How the COVID Genome Reveals Its Lab Origins

 In an interview on The DisInformation Chronicle Podcast, physician-scientist and entrepreur Steven Quay discussed his new book “The Code As Witness” explaining how scientific evidence shows that the COVID pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.

Science Magazine has published several false and misleading studies that allege the pandemic started in a market in December 2019, and then defended those deceitful conclusions and defamed critics in their news section. But even the head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, Gao Fu, has noted that the scientific evidence does not support inaccurate claims that COVID arose in a market.

Gao was involved in collecting samples at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market that Science Magazine claims was the pandemic’s origin. However, he told the South China Morning Post, “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market].”

Examining the virus’s genetic data, Quay also finds that the virus was circulating many months before it began spreading in December at the market in Wuhan.

You can purchase Quay’s book at this link on Amazon: “The Code as Witness: How the Covid Genome Reveals its Lab Origins and How to Prevent Future Outbreaks.”

An excerpted chapter follows, below.

Update: Last month, I reported that NIH virologist Vincent Munster was caught smuggling dangerous viruses into the United States while conducting research in Africa. The Department of Justice has announced that both Munster and his assistant have been charged with smuggling monkeypox into the United States and giving false statements to federal law enforcement.

Both NIH scientists now face a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

THE CODE AS WITNESS

CHAPTER ONE

Ground Zero

On my first trip to Wuhan in 2014, I knew little about the city. I was there to visit a laboratory testing site and negotiate a contract for research related to my work as the CEO of Atossa Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company mostly dedicated to finding solutions to the prevention and cure of breast cancer.

I had assumed that Wuhan might be something like Chicago: not the biggest city, nor the most important, but a big site for industry and a crucial center for transportation. When I arrived at Tianhe International Airport, I slipped into the underground Line 2 of the subway. I knew from looking at maps before the trip that the original, ancient city of Wuhan lies on the east side of the Yangtze River. On the west side lies the modern, sleek portion of the city, and when I emerged from the subway to find my hotel, it was immediately clear to me which side of the river Line 2 had brought me to.

I stood in the center of a city so modern that it makes Manhattan look like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. The glistening skyscrapers, bustling traffic, and high-speed trains seemed out of a postmodern utopian dream.

Wuhan itself is a major business hub for several international corporations. After checking in, I returned to Line 2 to travel eastward. I exited at the eleventh stop along Line 2, located near Optics Valley, where my meeting was to take place. You can think of Optics Valley as China’s version of Silicon Valley, as it is a hub for technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The zone retains forty-two institutes of higher learning, including Wuhan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Within its planned area of 322 square miles and a permanent population of about 1.8 million, it holds fifty-six scientific research institutes at the national, provincial, and ministerial levels and more than 300,000 professional and technical personnel, which makes it one of the three most talent-rich areas in the country. It has also been recognized as a major hub for biotechnology and bio-industry. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s two locations are within Optics Valley.

During my stay, I continued to be impressed with beautiful, brand-new stations that dotted the subway system, and I was struck by how easy it was to travel from Wuhan to anywhere else in China—from the center of the city, one can easily travel deep into the rural southern province of Yunnan, or to an international airport, or north to Beijing. All this and more is connected via Wuhan’s hypermodern mass transportation system that weaves through and around the city with nine lines used by millions daily.

Line 2, however, is of particular interest to this story. Before the pandemic, Line 2 alone carried an average of one million passengers per day, commuters going into the city center and then home to the outlying areas each night. The line begins in the east at Fozuling, moves through Optics Valley Square, and travels a zigzaggy course, going under the river and then continuing sixteen miles north of the city center before terminating at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport.

Wuhan Tianhe is the busiest airport in central China, and one can easily fly nonstop from Wuhan to major international destinations, such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rome, Istanbul, Dubai, Sydney, Bali, Bangkok, Moscow, Osaka, Seoul, and Singapore. Terminal 3, which services international flights, has a whopping passenger capacity of thirty-five million passengers per year. This steady flow of traffic lends credence to the airport’s name, Tianhe, which literally translates to “sky river.”

So, when I began hearing rumors in early 2020 that a virus had broken out in Wuhan, a virus that was a close genetic relative to a virus from Yunnan in the south, I was suspicious of the idea that what would be named SARS‑CoV‑2 was the result of a natural process. I had experienced firsthand how far Yunnan—the geographic location of the origin of the closest natural virus based on the virus’s genetic sequence—was from Wuhan, and I had also experienced the dense, urbanized, impressiveness of the city. Rumors held that the virus had broken out at a certain wet market, and I also knew just how close this suspected wet market was to China’s, and arguably the world’s, largest coronavirus-research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting some of the most dangerous viral research in China at the time—research that some scientists outside China worried, well before the COVID-19 pandemic, would lead to pathogens escaping. Like the rest of the world, I hadn’t ruled out that the virus had a natural origin, but my gut told me that I should dig deeper and discover from where this virus had emerged.

When we look closely at Wuhan as the virus’s ground zero, we can clearly see that the most significant locations for tracing the early days of the virus run along Line 2. In a later chapter, I will show why I believe that Line 2 was the “COVID-19 conduit” that allowed the virus to leave Wuhan and spread throughout China and the world before we even knew it existed. But for now, let us ride the rails of Line 2 through Wuhan and see where it takes us.

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