Chinese Lab Sequenced COVID-19 and Uploaded it to American Database on December 28th 2019

It’s being reported that a China-based researcher had mapped the COVID-19 sequence by December 26th 2019, two weeks before the Chinese Government published the sequence. U.S. Republicans have said this raises questions about what other crucial pandemic information Beijing may have concealed. The Epoch Times has more.

Documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee reveal that Ren Lili, a current Beijing-based recipient of U.S. federal grants through the New York nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance, uploaded COVID-19 sequencing data to a U.S. Government genetic database on December 28th 2019.

At the time, Chinese authorities were still calling the disease an unknown pneumonia and ordered health workers not to spread any information around it with threat of penalty.

It wasn’t until January 12th — more than two weeks later — that Beijing shared genetic makeup with the World Health Organisation. It took two more days before the regime acknowledged the disease could spread from human to human.

National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) GenBank repository, which received the data from Ms. Ren, notified the Chinese virologist that the submission was “incomplete” and “lacked the necessary information required for publication,” the Department of Health and Human Services told the House committee in a letter.

Following a quality review process that screens for technical details, the GenBank asked for additional information from Ms. Ren, who works at the state-run Institute of Pathogen Biology, but never heard back, leading to the sequence’s removal from the database on January 16th 2020. During this period, GenBank received a near-identical COVID-19 genetic sequence from a different submitter, which it published on January 12th 2020, according to the letter that the Energy and Commerce Committee released on January 17th this year.

I’m not convinced this incriminates the Chinese Government in the way critics are claiming. The mainstream lab leak narrative — as advanced by, for example, U.S. Republicans and Robert Kadlec in his Muddy Waters report — claims that the Chinese were fully aware of the virus leaking during autumn 2019 and had already taken numerous actions, including developing vaccines, but were covering it all up. This discovery that a Chinese researcher uploaded the sequence to an American database on December 28th 2019 would seem completely inconsistent with that; at any rate, no one had told her. Personally, I largely share Philippe Lemoine’s take on the Chinese ‘cover up’, that there is no real evidence they knew what they were dealing with and were trying to stop the world finding out. Rather, they seem to have been clueless, as they discovered the virus during December 2019 in Wuhan hospital patients and then tried to work out what was going on. I’d already wondered why, if the Chinese were covering it up, the WIV’s Shi Zhengli published a paper with the sequence in mid-January alongside that of RaTG13 and noted that the new virus didn’t appear to have evolved naturally from the existing sample she held — not the greatest cover-up technique. To learn that a researcher had uploaded the sequence to an American database in late December only reinforces this picture of a lack of cover-up.

Meanwhile, new ‘smoking gun’ claims have appeared in the form of an X thread — quickly removed for reasons that are unclear — from molecular biologist Valentin Bruttel arguing that new details of the 2018 DEFUSE project show that it really was the blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2. The ‘Naked Emperor’ offers a summary of Bruttel’s argument from Jan Hommel, translated from the Dutch.

Now we go to DEFUSE, the application to the American defence organisation DARPA by EcoHealthNYC.

It was proposed to incorporate a furin cleavage site into coronaviruses. What now turns out? The DEFUSE application proposes to be able to cut artificial viruses into six parts.

And which molecular scissors did they order for that? That’s right: the two pairs of scissors that the trio of VanDongen, Bruttel and Washburne discussed.

In other words, not only did DEFUSE propose building a furin cleavage site into coronaviruses, they also described exactly how they wanted to do this and using which molecular scissors. And exactly that method fits seamlessly with what SARS-CoV-2 looks like.

This is the gun. With the fingerprints. Literally.

Apparently something has happened, and Bruttel has shown something that was not yet intended to be published. Emily Kopp’s account from the USRightToKnow has strangely disappeared. We’ll see how this turns out. But this is “pretty much case closed”.

The ‘Naked Emperor’ adds:

Bruttel concludes that SARS2 was assembled from six fragments using various enzymes. BsmBI for the main body of the virus and BsaI for furin cleavage site and receptor binding domain. Exactly how EcoAlliance planned it in the DEFUSE document.

American molecular biologist, Richard Ebright says that “an order line for BsmBI in a draft of EcoHealth’s 2018 DARPA proposal is the equivalent of a smoking gun. There is no-zero-remaining room for reasonable doubt that EcoHealth and its associates caused the pandemic.”

Kevin McKernan, who discovered the DNA contamination in the vaccines, agrees. He writes:

Emily Kopp from the U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) has obtained additional detail about the DEFUSE proposal that is far more than a smoking gun but, in fact, is more analogous to finding the gun, fingerprint and confession note in one place.

Emily found evidence that this proposal also listed the very restriction enzyme (BsmBI) that Bruttel et al. claimed could build the virus. Not only did Bruttel et al. notice that BsmBI sites were conveniently evenly spaced throughout the viral genome and this spacing was not only not observed in other coronaviruses but that this approach made complete sense as a logical path to manually assembling the genome.

Low and behold the DEFUSE proposal actually contains NEB R0580S part numbers to order these very enzymes to construct the virus in the manner Bruttel et al. predicted.

This is case closed event!

There is no more debate. COVID-19 was made in a lab. Which lab and when is still a hot topic but it didn’t come from a pangolin courting a bat.

So did the Chinese know in advance about the virus or were they caught unawares? Who actually did the work — was it in the WIV (or another Chinese lab), or were U.S. scientists involved? Will any of these scientists ever tell us the truth and let us take a look at what they were actually working on in 2018 and 2019?