Maybe it’s my training as an attorney, but I always like to look back at what people said BEFORE they knew there was a problem.
Opinion by Kent Heckenlively, JD
When people KNOW there’s a problem, (and may have had a part in creating it), they’ll lie like crazy. No conspiracy theory necessary. It’s just human nature. Am I right?
Which is why your beloved attorney turned science teacher, turned virus hunter, has been relatively quiet these past few weeks.
I just haven’t known what to say because I hadn’t run across any REALLY GOOD INFORMATION that I felt supported my suspicion that this virus was created by humans and escaped(?) from a lab.
Then I ran across an article which appeared in Nature on November 12, 2015 by Declan Butler with the title, Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate Over Risky Research. Here’s the link: www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787
Let’s read the first few paragraphs together, shall we?
“An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus – one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) – has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.
In an article published in Nature Medicine on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells – proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them.”
The next few paragraphs talk about how this surface protein has been found in at least one other bat population in the wild, raising the question of whether the occurrence of bat to human transmission had happened in the past, or could happen, even though at the time it had not yet been observed.
However, it was the next three paragraphs which really caught my attention:
Continue reading Attack of the “Corona Bat Virus!” What Science REALLY Says About It!