The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology
(WIV), China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen
security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has been collecting large
numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2003;
including collecting more in 2016 (Hu, et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018).
Led by researcher Zheng-Li Shi, WIV scientists have also published experiments in which live bat
coronaviruses were introduced into human cells (Hu et al., 2017). Moreover, according to an April
14 article in the Washington Post, US Embassy staff visited the WIV in 2018 and “had grave
safety concerns” about biosecurity there. The WIV is just eight miles from the Huanan live animal
market that was initially thought to be the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Wuhan is also home to a lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control
(WCDPC). It is a BSL-2 lab that is just 250 metres away from the Huanan market. Bat
coronaviruses have in the past been kept at the Wuhan WCDPC lab.
Thus the lab escape theory is that researchers from one or both of these labs may have picked up a
Sars-CoV-2-like bat coronavirus on one of their many collecting (aka ‘”virus surveillance”) trips.
Or, alternatively, a virus they were studying, passaging, engineering, or otherwise manipulating,
escaped.
In
2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored
a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat
coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015).
In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat coronavirus
SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered live virus. The spike
was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway
cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed “notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice
(Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in
which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This
rMA15 was “highly virulent and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to
“overwhelming viral infection”.
In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi
lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the
human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made
recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly
passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017).
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Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an
emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted
passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s laboratory participated in GOF
experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced
recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these
experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors.
The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge
from the wild by creating one in the lab.
It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of
SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic
engineering or passaging, or both.
Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses the WIV
was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous publications since Sars-CoV-2
first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds with
exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor “at least ten times more tightly” than the
original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Letko
et al., 2020).
This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling studies of
the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates like snakes, civets
and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020). In this preprint these modellers concluded “This indicates that
SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen”.
Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely plausible
that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the human ACE2
receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor.
[On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further. Pointing out
what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of collected coronaviruses,
which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge et al., 2016).]
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.... NOTE THE targetting of receptor ACE2 receptor..... They were playing with human cells.