I'm still trying to piece all of this together, but a picture is emerging.
Shi Zhengli, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is known as the "Bat Woman" because of her work with bats and mutations of the Sars-COV virus.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...wn-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Shi was working on a project with some Americans in which they were creating, in their words, a "chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
This virus could "efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. "
Meaning it had an enhanced ability to infect humans.
The research also showed that palm civets in the wet market were probably NOT the transmission vector for SARS, but rather a direct transmission from bats to humans was more likely.
The Department of Health and Human Services decided that tweaking the SARS virus to make it more dangerous to humans was too risky, and they SHUT DOWN all research projects of this nature in the United States.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ogy-studies-leaves-work-14-institutions-limbo
But that didn't stop the Bat Woman from doing that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology...
When the news broke of the outbreak in China, the Bat Woman said that she was scared to death that it had come from her lab. But now she is helping the government to silence anyone who expresses the same fears she had.
Shi Zhengli, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is known as the "Bat Woman" because of her work with bats and mutations of the Sars-COV virus.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...wn-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Shi was working on a project with some Americans in which they were creating, in their words, a "chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
This virus could "efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. "
Meaning it had an enhanced ability to infect humans.
"Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone."
In testing with mice, they found that this virus was resistant to existing coronavirus treatments and vaccines. Not only did the vaccines not work, the vaccines themselves caused harm to the mice.
The research also showed that palm civets in the wet market were probably NOT the transmission vector for SARS, but rather a direct transmission from bats to humans was more likely.
The Department of Health and Human Services decided that tweaking the SARS virus to make it more dangerous to humans was too risky, and they SHUT DOWN all research projects of this nature in the United States.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ogy-studies-leaves-work-14-institutions-limbo
But that didn't stop the Bat Woman from doing that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology...
When the news broke of the outbreak in China, the Bat Woman said that she was scared to death that it had come from her lab. But now she is helping the government to silence anyone who expresses the same fears she had.
