Dr Li-Meng Yan, who investigated the origin of the COVID-19 virus during the initial outbreak in Wuhan China as a medical researcher in Hong Kong, has now provided unequivocal evidence that the virus was not of natural origin.

In the article, “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route,” Dr Yan and her colleagues have offered a detailed description of how the virus was synthesized in laboratories controlled by China’s military.

The Chinese Communist Party and some Western scientists have long insisted that the COVID-19 pandemic was a naturally-occurring outbreak, acquired by humans after exposure to infected animals, an unsubstantiated conclusion eagerly promoted by a politicized media.

According to Dr Yan, that politically-motivated “consensus” has undermined the integrity of science itself because scientific journals have clearly censored any dissenting opinions that suggest a non-natural origin of the COVID-19 virus.

Now, based on the work of Dr Yan and others, the entire foundation of the naturally-occurring theory is in doubt.

China has claimed that a bat coronavirus named RaTG13 is the closest relative to the COVID-19 virus, but RaTG13 is not actually a virus because no biological samples exist. It is only a genomic sequence of a virus for which there are now serious questions about its accuracy.

Dr Yan suggests that RaTG13 may have been used to divert the world’s attention away from the true source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She claims that the COVID-19 virus originated in laboratories overseen by China’s People’s Liberation Army, using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 collected from Zhoushan, China and used as the viral “backbone” for genetic engineering.

Those bat coronaviruses were originally isolated and characterized between July 2015 and February 2017 under the supervision of the Third Military Medical University (Chongqing, China) and the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command (Nanjing, China).

The article goes on to explain how the receptor binding motif (RBM), which defines the coronavirus’ ability to bind to the specific human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptor (ACE2) underwent genetic manipulation.

That critical segment of the COVID-19 virus is bounded by two “restriction sites” not found in any related bat coronaviruses, which allow researchers to easily splice, that is, cut and paste components of other viruses into the viral backbone.

The presence of those restriction sites is a known marker for genetic manipulation.

Furthermore, the COVID-19 virus contains a furin polybasic cleavage site with an amino acid sequence of proline-arginine-arginine-alanine or PRRA that facilitates membrane fusion between the virus and the human cell and widely known for its ability to enhance pathogenicity and transmissibility.

Such a sequence is not found in any other related bat coronavirus and, so far, there is no natural evolutionary pathway identified that could explain the appearance of that PRRA segment.

In contrast, techniques for the artificial insertion of such a furin polybasic cleavage site by genetic engineering have been used for over ten years.

Dr Yan and her colleagues note that the two arginine amino acids in that PRRA segment are coded by the nucleotide sequence CGG-CGG, which rarely appears in tandem and strongly suggests that this furin cleavage site is the result of genetic engineering.

In addition, the presence of a “FauI” restriction site at the furin polybasic cleavage site is also an indication of genetic manipulation.

The article concludes with a diagram describing the laboratory procedures for synthesizing the COVID-19 virus, which could have produced the virus within six months.

Given the scientific censorship that has been underway since the onset of the pandemic, we are only beginning to scratch the surface regarding the laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus.

Further investigations are warranted and must be forthcoming. With nearly a million dead and trillions of dollars in economic losses, the stakes are too high to ignore, especially if this deadly virus was a product of China’s military.

(Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and conducted basic and clinical research in the pharmaceutical industry. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.)

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)