The Chimera
By Benjamin Braddock · 4 February 2025
Note from the Editors: This article is included in our sixth print edition, “Health of a Nation“.
On the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2
The P4 lab looms like a dark grey sarcophagus on the sprawling complex that is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, situated in a bleak industrial zone some 30km south of Wuhan. When it opened in 2015, it was China’s first laboratory to be designated BS-4, a distinction given to labs that contain infectious agents or toxins that pose the highest risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapies are available. It was built under the guidance of French biotech giant BioMérieux. The BioMérieux CEO who had overseen the critical phases of the laboratory’s design and construction had moved on to run the fledgling biotech startup Moderna.
The French-Chinese partnership had fallen apart by completion. The French technical experts had been raising concerns with biosafety adherence and other alarming activities and in response were boxed out by their local counterparts. The opening of the P4 lab at WIV was one of the first tangible achievements of China’s future warfare strategy’s growing focus on biotechnology as a key new domain of warfare.
In 1969, Richard Nixon had ordered the destruction of the U.S. biological arsenal and the cessation of offensive biological weapons development, allowing only research into defense against biological weapons to continue. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed in 1972 which set up Nixon’s biological weapons doctrine as an international standard. But bioweapons researchers quickly devised a way to get around the limitations imposed by the BWC. Offensive weapons research could be conducted under the pretext of creating defensive countermeasures. The same knowledge that can create a vaccine or therapeutic can be used to engineer a weapon.
Historically, the usefulness of contagious pathogens as military weapons has been constrained by two important practical considerations. Targetability and retaliation. Initial outbreaks can be geographically targeted against an enemy, but from there they can spread to other populations, even to one’s own military and civilian populations. Governments cannot even manage to reliably keep the germs in their own labs confined. Over 400,000 Americans per year contract Lyme disease, which has been linked to Cold War-era U.S. military research into using ticks as vectors for bioweapons that could be unleashed on enemy populations. There is also the constraint that bioweapons attacks are extremely obvious as such. The Soviets used gain-of-function to enhance the severity of smallpox, with estimated fatality rates exceeding ninety percent and for which there is no effective vaccine or treatment. To deliver this deadly payload, intercontinental ballistic missile warheads were outfitted with many small dispersal canisters that would be released on atmospheric re-entry. A single such warhead could infect an area the size of the Pacific Northwest. But these were doomsday weapons built for mutually assured destruction. There is an incentive for states to possess these weapons for deterrent purposes but not to use them in first-use offensive actions because that would invite full counter-value retaliation. First-strike with such a bioweapon would virtually guarantee a nuclear and biological response. The main threat posed by the existence of such weapons is that they could wind up in the hands of non-state actors in the shadows for whom retaliation would not be a concern.
These constraints have driven the research direction of bioweapons programs toward pathogens that can both be targeted towards specific populations and which are not obviously apparent as bioweapons, but which can be masqueraded as emerging from the wild. Work on developing ethnically targeted bioweapons was done by the Israelis in the 1990s, where significant work on an “ethno-bomb” that would target Arab genes was conducted at the secretive Nes Tziyona research facility before reportedly being shelved due to the problem of non-Ashkenazi Israelis being too genetically similar to Arabs to reliably target the one group over the other.
Chinese future war strategists have long covertly advocated for research into race-specific bioweapons—by the 2010s they were making public moves. Zhang Shibo, a retired PLA general and former president of the National Defense University, wrote in 2017: “Modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the possibility that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” could be employed. The Science of Military Strategy textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University contains similar language on ethnic targeting.
In 2011, the Chinese government created a public-private partnership with Shenzhen-based BGI Group to establish the China National GeneBank, which aims to be the largest repository of genetic data in the world. A year later, the Obama administration approved BGI’s acquisition of Complete Genomics, a Silicon Valley-based gene sequencing firm that does genetic testing for research institutions, biotech companies, clinical laboratories, and healthcare provider groups. BGI also developed a prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, which was used by BGI to harvest the genetic data of millions of people worldwide across the 52 countries where the test was used. The privacy agreement for the prenatal test includes the stipulation that consumer data can be used and shared when “directly relevant to national security or national defense security” of China.
Research also advanced on the bioweaponeers’ other problem of how to hide the tell-tale genetic signatures that show a pathogen to have been manipulated in a lab. In 2006, Ralph Baric, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published a paper titled “Synthetic Viral Genomics: Risks and Benefits for Science and Society”. In it, Baric detailed federally-funded work he had done on creating synthetic viruses. He described a technique he developed named “No See’m Sites”, a way to insert foreign genes into a viral DNA sequence while simultaneously removing all evidence that the viral DNA had been manipulated. An additional technique that further masks the synthetic origins of lab-engineered viruses is serial passage, that is, passing the engineered pathogen through one or more natural host species to allow it to acquire additional mutations that would make it appear more “wild.”
Anthony Fauci making patient rounds during the early years of the AIDS crises, 1987.
Anthony Fauci making patient rounds during the early years of the AIDS crises, 1987.
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While CCP efforts to collect human genetic data were ramping up, Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was collecting genetic data of a different sort. Coronaviruses, collected from Chinese horseshoe bat guano in the caves of Yunnan province about a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan. Shi and her team’s work was sponsored by EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO funded by the U.S. government that was ostensibly dedicated to preventing future pandemics through early detection of viruses with high zoonotic potential. One of the sequenced samples from the bat cave showed a new virus, SHC014, thought to be a near relative of the original SARS virus. But Shi and her team had faced a stubborn challenge: they were able to sequence the coronaviruses they collected, but they weren’t able to keep them alive or culture them in the lab. That was no problem for Ralph Baric, who had pioneered a technique called reverse genetics that could bring a virus to life from just its genetic code. Not only could he resurrect a dead virus, he could create entirely new viruses by splicing together pieces of different viruses to create a chimera: a virus engineered to contain genetic material from different viral sources.
In 2013, Baric approached Shi at a meeting and asked if he could have the genetic code for SHC014. She agreed, and a collaborative relationship was born. In October 2014, after an embarrassing sequence of biosafety incidents at CDC labs, including the accidental shipment of live anthrax, accidental shipment of a dangerous influenza strain to a USDA poultry lab, and the discovery of six vials of live smallpox in a freezer at the FDA lab in Bethesda, the National Institutes of Health had implemented a moratorium on funding of gain-of-function research (altering pathogens to make them more transmissible or deadly), specifically related to influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses, due to controversy within the scientific community over the risks of such research. Baric’s research was temporarily halted, but after arguing that his work was nearly complete and the viruses he was working with had not yet proven to be deadly, he received special permission from NIH officials to finish the work.
Baric’s team grafted the spike protein from SHC014 onto the backbone of a virus that caused human-like SARS symptoms in mice, which they then introduced into a petri dish of human airway cells. The chimera exhibited robust replication. A milestone had been achieved. A naturally occurring bat virus that could attach to human ACE2 receptors but not replicate to the extent needed to cause sustained infection (much less a global pandemic) had been engineered into a form that could replicate within humans and become infectious. The findings were published in Nature Medicine in 2015 with the headline “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” and read:
“Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.”
The publication of Baric and Shi’s paper sent shockwaves through the scientific community. EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszaq took the occasion to claim that the results of the study “move this virus [SHC014] from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” and called for further government grants into gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefense expert at Rutgers University, pointed out the absurdity of this line of thinking, stating “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.” Baric had flagged these concerns himself, writing in his paper: “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens… Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” But more powerful than any scientific review panel was the man who controlled U.S. funding for pandemic preparedness and biodefense, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, and he was a strong proponent of gain-of-function research.
A plan was worked out between officials at Fauci’s agency and the researchers which would allow them to skirt the moratorium on gain-of-function research in the U.S. The research would continue, not at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina where enhanced biosafety protocols were in place, but at a BSL-2 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is a biosafety level roughly equivalent to that of a dentist office in the United States. As China had no such prohibition on gain-of-function research, the work could be outsourced to Wuhan while preserving U.S. funding.
In 2014, the NIH awarded EcoHealth Alliance a five-year grant of nearly $4 million to study bat coronaviruses with potential for spillover into humans. EcoHealth subcontracted much of the work to the lab in Wuhan. In 2016, Shi and Daszaq published a paper announcing that they had successfully engineered different versions of a SARS-like coronavirus that successfully infected human lung cells, ACE2 receptors, and green monkey kidney cells. They also announced that the Wuhan lab had successfully constructed a reverse genetics system—the same technology Baric had pioneered. In other words, the U.S. government may have just funded the transfer of a cutting-edge bioengineering technology to its chief geopolitical rival that could be used to create far more sophisticated bioweapons than have ever been seen before.
In June 2017, Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak traveled to Maryland to give a presentation on their coronavirus work at Anthony Fauci’s institute within the NIH, the NIAID. Four months later, Shi, Daszak, and Fauci all spoke at an Arlington conference on emerging viruses. Records show that Fauci and Daszak had a 1-1 meeting the same month. By December, the NIH had lifted the moratorium on gain-of-function research.
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Lab leaks of dangerous pathogens are commonly assumed to be uncommon occurrences that prompt five-alarm reactions by authorities. In reality, they are quite common. In 1967, the first outbreak of Marburg virus occurred in Germany and Yugoslavia. The outbreak was traced back to African green monkeys that were being used to produce polio vaccine strains. There were 25 primary infections and 7 deaths, and 6 non-lethal secondary cases. In August 1978, a medical photographer named Janet Parker contracted smallpox at the University of Birmingham Medical School, England. She worked one floor above a lab where smallpox research was being conducted. The virus was believed to have traveled through the building’s air duct system. Parker died from the infection, and several others were exposed, but they did not contract the disease. From 2000 to 2021, there were 309 lab-acquired infections (LAIs) and 16 pathogen lab escapes in the U.S. from BSL-3 labs. In Ralph Baric’s own lab at UNC, there were at least 6 potential spillover incidents, involving such occurrences as infected mice biting through lab workers’ gloves and at least 5 mice infected with mouse-adapted SARS-CoV went missing. None of these incidents caused a sustained human-to-human transmission leading to epidemics or pandemics.
What has started pandemics, and done so quite reliably, have been live-attenuated vaccines. In 1976, an 18-year-old soldier named David Lewis died of a respiratory illness at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Autopsy testing indicated the presence of an H1N1 swine flu-like strain of influenza. This set off a panic among the U.S. public health establishment. A previously healthy young man dying of the flu brought to mind the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which had been most deadly among healthy young men on account of the virus turning the immune system against the host, making those with the strongest immune systems most susceptible. No matter that Private Lewis had been roused from his sick bed and forced to go on a long overnight training hike in the February snow. He collapsed after 13 miles and died later that night. F. David Matthews, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (the cabinet-level agency that was the predecessor of the Department of Health and Human Services), declared the same month: “The indication is that we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of the flu. In 1918 a half million Americans died. The projections are that this virus will kill one million Americans in 1976.”
The virus didn’t kill one million Americans. In fact, it never spread beyond Private Lewis’ camp. But the fear of it did begin to spread, fanned by the media and the government. It was an opportunity to do something. President Gerald Ford lost the North Carolina primary to California Gov. Ronald Reagan the following month. The day after the primary, Ford brought some of the top virologists from around the country to a meeting at the White House to discuss the H1N1 threat. They all agreed with the President that a mass vaccination campaign would be necessary to avoid mass death the following winter. Following the meeting, Ford held a press conference with the developers of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, to ask Congress to make a special appropriation of $135 million to fund the development of an H1N1 vaccine. Congress raced to pass the appropriation, with an additional $1.8 billion in spending attached to it.
The Ford administration wanted a vaccine in time for a mass vaccination campaign in October, just before the election. Ford had clinched the GOP nomination and was facing Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. The drug companies had protested that it would take years to create a safe vaccine for H1N1 and that Congress would have to grant them legal immunity if the government wanted it any sooner. Congress refused. Then on August 2nd, there was an outbreak of a strange respiratory disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Initial media reports suggested that the feared H1N1 epidemic had arrived. Congress moved into action, then stalled again as it turned out that the outbreak was not flu-related after all but a new sort of pneumonia that we now know as Legionnaire’s disease. Ford went on television to tell Americans they faced a winter of darkness and death unless Congress acted to pass liability protections for the drug companies. Congress relented, and less than 8 weeks later the first immunizations were being given.
The result was disastrous. Some people died right away in the doctor’s office. Others developed horrible neurological and muscular disorders. The nightly news was showing young teachers left paralyzed by their vaccinations. Jimmy Carter, who had pointedly refused to take the vaccine, beat Ford in the presidential contest. Political support for public health agencies would not recover again until the AIDS crisis of the 80s.
President Gerald Ford receives a swine flu inoculation, 1976.
President Gerald Ford receives a swine flu inoculation, 1976.
America’s 1976 swine flu panic ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1977, index cases of H1N1 influenza appeared first in China, then in Russia. Soon it spread to Great Britain, France, and then the United States, where it first appeared in an outbreak at a high school in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The ‘Russian flu’ had become a global pandemic. Virologists began to notice some strange attributes of the new H1N1 influenza virus. Older people were immune to it—only those under the age of 26 were contracting it, which lessened the overall mortality burden substantially. And the history of influenza before this was that a new subtype would reliably displace and replace the old subtype, while the old H3N2 subtype continued to spread alongside the new H1N1. In 1977, after consultation with Russian and Chinese officials, the World Health Organization ruled out a laboratory origin. A 1978 genetic analysis undertaken by Peter Palese would reveal that the new H1N1 appeared to be extremely similar to H1N1 strains from the 1950s. A more recent analysis conducted with more advanced genetic mapping tools proved conclusively that the 1977 Russian flu strain had been missing 27 years of sequence evolution.
The scientific mystery of where H1N1 came from after being evolutionarily frozen for 27 years was cleared up when Palese wrote in Nature Medicine Supplement that in the course of his earlier work he had corresponded with Chinese virologist Chi-Ming Chu, who had revealed to him that the 1977 H1N1 reappearance was likely the result of vaccine trials in the Far East. In other words, America’s knee-jerk reaction to an isolated case of H1N1 and rush to create a vaccine had spurred the Chinese military (possibly in collaboration with Russia’s Biopreparat) to rush the development of their own vaccine, a live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) that was tested on thousands of soldiers, where it likely deattenuated and reintroduced H1N1 influenza to circulation. As a result, over 700,000 people died in the initial 1977-78 Russian flu pandemic, and more have died from it since in the successive flu seasons in which it has circulated.
Another example of a vaccine inadvertently introducing new pathogens to human circulation is Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), a respiratory virus that kills around 500 children and hospitalizes another ~80,000 under the age of 5 in the United States every year, which was introduced into humans via the use of chimpanzee cells in vaccine production. Inactivated vaccines are vaccines in which the pathogen being immunized against has been killed and combined with an adjuvant such as aluminum to provoke an immune response. Live attenuated vaccines are vaccines that contain a weakened form of the pathogen that does not cause the disease in healthy people but still stimulates an immune response. The advantage of a live attenuated vaccine compared to an inactivated vaccine is that it theoretically provides longer-lasting immunity because it more closely resembles a natural infection and can stimulate not only antibody production but also a strong cell-mediated immune response involving T-cells and memory B cells. However, a risk of LAVs is that the attenuated virus still retains the genetic memory of its ancestral form, and under certain conditions can deattenuate and revert back to a fully virulent state. The most well-known instance of this phenomenon is with the oral polio vaccine. In recent years, there have been more outbreaks from vaccine-derived poliovirus than from wild poliovirus itself, including sustained community transmission and cases of paralysis.
This historical evidence leads the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 away from a routine lab accident and towards the trial of a live-attenuated vaccine. This line of inquiry was first proposed by researcher Dan Sirotkin, who along with his father David Sirotkin authored the first scientific publication to suggest Covid came from a lab. We know there was concern over another SARS outbreak in Asia. Was there a live attenuated SARS vaccine in the works? There was. Out of 33 SARS vaccine candidates listed with the World Health Organization as of 2019, there were two live attenuated vaccine candidates in development. The developer? Ralph Baric, who had been working towards such a vaccine for years. Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology had followed his lead in everything else up to that point, copying his reverse genetics system, breeding and selling the special humanized mice he gave to researchers at WIV; it would be unusual if they didn’t also follow his lead in searching for a live attenuated vaccine for SARS.
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To test a vaccine, you need a pathogen to challenge it. During the years of the U.S. offensive biowarfare program, conscientious objectors such as Seventh-Day Adventists were conscripted as test subjects in the development of vaccines and treatments for everything from tularemia and yellow fever to hepatitis A and bubonic plague. They were exposed to biowarfare agents to test the effectiveness and effective doses of countermeasures so that the U.S. military could use bioweapons offensively while minimizing the chances of sickening our own forces. A live-attenuated vaccine could start a pandemic. But so could the pathogen used to challenge the vaccine. And the challenge pathogen could very well have been intended for potential use as a bioweapon.
The furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has been cited by many researchers as an indicator that the virus has undergone significant genetic engineering. Less discussed but even more suspicious is another oddity that is unique to SARS-CoV-2, a superantigen-like motif near the cleavage site, highly similar in both sequence and structure to Staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB). SEB is considered one of the most important toxin threats in warfare or bioterrorism, one of the seven bio-agents weaponized and stockpiled by the U.S. government from 1943 until Nixon ordered the stockpile’s destruction. It causes a hyperactivation of immune cells, which leads to a hyperinflammatory syndrome resembling toxic shock. Its weaponization and intended use in the U.S. biological weapons arsenal was as an incapacitating agent. This was its function when a target was hit with a discrete dose. Encoding it within a replicating virus is hitting an enemy not with a discrete dose of the toxin, but deploying molecular factories of this toxin to live inside their body.
The respiratory symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 are well known. This was driven by inflammatory storms in some patients, particularly with the Wuhan and Delta variants, but in many patients the severe pathology was driven not merely by inflammation but by hypercoagulation of the blood, leading to microclotting in the capillaries around the alveoli of the lungs and larger blood clots elsewhere, which could break loose and move to the lungs, heart, or brain, causing sudden life-threatening events like pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest, and stroke. Several members of my family had pulmonary embolisms. A friend had a large clot lodged in an artery that fed his lower GI tract. He collapsed and nearly bled to death after being sent home three days earlier due to a misread CT scan. In order to receive a small bowel transplant, the hospital required him to be vaccinated and receive an mRNA booster. He had a heart attack nearly immediately after receiving the booster. These thrombotic events sent me on a search for the answer of why SARS-CoV-2 seemed to trigger severe blood clotting in some people—particularly those with Scandinavian or Germanic ancestry—but not others. My search brought me into contact with an Iranian researcher who had been working on figuring out why Persians were having severe blood clots at much higher rates than other ethnic groups in and around Iran. The common link was a set of thrombophilic genetic mutations that are somewhat common in Persians and Europeans and those with significant Persian or European admixture, but are uncommon or entirely absent among Arabs, Africans, South Asians, and East Asians. These mutations, most notably factor V Leiden, likely arose millennia ago in the Aryan basin among warlike steppe peoples to whom it would confer a survival advantage from battle wounds. It is plausible that there was a component of ethnic targeting along the lines that Chinese military strategists had advocated for.
The most acutely severe symptoms inflicted by the Wuhan and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 seemed to have been lessened by the Omicron variant, which appeared in the United States in late 2021. But genetically, Omicron is actually an older strain of SARS-CoV-2. Was the Wuhan strain a challenge virus and Omicron a live attenuated vaccine? Did numerous lab strains escape into circulation? These and many other important questions need to be answered. Over a million Americans died because of this. More than all combat deaths in all of our wars combined. And this is a virus that still inflicts considerable harm. Even a mild infection can trigger autoimmune disease or significant depletion of T-cells which protect not just against viral and bacterial pathogens but also against cancer. Over two hundred million Americans took a gene modification injection that contains the foreign genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
We need a real investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. No matter what the fallout may be. No matter who it implicates. To protect a handful of octogenarian bureaucrats by not revealing the truth and punishing wrongdoing would be to rip out the foundations of justice for future generations. And looking to the future, the United States must renew efforts to stop the development and proliferation of biological weapons, both facially offensive and dual-use. Disrupting the funding by shutting down USAID is a good start. That work should be vigorously pursued until complete. There should be a full and open accounting for the U.S. government’s involvement in bioweapons research, both in the United States and abroad, as in the case of not just Wuhan but biolabs in Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet Republics. And for long-term risk reduction, work should be done to expand and strengthen the BWC and other bilateral and multilateral antiproliferation mechanisms.
We should also not get caught up in expanding our own pace of biotech development in a panicked effort to not be left behind China. The pattern is this: America innovates, China copies and scales. America can control the direction and pace of biotech development—or any technology for that matter—entirely through its own scientific institutions.
