Discovery of ‘lab grown’ coronavirus bolsters lab-leak theory

Art Moore(WND NEWS CENTER) The once ridiculed theory that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to gain credibility, with the latest evidence coming from the discovery of an early version of the virus that appears to have been grown in a laboratory.

The Telegraph of London reported Wednesday that Hungarian researchers made the discovery by accident while examining genetic data from soil samples collected from Antarctica in late 2018 and early 2019.

The bioinformatics experts from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Lorand University in Budapest sent the samples to a lab in Shanghai, China, in December 2019 for sequencing, where they became contaminated with a previously unknown variant of COVID-19.

The Telegraph said the variant could be an ancestral version of SARS-CoV-2, with mutations that bridge the gap between bat coronavirus and the earliest Wuhan strain.

If in fact it was sequenced in December 2019, the timing would be significant, because China has declared that SARS-CoV-2 was not discovered until Dec. 30 to 31.

Significantly, the discovered virus fits the prediction by a team of evolutionary biologists in May 2021 of what an ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 should look like, with three particular mutations.

The researchers believe it may have grown in a lab because the samples contain DNA from typical lab animals, hamsters and monkeys.

Matthew Ridley, co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” explained to the Telegraph that if the virus “was sequenced in say mid-December, before anybody had identified the virus in people and started trying to grow it in labs, then it points to secret samples in labs in 2019.”

“These are not from seals or penguins but from African green monkeys and Chinese hamsters,” he noted. “Both species are the source of commonly used laboratory cell lines.”

The Antarctic samples also were examined by Dr. Jesse Bloom, a virologist from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Bloom confirmed they contained COVID-19 and had three key mutations that brought bat coronaviruses closer to the first human Wuhan strain, Wuhan-Hu-1.

One of the closest natural relatives to COVID-19 is a bat coronavirus named RaTG13 that was found in caves in Yunnan Province, in southwestern China. It’s known that samples from the caves were being sent to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bloom said the three mutations are “intriguing because they are all ancestral mutations that move the sequence” closer to RaTG13 and the first reported Wuhan-Hu-1 sequence from the Huanan Seafood Market.

Last week, independent investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea produced a remarkable nine-minute video that documents the shift in the establishment narrative from ridiculing anyone who posed the lab-leak theory to accepting it as plausible.

Facebook famously teamed up with Dr. Anthony Fauci to censor the lab-leak theory, including a report by WND. It’s now known that Fauci was told early in 2020 by a trusted scientist that the novel coronavirus likely came from a lab and was genetically modified.

The lab-leak theory gained traction in May 2021 when former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade published a nearly 11,000-word analysis concluding the circumstantial evidence clearly points to a lab leak. The Wall Street Journal later reported three researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized with possible COVID symptoms in November 2019, when the outbreak in the city of 11 million began.

See the video:

Last month, Wade spotlighted a Jan. 31, 2020, email Fauci received from four top virologists that shows there was strong evidence the virus was engineered in a lab. But after a teleconference the next day with Fauci to discuss the virologists’ conclusion, the lead virologist began dismissing the lab-leak possibility as among “crackpot theories” that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”

The virologists then published a March 17, 2020, article in the journal Nature Medicine that stated, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

It mirrored an earlier article published in February 2020 in the British medical journal The Lancet written by zoologist Peter Daszak, known for his work with the “bat lady” Zhi Shengli on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The articles persuaded mainstream media not to investigate lab-leak theories and “froze into silence any dissenting voices from the scientific community.”

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