The Biden administration’s apparent unwillingness to conduct a serious official investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that holds China accountable for its actions and lack of cooperation could result in a pandemic much more lethal that the current one, warns a leading researcher.
Dr. Steven Quay, whose research became part of a State Department probe of the origin of COVID-19 under President Trump, told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum on Friday that “all of the evidence points toward the lab theory.”
“There’s no evidence that supports a natural origin at this point,” he said. “So I think we’re done, at this point, with the investigation.”
But it’s more vital than ever to stop the dangerous “gain-of-function” research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he said.
The Nipah virus, which causes severe inflammation of the brain or encephalitis, has a death rate of about 80%, Quay warned.
“If you didn’t like the pandemic that was just 1% lethal, this thing they were working on in December 2019 has an 80% lethality,” he told MacCallum. “It needs to be stopped.”
Quay told “Fox Business Tonight” on Thursday that virus research at the Wuhan lab poses “an existential threat to life as we know it on this planet.”
He explained to MacCallum on Friday that Wuhan scientists were manipulating Nipah viruses, just as, he believes, they engineered SARS CoV-2.
“This is their next project, if I could call it that,” he said.
Quay contends that the questions scientists have concerning viruses that pose the risk of a pandemic can be answered through the creation of “pseudoviruses,” which he said have “zero potential infectivity.”
But the Wuhan researchers were taking one-third of the entire genome of the Nipah virus and moving it around, via synthetic biology.
“If they completed a synthetic version of Nipah and then have a lab accident, like a believe SARS-CoV-2 was, we then have a virus that has a much higher lethality,” he said.
“We really need to focus on stopping this kind of dangerous research.”
MacCallum noted the Biden administration had an opportunity this week to put pressure on China regarding the origin of the pandemic when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with a top Chinese diplomat. But Sullivan didn’t bring up the subject, according to a readout.
Quay is the founder of Atossa Therapeutics in Seattle, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics for oncology and infectious diseases.
He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, a resident at the Harvard-MGH Hospital and a faculty member of Stanford University School of Medicine. He has more than 360 published contributions to medicine and has been cited more than 10,500 times, placing him in the top 1% of scientists worldwide. He holds 87 U.S. patents and has invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals that have been prescribed to more than 80 million people. He is the author of the best-selling book on surviving the pandemic, “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus.”
We have a whistleblower
Last week, Quay wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal with Cal Berkeley emeritus physics professor Richard Muller citing four studies, including two from the World Health Organization, that provide strong evidence for the lab-leak theory,
One study, published by Nature Medicine, concluded the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection, which is strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.
Another clue to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is found in the virus’s “furin cleavage site,” which is too complex to have been the result of spontaneous mutations.
The furin cleavage site enables the virus to bind to a human cell and release its genetic material, helping make the virus more transmissible and harmful.
The NIH database, researchers point out, shows no furin cleavage site in more than 1,200 viruses that can exchange with SARS-CoV-2.
Meanwhile, a 2018 grant application by EcoHealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak for research at the Wuhan lab proposed splicing furin cleavage site sequences into bat viruses so a research team could look for changes in infectivity.
Muller and Quay conclude: “We have an eyewitness, a whistleblower who escaped from Wuhan and carried details of the pandemic’s origin that the Chinese Communist Party can’t hide. The whistleblower’s name is SARS-CoV-2.”
See Quay’s interview explaining the furin cleavage site:
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