man made bat made from a longer article Dr. Meryl Nass:
Okay. Like everybody else in the world, I wondered at the beginning of this, whether this was a natural, a jump from a bat or some other animal virus to humans and scratched my head about it. Wasn't sure, I'm not a virologist, I can't read the detailed virology literature and understand it, But I do have an extensive background in biological warfare and I know what kinds of things have been created in the past, what it takes, where they may be made and how it has been done. So, I remained curious. And then in the end of February, the later part of February, a group of scientists wrote a piece that was published in The Lancet and it was a very curious piece to me.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
It didn't make sense. Yeah. And these were very prominent people, including the former head of the National Science Foundation, one of the former top people at CDC and other very prominent people. What they said is, "We need to quash the rumors of the fact that this came from a lab. That is conspiracy theory and we need to get rid of it. We have to stand with our colleagues in China. We all need to work together. We can't start problems with the Chinese basically." And so what this group was doing in a very short, less than a page, brief letter, was conflating the idea that this might've come from a lab with the fact that that would interfere with the US-China relationship. And we couldn't interfere with that because we needed China's information and maybe China's products to fight the coronavirus.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
So we had to put this idea aside. Well, I scratched my head and said, "That doesn't really make sense, but okay, these are political people." Then a couple of weeks later, an article came out in Nature Medicine, which said, "Here we have the scientific proof that this did not come from a lab. That there are certain things about this virus." And they talked about the two things that have been identified by others as the most problematic. These two sites on the spike genome, which seemed to enhance the tropism and the binding. So it just makes it easier for the virus to get into human cells. And they took these two areas and said, "Look, these mutations that are found in the new CoV-2 virus, which are not seen in any of the other bat viruses anywhere near it must have come from the wild because these weren't created in the ways that we virologists would have created it.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
We already have ways to create these things, and it wasn't done that way. And two, we did some computer imaging and designing and we decided that based on the computer model, this was not the ideal spike formulation. And so if a geneticist, a virologists was doing this, they would have used the computer model and they didn't and therefore this must have come from the wild. Well, that was a really crazy argument because it didn't make any scientific sense, it was a lot of hand-waving assertions, but the evidence was not there because clearly if you understand that those were two highly virulent mutations that could well have been added to a preexisting coronavirus, you would know that in fact each of those could well have been added in a lab by a variety of techniques including the old passage technique, which is what Pasteur used to make vaccines in 1880.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
So, passage has been around for a long time, but it is still used and there's a good possibility that it was used in this case. Because if you take cells that are not – if you take, sorry, viruses that are not particularly adapted to the human ACE-2 inhibitor but are adapted to another animals is ACE-2 inhibitor and passage them in human tissue culture with the ACE-2 receptor. Over time, they will develop
improved, receptor binding. So it's actually a likely way that this coronavirus might've been produced. So anyway, I read that article and I said, "This is complete nonsense. I can't believe Nature Medicine published it." And the two groups of authors, the one from the Lancet and the one from Nature Medicine have consistently referred to each other as they've been interviewed.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
Science Magazine did a short piece on the Lancet article. USA Today did a piece on the Nature of Medicine article. And then the actual head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins wrote a blog post or somebody wrote it for him saying, "Now we have the scientific answer. This piece in Nature Medicine has put to rest any thoughts that this could be a lab construct. That's a conspiracy theory. We have no room for conspiracy theories. This is the end of discussion."
Dr. Meryl Nass:
So I wrote a couple of blog posts about that and I said, "Well, this is really curious." Now the first thing I thought about the Nature Medicine article was, "Did these people actually write it?" Because it's such a piece of scientific nonsense that any real scientist reading it, if you can read the language, would not accept it, would dismiss it out of hand. So were they asked to place their names on those piece of junk in order to get it into a journal and create this smokescreen around the fact that this is a naturally occurring coronavirus.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
If you look at the names, there were five authors, I knew of a couple of them. One was a fellow named Robert Garry, who I have had some interactions with over the last 22 years, another one was Ian Lipkin. And I happened to show this piece to a friend of mine, Ed Hooper, who wrote a well-known book called, “The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.” And he noted that the three other authors had all challenged – This book, The River, is about the origin of AIDS. How did AIDS jump into the human population?
Dr. Mercola:
Fantastic book.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
Yeah. And so, although the claim is that it's due to Africans eating bush meat, Ed makes a very strong case and has put out additional evidence in the intervening 20-plus years since he wrote it, that it's much more likely that the jump into humans was because an oral polio vaccine was grown on monkey kidneys in the Belgian Congo. And that those monkey kidneys probably had the precursor to HIV.
Dr. Meryl Nass:
So it is interesting that three of these authors had actually challenged him on his AIDS origin theory and now they're challenging the coronavirus origin theory, which made me wonder, "Are these people who have Ph.Ds but can be pulled out by the political medical establishment to try to push theories or ideas that are politically desirable." So I guess I'll stop there.
Dr. Mercola: |
