My senior English teacher in high school, Father Becker, taught me two valuable lessons:

• To really ascertain the truth, you need to lift the rug up and look underneath it for what is really taking place.
• Always follow the money.

So, I am going to follow Father Becker’s two golden rules and attempt to verify that SARS-CoV-2 is really a genetically engineered virus and not the result of a spontaneous mutation in the wild that created this infectious monstrosity.

To this point, researchers understand that the possibility of a lab escape of a pathogen such as COVID-19 was a plausible, if hypothetical, possibility. Just a conspiracy theory it most definitely may not be.

Bats are proven to be natural reservoirs for many zoonotic viruses that are now materializing in humans.¹ Zoonotic viruses are microbial diseases spread between animals and people. Intermediate hosts are usually needed to amplify a zoonotic virus so that it can then be transferred to humans, but direct bat-to-human transmission was shown in a Nipah virus in Bangladesh.² Research has documented the ability of different coronaviruses (CoVs) to infect the same bat species and the propensity for genetic recombination among these dissimilar CoV’s.^3,4 Thus, it is not a gigantic leap to see that bats are a prime candidate for CoVs to mix and create novel CoVs. It is also entirely possible that it’s only a matter of time before one of these recombined viruses would make the cross species jump to humans.

So, various CoVs could have been percolating in bats, natural genetic recombination could have occurred, and presto SARS-COVID-2 could have emerged from this witch’s brew of viruses and jumped to humans. By coincidence, there happens to be not one but two virology institutes in Wuhan: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention/WHCDC and The Wuhan Institute of Virology/WIV. WHCDC is a biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) lab, and WIV is a BSL-4.⁵ Basically, a biosafety lab researching non-lethal agents would be considered a BSL-1. One working with microbial agents that can cause severe injury and death to humans would jump to a BSL-4 with BSL-2 and BSL-3 being somewhere in the middle. Preventing inadvertent introduction of microbes being experimented on from a BSL-4 lab into the natural environment would be of extreme importance. Workers in BSL-4 labs are required to shower and change clothes before and after each shift and wear ventilated protective suits with booties and face masks. Incoming and outgoing air is filtered, and water and waste are treated before exiting the facility.⁶

In addition, both WHCDC and WIV have conducted extensive research on novel bat viruses and maintain large research collections of novel bat viruses. WIV also houses bat virus RaTG13, which is the most closely related virus to SARS-COVID-19. RaTG13 was isolated in 2013 and its genome published on 23 January 2020. Also, at WIV, laboratory animals are infected with bat viruses.⁵

According to accepted theory, there was an intermediate host between the contaminated bats in the wild and people at the Wuhan fish market. A study in The Lancet notes that an intermediary host for SARS-COVID-2 hasn’t been identified; and prior to the closing and sanitization of the Wuhan fish market, none of the possible intermediary animals were sampled. The same study also showed that 14 of the original 41 SARS-CoV-2 infected people had not visited the Wuhan fish market, which included the very first recorded case on 1 December 2019.^5,7

Next, let’s look at the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t. Literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people, mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Observations from the cited article suggest that, by the time SARS-CoV-2 was detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to the late SARS-CoV. Next, these researchers pulled up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans? No, they were 100 percent the same. The new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. This definitely suggests the possibility that the virus originated from a lab where it had been trained on human cells.⁸ I love puzzle endorphins and fitting their pieces together!

So, what exactly are scientists trying to accomplish in these BSL-4 labs? They are attempting to utilize gain-of-function (GOF) studies in their research to improve the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, which can redefine the fundamental nature of that specific human/pathogen interaction and which could create the possibility of an epidemic with accidental release into an urban area. In GOF research, scientists are repeatedly passaging a bat virus through animal and/or human cells attempting to engineer specific genetic sequences into the virus.⁹ These GOF studies then are possibly entailing biosafety and biosecurity risks and need to be better evaluated as to their safety.

By repeatedly passaging the bat virus through animal/human cells, the bat viruses can be forced to adapt and more easily infect human cells. This is accomplished by forcing the bat virus to increase the strength of binding of the coronavirus’s spike protein to human ACE2 receptors, which also reduces its strength of binding to a bat ACE2 receptor.¹⁰

As these viruses are spending a large amount of time in a culture, they can also acquire other random mutations that don’t affect their virulence. Now you have created a virus that more readily binds to ACE2 receptors but not one that resembles the original bat virus. The acquired random mutations can hide the signature of a human gene jockey’s work in manipulating the virus to nefarious ends.¹⁰

Is there substantiated evidence of GOF research? After the 2002-03 SARS coronavirus outbreak, the National Institutes of Health funded a multiple center research effort, involving Chinese scientists, US military virologists from the bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, and the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases/NIAID (which just happens to be under the direction of our esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci), to prevent future coronavirus outbreaks by studying the evolution of virulent strains from bats to human tissues. GOF research was included in this effort, which entailed creating COVID viruses more lethal and transmissible than wild COVID ones.¹¹

Sometimes our government mysteriously works in positive ways. In 2014, the US instituted a temporary pause on funding GOF experiments after a series of lab accidents induced 300 global scientists to sign a petition banning these types of experiments. Unfortunately, there were exemptions to this pause as it only prohibited GOF research in US labs. From 2014-16 the Fauci-led NIAID continued funding GOF research at the Wuhan lab, and the ban was eventually lifted in 2017.^12-14

Unfortunately, humans can be less than stellar in their precautionary behavior. Thus, the possibility exists of a lab accident where there was direct transmission of a virulent bat virus to a lab animal and then to a human or improper disposal of lab animals and/or lab waste and inadvertent human contamination.

The real question is why people would wish to engage in research with the possibility of creating super microbes that could lead to widespread illness and death. To ascertain that answer, maybe we should all listen to a really old Bill Cosby riff, “Why is there air?” Rational explanations exist for the explanation of why there is air and why people feel money is more important than human and planetary health. Unfortunately, humans just seem to prefer engaging in irrational behavior instead of protecting the health of this incredibly beautiful planet and of its eclectically, diverse inhabitants.

So, urban myth or scientific fact? Will the future give us an answer? Hopefully, but don’t count on it. If there was a second or third JFK shooter, no one has ever squealed. Any extra JFK shooter(s) would probably have been in a shallow grave somewhere in the desert in a few hours afterwards anyway, but the shooters’ shooter(s) hasn’t/haven’t talked either. So, unfortunately any scenario can and is possible. With regards to SARS-COVID-2, hopefully, someone in the know will eventually squeal!

References

1. Calisher CH, et al. Bats: important reservoir hosts of emerging viruses. Clin Microbiol. 2006 Rev.19:531-545.
2. Eaton BT, et al. Hendra and Nipah viruses: different and dangerous. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2006 4:23-35.
3. Li W, et al. Bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. Science. 2005 310:676-679.
4. Tang XC, et al. Prevalence and genetic diversity of coronaviruses in bats from China. J Virol. 2006 80:7481-7490.
5. https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-cov-2-virus-arise-from-a-bat-coronavirus-research-program-in-a-chinese-laboratory-very-possibly/#
6. https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/biosafety-labs-needed
7. Chaolin Huang, et al. Clinical Features of Patients Infected with 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The Lancet. February 15, 2020; 395(10223): 497-506.
8. Shing Hei Zhan, Deverman BE, Chan YA. SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262 [This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.]
9. https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Pages/GainOfFunction.aspx
10. Latham J, Wilson A. The Case is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin. Independent Science News. June 2, 2020.
11. Children’s Health Defense. US Government’s $3.7 Million Grant to Wuhan Lab at Center of Coronavirus Outbreak. April 15, 2020.
12. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/statement-funding-pause-certain-types-gain-function-research
13. Lin C. Why US Outsourced Bat Virus Research to Wuhan. Asian Times. April 22, 2020.
14. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research