A Freedom of Information request by reporter Emily Kopp is now pointing to the lab leak being more likely than previously thought.
From Richard Ebright:
"An order line for restriction endonuclease BsmBl--and no other restriction endonuclease--in a draft of EcoHealth's 2018 DEFUSE proposal is equivalent to a smoking gun. There is no--zero--remaining room for reasonable doubt that EcoHealth and associates caused the pandemic. Full draft of EcoHealth's 2018 DEFUSE proposal. The four years of lies by EcoHealth and its associates need to end now."
Okay, so, wha...??? Luckily Kashif Pirzada explained it:
"The gist is that there was a grant proposal to DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) preceding the pandemic to create a new virus based on SARS1 but with additional properties to study in the lab. DARPA rejected the proposal, but the allegation is that some scientists in China and/or the US may have gone ahead with the research anyway. [He later clarified] They were screening other coronaviruses against SARS1 to find similar viruses, but were not using SARS1 itself.
The evidence so far:
a) SARS2 came out of the gate with an unnatural ability to infect human cells by binding exactly to the human ACE2 receptor, which was a subject of this research. Normally a new virus may need to pass through humans for some time before this adaptation happens, as we see in bird flu strains that (thankfully) never cross over into being transmissible human to human.
b) SARS2 has an inserted cleavage site that makes it much more infectious. Furin is an enzyme that floats around in your body that naturally acts to activate important proteins by cleaving them at specific sites. It just so happens that a cleavage site on the SARS2 sequence exactly mentioned in this research proposal makes it far more active and infectious, using your own body's natural machinery to become more dangerous.
c) SARS2's sequence is rather too neatly chopped up by off-the-shelf enzymes (BsmBI and BasI) to be natural. From my time in a genetics lab as an undergrad 25 years ago, your lab buys these enzymes from a vendor, to chop particular DNA or RNA sequences you're working on. A receipt for purchase of these enzymes was found in the new documents.
Anyone with a more up-to-date and less rusty knowledge of genetics please correct me if I got this wrong! . . .
In the end, whether intentional or not, lab leak is not a fringe conspiracy theory, since the DEFUSE proposal goes a long way to explain how one could create SARS2. Those most adamant in denying the theory knew that it was, in fact, a plausible theory to begin with."
So, that's fun. If it's intentional, that could point to some serious bioterrorism charges. If it's some lab that was curious and careless, then it's less worrisome but still a huge problem. I'm not convinced anyone will get in trouble for anything, or that this new information will have much of an impact except to vindicate anyone who was leaning in this direction. Regardless how it started, it can be stopped with N95s!!
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Well-fitting N95s reduce transmission by about 95% - even higher if everyone wears them; cleaning the air helps by about 30%, and vaccines reduces hospitalization by 60%. Put together, we could ALL be 99.999% protected from this mess and more! We don't have to get sick every winter; it's a choice.
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