From City-Journal, January 25:
New documents strengthen—perhaps conclusively—the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins.
The day is growing ever closer when Washington may have to add to its agenda with Beijing a nettlesome item it has long sought to avoid: the increasingly likely fact that China let the SARS2 virus escape from the Wuhan lab where it was concocted, setting off the Covid-19 pandemic that killed some 7 million people globally and wrought untold economic havoc.
New documents may explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats, from which it might have jumped to people. The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence—the genetically most infectious form—of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002. The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure.
The documents unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, and analyzed by its reporter Emily Kopp, include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.
The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers—Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen—noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.
Restriction enzymes, made naturally by bacteria as a defense against viruses, are an invaluable tool for biologists because they cut DNA at specific points known as recognition sites. These sites occur randomly across the genome, so a natural virus treated with a restriction enzyme will be cut into pieces of different sizes. However, researchers who want to synthesize a virus from scratch in order to manipulate its parts more effectively will often rearrange the recognition sites so that they are evenly spaced. This allows short chunks of DNA, all of roughly equal length, to be synthesized chemically and then strung together in a complete viral genome. Bottom line: if your virus has evenly spaced recognition sites, it’s a pretty good bet that it was made in a laboratory.
Bruttel and his colleagues guessed that a commonly used pair of restriction enzymes, known as BsaI and BsmBI, might have been used to assemble the SARS2 virus’s genome. When they examined the structure of SARS2, they found that the recognition sites used by these enzymes were indeed evenly spaced across the genome, marking it into six sections. “Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” they wrote.
Their paper did not receive the attention it deserved, in part because of the difficulty of ruling out a natural explanation for the even spacing. The small group of virologists who adamantly oppose the lab-leak hypothesis attacked the paper as “confected nonsense” (Edward Holmes) and “kindergarten molecular biology” (Kristian Andersen).
The recipe in the new DEFUSE drafts, however, closely resembles the one posited in the Bruttel article in saying that new viruses would be constructed from six sections of DNA synthesized in a lab. The documents even include a form for ordering the BsmBI restriction enzyme....
....MUCH MORE
Probably related, the China-beat journalist who ended up as United States deputy national security advisor from September 22, 2019 to January 7, 2021.
Dr. Deborah Birx was appointed Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Response Task Force on February 27, 2020:
....the National Security Council recruited and appointed her to the job, through Deputy National Security Advisor for Asia, Matt Pottinger.
But why? Why would someone with no relevant medical or scientific background be appointed to a top pandemic-response position? The answer, I believe, is that Birx was installed in that position in order to impose the untested, unscientific, totalitarian pandemic mitigation measures copied directly from China – measures chosen by the biosecurity community because they feared the havoc and backlash of a leaked genetically altered virus. But that’s jumping too far ahead into the realm of speculation.
— Dr. Birx’s Fake Science Revealed in Her Own Words
That's Debbie Lerman writing at the Brownstone Institute, August 12, 2022.
She also wrote a piece for Brownstone August 4: "How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?" and it is here that we begin....
