Lab Babble: Case not proven
Efforts to pin Covid on lab error fail the fact test, says Russ Swan.
What if I told you that a forensic trail of scientific investigation had shown the pandemic-causing virus was created in a laboratory, and escaped into the wild as the result of an accident or a poorly executed vaccination experiment? You’d expect that to be headline news, right?
Maybe not first item on the bulletins. Not with all the wars and rogue AIs dropping bombs on schools, establishment figures selling their souls along with their loyalties, and all the cover-ups of financial and sexual misbehaviour by the people running the world. Not top of the news, but in there somewhere. ‘Pandemic virus came from lab: proof’ is the sort of thing a tabloid editor would have an orgasm over.
Clickbait and a bit of scientist-bashing in just a handful of words. And yet this story seems to have been buried deeper than the files of a certain predatory financier.
Like most clickbait, the headline leads to a slight anticlimax. The virus in question is not SARS-CoV-2, and the pandemic not Covid-19, but an influenza from five decades ago. It’s a story that reads like something from science fiction.
In the mid-1970s, a laboratory in China or eastern Russia was conducting experiments on a zoonotic influenza virus, using thawed-out samples from a swine flu outbreak that took place 30 years before. Their aim was to develop an H1N1 vaccine, built on an attenuated version of the virus.
This has never been seen in any other influenza, and notin Mpox, Ebola, or Coronavirus. Only in this 1977 bug
But the experiment went disastrously wrong, and the not-so-attenuated virus escaped into the wild. As is the nature of viruses, it spread rapidly across the globe, reaching Europe within weeks and North America within months. It had an astonishing clinical attack rate of 70%.
H1N1 is the same subtype of influenza responsible for the 1918 pandemic, which infected 500 million people – a third of the world population – and killed as many as 100 million. This is not a bug to be trifled with, yet it affected mostly younger people, under 26, and the mortality rate was mercifully low.
Genetic analysis provides the smoking gun for the lab genesis explanation. Viruses mutate, erupt, lie low, and evolve again, and H1N1 is no exception. After 1918 it erupted again in the 1940s, in 1977, and in a 2009 pandemic that may have infected a billion people and killed 250,000.
Writing in the New York Times, columnist Carl Zimmer reported on the investigation to track the mutations and compare them with the pattern seen in other viruses. Mutations occur at a predictable rate… until a virus crosses into a new species, when they accelerate to exploit their new territory.
The pattern of mutations in this particular influenza, alone among the many viruses analysed, was different.
They were variations that would have killed the virus in its original porcine host, but not if they occurred in a Petri dish. This has never been seen in any other influenza, and notin Mpox, Ebola, or Coronavirus. Only in this 1977 bug.
It may have taken the best part of 50 years, but the science proves that the thing came from a laboratory. The detective work also drives a nail in the coffin of the lab-grown Covid theory, expounded by some people who should know better. The genetic mutations in SARS-CoV-2 are entirely in line with that seen in other viruses.
Tell that to the next know-it-all who claims Covid was human made.
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