The Origin of Covid-19 —Updated

by Dennis Cuddy, Ph.D.

Note: A very short version of this article appeared in THE MIAMI HERALD on June 23, 2021, on page 10A.

On March 2, 2020, I emailed ABC News regarding the origin of Covid-19, and I said at that time that the economic impact had only begun to be felt. In October 2013, NIH director Francis Collins said certain studies (gain-of-function) “entail biosafety and biosecurity risks.” He was talking about studies such as Ralph Baric-led UNC Bioscience Lab Level 3’s efforts to engineer a virus with a surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in China. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells.

Dr. Baric and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Lab Level 4), among others, co-authored “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” in Nature Medicine (November 9, 2015). The article’s Abstract states that “Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014…,and the spike can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells….” (See also Jef Akst’s article in The Scientist, November 9, 2015.) Synthetic construction of chimeric mutant and full-length SHC014-CoV was approved by the University of North Carolina institutional Biosafety Committee, and research in this manuscript was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, among others.

According to “Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan” by Rowan Jacobsen (MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW June 29, 2021), Dr. Baric had asked Dr. Shi if he could have the genetic data for SHC014, and he sent transgenic mice with human lung receptors to Wuhan. Then on March 15, 2016, Dr. Baric and 3 others with his team among others co-authored “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence” (PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). In the Acknowledgments, it states: “We thank Dr. Zheng-li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for access to the bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein. Research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the National Institute of Aging of the NIH under Awards U19AI109761 and U19AI107810 (to R.S.B.), AI1085524 (to W.A.M.), and F32AI102561 and K99AG049092 (to V.D.M.)….Support for the generation of mice expressing human ACE2 was provided by NIH Grants AI076159 and AI079521 (to A.C.S.). The spike protein is a toxin that has been shown to cause cardiovascular problems such as blood clots. Canadian immunologist and vaccine researcher Byram Bridle made the following comment after reading the Pfizer study: “We made a big mistake. We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen; we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So, by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.”

Regarding Moderna, on January 28, 2020, Moderna received U.S. Patent Number 10,543,269, and at the top of page 30, it states: “Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in China in 2002 and spread to other countries before brought under control. Because of a concern for reemergence or a deliberate release of the SARS coronavirus, vaccine development was initiated.” This does not mean that Moderna knew that Covid-19 was deliberately released, but it does show Moderna thought some type of SARS could be deliberately released by someone or some country. Concerning the Moderna vaccine, a healthy friend of mine was vaccinated and had a horrible case of the hives for 2 weeks. Also, Shauna O’Neill, the mother of Haley Link Brinkmeyer, stated: “My 28-year-old daughter took the (Moderna) vaccine on a Tuesday and she was dead by Thursday.” And concerning the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, perhaps 25% of those vaccinated will find that it is not effective, and 8 New York Yankees baseball players got infected with Covid-19 after having the shot.

In former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade’s “Origin of Covid-19: Following the Clues” (May 2, 2021), he wrote: “Dr. Baric had developed and taught Dr. Shi a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells….Dr. Shi returned to her lab at Wuhan and resumed her work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells (gain-of-function research)….The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that (1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and (2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of bat-preferred codons…..Dr. Shi’s work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and infectious Diseases (headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci), and her grant proposals specified exactly what she planned to do with the money….” The way this worked was funds went to EcoHealth Alliance, which then subcontracted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology where Dr. Shi worked.

Originally, virologist Kristian Andersen indicated there was a possibility of a lab leak, but then changed his mind. Dr. Anthony Fauci thanked him for the change, and 5 months later Andersen received $1.88 million from the National Institute of Health (NIH) under which Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) exists. Perhaps just a coincidence, like the coincidence that in the same year Drs. Baric and Shi were co-authoring the November 9, 2015 NATURE MEDICINE article, Bill Gates in a Ted Talk said: “Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn’t look like this (picture of war). Instead, it looks like this (picture of a virus). If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes….You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they’re infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic, or it could be bioterrorism….It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly….” Did a Wuhan lab worker walk out into a fish “market,” and then Covid-19 spread quickly throughout the world by people traveling on “planes”?

In THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s June 4, 2021 editorial, “Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan Lab,” one reads: “From 2014-19, the National Institutes of Health sent $3.4 million to WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance….The NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, and it’s likely the WIV conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious. In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy Hugh Auchincloss a paper about gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. ‘Read this paper,’ he ordered. ‘You will have tasks today that must be done.’ His deputy commented on the paper and said they would ‘try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.'”

For at least a year, the prevailing theory has been that the pandemic began accidentally, spreading from an intermediary host (e.g., horseshoe bat) to humans. However, on May 16, 2020, Nikolai Petrovsky’s team at Flinders University in Australia published a statistical analysis showing strong evidence that Covid-19 most likely was engineered to go from human to human. According to the study’s authors, there is strong evidence that “the virus that caused Covid-19 did not come from an animal intermediary, but became specialized for human cell penetration by living previously in human cells, quite possibly in a laboratory.”

To see how the Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus, see “The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak” by Steven Quay and Richard Muller (The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2021). Nicholas Wade also supports this by writing that the virus was already well adapted to humans when the pandemic broke out, plus “it possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence do you want?”

The question then is for what purpose would the Chinese government want such a pathogen as Covid-19? According to a January 26, 2020 column by Bill Gertz, former Israeli military intelligence officer Dany Shoham, who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said Covid-19 “may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory, which is linked to Beijing’s covert …..bio-weapons program.” (also see “China’s Biological Warfare Programme and the Curious Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu” by Dany Shoham, CBW Magazine, July-December 2019) Also, there is a recent article in The Australian (national newspaper) titled “Chinese held talks on bio-weapon benefits” about a 2015 Chinese government document concerning their military scientists discussing the long-term psychological damage of bioweapons on foreign troops and the low cost of biological attacks. The Chinese document is 261 pages and is titled, “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bio-weapons.” The editor-in-chief is Xu Dezhong who had written over several years dozens of papers outlining his belief that SARS-CoV-1 (that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic) was NOT of natural origin! On June 28, 2021, Prof. Francis A. Boyle, who drafted the “Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989,” emailed me the following: “I and others have publicly stated that SARS1 leaked out of a Chinese Biowarfare Facility and Program.” The 261-page document not only looks at the military effects of coronaviruses as bioweapons, but also at the secondary effects such as placing destructive stress upon an enemy’s health care system. Remember the stress upon American health care systems (hospitals, doctors, nurses, etc.) caused by Covid-19?

Dr. Shi has constantly denied conducting studies with the Chinese military. However, according to Edmund DeMarche in “Wuhan virologist who worked on bat coronaviruses tied to military scientists, report says” (June 29, 2021), “NBC News reported that it uncovered evidence linking Shi to military scientists. She collaborated with Ton Yigang, a military scientists, on coronavirus research in 2018 and then Zhou Yusen, another military scientist in December 2019….David Asher, a former State Department advisor WHO coauthored a fact sheet last January on activity inside the lab, told NBC News that he is ‘confident’ that the Chinese military was funding a ‘secret program’ that involved coronaviruses.”

Also, don’t forget the economic impact that I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

E-Mail Dennis Cuddy: recordsrevealed@yahoo.com