BIDEN ADMINISTRATION CUTS WUHAN FUNDING, VINDICATES IPAK ON LABORATORY ORIGIN LIKELIHOOD

1,267 days after we published the first proposal of a lab-related origin, even the Biden Administration has finally admitted WIV is unsafe. If it is so unsafe, lab leak seems quite likely.

On Jan 30, 2020, IPAK, The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, published a proposal that the Wuhan Institute for Virology was the most likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (then known as nCOV2019). (See article). Dr. Lyons-Weiler was invited to an appeared on The Highwire (Bigtree) and Christian Broadcast News (CBS)

This upset certain Chinese scientists to the point where they published a rebuttal, entitled “Is SARS-CoV-2 originated from laboratory? A rebuttal to the claim of formation via laboratory recombination”, to the article. They published their rebuttal in “Emerging Microbes and Infections”:

Their article starts:

“Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, the CEO of the “Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge,” made an appalling online statement on 3 February 2020, which claimed the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic was most likely constructed via laboratory recombination [1]. In the results, he showed that SARS-CoV-2 had a unique inserted sequence (1378 bp) located in the middle of its spike glycoprotein gene that had no match in other coronaviruses (Supplementary Figure 1). Furthermore, he claimed this unique sequence was similar to some sequence in pShuttle-SN (Supplementary Figure 2), a common expression vector used in a research laboratory.”

The EMI article asserted that pShuttle-SN is not a vector technology, contrary to the manufacturer’s description.

Today, the Biden Administration vindicated IPAK’s assertion of the likelihood of the leak by suspending funding to the WIV.

The suspension came after Chinese researchers declined to provide the NIH with the required documentation of safety. CNN reports:

“China has blocked international scientists from freely exploring all hypotheses for how the virus emerged – hampering research that could have potentially shone a light on the outbreak’s origin.”

The CNN article also outlines that the WIV had lapses in safety leading up to the first human cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Questions remain on whether NCBI collaborated with Chinese scientists to alter data leading up to the discovery by IPAK. In June 2021, NYTimes reported that sequences related to SARS-CoV-2 that had been deleted by Chinese scientists re-appeared in the database. The return of those sequences occurred later:

“In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from Covid-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, managed to track down 13 of the sequences on Google Cloud. When Dr. Bloom shared his experience in a report posted online, he wrote that it ‘seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.’”

IPAK had pulled back from the specific mechanism of genetic manipulation after Dr. Lyons-Weiler tried to repeat his analysis using data stored at NCBI and was unable to do so. This occurred four days after he initially appeared on The Highwire and CBN and immediately thereafter to report that while the laboratory leak hypothesis was still plausible, the evidence was not to be found now in the database.

This has been misinterpreted as a claim that Lyons-Weiler thought the laboratory leak hypothesis was improbable, but this was never his position. He has subsequently called for an inquiry on SARS-CoV-2 sequence data manipulation within and by the NCBI.

Dr. Lyons-Weiler is available for appearances on podcasts and news interviews via admin@ipak-edu.org.

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