Shi Zhengli: We need to learn to live with the virus

Shi Zhengli, China’s ‘Bat Woman’, has said that new variants of Sars-Cov-2 will continue to emerge, but that vaccines are ‘effective’.   More...

India: Shi Zhengli, October 2019 – Filovirus antibodies in humans and bats imply zoonotic spillover

India, October 2019, Zhengli Shi et al: “We present evidence for prior exposure of bat harvesters and two resident fruit bat species to filovirus surface glycoproteins… Our results indicate circulation of several filoviruses in bats and the possibility for filovirus transmission from bats to humans.  More...

“Gain of Function research hasn’t protected us from this outbreak, hasn’t provided us with any effective treatments or vaccines to save hundreds of thousands of lives lost to CoV2, and if there is even a 0.1% chance GOF research caused the whole thing, that chance is too high”

Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research

CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not nesessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate.  More...