WARNING!
This is an older article that may not reflect Dr. Mercola’s current view on this topic. Use our search engine to find Dr. Mercola’s latest position on any health topic.
I've already written several articles reviewing the evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 is a manmade creation, and likely the result of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. While the mainstream media vehemently deny these theories as hoaxes, the number of scientists speaking out in support of SARS-CoV-2 being a laboratory creation keeps growing.
Among the latest is professor Giuseppe Tritto, an internationally recognized expert in bio and nanotechnology. He's also the president of the World Academy of Biomedical Sciences and Technology, founded under UNESCO.
The Chimera That Changed the World
According to Tritto, author of the newly released book, "China COVID-19: The Chimera That Changed the World,"1 SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural virus that evolved to make the jump from bats to humans.
He insists the virus was genetically engineered, and presents evidence in support of that view in his book, which is presently only available in Italian. As reported by Life Site News, Tritto claims the virus:2
"… was genetically engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology's P4 (high-containment) lab in a program supervised by the Chinese military … What sets Prof. Tritto's book apart is the fact that it demonstrates … the pathway by which a PLA-owned coronavirus was genetically modified to become the [pandemic virus] now ravaging the world.
His account leaves no doubt that it is a 'chimera,' an organism created in a lab. He also connects the dots linking the Wuhan lab to France and the United States, showing how both countries provided financial and scientific help to the Chinese as they began to conduct ever more dangerous bioengineering experiments.
Although neither American nor French virologists are responsible for the end result … their early involvement may explain why so many insist that the 'chimera' must have come from nature. The last thing they want to admit is that they might have had a hand in it."
According to Tritto, the creation of SARS-CoV-2 began in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS epidemic, when Chinese researchers started working on a SARS vaccine. The scientist in charge of that Wuhan Institute of Virology program was Shi Zhengli, Ph.D.
Tritto claims Shi used reverse genetics to produce a SARS-like virus with increased pathogenicity with the help from the French Pasteur Institute, which showed her how to insert a segment of the HIV virus into a horseshoe bat coronavirus.
American Involvement
Among the American scientists Tritto names is professor Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who has received grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Baric specializes in recombinant coronaviruses, and owns a patent (U.S. patent 7279327) on "methods for producing recombinant coronaviruses."
In 2013, the National Institutes of Health determined that gain-of-function research on coronavirus was far too risky to continue, so they suspended funding of such research.
Unfortunately, they made the funding pause voluntary, not mandatory, and in 2014, when the push-back against gain-of-function research into coronaviruses grew further, the controversial research was offshored to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
In a nutshell, Tritto believes that while Shi's research began as an earnest effort to develop a SARS vaccine, it grew into a biological weapons effort using reverse genetics technology. In a recent interview, Tritto explained:3,4
"Thanks to the matrix viruses provided by Shi, Baric created in 2015 a mouse SARS-virus chimera, which has a pathogenic effect on human cells analyzed in vitro. At that point, the China-U.S. collaboration becomes competition.
Shi wants to work on a more powerful virus to make a more powerful vaccine: it combines a bat virus with a pangolin virus in vitro and in 2017 publishes the results of this research in some scientific articles.
Her research attracts the interest of the Chinese military and medical-biological sector which deals with biological weapons … Thus Shi is joined by doctors and biologists … such as Guo Deyin, a scholar of anti-AIDS and anti-viral hepatitis vaccines and expert in genetic recombination techniques.
The introduction of the new engineered inserts into the virus genome is the result of the collaboration between the Shi team and that of Guo Deyin.
The realization of this new chimera, from a scientific point of view, is a success. So much so that, once the epidemic has broken out, the two researchers ask WHO to register it as a new virus, H-nCoV-19 (Human new COVID-19), and not as another virus derived from SARS."
Tritto also points out that natural mutation of SARS-CoV-2 make it "extremely unlikely" that any given vaccine will successfully inhibit the virus. So far, 11 different strains of the virus have been identified.
Speaking of the University of North Carolina, as reported by ProPublica,5 the University's high-security laboratory has experienced several safety breaches over the past five years, in which researchers "were potentially exposed to lab-created coronaviruses." As noted by ProPublica:
"While no one is suggesting that UNC created the virus that causes COVID-19, alone or with the Wuhan lab, such near misses highlight the potential risks of an infected lab worker exposing the public even in the most secure and respected research facilities as they search for treatments and vaccines …
Records show that during the five years before the pandemic began, at least six UNC researchers were required to undergo medical monitoring following four incidents where they were potentially exposed to what the NIH now confirms were types of lab-created SARS coronaviruses.
In addition, two other UNC researchers had to undergo medical surveillance because of their potential exposure to a type of lab-created MERS coronavirus. The monitoring involved reporting temperatures or any symptoms to university medical officials twice daily.
In each case, the reports indicate these workers were allowed to go about their lives while waiting for symptoms to appear. As the world has learned in recent months, it's possible for people without symptoms to be infected with the coronavirus and unknowingly spread disease to others."
Is SARS-CoV-2 Really a Novel Virus?
As mentioned, Tritto is far from alone in his assertions. Two other scientists who have spoken out about the evidence for a laboratory origin are Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and a virologist, and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a molecular biologist. I interviewed Latham about some of their theories in July 2020. His interview is featured in "Cover-Up of SARS-CoV-2 Origin?"
Latham and Wilson argue that while the virus likely originated in a bat at some point, the mechanism by which it jumped from bat to human was not natural. In our interview, Latham described three different theories by which the virus may have been created in and escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Interestingly, Latham and Wilson believe SARS-CoV-2 isn't really a novel virus at all. In an August 15, 2020, article,6 New York Post reporter Isabel Vincent reports their claim that COVID-19, the disease, first appeared in six Chinese miners back in 2012.
Latham and Wilson came to this conclusion after translating a master's thesis written by the doctor who treated the sick miners. Tissue samples from the patients were at the time sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for testing, which revealed the infection was caused by a SARS-like coronavirus from horseshoe bats. As reported by Vincent:7
"Latham and Wilson believe the virus — once inside the miners — 'evolved' into SARS CoV-2, 'an unusually pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans,' and the samples somehow escaped from the lab last year, launching what has morphed into the coronavirus pandemic."
Five Categories of Review
In related news, Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment, recently spoke to Corporate Crime Reporter8 about the lingering controversy surrounding SARS-CoV-2's origin. He suggests looking at five categories of facts or evidence before dismissing the lab-origin theory:
- Is there anything about the virus that would immediately indicate that it's natural or manufactured?
- Location — Where did the outbreak occur?
- Precedent — Has anything like this happened before?
- Warnings — Did anyone warn that this might happen?
- Cover-up — Is there evidence of a cover-up?
Kimbrell then goes through what we now know about each one, starting with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is indisputably a chimeric (hybrid) virus. The bat coronaviruses that resemble it the most do not have the same spike protein and furin cleavage site — two features that make SARS-CoV-2 uniquely pathogenic to humans. As noted by Kimbrell:9
"You have a basic bat coronavirus and you have two things that have been added to it. The spike protein is closest to an animal called the pangolin. We do know that somehow this bat virus was infected by at least two other animals and then went into a human host. And for that virus to be the way it is, it had to happen simultaneously …
Someone will have to come up with a scenario [for how that could happen]. It sounds almost like a joke. A horseshoe bat, a pangolin and some other creature met in a bar in Wuhan and somehow simultaneously infected them.
I haven't seen any scenario of how that happened or where that happened. But we know that had to happen. It happened somewhere. It either happened in nature or it happened in the Wuhan Institute of Virology or it happened at the CDC lab in Wuhan."
Low-Tech Engineering Technique Can Explain SARS-CoV-2
Australian researcher Nickolai Petrovsky and his team sought to identify a way by which these animals might have co-mingled to give rise to SARS-CoV-2. Their conclusion was that it could not be a naturally-occurring virus, Kimbrell notes.
Petrovsky's team points out you can alter a virus in a laboratory, without genetic engineering, by growing it in different kinds of animal cells. To adapt it to humans, you would then grow the virus in cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus can thereby adapt and gain the ability to bind to that receptor.10
"We know that this was exactly the kind of work that was going on at one or both of the Wuhan labs," Kimbrell says.11 "They were taking NIH money, through the EcoHealth Alliance to do exactly this …
They added different kinds of protein spikes. They mixed and matched various viruses. They genetically engineered them. They infected a number of animals. They put them into human cell cultures to increase the threat."
Many Scientists Argue for Manmade Origin
Aside from Tritto, Latham, Wilson and Kimbrell, many other experts in various fields have also presented arguments for a manmade or laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, including the following. I've interviewed some of them already, so for further details, follow the hyperlinks:
Dr. Michael Antoniou is a London-based molecular geneticist who has noted that enhanced-infectivity viruses can be engineered in the lab without using a previously used virus backbone.
Using a method called "directed iterative evolutionary selection process," you can generate "a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor," and then to select those protein receptors most effective at infecting human cells. The inventors of this technique received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2018.
If lab technicians in the Wuhan lab did use the directed iterative evolutionary selection process to engineer a "gain of function" (weaponized) bat coronavirus, and the virus subsequently leaked, infected one or more lab technicians, then spread to people outside the lab, including people from the Wuhan Seafood Market, there would be no trace of the virus having been genetically engineered or manipulated.12 |
Dr. Richard Ebright is an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University who has pointed out that both U.S. and Chinese researchers have genetically engineered bat coronaviruses using methods that "leave no sign or signature of human manipulation."13 |
Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, and editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Theory, has also pointed out that "Virologists have been experimentally recombining and genetically modifying coronaviruses for more than a decade to study their mechanisms of pathogenicity."14 Indeed, such experiments go back two decades.15,16 |
Francis Boyle, whose background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, a juris doctor (lawyer) degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science, drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 and has been involved in antibiological warfare work for several decades.
According to Boyle, the scientific literature establishes that this virus is an engineered synthetic virus that was not transmitted from animals to humans without human intervention. |
Dr. Meryl Nass, who in 1992 published a paper17 in which she identified the 1978-1980 Zimbabwe anthrax outbreak as a case of biological warfare, also isn't buying the all-natural argument. In an April 2, 2020, blog post, she wrote:18
"Why are some of the U.S.' top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2? … Prior to genetic engineering techniques being developed (1973) and widely used (since late 1970s), more 'primitive' means of causing mutations, with the intention of developing biological weapons, were employed …
They resulted in biological weapons that were tested, well-described, and in some cases, used … These methods can result in biowarfare agents that lack the identifiable signature of a microbial agent constructed in a lab from known RNA or DNA sequences.
In fact, it would be desirable to produce such agents, since it would be difficult to prove they were deliberately constructed in a lab. Here are just a few possibilities for how one might create new, virulent mutants:
1. Exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics
2. Passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures
3. Mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors"
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Chris Martenson,19 who has a Ph.D. in pathology, in the video below details the science behind his assertion that SARS-CoV-2 must have undergone laboratory manipulation. I also did a write-up on this in "The Smoking Gun Proving SARS-CoV-2 Is an Engineered Virus."
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André Leu, international director of Regeneration International, wrote an article reviewing the evidence for a manmade origin, in which he notes that several researchers have stated SARS-CoV-2 is a result of the genetic recombination of part of the spike protein of the Malayan Pangolin coronavirus into RaTG13. |
Norwegian and British researchers Birger Sorensen, Andre Susrud and Angus Dalgleish claim SARS-CoV-2 has unique fingerprints that could not have evolved through natural means and are indicative of purposive manipulation. According to the authors:20
"Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we also show, there are puzzling errors in their use of evidence."
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Canadian researchers Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin E. Deverman and Yuji Alina Chan, from the Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of British Columbia, published a study in May 2020, in which they note:21
"In a side-by-side comparison of evolutionary dynamics between the 2019/2020 SARS- CoV-2 and the 2003 SARS-CoV, we were surprised to find that SARS-CoV-2 resembles SARS- CoV in the late phase of the 2003 epidemic after SARS-CoV had developed several advantageous adaptations for human transmission.
Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected.
The sudden appearance of a highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 presents a major cause for concern that should motivate stronger international efforts to identify the source and prevent near future re- emergence. Any existing pools of SARS-CoV-2 progenitors would be particularly dangerous if similarly well adapted for human transmission …
Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely."
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In my opinion, the strongest pieces of evidence so far all point toward SARS-CoV-2 being a laboratory creation. How it got released, however, is anyone's guess.