The Origin of Covid-19—Updated, Part 17

by Dr. Dennis Cuddy, Ph.D.

October 28, 2022

On October 20, Antonius VanDongen (Duke University, Valentin Bruttel (University Clinics Wurzburg, Germany) and Alex Washburne (Selva Analytics) co-authored “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of Sars-CoV-2.” The authors state that to make a virus in a lab, researchers usually engineer the viral genome to add and remove stitching sites called restriction sites, and the ways they modify these sites can serve as fingerprints of in vitro genome assembly. The authors found that SARS-CoV has the restriction site fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses, and the fingerprint of SARS-CoV-2 is common in lab-assembled viruses. Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among sarbecoviruses in having a Furin cleavage site (FCS) between the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike protein.

At this point, I would encourage the reader to look at Parts 1 (beginning June 29, 2021) through 3 of my series “The Origin of Covid-19—Updated.” in which I stated that “Dr. Ralph Baric of UNC and Dr. Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China among others co-authored “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” in Nature Medicine (November 9, 2015)….Synthetic construction of the chimeric mutant and full-length SHC014-CoV was approved by the University of North Carolina Biosafety Committee, and research in this manuscript was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, among others.

According to “Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan” by Rowan Jacobsen (MIT Technology Review, June 29, 2021), Dr. Baric had asked Dr. Shi if he could have the genetic data for SHC014, and he sent transgenic mice with human lung receptors to Wuhan. Research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and support for the generation of mice expressing human ACE2 was provided by National Institutes of Health grants.

Dr. Baric had developed and taught Dr. Shi a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species (such as human cells). The method is a seamless ligation methodology referred to as reverse genetics. SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus, which would develop into the disease called Covid-19, and in the same year (2015) Baric and Shi co-authored the article mentioned above, Xu DeZhong was editor-in-chief of a 261-page document titled “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bio-Weapons.” Over several years, DeZhong had written several papers outlining his belief that SARS-CoV-1 (that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic in China) was NOT of natural origin ! The document not only looked at the military effects of coronaviruses as bioweapons, but also at the secondary effects such as placing destructive stress upon an enemy’s health care system.

At this point, it is helpful to look at a timeline prepared by Dr. Richard Fleming”

2000 – In May, Dr. Baric successfully uses reverse genetics to reverse infectious clone of SARS-CoV.

2001 – On May 21, Dr. Baric files Patent US 6,593,111 B2 granted July 15, 2003 to manipulate genomes of viruses, etc.

2002 – In April, Dr. Baric and others file a patent for a recombinant (chimeric) DNA means of producing “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus (funded by the National Institutes of Health).”

Dr, Shi and colleagues increase infectivity (Gain-of-function) by combining an HIV pseudovirus with SARS-CoV-1.

2003 – Dr. Baric recives NIH grant to work on synthetically altering Coronaviridae.

2008 – Dr. Fauci awards a NIAID grant to Dr. Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance CEO) to study factors that explain why some viruses are able to cross the species barrier…and use a range of in vitro techniques to examine the pathogenesis of these new viruses.

In a U.S. Congressional House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Report of August 2021, one reads: “In the years leading up to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, there was repeated collaboration between Daszak, Shi and other researchers on genetically manipulating coronaviruses to increase their infectiousness in humans….It is self-evident that Shi and her colleagues, with funding and support from Daszak, were actively genetically manipulating and testing them against human immune systems in 2018 and 2019, before the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Shi also worked with Dr. Baric and his team at UNC between 2014 and 2016. In 2005, Dr. Baric had published a paper about a novel genetic engineering system he had developed with his UNC colleagues to engineer full-length SARS-CoV genomes without leaving a trace….It is clear that Shi and others at the Wuhan Institute of Virology not only possessed the capability to genetically modify coronaviruses ‘without traces,’ but were actively doing so in the years leading up to the current pandemic. At 12:43am on February 6, 2020, Daszak sent a draft statement to Baric and others, which was published on February 19 declaring discussion of a lab leak a conspiracy theory, and suppressing public debate on the origins of Covid-19….At 3:16pm on February 6, Daszak sent a highly important email to Baric informing him the statement will be ‘put out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration.” One must ask at this point why Baric et al would not want to leave any traces of what was being done?

There were grants from NIH/NIAID to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance, whose CEO Dr. Peter Daszak in a 2016 book “reiterated that until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and an emergency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, he said, we need to increase public understanding of the need for medical countermeasures such as a pan-influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of the process.”

© 2022 Dennis Cuddy – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Dennis Cuddy: recordsrevealed@yahoo.com