Was SADS-COV Used As The Template For SARS-COV-2?
6 June 2021
By R. L. Ireland
It came from pigs. Whether it was an accidental leak or not, and from which Chinese lab it came, doesn’t change the data on its origin. Any investigation of COVID-19 origins may or may not ever see the light of day if one focuses only on the bio-weapon/accident vs. deliberate/targeted aspect of it. What is far more important, and with wider ranging implications, is to understand the overwhelming evidence that this novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was in fact engineered in laboratories using yet another coronavirus which came from the rufous horseshoe bat in Guangdong province China.
And, most importantly… there are only a couple of those. Of the over 700 bat coronaviruses isolated in China there are only a few which have been known to either infect humans or have the ability to infect humans: the coronavirus which caused the SARS-COV-1 human outbreak in 2002-2004; the SADS-COV swine outbreak in China in 2016-2018; and the current SARS-COV-2 pandemic. So far, the other bat coronaviruses have not been detected in humans – that we know.
From the 5 April 2018 online review of The National Hog Farmer:
“Scientists confirmed the connection of SADS-CoV to bats by identifying the new virus in the small intestine of piglets from the outbreak. They determined the genetic sequence of SADS-CoV is like that of a bat coronavirus discovered in 2007 and looked for evidence of SADS-CoV in bat specimens collected from 2013 to 2016 in Guangdong Province. It shares 95% of its genetic code with another coronavirus, HKU2, detected in cave-dwelling horseshoe bats.
“Interestingly, the research team found striking similarities between SADS-CoV and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)– a highly infectious virus that killed humans in China in 2002 and 2003- in geographical, temporal, ecological and etiological settings. SADS-CoV came from horseshoe bats in a region near the origin of SARS.
Figure 1: Map of outbreak locations and sampling sites in Guangdong province, China and the co-circulation of PEDV and SADS-CoV during the initial outbreak on farm A. SADS-affected farms are labeled (farms A–D) with blue swine silhouettes following the temporal sequence of the outbreaks. Bat sampling sites are indicated with black bat silhouettes. The bat SADSr-CoV that is most closely related to SADS-CoV (sample 162140) originated in Conghua. The red flag marks Foshan city, the site of the SARS index case.
“Evidence suggests these two coronaviruses share a common ancestor and that SADS-CoV jumped from bats to pigs, researchers report April 4 in Nature. While the first documented human cases of SARS emerged 60 miles from pig farms hit by SADS-CoV, the disease doesn’t appear to infect humans as indicated by no positive test for SADS-CoV found in farm workers.”
But… that was then. The breaking news last year in September and October 2020 was that the SADS coronavirus could indeed infect human tissues, especially lung tissues of all types which were shown to be highly prone to SADS-COV infection. This revelation in late 2020 may be too little too late however.
Because… there were basically two choices of progenitor coronaviruses for gain-of-function (GOF) researchers to use: the ultra-deadly SARS-COV-1 with its 11 percent fatality rate or; the porcine SADS coronavirus which, until just last year, had been thought to have no zoonotic risks to humans. Any scientist bent on doing GOF tinkering with a live pathogen, would probably do it with the later, and seemingly safer, SADS coronavirus one would hope. Yet there were also other reasons in 2019 to choose the seemingly safer coronavirus to experiment on.
The genetic similarities between SARS-COV-1 and our current SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) are about 90 to 95 percent, while the similarities for SADS with SARS-COV-2 are over 98 percent according to the consensus of the tripartite of COVID researchers Shi Zhengli (known as the “bat woman”), Dr. Ralph Baric (who created synthetic clones of both SADS and SARS-COV-2 viruses) and Dr. Peter Daszac, the WHO’s pointman on COVID-19. Dr. Daszac is also President of EcoHealth Alliance and apparently a confidant and/or co-conspirator with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Much attention has been correctly pointed towards the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But since all research, including agriculture, both military and civilian (there is no difference in communist China) is run by the Peoples Liberation Army of China (PLA), it looks like the COVID-19 coronavirus could have been tinkered with in any of their military labs. However, the COVID-19 outbreak itself was most likely centered around Wuhan’s 14 swine laboratory farms, efficiently co-located in Wuhan and usually referred to as “animal disease and control” centers or “Wuhan Animal Labs” or even more succinctly as “Wuhan University’s ABSL-3 Animal Laboratory” in the Wuchang district of Wuhan just north of the WIV itself.
Graphic from Dr. Lawrence Sellin’s excellent research expose posted in The Gateway Pundit. Link here:
So, if they were tinkering with a swine coronavirus, and I believe they were, and posted about just that in May 2020, and now we have discovered that the SADS-COV pig virus can indeed infect humans, both intestinal and lung tissues, we can see how easily it explains the origin of the SARS-COV-2 and how it came into being. The “why” isn’t as important as the “how” and “when”. Even if bat-swine-human pretty much completes the etiology in question, any pandemic being spawned by human engineering should be of the utmost importance and at the highest levels of concern.
One of the under-reported first symptoms of COVID-19 is diarrhea, specifically yellow diarrhea. If indeed the SADS-COV was the template they used to create the SARS-COV-2 then that would make sense. Also, SADS-COV is primarily spread by the fecal-oral route of transmission in pigs. It would be medically prudent to understand that first and foremost if in fact the SARS-COV-2 was an engineered clone of it. Even if SADS-COV wasn’t the conduit and it turns out to have been another variant of the bat coronavirus, the data shows that COVID-19 is not airborne – and never has been. It has always been spread by the most usual method: fecal-oral transmission via fomites.
For this discussion, we will focus on the two significantly different characteristics of spreading contagions in a pandemic: airborne and fecal-oral.
Airborne: Highly randomized. Not specific. Non-clustered. Widespread. (seasonal flus, colds, TB, etc.)
Fecal-Oral: Not randomized. Highly specific. Clustered. (Ebola, Cholera, and many other diseases. Mostly from fomites on surfaces in bathrooms, bars, restaurants, frozen/packaged foods, subways, ships, trains, airplanes, nursing homes, cafeterias, etc.)
I cannot imagine why they would intentionally invert these two distinctly different characteristics of a pandemic. But they did. The only explanation that I can come up with is that somebody wants to deliberately focus on airborne mitigation efforts for a disease that isn’t airborne. SADS-COV is spread in swine by the fecal-oral transmission routes. So is SARS-COV-2. Please see characteristics above.
Further muddying the distinctions of bat coronaviruses, in 2009 they split the genus into four genera to codify the distinctions of bat coronaviruses into at least four categories, taxonomically designating them by what they believe is that particular pathogen’s favored target of infection and replication. The four groups so designated are alpha-, beta-, gamma-, and delta-coronaviruses. Alpha-coronaviruses supposedly target intestinal and liver cells. Beta-coronaviruses supposedly only target lung, stomach, and respiratory cells. Both alpha- and beta-coronaviruses come from bats. Gamma-coronaviruses are found in avian species, while the delta-coronaviruses are primarily found in swine and some avian species, but both being derived from those species.
One of the problems with having four subgroups of genera is that as science progresses and our understanding of bat coronaviruses grows, those four distinctions fail and sometimes are completely ignored. For example, the swine alpha-coronavirus, SADS-COV, has been shown as recently as just last year to definitely infect human respiratory tissues including the most invasive lung tissues, an area of target infection that was previously relegated only to beta-coronaviruses. Most epidemiologist seem to try very hard to adhere to the nuanced 2009 distinctions, but from what the science teaches us now, the alpha- and beta- distinctions are actually blended and may not be a proper distinction at all. It is on this very poor distinction that I believe, and stated so a year ago in May 2020, that scientists using Gain Of Function tinkering with what they believed to be a “safe” from humans alpha-coronavirus, SADS-COV, to create a vaccine to use in swine against other disease. All evidence in the past year points to that being the case. Whether it was a deliberate or accidental release is immaterial. SARS-COV-2 was most likely engineered from SADS-COV and then it went zoonotic.
In my opinion, pigs are the intermediary of COVID-19 that all of science has been ignoring, with dreadful results. For the remaining purposes of this blog, I will refrain from adding the (mostly bogus) distinction between alpha- and beta-coronaviruses.
Some of the clearest examples of swine-COVID-19 nexus isn’t just the 14 pig labs in and around Wuhan COVID-19 outbreak noted above. The same type of COVID-19 outbreak mapping shows that in both Brazil and Italy the largest concentration of COVID-19 cases were almost directly on top of those countries’ highest pork production areas. In Brazil, over half their cases centered directly near their major (60 percent) pork production areas in the Santa Catarina region. In Italy, the profound correlation to their pork industry (over 70 percent of Italian pork comes from Lombardy) in just three northern provinces, mostly Lombardy, Veneto, and Trento-Tyrol, are where the overwhelming abundance of COVID-19 cases are confirmed.
Here is a compilation of Maps 1, 2, and 3 showing the COVID-19 and pork producing areas of Brazil compiled by Dr. Immo Fiebrig, Professor Dr. Larissa Bombardi, and Dr. Pablo Nepomuceno.
Scientists see epidemiological connection between Covid-19 and pigs in Brazil
In northern Italy the correlation is even more striking. From Wikipedia the northern provinces of Lombardy, Veneto, and Trento-Tyrol (also called Trentino-Alto) made up the majority of COVID-19 cases. That Lombardy alone accounts for 70 percent of all Italian pork production should definitely sound alarms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Italy
But these are just a few of the many swine-COVID-19 correlations. Most of these incidents of bat-pig-human contagions very quickly are ignored by the media and apparently government and health officials as well. Sometimes media and officials seemed to go out of their way to dismiss any correlation at all. Here is just a partial listing of meat packing companies (not just pork) that were forced to close plants in the US:
Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, Sanderson Farms, Tyson Foods, Maple Leaf Foods, Cargill, West Liberty Foods, and Brazilian-owned JBS have also closed some plants after employees or local residents were confirmed to have COVID-19. The April 2020 Sioux Falls South Dakota Smithfield Foods pork plant had the largest COVID-19 outbreak at that time.
Oh, and by the way, did you know that China tried to smuggle a million pounds of African Swine Fever infected pork into the US back in 2019? They were caught in New Jersey because of the smell. The infected pork was disguised in Tide laundry detergent boxes and ramen noodle packages. None of it was refrigerated. It was all incinerated by US Customs. https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/1-million-pounds-of-pork-seized-at-u-s-border-amid-deadly-chinese-outbreak 17 March 2019
Now, why would China do that? More importantly, what if we caught them, but Brazil and Italy didn’t?
Your wingman,
reeko
Links:
“This study suggests humans may be susceptible to spillover of SADS-CoV. Researchers tested several types of cells by infecting them with a synthetic form of SADS-CoV to understand just how high the risk of cross-species contamination could be.”
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/swine-%CE%B1-coronavirus-jumping-to-humans-how-likely-is-it-2dacc599050 Oct 14, 2020 by Shin Jie Yong, Malaysia
- SADS-CoV replicated efficiently in both pig and human cells cultured from the lungs, liver, stomach, and intestines. Specifically, all sorts of human lung cells — including microvascular endothelial cells, fibroblasts, and nasal and airway epithelial cells — were prone to SADS-CoV infection.
- To discern if humans have any existing immunity against SADS-CoV, the study exposed human cells to common cold-causing coronaviruses. And then check if the antibodies generated could cross-neutralize SADS-CoV. It did not, which suggests no existing immunity.
- Remdesivir — an antiviral to treat Covid-19 — stopped the replication of SADS-CoV in human cells. Indeed, remdesivir restrains RNA polymerase — an enzyme RNA viruses (like coronaviruses) use to make their genes.
- SADS-CoV could still infect cells despite blocking the common receptors coronaviruses exploit — i.e., angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2; for SARS-CoVs), dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DDP4; for MERS-CoV), and aminopeptidase N (APN; for other swine coronaviruses). “These data suggest that SADS-CoV does not use any of these known coronavirus receptors for docking and entry into human cells,” stated the authors.
- SADS-CoV could not replicate properly in mice. “We noted little, if any, evidence of reproducible or robust virus replication in the liver, spleen, or various sections of the intestine,” the researchers wrote. This result is expected since mice are poor animal models of coronaviruses.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uonc-scr101320.php
14 Oct 2020 UNC Chapel Hill News Release
“The Baric lab worked with Caitlin Edwards, a research specialist and master of public health student at UNC-Chapel Hill, on the study which suggests humans may be susceptible to spillover of SADS-CoV.
Edwards, the study’s first author, tested several types of cells by infecting them with a synthetic form of SADS-CoV to understand just how high the risk of cross-species contamination could be.
Evidence from the study indicates that a wide range of mammalian cells, including primary human lung and intestinal cells, are susceptible to infection. According to Edwards, SADS-CoV shows a higher rate of growth in intestinal cells found in the human gut, unlike SARS-CoV-2, which primarily infects lung cells.”
“If it turns out that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, it is likely that Baric and his colleagues Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance will be implicated in its creation. Even dissident Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan’s allegation that SARS-CoV-2 is a biological weapon intentionally released by the Chinese government relies heavily on Shi’s work, which can’t be separated from her collaborations with Baric and Daszak. “
“A new form of African swine fever has been identified in Chinese pig farms. According to Reuters, industry insiders say that the disease was most likely caused by illegal vaccines, and serves as a fresh blow to the nation where the COVID-19 coronavirus was first identified. China is the world’s largest producer of pork.”
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