https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi
"[The] Obama administration and U.S. National Institutes of Health were sufficiently worried about scientists working on these types of viruses, and the risk of an accidental release of one of these viruses, to halt federal funding for this research. They were also sufficiently worried about an accidental release to encourage anyone not taking federal funding to halt their work as well. They had good reason to be; in addition to the cases at the U.S. CDC and FDA, the Chinese CDC’s National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice. The “pause” on funding remained in place for the remainder of the Obama administration, and wasn’t lifted until a year into the Trump presidency."
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morn
"This work, results from which were also published in Nature Medicine, demonstrated that SARS-CoV’s jump from bats to humans had not been a fluke; other bat coronaviruses were capable of something similar. Useful to know. But giving pathogens and potential pathogens extra powers in order to understand what they may be capable of is a controversial undertaking. These “gain of function” experiments, their proponents insist, have important uses such as understanding drug resistance and the tricks viruses employ to evade the immune system. They also carry obvious risks: the techniques on which they depend could be abused; their products could leak. The creation of an enhanced strain of bird flu in 2011 in an attempt to understand the peculiar virulence of the flu strain responsible for the pandemic of 1918-19 caused widespread alarm. America stopped funding gain-of-function work for several years.
Filippa Lentzos, who studies biomedicine and security at King’s College, London, says the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 having an origin connected with legitimate research is being discussed widely in the world of biosecurity. The possibilities speculated about include a leak of material from a laboratory and also the accidental infection of a human being in the course of work either in a lab or in the field.
Leaks from laboratories, including BSL-4 labs, are not unheard of. The world’s last known case of smallpox was caused by a leak from a British laboratory in 1978. An outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2007 had a similar origin. In America there have been accidental releases and mishandlings involving Ebola, and, from a lower-containment-level laboratory, a deadly strain of bird flu. In China laboratory workers seem to have been infected with SARS and transmitted it to contacts outside on at least two occasions.
A preprint published on ResearchGate, a website, by two Chinese scientists and subsequently removed suggested that work done there may have been cause for concern. This lab is reported to have housed animals—including, for one study, hundreds of bats from Hubei and Zhejiang provinces—and to have specialised in pathogen collection.
Richard Pilch, who works on chemical and biological weapons non-proliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, in California, says that there is one feature of the new virus which might conceivably have arisen during “passaging experiments” in which pathogens are passed between hosts so as to study the evolution of their ability to spread.
Many scientists think that with so many biologists actively hunting for bat viruses, and gain-of-function work becoming more common, the world is at increasing risk of a laboratory-derived pandemic at some point. “One of my biggest hopes out of this pandemic is that we address this issue—it really worries me,” says Dr Pilch. Today there are around 70 BSL-4 sites in 30 countries. More such facilities are planned."
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t
"At the junction of the S1 and S2 protein subunits, COVID-19 has just such a polybasic cleavage site that uses the host cell enzyme furin, which is found in many human organ systems and known to be involved in the pathogenic processes of viruses, for example, HIV, Ebola and various strains of coronavirus.
The presence of the furin polybasic cleavage site may explain clinical reports of COVID-19’s ability to infect a variety of organ systems.
The furin polybasic cleavage site in COVID-19 can be roughly defined by the amino acid sequence SPRRARS, which is Serine-Proline-Arginine-Arginine-Alanine-A
Within that broader sequence, the minimum sequence for a furin cleavage site is R-X-X-R, where Arginine (R) occurs in the 3rd and 6th positions and positions 4 and 5 can be any amino acid, but activity of the furin cleavage site can be significantly enhanced with a basic amino acid like Arginine in the 4th position, as occurs in COVID-19.
It is very important to note that the furin polybasic cleavage site in COVID-19 is unique and has not been found in any of the coronaviruses yet identified as close relatives.
Remarkably, however, such sequences do exist in other viruses, including coronaviruses not directly related to COVID-19. [..]
It is also interesting to note that the S2′ sequence of bat coronavirus CoVZX21, often cited as a close relative of CoVid-19, has an identical amino acid sequence of SKPSKRS at that position, but is demonstrably different at the critical S1 cleavage site.
The bioengineering capability to insert polybasic cleavage sites into the coronavirus S1 protein is well-established, already from 2006.
Scientists in China have used site-directed mutagenesis to alter the cleavage site of an infectious bronchitis virus by introducing basic amino acids, thereby increasing its pathogenicity and resulting in a “gain of function” such that the new virus was capable of infecting the brain producing “severe encephalitis.”
Applying the bioengineering techniques of recombination, site-directed mutagenesis and reassortment, CoVid-19 could have been created through the introduction of a furin polybasic cleavage site onto an appropriate coronavirus “backbone” from the catalogue of isolated strains in Chinese laboratories.
All of the above could be considered coincidental except for the fact that no clear evolutionary pathway has been identified that would explain the presence of COVID-19’s furin polybasic cleavage site, especially given its enhanced pathogenic significance.
It is also strange that with all the information publicly available, the most widely cited article by many scientists and media, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” never mentions BtCoV/4991.
And how did a coronavirus, whether it be RaTG13 or BtCoV/4991, isolated from bats in Yunnan Province, nearly 1,000 miles away, end up in the Wuhan Seafood Market, if that was indeed the source of the outbreak?
Or, more likely, was it the result of a leak from a Wuhan laboratory, where experiments were being conducted on a variety of bat coronaviruses?"
Lawrence Sellin, Retired US Army Colonel
https://www.wionews.com/author/lawerenc
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-o
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