Fauci's emails released.
A devastating narrative emerges, of a cover-up of gain of function research.
Fauci’s Nightmare.
When the Coronavirus pandemic was developing, in early February 2020, about 800 cases had emerged in China and the virus was beginning to spread to other nations.
Anthony Fauci, Director of the NIAID, who was ultimately responsible for approving grants to EcoHealth Alliance to do gain-of-function research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was soon to suffer a huge shock. The full story has only recently come to light, for while Fauci’s emails at the NIAID were initially released under FOI in 2021, they were in a highly redacted form, and much of the more incriminating information was hidden behind redactions.
They were not released in an unredacted form until late January of 2023, after Fauci had resigned from the NIAID. Hence the true story was not known until then.
The Intercept covered the story first, I believe, and they have the unredacted emails on their website.
On the 27th of February 2020, Fauci was happily doing media appearances and heavily involved in drafting a statement by the GPMB, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, conferring with Tedros the Director General of WHO, encouraging nations and institutions to work together to support WHO’s response and that they should all share information freely, rather ironic advice considering subsequent events.
On the 31st of January, Fauci received an email from Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome trust, “Tony, really would like to speak with you this evening. It is 10pm now UK. Can you phone me on - - - - ?”
Fauci’s personal assistant replied, “Will call shortly…”
Later in the evening she sent another email:
Thanks Tony can you phone Kristian Anderson
He is expecting your call now. The people involved are:
Kristian Anderson, Bob Garry, Eddie Holmes
All three are Professors in Virology and/or Microbiology Departments, Anderson at Scripps, Garry at Tulane, and Edwards Holmes at Sydney University.
Fauci left the call very disturbed. We know this because Fauci immediately emailed Jeremy Farrar, and his email betrays his state of mind:
Jeremy:
I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV. I told him that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my US Government official colleagues of my conversation with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend. Let us stay in touch.
Best regards, Tony
It is no wonder he was disturbed. The Furin cleavage site is a unique part of the SARS-CoV-2, whereas much of the rest of the virus genome is identical to RaTG13.
Here is the diagram that was later shared with the group:
The top row plots the similarities and differences between the genome of ‘2019-nCoV’ and that of ‘RaTG13.’ They’re exactly the same. Except for the Furin cleavage site.
To bond to a human cell - or any cell - the virus needs a protein on its surface that can bond to a protein on the human cell. Coronaviruses use the ACE2 protein, which regulates blood pressure and many other functions in the body. Think of the ACE2 molecule as a lock - and the Spike protein as the key. The fact is, most viral keys don’t work very well, especially from animal viruses. You see, the ACE2 receptor in a mouse is different from that in human, and they’re different from the ACE2’s in a monkey, etcetera, you get the idea.
Now this - ‘RaTG13’- was a bat virus - now if you have a key to the bat cell, it won’t work too well for a human cell. But the Furin cleavage site is the perfect key.
The Furin cleavage site is right in the middle of the Spike protein.
And it’s an exact match - 12 bases - to a site right in the middle of the ACE2 receptor. In reverse. It fits perfectly.
Whoever did this diagram plotted the correspondences at the top. See where all the “N’s” are - they’re the only bits that don’t match. Everything else is a hundred percent match.
How does that happen in nature? A complete match, not resulting from chance mutations of existing bases, but another sequence spliced in somehow.
How long would it take the Furin cleavage site to splice in, if it happened naturally? We don’t know. But in nature it doesn’t happen instantaneously. One bit of the genome evolved, into an insertion for God’s sake, and the rest of it didn’t, it’s completely the same as the other with no mutations. How could this possibly happen in nature? You’d expect to see the mutations here and there, sort of randomly scattered about. Selection, mutations, randomness, but here only in one select part of the virus? 96%, most of the rest of the genome, is a complete, perfect match, except for a few other changes that are very strategically placed to make it more infectious to humans.
The following morning, Jeremy Farrar sent a message to Fauci that he was trying to organise a conference call.
Could you join?
Trying to set up an initial call with
Kristian Anderson
Bob Garry
Christian Drosen
Tony Fauci
Ron Fouchicr
Eddie Holmes
Marion Koopmans
Patrick Vallance Chief Scientist UKTime zones a challenge
‘Suggestion - Today 1st February (2nd Feb for Eddie)- I will confirm later today. If you cannot make it,we will phone you afterwards to update.
6am Sydney
8pm CET
7pm GMT
2pm EST
9am West Coast
My preference is to keep this really tight group.
“To listen to the work Eddie, Bob and Kristian have done.
Question it
And think through next steps.
Obviously ask everyone to treat in total confidence.
Fauci accepted the invitation, and corrected the Pacific time to 11am.
They set their agenda and a pdf was sent out to the group entitled “coronavirus sequence comparison”.
In it, the sequence of 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV2) is compared to bat SARS-like coronavirus RaTG13; they are 96% identical.
They explicitly deal with the evidence that SARS-COV2 did not have a natural origin in the pdf:
(my explanation ) There is a high level of mutations around significant parts of the receptor binding domain. This implies design, because the mutations are targeted at strategic places, not random.
(my explanation) The Furin Cleavage site: the Furin Cleavage site is unique and allows the S-Protein to bind far more easily to human ACE2 receptors than any animal virus would normally be able to, particularly because it contains a protein that is symmetrically related to a part of the ACE2 receptors. This particular protein sequence allegedly was apparently patented by Moderna, and is one of the most telling indications that SARS-COV2 did not have a natural origin. This is my chart, showing the way the furin cleavage site appears to have been inserted:
This is in the pdf that was sent out - the gap in the RaTG13 sequence at the bottom is where the furin cleavage site is spliced in:
(my explanation) This diversity upstream, followed by none downstream, is not what you would expect in a virus that had naturally evolved - there would be roughly similar amounts of diversity:
(my explanation) The Spike protein, which is the strategic part of the virus, suddenly reverts to the exact SARS sequence at the end. Again, random mutations would be spread around randomly. The fact that it reverts to the exact SARS sequence is extremely suspicious:
After this they have links to a number of studies, some of which we have already looked at, that are all related to gain of function at Wuhan.
A few references - to be significantly updated
A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/
A mouse-adapted SARS-coronavirus causes disease and mortality in BALB/c mice; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17222058
SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26976607
Modeling pathogenesis of emergent and pre-emergent human coronaviruses in mice; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30043100
Receptor recognition by novel coronavirus from Wuhan: An analysis based on decade-long structural studies of SARS
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31996437/
Molecular determinants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus pathogenesis and virulence in young and aged mouse models of human disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22072787
These studies are listed on the document presumably because they are highly incriminatory gain of function studies, all of them funded by NIAID.
This 2015 study, one of the Wuhan ones, is notorious: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ Two of the authors of the study, Ralph Baric and ZhengLi Shi are both heavily implicated in gain of function studies, Ralph Baric’s department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ZhengLi Shi’s research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This study is clearly gain of function, done in the Wuhan lab, and was published after Obama’s moratorium.
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can 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.
A mouse-adapted SARS-coronavirus causes disease and mortality in BALB/c mice; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17222058 This Wuhan study recounts various ways they were gain-of-functioning the SARS coronavirus in order to make it more lethal for mice.
SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26976607 This 2016 study from Ralph Baric’s department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was gain-of-functioning WIV1-Cov by swapping out Spike proteins and doing the sort of snipping and replacing of strategic points on the genome in order to make it more infectious to humans, that is so suspicious about SARS-COV2, then they were saying that this shows that SARS might well be poised for human emergence. It is noteworthy because it was published after Obama’s moratorium.
Modeling pathogenesis of emergent and pre-emergent human coronaviruses in mice; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30043100 This study, in which the aforementioned Ralph Baric is one of the authors, contains some very incriminating passages about what they were trying to do:
Lethality was not achievable using clinical SARS-CoV isolates in various young wild-type or immune-incompetent mouse strains. With this in mind, attention turned to genetic modification of mice to acquire a lethal model for SARS-CoV pathogenesis. In order to continue working with unaltered human clinical isolates of SARS-CoV, mouse strains constitutively expressing the human receptor for SARS-CoV, human angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (hACE2), were generated….
Accordingly, despite the successful generation of lethal hACE2 overexpression mouse models for SARS-CoV pathogenesis, neurological-related mortality confounded their value as models that could effectively mimic lethal respiratory disease often observed in infected humans.
Receptor recognition by novel coronavirus from Wuhan: An analysis based on decade-long structural studies of SARS
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31996437/ I’m not sure why they included this one; maybe for discussion on plausible deniability from here on in? It’s a Ralph Baric study of SARS-COV2 published just a day before - treating “2019-nCoV” (SARS-COV2) as if it was a peculiarity that had arisen naturally.
Molecular determinants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus pathogenesis and virulence in young and aged mouse models of human disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22072787 This is Ralph Baric et al’s study, from the department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and shows them manipulating Spike proteins again to increase mortality in mice.
After the conference call, the emails show them scrambling to put together proof that “2019-nCoV” (SARS-COV2) was not a lab leak. Circumstantial proof that this seems to have been their intention from the beginning, and not an unbiased scientific enquiry, is provided by this intemperate outburst from Christian Drosten to the group:
Dear All,
I am overloaded with nCoV patient-related work and will need a few days before I can work on this text.
Can someone help me with one question: didn't we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? This whole text reads as if the hypothesis was obvious, or was brought up by some external source, forcing us to respond. Is this the case? It does not seem as if this was linked to the HIV nonsense.
Who came up with this story in the beginning? Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?
Christian Drosten
Eddie Holmes, the Australian scientist, responds more cautiously; a cynical person might suggest that he is aware that emails of public servants in the US must be preserved, and could be subject to FOI requests in the future. He gives the impression that he is coming round to the view that the virus could have a natural origin.
Hi Christian,
I don't know where this story came from, but it has nothing whatsoever to do the HIV nonsense. Please don't associate this with that. This is a broader story.
Ever since this outbreak started there have suggestions that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, if only because of the coincidence of where the outbreak occurred and the location of the lab. I do a lot of work in China and I can you that a lot of people there believe this and believe they are being lied to.
Things were made worse when Wuhan lab published the bat virus sequence - a bat sampled in a different province for which they have a large collection of samples.
I believe the aim/question here is whether we, as scientists, should try to write something balanced on the science behind this? There are arguments for and against doing this.
Personally, with the pangolin virus possessing 6/6 key sites in the receptor binding domain, I am in favour of the natural evolution theory.
Best wishes,
Eddie
Who this next reply was from is unclear in the emails, but it looks like Fauci’s wording to me; I might be wrong:
The theory of the origin of the has gathered considerable momentum not in social media, but increasingly among some scientists, in main stream media, and among politicians.
The aim of this was to bring a neutral, respected, scientific group together to look at the data and in a neutral, considered way provide an opinion and we hoped to focus the discussion on the science, not on any conspiracy or other theory and to lay down a respected statement to frame whatever debate goes on - before that debate gets out of hand with potentially hugely damaging ramifications.
With the additional information on the pangolin virus, information not available even 24 hours ago, think the argument is even clearer.
My preference is that a carefully considered piece of science, early in the public domain, will help mitigate more polarised debate. If not, that debate will increasingly happen and science will be reacting to it. Not a good position to be in.
Kristian G Anderson replied:
A lot of good discussion here, so I just wanted to add a couple of things for context that I think are important - and why what we're considering is far from "another conspiracy theory", but rather is taking a valid scientific approach to a question that is increasingly being asked by the public, media, scientists, and politicians (e.g., I have been contacted by Science, NYT, and many other news outlets over the last couple of days about this exact question)
To Ron's question, passage of SARS-like CoVs have been ongoing for several years, and more specifically in Wuhan under BSL-2 conditions - see references 12-15 in the document for a few examples. The fact that Wuhan became the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV is likely an unfortunate coincidence, but it raises questions that would be wrong to dismiss out of hand. Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered. Like Eddie- and I believe Bob, Andrew, and everybody on this email as well - I am very hopeful that the viruses from pangolins will help provide the missing pieces.
For now, giving the lab theory serious consideration has been highly effective at countering many of the circulating conspiracy theories, including HIV recombinants, bioengineering, etc. - here's just one example: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theories-claim-new-coronavirus-was-bioengineered/ .
As to publishing this document in a journal, I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage. I think it's important that we try to gather additional evidence - including waiting on the pangolin virus sequences and further scrutinize the furin cleavage site and O-linked glycans - before publishing. That way we can (hopefully) come out with some strong conclusive statements that are based on the best data we have access to. I don't think we are there yet.
Best,
Kristian
The theory that the virus could have come from a pangolin is one they jump on quite hopefully, initially, but eventually they drop it, perhaps because it turned out to be untenable.
In the released emails, the developing paper is given also as an attachment, as it approaches a point where it is publishable.
Please treat in confidence - a very rough first draft from Eddie and team - they will send on the edited,
cleaner version later.
Pushing WHO again today
Jeremy
Then,
Here's our summary so far. Will be edited further.
It's fundamental science and completely neutral as written. Did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons. As it stands it is excellent basic science I think, which is a service in itself.
Will finish as soon as we can.
Edward Holmes
The arguments continue,
On 4 Feb 2020, at 10:58, Collins, Francis (NIH/OD) [E]
(b) (6) wrote:
Very thoughtful analysis. I note that Eddie is now arguing against the idea that this is the product of intentional human engineering. But repeated tissue culture passage is still an option - though it doesn't explain the O-linked glycans.
Francis
I’m not sure why O-linked glycans are an anomaly. Possibly because the original SARS virus Spike protein has N-linked glycans rather than O-linked glycans. O-linked glycans would have to be some sort of unnatural addition.
From Jeremy Farrar:
Being very careful in the morning wording "Engineered" probably not.
Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans. Will forward immediately or if you want to give Eddie a ring.
Eddie would be 60:40 lab side. I remain 50:50..
Yes, l'd be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?)
Francis
Fauci:
?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice
Fauci’s phrase, serial passage, means the virus has been caught and passed on through numerous mice, and has acquired various mutations along the way.
Farrar:
Exactly!
Collins:
Surely that wouldn't be done in a BSL-2 lab?
Here Collins is probably referring to the BSL-2 labs in Wuhan, which is where ZhengLi Shi and her teams were doing their research initially. There is an assumption here too; that in a BSL-3 or 4 lab, the extra biosecurity means the mouse colony would not be given the opportunity to catch the virus from one another.
Farrar:
Wild West.
The debate continues, and ultimately in early March they came up with a workable final copy, and submitted it to Nature Medicine.
Dear Jeremy, Tony, and Francis,
Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-
CoV-2 'origins' paper. We're happy to say that the paper was just accepted by Nature Medicine and should be published shortly (not quite sure when).
To keep you in the loop, I just wanted to share the accepted version with you, as well as a draft press release. We're still waiting for proofs, so please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions about the paper or the press release.
Tony, thank you for your straight talk on CNN last night - it's being noticed.
Best,
Kristian
The paper was published in Nature magazine on March 17, as The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Their final version of the paper argued very clearly for a natural evolutionary origin of the virus, and this had the effect of quashing the lab leak theory for quite a while.
The paper was a success, in other words.
References
Andersen, K.G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I. et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 26, 450–452 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9#citeas
This post is journalistic opinion and should not be taken as medical advice. For medical advice go see a Doctor; preferably one who follows the historical Hippocratic oath, by which I mean, the one where Doctors swear to “do no harm” and not to kill people with pharmakea.
Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity did a video yesterday on Fauci Lied, People Died which was excellent...and goes back to May 2020 when they knew the thing was developed ina lab because of the furin cleavage that no other coronovirus had...worth a watch.https://youtu.be/KYmBAWtjoQw
So...now what? Australia's working away on dual-use bioweapons in Melbourne that are much worse than SARS-Cov-2. Airbourne rabies for one.