Is Vaccine Research Behind A Leak From The Wuhan Lab?

As a followup to Did Covid-19 Come From The Wuhan Lab? I'm presenting a partial transcript (the conclusion) from a Youtube video that explains the lengthy blog Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19), which formed the basis for that initial post.

I hope what follows will also raise awareness among readers regarding development of "herd immunity" and vaccines. Herd immunity is not inevitable, quick, and certainly not without serious and sometimes catastrophic risks. Vaccine development is not always easy--in the case of viruses it can be not only very difficult but also risky, as you'll see below.

Talk of a Covid-19 vaccine in the near future, or next year, is just that until we actually see it: talk. Michael Osterholm, who is a strong advocate of what might be called a "universal flu vaccine" to replace the highly unreliable current flu vaccines, reminds readers: 'Remember, I'm the guy who in 1980 said an HIV vaccine was unlikely to be developed during my professional lifetime.' Forty years later he's still right: there's no HIV vaccine, despite the vast amounts of money and research resources thrown at it. And that HIV research, as you'll see below, is very relevant to our present concerns.

Before we begin the presentation we should also note that there are a fair number of well known scientific journals that purport to debunk a lab origin for Covid-19. Sadly, we all know that these journals have a track record of deferring to both political correctness as well as to political pressure--especially when it comes from China. Here is a link to a takedown of Nature's claim that Covid-19 didn't come from a lab: China owns Nature magazine’s ass – Debunking “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” claiming COVID-19 definitely wasn’t from a lab.

Another preliminary. This background on coronaviruses from

A tug-of-war between severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and host antiviral defence: lessons from other pathogenic viruses

should make the video transcript (which appears below) conceptually clear and fairly easily understood.

The article assumes that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is "zoonotic", i.e., that it crossed to humans from another mammal species--a premise that both the first link and the video presentation strongly dispute.

World Health Organization has declared the ongoing outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The virus was named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Human infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to a wide range of clinical manifestations ranging from asymptomatic, mild, moderate to severe. The severe cases present with pneumonia, which can progress to acute respiratory distress syndrome. The outbreak provides an opportunity for real-time tracking of an animal coronavirus that has just crossed species barrier to infect humans. The outcome of SARS-CoV-2 infection is largely determined by virus-host interaction. Here, we review the discovery, zoonotic origin, animal hosts, transmissibility and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 in relation to its interplay with host antiviral defense.

The 2019 novel CoV (SARS-CoV-2) is the newest addition to human CoVs (HCoVs) that also include 229E, OC43, HKU1, NL63, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) CoV, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) CoV. ... SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are highly pathogenic and can cause severe diseases presented as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Although the other four community-acquired HCoVs are a common cause of common cold only, they are thought to cause pandemics and major outbreaks of probably more severe respiratory diseases when they initially crossed species barriers to infect humans decades and centuries ago. ... As a result of this selection and mutual adaptation for a long period of time, they usually become non-pathogenic or cause very mild diseases in their native reservoir hosts. However, when an animal CoV such as SARS-CoV-2 enters a new host such as humans, the severity of the disease is significantly increased at the start of a new round of adaptation. The outcome of infection is governed largely by the interplay between virus and host antiviral defence. ...

The Youtube presentation can be found here.  The conclusion transcript begins around 27:40.

The basic idea is that the Wuhan virus is quite likely the result of vaccine research. Vaccine research has for over a decade involved what's known as "dual-use gain-of-function" research. "Gain-of-function" research involves experimentation with the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens. Do this search to learn more: "dual-use gain-of-function research". As I noted earlier, Michael Osterholm--who views such research as justifiable--devotes an entire chapter in Deadliest Enemy to the very real risks of such research. That whole topic is the subject of VERY heated debates in the scientific world. The presenter in the video obviously disagrees with Osterholm:

The basic gist of it [the Harvard To The Big House article] is: This is likely a virus that came out of the laboratory in Wuhan. You can debate whether this is gain-of-function research or whether it was somehow naturally acquired, but the bottom line is that we had the technology for at least 20 years, we've been doing the research for at least 15 years, and the researchers didn't know how to do it [garbled: right?] in Wuhan.  

So the idea that this is a zoonosis [disease that can be transmitted from one species to another] is likely just an excuse to cover up for the fact that they've been doing gain-of-function research in the United States and in Canada and also in Australia and in China for about 10 to 15 years now. And the only question in China was, when was it going to get out. In Beijing they've had four separate releases of SARS virus since SARS was discovered in 2003.  

In the world after 2003 we've had MERS virus break in 2012, so there's reason to believe that zoonosis occurs. But generally speaking zoonosis does not release a superbug [which Covid 19 appears to be] simply because, generally speaking, the mutation that allows the zoonotic jump is not a mutation that's specific enough to also be hyper-virulent in the new species that it jumps to.  

So, all this circumstantial evidence leads me to believe and Dan [author of linked blog] to believe, and his expert to believe, that this virus was a gigantic mistake. It was probably found, it was probably enriched, it might have even been created in the laboratory in Wuhan as a way of creating a vaccine for coronavirus--or a vaccine for AIDS or SARS.  

I have evidence that they tried to do coronavirus vaccine with AIDS [a vaccine for AIDS using a coronavirus.] I have evidence and Dan has evidence that they have done vaccines with coronavirus for SARS. The idea was to make a weakened virus which had a lot of the immunal properties of the virulent virus, so that your body would make antibodies to it and impart immunity on these hyper-virulent viruses.  

It was also the idea of using coronavirus to make an AIDS vaccine. If you could use a virus that was a fairly innocuous virus like the common cold, but then engineer it to have particular epitopes [Chemical entity which can be bound by an antibody] on it which would allow the body to make functional enzymes, sorry, functional antibodies for that HIV virus, then you could impart HIV immunity using a simple coronavirus vaccine.  

This idea's been around for a long time. The only time that I've seen evidence that they've tested it was in mice, where the mice--after the second attack of SARS, they immunized them [the mice] to SARS--when they [the mice] were again challenged by the SARS virus they [the mice] ended up developing an even more severe reaction, which included auto-immunity. So this could be the reason that people are falling in the streets in China and why the very severe cases of this virus end up to be death. 

So now the question is, How fast is it really spreading? The latest paper that's out gives the range anywhere from 2.7 to 6. Six would be crazy. And it does seem that at least in certain countries--Korea, China, and Italy--it's starting to go exponential. It's already in ten different countries in Europe, it's already in South America, so it's on every continent. The question now is how fast is it gonna spread and how much of a tax is it gonna put on our production system, on our commerce, and on our healthcare system. If ten thousand old people in Pittsburgh need to be in the hospital at once, we have a serious problem.