Origins

Origins

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-virology-origins-pandemic-11633462827?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

There are many vexing issues presented to the thinking person by the covid-19 pandemic. Why are so many people resistant to getting vaccinated? Why are people willing to use unproven and unapproved medicines to treat a disease for which there are real treatments, albeit not curative ones? Why are so many infected people minimally affected by the virus and some fatally infected? But for sure, the most vexing of all of the questions surrounding SARS-CoV-2 is where the heck did it come from?

There are two main theories that have been entertained. The first is that the virus’ origin is in Chinese bats. The virus then jumped from bats to some other mammal, perhaps a civet or pangolin, and then infected humans. The “wet market” in Wuhan is supposedly the scene of that crime.

The other theory is that bat viruses were being manipulated to contain gain of function mutations in the Wuhan Virology Institute and somehow these lethal mutations escaped. Part of that manipulation included the use of humanized mice which might lead to a virus more prone to infect humans and subsequently for humans to infect other humans.

In The Wall Street Journal on October 6, Richard Muller and Steven Quay set out evidence that supports the second scenario.

There ought to have been a host animal found by the WHO team that investigated the infection’s origins in China. The team found none. Unfortunately, among the 80,000 animals tested were none of the humanized mice from the Wuhan Institute.

A publication supported the lab origin of the covid-19 virus due to its optimization for human infectivity and its inclusion of the furin cleavage site being likely inserted into the virus in a lab. This cleavage site is not seen in naturally occurring viruses. A grant proposing the insertion of such a cleavage site into viruses to increase their infectivity was rejected by DARPA in 2018, but clearly the desire to manipulate the virus in such a fashion existed before the onset of the pandemic.

Now the only way to really tie down the origin of the virus is to test those humanized mice and all of the samples in the Wuhan Institute as well as the samples from the earliest covid cases in China. The WHO team was not allowed to do any of that.

Why does it matter?

First, if China is developing biological weaponry like this, the world ought to know and China ought to be isolated from other civilized countries immediately.

Second, the world should aim to sue China for bringing this Old Testament-like scourge on the world and killing so many.

Third, the United Nations needs to move to outlaw any research such as that going on at the Wuhan Institute if it gave birth to covid.

Finally, maybe the world will wake up to the threat posed to civilization by the Chinese Communist Party and the world will band together and oppose China before it has to fight the Mainland Chinese in a world war.

I remember when terrorists set off lethal sarin gas on a Tokyo subway. It was by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995. My Dad said “what do you think that was?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “practice.”

We’ve suffered a good bit of terrorism since then.

The evidence in this article does not make an open and shut case for a lab-leak origin for covid. However, it certainly lays the groundwork for a needed external investigation that includes a deep dive into what was going on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Such an investigation cannot happen soon enough. It is possible that this was just practice.