"The conclusions of the Australian journalist Sharri Markson are close to the latter. She has set up a crime scene around the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China, with the murder weapon a virus called Sars-CoV-2.
It is a plausible line of research. Just a few miles from the Wuhan food market, where the first major cluster of virus infections was discovered, the institute has arguably the world’s largest collection of the type of bat coronavirus from which Sars-CoV-2 appears to be derived.
In the lab at the highest biosecurity level, WIV scientists are doing ‘function gain’ gene editing on bat viruses to increase infectivity for humans.
Could an institute staffer have accidentally become infected with such an amplified virus and carried it outside? In her new book, based on reporting for News Corp newspapers and Sky television, Markson says yes.
It goes even further by playing WIV’s collaborative work with People’s Liberation Army medical researchers to nurture, not completely dismiss the possibility that gain-of-function research isn’t just about investigating potential future pandemics’. to remain’, but to engineer viruses as potential bioweapons."
Other scientists make great use of the presence of a feature called a furin cleavage site on the Sars-CoV-2 spike proteins, which is not seen in other bat viruses, which they say has been used in other cases to create a larger to induce contagiousness. David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology says this was a “smoking gun to the origin of the virus,” pointing to laboratory origins. Richard Muller of the University of California says it was “like finding a fingerprint at a crime scene.”
Anderson was at the Wuhan Institute, the only foreign scientist there, when Covid-19 first appeared in the city. When, as Markson writes from unspecified intelligence sources, several WIV employees contracted Covid-19 in November 2019, the mobile phone network around the WIV was mysteriously shut down and road access was closed for several days in October 2019, this went on and on. all past Anderson.