the most recent publicly available high-resolution imagery. The photo was taken in 2006. The white marker shows the old, now-demolished prison and the red marker shows the new one on the outskirts.


Google Earth




Here is a close-up of the location where the new prison would eventually be built.


Google Earth



Planet Labs took a new satellite image in 2020, showing the fully built facility.


Planet Labs



Prison requirements — why prisons are built where they are
There’s good reason why these places are developed close to towns. There’s the occasional camp in a more remote location, such as the sprawling internment camp in Dabancheng, but even there it’s next to a major road, with a small town nearby. Having the prison or camp close to an existing town minimizes, in principle, the distance that detainees must be transported (although there are also examples of prisoners and detainees being taken right across Xinjiang, from Kashgar to Korla, as in the drone video that reemerged recently, according to analysts). It is easier for families to visit loved ones who are in custody. Being near a town means that a prison or camp can be staffed more easily. Guards have families, their children need to go to school, their partners have jobs, they need access to healthcare, etc. Construction workers are needed to build the prison in the first place. It is also useful for amenities. Prisons and camps need electricity, water, telephone lines. It is way cheaper and easier to connect to an existing nearby network than to run new pipes and cables tens of kilometers to a more remote location.

Finally, you need a large plot of land for a prison, preferably with space to expand in the future, and this is what the recently developed industrial estates offer: large, serviced plots, close to existing towns and cities. Building in industrial estates also places the camps close to factories for forced labor. While many camps have factories within their compounds, in several cases that we know of detainees are bused to other factory sites to work.
Our list of sites
In total we identified 428 locations in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons and detention centers. Many of these locations contain two to three detention facilities — a camp, pretrial administrative detention center, or prison. We intend to analyze these locations further and make our database more granular over the next few months.
Of these locations, we believe 315 are in use as part of the current internment program — 268 new camp or prison complexes, plus 47 pretrial administrative detention centers that have not been expanded over the past four years. We have witness testimony showing that these detention centers have frequently been used to detain people, who are often then moved on to other camps, and so we feel it is important to include them. Excluded from this 315 are 39 camps that we believe are probably closed and 11 that have closed — either they’ve been demolished or we have witness testimony that they are no longer in use. There are a further 14 locations identified by other researchers, but where our team has only been able to check the satellite evidence, which in these cases is weak. These 14 are not included in our list.

We have also located 63 prisons that we believe belong to earlier, pre-2016 programs. These facilities were typically built several years — in some cases, several decades — before the current internment program and have not been significantly extended since 2016. They are also different in style from the detention centers, known in Chinese as “kanshousuo,” and also from the newer camps. These facilities are not part of the 315 we believe to be in use as part of the current internment program and are included separately in our database.
Many of the earlier camps, which were converted from other uses, had their courtyard fencing, watchtowers, and other security features removed, often in late 2018 or early 2019. In some cases, the removal of most barricading, plus the fact that there are often cars parked in several places across the compounds, suggests that they’re no longer camps and are classified as probably closed in our database. The removal of the security features, in several cases, coincided with the opening of a larger, higher-security facility being completed nearby, suggesting that detainees may have been moved to the newer location.
Where facilities were purpose-built as camps and have had courtyard fencing removed but otherwise don’t show any change of use (like cars in the compound), we think they’re likely to still be camps — albeit with lower levels of security.


The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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johnq

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The following article give evidence by multiple researchers that Covid-19 virus was created via genetic manipulation in a Chinese Communist Party PLA military lab and intentionally spread to other countries by Chinese government. I am posting sections from the article in parts as it is very long:

SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

More than eight months after SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a global threat, there is still no clarity about its origins. Those who suspect that the virus was developed in a laboratory are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but there is growing evidence to support the suggestion that gain-of-function research has made SARS-CoV-2 particularly virulent.

While some scientists still argue that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of natural evolution, others consider an accidental or deliberate leak from a laboratory to be a valid hypothesis that merits further investigation.

For decades, gain-of-function research, which alters viruses to increase their transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence or lethality, has been carried out by American and Chinese scientists working in collaboration. There have been numerous ‘leaks’ of viruses from laboratories, including during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that occurred in 2003–2004.

Those who suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may well have originated in a laboratory include the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, the French scientist and Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier, and the exiled Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan, who says that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud” in covering up the truth.

Yan and others say there is evidence within the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that suggests it is a product of genetic manipulation. . . .

(Part 1):

Scientists point to ‘suspicious’ SARS-CoV-2 properties

In an interview published in Minerva in Norway on July 2, Birger Sørensen said it was more than 90% certain that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory.

Sørensen and his fellow scientists Angus Dalgleish and Andres Susrud have done their research with a view to producing a vaccine.

Sørensen’s work came to international attention in 2008 when he launched a new immunotherapy for HIV. Dalgleish is the professor at St George’s medical school at the University of London who became world famous in 1984 after he discovered a novel receptor that the HIV virus uses to enter human cells.

Sørensen (pictured left) told Minerva that he and his colleagues discovered that SARS-CoV-2 was exceptionally well adjusted to infect humans, to the degree that it was suspicious.

He said he and his colleagues had discovered properties in SARS-CoV-2 that enable it to use an additional receptor and create a binding to human cells in the upper respiratory tract and the intestines that is strong enough to produce an infection.

Sørensen says the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is very stable and this points to it being “a fully developed, almost perfected virus for infecting humans”. This, he says, indicates that the structure of the virus cannot have evolved naturally.

He also points to the inserts in SARS-CoV-2, several of which do not, he says, exist in other coronaviruses. Sørensen told Minerva that it’s possible for a virus to attain these properties in nature, but it’s not likely.

“If the mutations had happened in nature, we would have most likely seen that the virus had attracted other properties through mutations, not just properties that help the virus to attach itself to human cells,” he said.
“What we see is that an area that you could observe in the first SARS coronavirus has been moved, so that the parts of the virus that are particularly well suited to attach to humans have become part of the spike protein that the virus uses to penetrate human cells.”
Sørensen told Minerva that the properties seen in SARS-CoV-2 had yet to be discovered anywhere in nature. If the virus came from nature, he says, there should also be many animals infected with it.

“The only place we are aware of where an equivalent virus to that which causes Covid-19 exists is in a laboratory,” Sørensen told Minerva. “So the simplest and most logical explanation is that it comes from a laboratory. Those who claim otherwise, have the burden of proof.”

In an article published on July 13, Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud present detailed reasoning for their argument that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not natural.
“SARS-CoV-2 is possessed of dual action capability. In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small,” the authors state.
“The spike has six inserts which are unique fingerprints with five salient features indicative of purposive manipulation.”
Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud analyse four research projects which, they suggest, show by deduction “how, where, when, and by whom the SARS-CoV-2 spike acquired its special characteristics”.

They state: “This reconstructed historical aetiology meets the criteria of means, timing, agent and place to produce sufficient confidence to reverse the burden of proof.

“Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we also show, there are puzzling errors in their use of evidence.”

Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud challenge the arguments put forward by Andersen et al. in their controversial article entitled ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’, published on March 17 in Nature Medicine.

The three scientists say the contention of Andersen et al. that it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus because the ACE2 binding is not ideal “is weakened because Andersen et al. cite two authorities which actually say the reverse of what they say that they say”.

ACE2 (the Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) is a protein found on the surface of human cells, as well as in soluble form in the blood, that has been identified as the receptor for the SARS-CoV-2 viral entry.

Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud have identified five features of SARS-CoV-2 that individually, they say, seem unlikely to be the result of natural evolution and which, taken together, make natural evolution a less likely explanation than purposive manipulation, “specifically for gain of function”.

Sørensen and his colleagues say that a major part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has human-like domains with matured transmission adaption.

“Blasting the spike protein with a rolling window of six amino acids showed that 78.4% of six amino acid windows are human like,” they write.

Nearly 80% of the spike protein has a built-in stealth property by having high human similarity, they add.

“Therefore, it is remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence,” the scientists write. “Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) unless specific precautions are taken when using the spike protein in any vaccine candidate.”

Sørensen and his co-authors say their discovery that the SARS-CoV-2 spike displays new amino acid inserts “with condensed cumulative charge, all of which are surface exposed” is particularly significant.

“Being physically located on the surface of the spike protein greatly increases the infectivity and pathogenicity of the virus, enabling these inserts to participate in binding to co-receptors/negatively charged attachment receptors or even, as we have discovered, to the negatively charged phospholipid heads on the cell membrane,” they write.
“Such a result is typically the objective of gain of function experiments to create chimeric viruses of high potency. Therefore this is a strong indicator of manipulation.”
Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud point to articles by Chinese and American researchers in which, they say, “those researchers demonstrate and discuss how they have manipulated new chimeraviruses into existence, with SARS-coronavirus as a starting point”.

A comprehensive review of the relevant literature shows that a substantial amount of directly relevant gain-of function research has been undertaken, the three scientists say.

“Four studies are especially noteworthy. They are linked in two ways: scientifically, in that the third and fourth build upon the results of the first and second, and in continuity of the institution and personnel across all four.”

Sørensen and his colleagues note that the WIV was a key collaborator in all the projects.

The first project, in 2008, successfully demonstrated technical capabilities to interchange receptor-binding domains (RBDs) between bat SARS-like and human SARS viruses, Sørensen and his co-authors say.

Sørensen and his colleagues also say that, in 2010 scientists from the ‘Special Viruses’ section of the WIV were engaged in gain-of-function experiments, jointly with international collaborators, to increase SARS-CoV infectiousness for humans.
“They used an HIV pseudovirus to express seven bat ACE2 receptors and compared their binding properties to human ACE2 receptors in order to pick the best for further optimising a SARS-like coronavirus’s ability to bind to human cells”, Sørensen and his co-authors write.
“They also found that some bat ACE2 receptors are very close to human ACE2 receptors. This study provided a model system for testing the most infectious of SARS-CoV-like viruses which already had been selected in a vast survey of Chinese bat populations between 2005–2013.”

Sørensen and his co-authors also highlight the gain-of-function research carried out in 2015.
“In 2015 scientists from the ‘Special Viruses’ section of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were engaged in ‘gain-of-function’ experiments jointly with a majority team from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,” they write.
“Together, they manipulated bat viruses to create a mouse adapted chimeric virus SHC014-MA15 which binds to and can proliferate on human upper airway cells.”

Sørensen and his colleagues detail the way the SHC014 spike, in a wild-type backbone, can “efficiently utilise multiple ACE2 receptor orthologs, replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells, and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV” and say that what are described are “precisely SARS-CoV-2 properties”.

The three scientists say that those who reported on the research carried out in 2015 “were well aware that the chimeric virus which they had created was very dangerous because they discussed this fact”.

Sørensen and his colleagues added: “It is certainly the case that this experiment created a chimeric virus with very high infectivity potential targeted to the human upper respiratory tract.”

Sørensen, Dalgleish, and Susrud say that when the in vivo experiments were carried out at Chapel Hill, and the chimeric virus replicated in mouse lung showed significant pathogenesis, this was the opposite of the result the researchers had expected.

“The creation of chimeric viruses like SHC014-MA15 was not expected to increase ‘pathogenicity’,” Sørensen and his colleagues write.

In summary, the scientists say the work done in 2010 built upon the research carried out in 2008. “The 2010 work (Hou et al., 2010) perfected the ability to express receptors on human cells.

“On these foundations, the central gain of function work that underpins the functionalities of SARS-CoV-2 took place, carrying the WIV spike and plasmid materials to bond successfully to a UNC Chapel Hill human epithelial cell-line.”
 

johnq

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The following article give evidence by multiple researchers that Covid-19 virus was created via genetic manipulation in a Chinese Communist Party PLA military lab and intentionally spread to other countries by Chinese government. I am posting sections from the article in parts as it is very long (Part 1 is above; Part 2 is below the introduction below):

SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

More than eight months after SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a global threat, there is still no clarity about its origins. Those who suspect that the virus was developed in a laboratory are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but there is growing evidence to support the suggestion that gain-of-function research has made SARS-CoV-2 particularly virulent.

While some scientists still argue that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of natural evolution, others consider an accidental or deliberate leak from a laboratory to be a valid hypothesis that merits further investigation.

For decades, gain-of-function research, which alters viruses to increase their transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence or lethality, has been carried out by American and Chinese scientists working in collaboration. There have been numerous ‘leaks’ of viruses from laboratories, including during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that occurred in 2003–2004.

Those who suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may well have originated in a laboratory include the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, the French scientist and Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier, and the exiled Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan, who says that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud” in covering up the truth.

Yan and others say there is evidence within the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that suggests it is a product of genetic manipulation. . . .

(Part 2):

Citing the comment of the Australian virologist Nikolai Petrovsky, from Flinders University, that no natural virus matching SARS-CoV-2 has been found in nature despite an intensive search to find its origins, Latham and Wilson said: “The idea of an animal intermediate is speculation. Indeed, no credible viral or animal host intermediaries, either in the form of a confirmed animal host or a plausible virus intermediate, has to date emerged to explain the natural zoonotic transfer of Sars-CoV-2 to humans (e.g. Zhan et al., 2020).”

Petrovsky (pictured left) was the lead author of a preprint paper published on the arXiv server on May 13.

The Flinders University scientists found that SARS-CoV-2 targeted humans more potently than any of the tested animal species.

They said: “The binding energy between SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and ACE2 was highest for humans out of all species tested, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is uniquely evolved to bind and infect cells expressing human ACE2.

“This finding is particularly surprising as, typically, a virus would be expected to have highest affinity for the receptor in its original host species, e.g. bat, with a lower initial binding affinity for the receptor of any new host, e.g. humans.
“However, in this case, the affinity of SARS-CoV-2 is higher for humans than for the putative original host species, bats, or for any potential intermediary host species.”
Latham and Wilson note that, in 2014, just before a ban on gain-of-function research went into effect in the US, Zhengli did work with researchers from Ralph Baric’s laboratory in North Carolina, where gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses was carried out, and published a paper.

The researchers combined the spike of the bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone into a single engineered live virus, Latham and Wilson write.
“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.”
Researchers in Shi Zhengli’s laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells, Latham and Wilson note. “All these experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors,” they said.
 

skywatcher

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Country flag
Chinese leaders focus on tech in new five-year plan

DECOUPLING FROM US: The China’s 14th five-year plan is expected to emphasize lower reliance on foreign semiconductors


exp-2020-10-27_01_59_00.png


Chinese leaders yesterday met to formulate an economic blueprint for the next five years that is expected to emphasize development of semiconductors and other technology at a time when Washington is cutting off access to US technology.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government is working to promote self-sustaining growth supported by domestic consumer spending and technology development as tensions with trading partners hamper access to export markets and technology.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants Chinese industry to rely on domestic suppliers and consumers, a strategy it calls “dual circulation.”

The five-year plan, the 14th in a series issued since the 1950s, is the foundation for government industrial plans in the heavily regulated economy. Its broad outlines are due to be announced after the meeting ends on Thursday, but the full plan would not be released until March next year. Legal and regulatory changes and plans for individual industries would follow.

“Achieving independence in key areas, such as scientific research and finance, is expected to be a focus,” it said.

The latest plan is expected to emphasize domestic development of semiconductors for computers and smartphones — China’s biggest single import by value — next-generation telecoms, artificial intelligence and other fields.

Chinese leaders have promoted semiconductor development for two decades, but Chinese makers of smartphones and other products still rely on the US, Europe and Japan for processor chips. Beijing feels increased pressure after US President Donald Trump’s administration cut off access to most US supplies for Huawei Technologies Co (華為), a global maker of smartphones and switching equipment, in a feud over technology and security.

Decoupling is a concept that has gained attention as the Trump administration has pushed US companies to return manufacturing to the US and rely less heavily on production in China. Likewise, Beijing’s plan is likely to emphasize “lower reliance on foreign suppliers for strategic products such as food, energy, semiconductor and other key technologies,” Hu and Ji wrote.

China became the first major economy to begin the struggle of economic recovery after the CCP declared victory over the disease in March. Automakers and other major industries are back to normal production. Consumer spending edged back above pre-pandemic levels in the quarter that ended last month.

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johnq

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The following article give evidence by multiple researchers that Covid-19 virus was created via genetic manipulation in a Chinese Communist Party PLA military lab and intentionally spread to other countries by Chinese government. I am posting sections from the article in parts as it is very long (Parts 1 and 2 are above; Part 3 is below the introduction below):

SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

More than eight months after SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a global threat, there is still no clarity about its origins. Those who suspect that the virus was developed in a laboratory are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but there is growing evidence to support the suggestion that gain-of-function research has made SARS-CoV-2 particularly virulent.

While some scientists still argue that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of natural evolution, others consider an accidental or deliberate leak from a laboratory to be a valid hypothesis that merits further investigation.

For decades, gain-of-function research, which alters viruses to increase their transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence or lethality, has been carried out by American and Chinese scientists working in collaboration. There have been numerous ‘leaks’ of viruses from laboratories, including during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that occurred in 2003–2004.

Those who suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may well have originated in a laboratory include the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, the French scientist and Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier, and the exiled Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan, who says that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud” in covering up the truth.

Yan and others say there is evidence within the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that suggests it is a product of genetic manipulation. . . .

(Part 3):
Reports by exiled Chinese scientist


Exiled scientist Li-Meng Yan (pictured left) and three of her colleagues at the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation in New York in the US have published two reports about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2.


In the first report, published on September 14, Yan, Shu Kang, Jie Guan, and Shanchang Hu lay out arguments that suggest that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory in China.


Yan, who specialised in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, but fled to the US in April, says that the Chinese government and the WHO knew about person-to-person transmission of Covid-19 much earlier than was reported.


She says that her supervisors ignored research that she conducted at the beginning of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.


In their first paper, which was published on the preprint website Zenodo, Yan, Kang, Guan, and Hu say genetic evidence within the spike gene of the SARS-CoV-2 genome exists that suggests that the genome is a product of genetic manipulation.


“Furthermore, the proven concepts, well-established techniques, and knowledge and expertise are all in place for the convenient creation of this novel coronavirus in a short period of time,” Yan et al. state.
The scientists say that the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has likely undergone genetic engineering, through which the virus has gained the ability to target humans with enhanced virulence and infectivity.


“The characteristics and pathogenic effects of SARS-CoV-2 are unprecedented. The virus is highly transmissible, onset-hidden, multi-organ targeting, sequelae-unclear, lethal, and associated with various symptoms and complications,” they state.
The four scientists say that the theory that SARS-Cov-2 has a natural origin, although widely accepted, lacks substantial support.


“The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus.
“In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory.”


Yan et al. say there is evidence indicating that SARS-CoV- 2 is a laboratory product created by using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 as a template and/or backbone.


“Evidently, the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through gain-of-function manipulations at the WIV is significant and should be investigated thoroughly and independently,” they write.
The four researchers present three main arguments to support their contention that SARS-CoV-2 was manipulated in a laboratory.


They say that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is “suspiciously similar” to that of a bat coronavirus discovered in military laboratories in the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, and the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command.


ZC45 and ZXC21 were discovered (between July 2015 and February 2017), isolated, and characterised by researchers at the military laboratories in the Third Military Medical University and the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command, Yan et al. say. The data and associated work were published in 2018.


The researchers also say that the receptor-binding motif (RBM) within the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 cannot be born from nature. They say that the RBM of the spike resembles that of SARS-CoV from the 2003 epidemic “in a suspicious manner”. Genomic evidence suggests that the RBM has been genetically manipulated, they say.


“The way that SARS-CoV-2 RBM resembles SARS-CoV RBM and the overall sequence conservation pattern between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 are highly unusual,” Yan et al. write. “Collectively, this suggests that portions of the SARS-CoV-2 genome have not been derived from natural quasi-species viral particle evolution.”


The scientists further state that SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin cleavage site in its spike protein, “which is known to greatly enhance viral infectivity and cell tropism”.


This cleavage site is completely absent in this particular class of coronaviruses found in nature, the scientists say.


“Within the lineage B of β coronaviruses and with the exception of SARSCoV-2, no viruses contain a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction [of the spike protein],” they write.
“In addition, rare codons associated with this additional sequence suggest the strong possibility that this furin cleavage site is not the product of natural evolution and could have been inserted into the SARS-CoV-2 genome artificially by techniques other than simple serial passage or multi-strain recombination events inside co-infected tissue cultures or animals.”


A codon is a trinucleotide sequence of DNA or RNA that corresponds to a specific amino acid.


Yan et al. say that, in a discovery that is consistent with the RBM engineering theory, they have identified two unique restriction sites, EcoRI and BstEII, at either end of the RBM of the SARS-CoV-2 genome.


“These two sites, which are popular choices of everyday molecular cloning, do not exist in the rest of this spike gene,” the scientist say.


“Such EcoRI and BstEII sites do not exist in the spike genes of other β coronaviruses, which strongly indicates that they were unnatural and were specifically introduced into this spike gene of SARS-CoV-2 for the convenience of manipulating the critical RBM.”


A restriction site is a sequence of approximately six–eight base pairs of DNA that binds to a given restriction enzyme. A restriction enzyme is a protein that recognises a specific, short nucleotide sequence and cuts the DNA only at a specific restriction site. The natural function of restriction enzymes is to inactivate invading viruses by cleaving the viral DNA.


Yan et al. say that once restriction sites are successfully introduced, the RBM segment can be swapped conveniently using routine restriction enzyme digestion and ligation.


The feasibility of this RBM-swap strategy has been proven, the researchers add. In 2008, they say, Shi Zhengli’s group swapped a SARS RBM into the spike proteins of several SARS-like bat coronaviruses after introducing a restriction site into a codon-optimised spike gene. They then validated the binding of the resultant chimeric spike proteins with the human ACE2 receptor (hACE2).


Yan et al. refer in their report to the work of Zhengli’s collaborator, Fang Li. “Dr Li was the first person in the world to have structurally elucidated the binding between SARS-CoV RBD and hACE238 and has been the leading expert in the structural understanding of spike-ACE2 interactions,” the researchers said.


“The striking finding of EcoRI and BstEII restriction sites at either end of the SARS-CoV-2 RBM, respectively, and the fact that the same RBM region has been swapped both by Dr Shi and by her long-term collaborator, respectively, using restriction enzyme digestion methods are unlikely a coincidence.


“Rather, it is the smoking gun proving that the RBM/Spike of SARS-CoV-2 is a product of genetic manipulation.”
Although it may be convenient to copy the exact sequence of SARS RBM, it would be too clear a sign of artificial design and manipulation, Yan et al. say.


“The more deceiving approach would be to change a few non- essential residues, while preserving the ones critical for binding … Importantly, changes might have been made intentionally at non-essential sites, making it less like a ‘copy and paste’ of the SARS RBM.”


Yan et al. say that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created in a laboratory in a period of about six months.


The four scientists question the existence in nature of the RaTG13 virus.


“While suggesting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, the RaTG13 virus also diverted the attention of both the scientific field and the general public away from ZC45/ZXC21,” Yan et al. say.
They say that researchers from a Chinese BSL-3 lab (the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre), published an article in Nature in which they reported a conflicting close phylogenetic relationship between SARSCoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 rather than with RaTG13, but the article “was quickly shut down for ‘rectification’”.


They add: “It is believed that the researchers of that laboratory were being punished for having disclosed the SARS-CoV-2–ZC45/ZXC21 connection.


“On the other hand, substantial evidence has accumulated, pointing to severe problems associated with the reported sequence of RaTG13 as well as questioning the actual existence of this bat virus in nature.”


Yan et al. say that a very recent publication indicates that the RBD of the RaTG13’s spike protein could not bind to the ACE2 of two different types of horseshoe bats.


They say that their finding further substantiates the suspicion that the reported sequence of RaTG13 could have been fabricated “as the spike protein encoded by this sequence does not seem to carry the claimed function”.


They add: “The fact that a virus has been fabricated to shift the attention away from ZC45/ZXC21 speaks for an actual role of ZC45/ZXC21 in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.”


Yan et al. say genomic sequence analysis reveals that bat coronavirus ZC45 is the closest match to SARS-CoV-2.


“When SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 are compared on the amino acid level, a high sequence identity is observed for most of the proteins,” they say.


“The nucleocapsid protein is 94% identical. The membrane protein is 98.6% identical. The S2 portion (2nd half) of the spike protein is 95% identical. Importantly, the Orf8 protein is 94.2% identical and the E protein is 100% identical.”


Yan et al. say sequence blast analysis indicates that, with the exception of SARS-CoV-2, no known coronaviruses share 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45/ZXC21.


“Although 100% identity on the E protein has been observed between SARS-CoV and certain SARS-related bat coronaviruses, none of those pairs simultaneously share over 83% identity on the Orf8 protein.”


Yan et al. say that the 94.2% identity on the Orf8 protein, 100% identity on the E protein, and the overall genomic/amino acid-level resemblance between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 are therefore highly unusual.


“Such evidence, when considered together, is consistent with a hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 genome has an origin based on the use of ZC45/ZXC21 as a backbone and/or template for genetic gain-of-function modifications,” they write.


They add that the high sequence identity between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 on various proteins (94-100% identity) do not support the scenario of an ancient recombination event followed by convergent evolution and clearly indicates that SARS-CoV-2 carrying such an RBM cannot come from a ZC45/ZXC21-like bat coronavirus through this convergent evolutionary route.


Yan et al. say that, if a natural recombination event is responsible for the appearance of SARSCoV-2, then the ZC45/ZXC21-like virus and a coronavirus containing a SARS-like RBM would have to recombine in the same cell by swapping the S1/RBM, which is a rare form of recombination.


“Furthermore, since SARS has occurred only once in human history, it would be at least equally rare for nature to produce a virus that resembles SARS in such an intelligent manner – having an RBM that differs from the SARS RBM only at a few non-essential sites.”


The possibility that this unique SARS-like coronavirus would reside in the same cell with the ZC45/ZXC21-like ancestor virus and the two viruses would recombine in the “RBM-swapping” fashion is extremely low, the researchers say. Also, such a recombination event would have to happen to produce a spike as seen in SARS-CoV-2.


Yan et al. say that, judging from the evidence that they and others have gathered, there should be an independent audit of the WIV P4 laboratories and the laboratories of close collaborators of the WIV researchers.


“Such an investigation should have taken place long ago and should not be delayed any further,” Yan et al. say in their report.
“We also note that in the publication of the chimeric virus SHC015-MA15 in 2015, the attribution of funding of Zhengli Shi by the NIAID was initially left out. It was reinstated in the publication in 2016 in a corrigendum, perhaps after the meeting in January 2016 to reinstate NIH funding for gain-of-function research on viruses.”


This, the four scientists say, is unusual scientific behaviour, which needs explaining.


The researchers also say a critical look should be taken into certain recently published data, “which, albeit problematic, was used to support and claim a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2”.


Yan, Kang, Guan, and Hu published a second report on October 8 in which they say SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud”.


They allege that records indicate that “the unleashing of this weaponised pathogen should have been intentional rather than accidental”.


The current pandemic, they say, is “a result of unrestricted biowarfare”.


In the new paper, published on the preprint website Zenodo, Yan, Kang, Guan, and Hu write: “The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.


“The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health.
“As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both to the reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.”



Yan et al. say that, while SARS-CoV-2 meets the criteria of a bioweapon specified by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China, “its impact is well beyond what is conceived for a typical bioweapon”.


In their new paper, Yan et al. write about the novel animal coronaviruses they say were reported by researchers in laboratories in China after the start of the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.


“While no coronaviruses reported prior to 2020 share more than 90% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2, these recently published, novel animal coronaviruses (the RaTG13 bat coronavirus, a series of pangolin coronaviruses, and the RmYN02 bat coronavirus) all share over 90% sequence identities with SARS-CoV-2,” they write.


“As a result, these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have filled an evolutionary gap and served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin.


“In this report, we provide genetic and other analyses, which, when combined with recent findings, prove that these novel animal coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their genomic sequences are results of fabrication.”
Yan et al. say the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 must have a natural origin, but no live virus or intact genome of RaTG13 has ever been isolated or recovered.


“Therefore, the only proof for the ‘existence’ of RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank,” they write.


Yan et al. refer to an article by Yong-Zhen Zhang et al., published in Nature magazine on February 3, in which they make no mention of RaTG13 and show that, evolutionarily, SARS-CoV-2 is closest to two bat coronaviruses, ZC45 and ZXC21.


Both of these viruses “were discovered and characterised by military research laboratories under the control of the CCP government,” Yan et al. say.


“Immediately after the publication of this article, Dr Zhang’s laboratory was shut down by the CCP government with no explanations offered,” they write.


In order to have the sequence of a viral genome successfully uploaded onto GenBank, submitters have to provide both the assembled genomic sequence (text only) and raw sequencing reads.


“However, due to the huge amount of work involved in assembling raw reads into complete genomes, no sufficient curation is in place to ensure the correctness or truthfulness of the uploaded viral genomes,” Yan et al. write.


Therefore, Yan et al. say, an entry on GenBank is not definitive proof that the viral genome is correct or real.


“Clearly, a viral genomic sequence and its GenBank entry can be fabricated if well-planned.”


The RaTG13 virus and its published sequence are suspicious and show signs of fabrication, Yan et al. say.


“The evidence presented both here and from recent literature collectively prove that RaTG13 does not exist in nature and its sequence has been fabricated,” they add.
“If the RaBtCov/4991 virus is equivalent to RaTG13, then RaBtCoV/4991 must be fraudulent as well.”
Yan et al. suggest that the fabrication of RaTG13 was planned and executed in coordination with the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2.


The four researchers say in their new report that the complete genomic sequence of RaTG13 was first submitted to GenBank on January 27, 2020, and the raw sequencing reads were made available on February 13.


“However, the sequencing data for gap filling, which is indispensable in assembling a complete genome, was only made available on May 19th, 2020 … The timing and the reversed order of events here are strange and suspicious.”


According to Yan et al., the raw sequencing reads of RaTG13 have multiple abnormal features.


“No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because, according to Dr Zhengli Shi, the raw sample has been exhausted and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered,” they add.


“However, judging from Shi’s published protocol, exhaustion of the faecal swab sample is highly
unlikely.”


Yan et al. write: “Intriguingly, despite the pivotal role of RaTG13 in revealing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the information provided for its discovery was surprisingly scarce with key points missing (location and date of sample collection, previous knowledge and publication of this virus, etc).”


They added: “Only in the source section of the NCBI entry for RaTG13 (GenBank accession code: MN996532.1), one could find that the original sample was a ‘faecal swab’ collected on ‘July 24th, 2013’.”


According to Yan et al., there are discrepancies between what Shi Zhengli suggested in the article published in Nature in January 2020 (that the sequencing of the full genome of RaBtCoV/4991 was not done until 2020) and what Zhengli said later in emailed replies to Science magazine.


Yan et al. say that, in June 2020, file names of the raw sequencing reads for RaTG13 uploaded were found, which indicated that the sequencing experiments were done in 2017 and 2018.


“Likely responding to this revelation, in her email interview with Science, Dr Shi contradicted her own description in the Nature publication and admitted that the sequencing of the full genome of RaTG13 was done in 2018.”


The researchers say no follow-up work on RaTG13 has been reported by Zhengli and her colleagues.


“Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been shown repeatedly.


“However, such a pattern is not seen here despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2.”


There were, Yan et al. say, deviations from normal research activities and logical thinking that are difficult to reconcile or explain.


Yan et al. say investigations should be carried out “on the suspected government and individuals and the responsible ones be held accountable for this brutal attack on the global community”.


Yan has told television host in the US Tucker Carlson that her 63-year-old mother has been detained in China.
 

johnq

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The following article give evidence by multiple researchers that Covid-19 virus was created via genetic manipulation in a Chinese Communist Party PLA military lab and intentionally spread to other countries by Chinese government. I am posting sections from the article in parts as it is very long (Parts 1, 2 and 3 are above; Part 4 is below the introduction below):

SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

More than eight months after SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a global threat, there is still no clarity about its origins. Those who suspect that the virus was developed in a laboratory are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but there is growing evidence to support the suggestion that gain-of-function research has made SARS-CoV-2 particularly virulent.

While some scientists still argue that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of natural evolution, others consider an accidental or deliberate leak from a laboratory to be a valid hypothesis that merits further investigation.

For decades, gain-of-function research, which alters viruses to increase their transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence or lethality, has been carried out by American and Chinese scientists working in collaboration. There have been numerous ‘leaks’ of viruses from laboratories, including during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that occurred in 2003–2004.

Those who suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may well have originated in a laboratory include the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, the French scientist and Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier, and the exiled Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan, who says that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud” in covering up the truth.

Yan and others say there is evidence within the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that suggests it is a product of genetic manipulation. . . .

(Part 4):

Andre Watson, who is the founder and CEO of the regenerative medicine and pandemic defence biotechnology company Ligandal, which is based in San Francisco, says that a number of other coronaviruses have more than 60% sequence similarity to SARS-CoV-2 and they include viruses that cause neurological, vascular, gastric, and respiratory symptoms. Some of them have been studied for decades, “since the 1970s and earlier”, Watson says.


SARS from 2003 was only 80% similar to SARS-CoV-2 and MERS from 2012 was only 64.3% similar to SARS-CoV-2.


In 2017, the EcoHealth Alliance collaborated with the WIV and the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore on research that was funded by the NIH, NIAID, the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats programme (under the umbrella of the PREDICT project), and by funding sources in China.


The scientists published a paper about research done in bat caves. Researchers drew blood from the bats, or took nasal swabs or fecal samples. They identified 11 new viruses that they called SARS R (SARS-related viruses) in bats, Watson notes. Of these 11 viruses, three of them had spike proteins that had a high affinity for human ACE2.


The authors said: “In this study, we confirmed the use of human ACE2 as receptor of two novel SARSr-CoVs by using chimeric viruses with the WIV1 backbone replaced with the S gene of the newly identified SARSr-CoVs.”


Watson (pictured left) says this means that the researchers admit to doing recombination work with higher-binding ACE2 spike proteins on various SARS-CoV-2-related viral scaffolds.


“Furthermore, overlapping authors published a study in 2015 in which they admitted to discovering ‘SARSr-CoVs’ that had immunological cross-reactivity with SARS-CoV-1 antibodies,” he said.


The 2015 paper is the one Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson refer to in their June 2 article. The paper’s authors include Zhengli and Baric.


Watson said: “They have still not published the sequences of viruses taken from those infected with the virus.


“The authors directly admit to doing genetic engineering of the viruses, which means that they were taking bits and pieces of one type of virus and mixing it with bits and pieces of other clades and strains of virus.”


Vineet Menachery, Zhengli, Baric et al. said in their article that both wild-type and chimeric viruses were derived from either the epidemic SARS-CoV Urbani strain or the corresponding mouse-adapted (SARS-CoV MA15) infectious clone.


“Plasmids containing spike sequences for SHC014 were extracted by restriction digest and ligated into the E and F plasmid of the MA15 infectious clone,” they wrote.


Menachery et al. go on to explain that plasmids containing wild-type, chimeric SARS-CoV and SHC014-CoV genome fragments were amplified, excised, ligated, and purified.


“In vitro transcription reactions were then preformed to synthesise full-length genomic RNA, which was transfected into Vero E6 cells … The medium from transfected cells was harvested and served as seed stocks for subsequent experiments.”

. . .

The EcoHealth Alliance researchers and their Chinese colleagues took an RNA strand from each of the viruses they identified and converted it to DNA, Watson says. They then put the DNA into a plasmid, where it could replicate.


“When you want to do genetic engineering, you don’t do it on RNA, you do it on DNA,” Watson explained. “A plasmid is stable. You can put it in the fridge or the freezer and put it in some cells and they’ll produce RNA.”


The researchers took spike proteins and combined them with envelope and nucleic acid proteins.


“Basically you’re holding the core of the virus stable, and you’re swapping out the pieces on the outside to get one that binds more strongly to human cells,” Watson said.


“They did not publish any of those sequences, but they admitted that they did that work.


“The nature of studying these viruses in cells is that there are going to be mutation events; evolutions are going to happen – especially if you are optimising the virus for infectivity of ACE2-expressing cells with human ACE2.”


The researchers also admitted to infecting humanised mice that had the human ACE2 receptor, Watson says. “It’s clear that they were doing gain-of-function studies.”
. . .

Watson suspects that, in 2019, a SARS virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.


“There’s clear evidence that the first infections were not from people coming from the wet market in Wuhan, but that the virus was brought to the wet market.


“It’s awfully suspicious that Wuhan would be home to the only known biosafety level-4 research facility in China, and they worked on these viruses there.”

Watson says that, throughout the progression of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there have been consistent efforts by officials and the mainstream media to repress factual information about the severity, transmission dynamics, origins, and physiological effects of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19.


“On January 21, President Xi Jinping asked the director-general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, to withhold information about person-to-person transmission of the virus, as well as pandemic classification. Likely as a consequence, pandemic classification of the virus was delayed four to six weeks.”
 

johnq

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Joined
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Continued from my last post . . .
The following article give evidence by multiple researchers that Covid-19 virus was created via genetic manipulation in a Chinese Communist Party PLA military lab and intentionally spread to other countries by Chinese government. I am posting sections from the article in parts as it is very long (Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 are above; Part 5 is below the introduction below):

SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

More than eight months after SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a global threat, there is still no clarity about its origins. Those who suspect that the virus was developed in a laboratory are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but there is growing evidence to support the suggestion that gain-of-function research has made SARS-CoV-2 particularly virulent.

While some scientists still argue that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of natural evolution, others consider an accidental or deliberate leak from a laboratory to be a valid hypothesis that merits further investigation.

For decades, gain-of-function research, which alters viruses to increase their transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence or lethality, has been carried out by American and Chinese scientists working in collaboration. There have been numerous ‘leaks’ of viruses from laboratories, including during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that occurred in 2003–2004.

Those who suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may well have originated in a laboratory include the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, the French scientist and Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier, and the exiled Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan, who says that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bioweapon” and there has been “large-scale, organised scientific fraud” in covering up the truth.

Yan and others say there is evidence within the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that suggests it is a product of genetic manipulation. . . .

(Part 5):
Evidence of possible manipulation


Andre Watson explains that there is a way that small sequences of HIV may have been inserted into SARS-CoV-2 that would have made the manipulation less noticeable. There could, he says, have been a forensic cover-up.


Watson says it’s very odd that all four of the inserts in question have been found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.


“One thing that has made this forensically difficult to investigate is that the genomic sequences don’t match. If you line up the RNA letters in those inserts with HIV, they don’t match.


“However, there is something called sense mutation. If I were trying to put a HIV sequence into something, and my job was to cover it up, I wouldn’t use the same genetic sequence, I would get the same protein sequence. I would change the genetic sequence.”


Three DNA or RNA letters create one amino acid, but there are multiple combinations of three that will create a given amino acid, Watson says. “So, you can scramble the genetic letters around and still get the same protein letters to come out.”


Two of the domains that have been found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are also present in the HIV-1 gp120 surface domain, which, Watson says, is part of HIV’s “viral fusion machinery with CD4+T cells”. (T cells, also called T lymphocytes, are a type of white blood cell. They are an essential part of the body’s immune system.)


Watson says gp120 is known to interfere with dendritic cell function during HIV infections, and also modulates the activity of CD4+ T cells, which interact with dendritic cells to sense and respond to various pathogens.


“While I have yet to see structural modelling data of these domains interacting with known HIV binding motifs and this isn’t damning in and of itself, it does raise several questions, especially when coupled to the known immune-evasive properties of SARS-CoV-2, which includes T cell exhaustion and antibody avoidance in a number of patients,” Watson said.


Watson says he hasn’t a clue what the gp120 domains are doing, “but they are there”.


It’s also very strange, Watson says, to see a malaria sequence on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.


He says the malaria sequences don’t match the known binding domain of malaria to CD147 (malaria’s entry receptor into red blood cell precursor cells and red blood cells).


“However, there is speculation and computational modelling suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 also binds to CD147 and, in our own experiments, we have preliminarily seen some binding responses in the ~100–300 nanomolar range, which need to be further validated.


“What are the odds, if there was not laboratory manipulation, of having four little inserts that match protein sequences from HIV on solvent-accessible domains on the surface of the spike, along with a malaria sequence?”
Watson says he doesn’t want to make claims that cannot be proven, but the presence of the four inserts, and the malaria sequence, need to be investigated – and “certainly line up with the gain-of-function work that is suggested by the plasmid recombination experiments and insertion of higher binding affinity ACE2-binding spike proteins into infectious clones”.


It is important, Watson says, to remember that American and Chinese researchers were doing genetic engineering work in 2015, and admitted that they were doing it.


When a virus is randomly evolving, there is usually a fixed ratio of change if there is mutation, Watson says.


“In the case of SARS-CoV-2, when compared to the 2013 RaTG13 virus that was 96.11% similar to the current outbreak, there is an entire region where the virus has mutated in a way that is statistically impossible,” he said.


“It is virtually impossible for these particular mutations to have happened naturally. And this has happened in the same region of the virus – the spike protein – on which American and Chinese researchers have admitted doing recombination work.”
If SARS-CoV-2 were mutating accidentally, it would have a constant ratio of sense and missense mutations that is typically 5:1, Watson says.


“However, for nearly 2,100 RNA letters, there are virtually no missense mutations, as would be expected naturally between two viruses that are experiencing some form of genetic drift.


“The RNA letters are changing, but most of the protein letters are not – and it’s just in the part of the virus that was known to be spliced around in the SARS-related viral recombination experiments.”


The SARS-CoV-2 research was done in collaboration between the US and China, as well as other global actors, Watson points out.


“To say that we didn’t know what this was when it appeared in December is to outright lie about biological research that we knew was happening. We knew what SARS-CoV-1 did in 2003.”

Quote from previous section:
“On January 21, President Xi Jinping asked the director-general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, to withhold information about person-to-person transmission of the virus, as well as pandemic classification. Likely as a consequence, pandemic classification of the virus was delayed four to six weeks.”


The scientific evidence shown in this and previous articles is further proof that Covid-19 virus is a result of lab modification by Wuhan Institute of Virology of viruses owned by the Chinese Communist Party funded People's Liberation Army (PLA) laboratories. The fact that Xi Jinping hid person-to-person transmission of the virus from the world for six weeks while allowing international travel from Wuhan is proof that Xi Jinping and Chinese Communist Party intentionally spread the Covid-19 virus to other countries. The Covid-19 virus was created as a bioweapon through modification of viruses in Chinese Communist Party funded PLA laboratories, and then intentionally leaked from Wuhan Virology Institute in Wuhan as a bio-weapon. The knowledge about the virus was then suppressed as it was allowed to spread to the rest of the world intentionally using the Chinese people as carriers. This should not be surprising as the Chinese leadership does not care about common Chinese people. The Chinese leadership also stocked up on PPE (masks, etc) and antiviral medications ahead of time, so they were well-prepared. And since they were the ones who spread the virus, they knew where to lock down (Wuhan) as well as where to trace the cases within China.
 

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