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harddriver
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https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/...entists planned to work,by U.S. Right to Know
American scientists planned to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engineer novel coronaviruses with the features of SARS-CoV-2 the year before the virus emerged from that city, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.
While rare in nature, these features were central to the esoteric research interests of the scientists working with the Wuhan lab, those documents show.
Scientists divided over the so-called “lab leak” and natural origin hypotheses have for years pored over the arcane language of a U.S.-China research proposal called “DEFUSE” describing coronavirus engineering experiments.
The DEFUSE grant proposal was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
Now, drafts and notes uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act reveal fresh details about the intended research.
Specifically, the scientists sought to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein; to assemble synthetic viruses in six segments; to identify coronaviruses up to 25 percent different from SARS; and to select for receptor binding domains adept at infecting human receptors.
The genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, matches the viruses described in the research proposal:
- SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site positioned in the spike protein at the S1/S2 junction. The furin cleavage site supercharged the virus into the worst pandemic pathogen in a century. Virologists have yet to identify one in any other related coronavirus.
- SARS-CoV-2 can be divided into six contiguous genomic pieces by the restriction enzymes Bsal and BsmBI. These restriction enzymes occur in nature but can also be used in the lab to splice viruses. A trio of scientists estimated in a 2022 analysis that the likelihood of seeing the pattern found in SARS-CoV-2 in nature would be remote. Orders for one of these restriction enzymes, BsmBI, can be found in the documents.
- SARS-CoV-2 emerged highly infectious without evolving much in humans. The virus “came out of the box ready to infect.” The receptor binding domain appeared “finely tuned” for the human ACE2 receptor, yet had little genetic variation when first spilling over into humans, presenting a difficult “paradox” to virologists who sought to prove it emerged naturally. The documents confirm the scientists working with the Wuhan lab sought to select for receptor binding domains that bind well to human ACE2 in their research.
- The genome of SARS-CoV-2 falls within the range of a 25 percent genetic difference from SARS.
- The documents reveal for the first time that a virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer new spike proteins – in contrast with the collaboration’s public work to insert whole spike proteins into viral backbones. Language in the proposal indicates this work may have involved unpublished viruses, generating unpublished engineered spike proteins.
This American virologist, University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, was set to engineer twenty or more “chimeric” SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses. Documents previously reported by U.S. Right to Know show that some of the experimentation could secretly occur in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level than specified in the grant, apparently to save costs.
