{"id":1731381,"date":"2022-11-09T07:02:25","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T12:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1731381"},"modified":"2022-11-09T07:02:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T12:02:30","slug":"3-years-after-covid-started-why-dont-we-have-answers-about-the-likely-lab-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/3-years-after-covid-started-why-dont-we-have-answers-about-the-likely-lab-leak\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Years After Covid Started, Why Don\u2019t We Have Answers About The Likely Lab Leak?"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2F3-years-after-covid-started-why-dont-we-have-answers-about-the-likely-lab-leak%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1731381&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Why don\u2019t we know the origins of Covid-19? It\u2019s been nearly three years, and even after scientists have analyzed millions of virus sequences, have taken samples of thousands of animals, including hundreds from the Wuhan market where the virus first is alleged to have broken out, we still haven\u2019t discovered the proximal cause of the pandemic. It is strange, to say the least.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In November of 2002, a SARS outbreak erupted among restaurant workers handling live animals in a\u00a0 \u201cwet market\u201d located in Shenzhen, China. Not long after the initial outbreak, the disease went international. By May 2003, Chinese researchers found a virus in palm civet cats at the market that was nearly identical to the <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.1087139\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pandemic virus<\/a>. This virus, SARS-CoV, fizzled out after causing 8,000 cases resulting in 800 deaths worldwide. But the virus currently in question is believed to have caused nearly 1 billion cases and possibly 20 million excess deaths, and we are still searching for answers. Why?<\/p>\n<p>What if the proximal origin of the current pandemic is a U.S. government-funded, lab-engineered virus that leaked from the Wuhan laboratory? What if powerful interests would rather you not find out? It may <em>sound <\/em>conspiratorial, but we should consider the science.<\/p>\n<p>The closest overall genetic match to SARS-CoV-2 is a bat coronavirus named RaTG13. But this virus is not a close enough genetic match to have morphed into SARS-CoV-2, especially given that RaTG13 cannot infect human cells. Curiously, the part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike that binds to human cells (i.e., the receptor-binding domain or RBD) is nearly identical to the RBD in a pangolin <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-021-21006-9\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">coronavirus spike<\/a>. Stranger still is that a virus that supposedly just emerged from an animal was so optimized for <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41598-021-92388-5\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">human infection<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Should we be alarmed that publication of this important information was suspiciously stifled for over one year, corresponding to when Anthony Fauci reluctantly admitted that a \u201clab leak\u201d was possible?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Another anomaly of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is the presence of the all-important \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.isci.2020.101642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">furin cleavage site<\/a>\u201d (FCS) that is missing in all known <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/molbev\/msab327\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">close relatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Due to similar designs, some hypothesized origins of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 include a distantly related feline coronavirus or an important protein in human lungs called ENac-alpha. Feline coronaviruses have so little in common with SARS-CoV-2 that it\u2019s a huge stretch to imagine natural recombination between these viruses occurring at all, especially given that only the tiny FCS fragment would have been acquired. With regard to ENac-alpha, it\u2019s been <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1073\/pnas.2202769119\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">suggested<\/a> that an FCS found in the human lungs \u201cmight be a rational, if not obvious\u201d choice for insertion into a hybrid virus.<\/p>\n<p>There are published\u00a0 \u201cproof of concept\u201d examples of this type of work in which an FCS from one virus was transplanted into another, resulting in demonstrable \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1128%2FJVI.02422-20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gain of function<\/a>.\u201d Meanwhile, the \u201cnatural origin\u201d position suggests that bat and pangolin coronaviruses naturally co-mingled, their hybrid progeny somehow picked up an FCS, possibly by co-mingling with a distantly related cat coronavirus, then the hybrid virus burst into the world from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been almost three years since the Covid-19 pandemic started. Why don&#8217;t we know where the virus came from?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":801,"featured_media":1731384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1731381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1731384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}