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A cold war with China isn’t sufficiently priced into the market. Trump may have a smoking gun, showing that the virus was created in Wuhan to study SARS and accidentally escaped via a lab accident. Even without a smoking gun, it isn’t a conspiracy theory. Here’s the evidence:
The smoking gun could be the full text and progress reports of the NIH grant, or evidence from the 2018 visit, describing making exactly the virus we see now. Given his history, Trump will likely lay into unsubstantiated rumors. 2/ https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421
Then, after his opponents have exhausted their breath attacking him for making baseless claims, he will drop the smoking gun, making them look like idiots. This will allow him to deflect responsibility to China. 3/
In 2016, he campaigned on making Mexico pay for the wall. This worked, even though most American weren’t directly affected by Mexico. Everyone is severely affected by the virus, and Trump will campaign on making China pay reparations. This will probably crescendo in September. 4/
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is probably the only lab in the world which is actively growing bat coronaviruses in human lung cells, is located less than 10 miles from the first reported cases of COVID-19. 5/
This lab was the first BSL-4 lab in China. SARS research only requires BSL-3, so you can imagine that non-SARS bat coronaviruses might be BSL-2, which is very lax and for routine work. 6/ https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487
She unsuccessfully tried to grow wild isolates of Ebola-like viruses in her lab. 7/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30617348
Shi Zhengli is the Deputy Director of the Institute. Her research focuses on collecting and researching coronavirus samples from wild bats. She has published many articles on the bat coronaviruses, and has published on growing wild SARS-like viruses in human cells. 8/
The mandate of her lab is to determine which bat coronavirus can infect humans, and to try to make vaccines and drugs to combat these viruses 9/
Shi collects and characterizes bat coronaviruses from the wild, and has the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses, by a large margin. 10/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31996413
In 2015, Shi collaborated with Ralph Baric UNC to show that pseudotyped bat viruses could infect human lung cells. 11/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26552008
Shi grew wild isolates of novel SARS-related viruses in Hela cells over-expressing ACE2 receptors. 12/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29190287
Fully infectious SARS escaped twice from Chinese researches. Working on bat coronaviruses, they likely thought the risk of infection was lower and were probably more careless. 13/ https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-50137
Given the mild symptoms in younger people, a technician likely infected themselves and then spread it into the local community. An infection could result from bringing your notebook to the lab, or rushing a protocol to not go over your timeslot. 14/
SARS-like viruses have not been detected in bats near Wuhan. Researchers would have surveyed the closest locations first, so they must not have found SARS viruses in Wuhan. 15/
Shi Zhengli tried very hard to make the case that this came from the seafood market. The seafood market is not longer thought to be the source of the virus. 16/ https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-07/wuhan-virology-lab-deputy-director-again-slams-coronavirus-conspiracies-101512828.html
The first known case of the disease, identified on Dec 1, 2019, had no link to the market. 17/ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext#bib35
Media reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was ordered to destroy it’s samples. This is inconsistent with the Wuhan Institute of Virology being the most qualified place on earth to understand what was happening. 18/ https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-of-the-coronavirus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-in-china
Growing Civet SARS in human airway epithelial cells for 28 days was sufficient to develop 2 mutations that enhance infectivity of human ACE2. 19/ https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/5/2274
People claim viruses cannot generate a new polybasic cleavage site in vitro, but this has actually been observed with flu virus. 20/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
The state department was concerned about lax biosecurity of Wuhan coronavirus research in 2018, as reported by @joshrogin 21/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/
Shi published the first paper on SARS-CoV-2. They identify RaTG13 as the closest known virus which exists in 2 places in the world: Across China in Yunnan and at WIV. They had to thaw their sample and resequence the genome. 22/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32015507
Critical here is that Shi herself is providing the evidence that it didn’t come from her lab. Even in the unlikely event that they didn’t already know about the virus, it still could have come via a researcher who infected herself while collecting samples from bats. 23/
The WIV possibly got unlucky and the virus randomly entered the population 10 miles from the only place on earth that people were growing these viruses in human cells. But it isn’t possible to disprove that the virus came from the lab, which is all that matters politically. 24/
But the SARS-CoV-2 has a spike protein from a pangolin virus, not a bat virus, and has a novel, human optimized polybasic cleavage site. Is there evidence that researchers were inserting novel spike proteins into bat coronaviruses? Yes! 25/
A recently cancelled NIH grant which funds Shi, written by Peter Daszak, describes inserting novel spike sequences into bat coronaviruses and using them to infect animals, to study the potential for novel viruses to infect humans. See aim 3:
https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421
https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421
In this video this week, Peter Daszak explained in December that engineering these recombinant viruses is important to make vaccines against novel threats. This is an admiral goal, but seems to have led to this pandemic due to poor biosecurity. 27/
In conclusion, there is a good chance that this virus was created by combining pre-existing viruses, adapted to humans because researched maintained the virus on human cells, and escaped because of poor biosecurity. 28/
The administration has the full NIH grant, along with progress reports. They have additional data from the 2018 visit, and potential info from scientific meetings in China. They will leverage this to shift economic blame to China, winning the election but causing a cold war. END
So @Jkylebass and @RiskReversal, what are the best shorts for a Chinese cold war, and the best longs for a return of American manufacturing?
@ydeigin and @_hoeman discover more evidence that polybasic cleavage sure can arise during routine cell culture. https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1264647371696361472?s=21 https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1264647371696361472
