In the post immediately below regarding her Parliamentary testimony, "Covid-19 Origins: Well Speak Of The Devils", Dr. Alina Chan is quoted:
Dr Chan added: 'We know this virus (Covid) has a unique feature, called the furin cleavage site, and without this feature there is no way this would be causing this pandemic.
'A proposals was leaked showing that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites. So, you find these scientists who said in early 2018 'I'm going to put horns on horses' and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.'
Here is the Daszak/EcoHealth Alliance proposal to put 'horns on horses', March 24, 2018 (75 pages - DocumentCloud or PDF)
It was uploaded by Sharon Lerner as part of The Intercept's headline story, September 23, 2021:
The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
A grant proposal written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.
Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.
The furin cleavage site enables the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell and is one of the reasons that the virus is so easily transmissible and harmful. But scientists are divided over how this particular site wound up in the virus, and the cleavage site became a major focus of the heated debate over the origins of the pandemic.
Many who believe that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a laboratory have pointed out that it is unlikely that the particular sequence of amino acids that make up the furin cleavage site would have occurred naturally.
Adherents of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a natural spillover from animal hosts have argued that it could have evolved naturally from an as-yet undiscovered virus. Further, they argued, scientists were unlikely to have engineered the feature.....
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