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After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
President Joe Biden has until the end of the day Sunday to declassify “any and all information” relating to the potential lab theory related to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it may not be that simple.
“In implementing this legislation, my Administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security,” Biden said.
So while Biden may have agreed to release information, he — along with the intelligence community, may decide releasing the information could jeopardize U.S. security interests.
The law does not impose any sanctions for not meeting the deadline, but if the White House does not release a report producing the information requested from Congress, there will likely be political consequences in the form of increased pressure from Republican lawmakers.
originally posted by: Haxlee
a reply to: IndieA
Well this aged like milk. Cheers to never finding out the truth 🍻 This is depressing.
Speaking ahead of the deadline for the Biden administration to declassify "any and all information" related to the origins of COVID-19, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called gain of function research the "biggest danger to mankind" and said the United States should not fund it at home or abroad.
Paul said on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," "Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, and ... Alex Gutentag" in an article "reveal that the first people to get sick from COVID were three scientists, that they worked in the Wuhan lab with the bat scientist Dr. Shi [Zhengli]. "In fact, one of them, the one they think that was the first scientist to get sick, the first person to get sick, was one of the ones creating these new viruses, viruses not found in nature. This is the gain of function research.
"The blame equally should go not only to Chinese authorities, but to Anthony Fauci and all those who advocated for this," he stated. "... Look, Bill Gates has been over there recently. Bill Gates is the largest funder of trying to find these viruses in remote caves and bring them to big cities. What happened in China is they went eight to 10 hours south of Wuhan, 2 to 300 feet deep into a ... cave, found viruses, and took them back to the city of 15 million."
In contrast, the site frequency spectra of early SARS-CoV-2 in humans only show an excess of low-frequency mutations, consistent with the recent outbreak of the virus. Strong positive selection in the mink SARS-CoV-2 implies that the virus may not be preadapted to a wide range of hosts and illustrates how a virus evolves to establish a continuous infection in a new host. Therefore, the lack of positive selection signal during the early pandemic in humans deserves further investigation.
The cell entry mechanism of SARS-CoV has been extensively studied. SARS-CoV S1 contains a receptor-binding domain (RBD) that specifically recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor (17–19). The RBD constantly switches between a standing-up position for receptor binding and a lying-down position for immune evasion.
I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find
the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory . But we hav e to look at this much
more closely and th ere are still further analyses to be done, so tho se opinions could still change.
On a phylogen etic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with ba ts suggest that bats serve as the reservoir .
The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome ( less than 0 .1%) so one has to look
really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.