Mark J. Bailey
2nd of June, 2024
A commentary on the origins of the COVID-19 “lab leak” and ‘HIV insert’ narratives and why they continue to serve multiple pandemic industries. An examination of gp120, a protein first described in 1984 and attributed to ‘HIV’, unravels the propagation of virological fraud into the present era.
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On the 31st of January, 2020, Pradhan et al. uploaded a paper titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” onto the preprint site bioRxiv.1 (“Bio-archive”) It was removed just two days later with the explanation that, “this paper has been withdrawn by its authors. They intend to revise it in response to comments received from the research community on their technical approach and their interpretation of the results.”² Despite its brief appearance, as of May 2024, the website metrics indicate that the article has been picked up by 116 news outlets, is mentioned in seven Wikipedia entries, and the online PDF version has been accessed over 480,000 times.3
On the 2nd of February, 2020, ZeroHedge promoted the Pradhan et al. preprint paper in an article titled “Coronavirus Contains ‘HIV Insertions’, Stoking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon” which received almost 1.7 million views.4 This followed on from ZeroHedge’s 29th of January,4 2020, article “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?” which received over 1.1 million views.5 The author(s)*6 implied that Peng Zhou from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the likely culprit behind the “coronavirus pandemic” as it was stated that:
Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit. Or at least start with an email: Dr Peng can be reached at peng.zhou@wh.iov.cn, and his phone# is 87197311.7
This was six weeks before the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) even declared that ‘COVID-19’ was a “pandemic”.8 One of my colleagues did contact Peng Zhou’s team following their online publication of “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin” in Nature on the 3rd of February, 2020.9 This was one of the first papers from China claiming to demonstrate the existence of 2019-nCoV, later called ‘SARS-CoV-2’.*10 An extraordinary scientific fraud regarding their “virus” isolation claim was exposed by my colleague and documented in “The Disclosures Of Peng Zhou et al.” in A Farewell to Virology (Expert Edition).11 Aside from the usual failure to physically isolate any particle that met the description of a virus, the team admitted to doubling the amount of antibiotics in the experimental cell lines.
On the 7th of February, 2020, the website FactCheck.org jumped onto the “HIV inserts” story with an article titled “Baseless Conspiracy Theories Claim New Coronavirus Was Bioengineered”.12 In line with all the stories that had preceded it, there was no question as to whether there was a new “coronavirus” - that was presented as a given - the only question being posed to the public was the
origin of the alleged virus. The summary provided in the FactCheck.org piece stated:
Several online stories inaccurately claim that the new coronavirus contains HIV “insertions” and shows signs of being created in a lab. But there is no evidence that the new virus was bioengineered, and every indication it came from an animal.13
The “lab-leak theory” then featured in various mainstream news platforms for four years, whether supporting the story or not, and perhaps not surprisingly, by 2023 it was reported in The Washington Post that over 60% of Americans believed that the “virus” originated in a laboratory.14 Despite this fact, organisations such as Children’s Health Defense (CHD) have asserted that the public are being kept in the dark over such matters. On the 5th of December, 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD published the book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race15 cementing their position that SARS-CoV-2 not only exists as a disease-causing particle but was created in a laboratory and caused a novel disease. The present author notes that many in the ‘health freedom’ community continue to adhere to CHD’s central claims, including the “cover up” aspect.*16
Several points are clear though: (1) the “lab leak” claim was well-developed and appeared at the start of the “pandemic”, (2) the Wuhan Institute of Virology was publicised by the Chinese government*17 and in mainstream platforms, and (3) the so-called “cover up” is known about by the majority of Americans. In this regard, it is also of note that online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has a very large “COVID-19 lab leak theory” entry.18 It even suggests to the reader that the question may simply boil down to how the laboratory virus went on to cause a pandemic:
Historian of science Naomi Oreskes says that she does not know of any credible scientists who support the view that the virus was released deliberately, while the version proposing the virus may have escaped accidentally is more plausible.19
From the author’s perspective it would currently venture into speculation as to why in January 2020 a financial and political blog site such as ZeroHedge*20 started penning articles about, “whether the coronavirus epidemic isn't a weaponized virus that just happened to escape the lab.”21 We have addressed the baseless virological claims behind such “gain of function” and “bio-weapon” stories by dismantling the relevant scientific documents on which they rely.22 In our estimation the stories are most often promulgated by those who have been misled by the virologists’ claims or those who are gaslighting (or being gaslit) in order to maintain acceptance of “viruses” and contagion. On the 2nd of May, 2024, ZeroHedge continued to advance the engineered virus story for the fifth consecutive year in their article “Watch Live: Peter Daszak23 Testifies Days After Whistleblower Documents Expose More About Dangerous Wuhan Research”:
Meanwhile on Monday, journalist Paul Thacker revealed a new set of documents which raise further questions into the work done by Daszak, as well as statements made by the National Institutes of Health regarding papers showing they funded risky virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create dangerous chimeric viruses.24
There was no mention of the “HIV gp120 insertions” or other “suspicious” sequences that caught the interest of Pradhan et al. as well as outspoken individuals such as Dr Richard Fleming.25 The latest ZeroHedge article referred to congressional testimonies, National Institutes of Health grants and the activities of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. All of this continued to uphold the key tenets that: (1) COVID-19 was a pandemic, (2) it was caused by SARS-CoV-2, and (3) laboratory experiments involving “coronaviruses” are taking place. Indeed, during the congressional hearing video that featured in the ZeroHedge article, congressman Dr Raul Ruis26 stated that, “whether the virus came from a lab or from nature is still unknown. Two federal agencies still assess with low and moderate confidence that the virus originated in a lab and four government agencies still assess with low confidence that the virus emerged from nature.”27
In 2020 we earnestly believed that exposing the fraud concerning the lack of evidence for SARS-CoV-2, the inappropriate use of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) as a claimed human diagnostic test and the WHO’s non-sensical case definition would result in the COVID-19 “pandemic” fizzling out before the end of that year. In retrospect, we were naïve at that time as to how crucial the virus model is to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and genomics industries as well as the development of the “biosecurity” surveillance state.
It is apparent that “alternative” theories are permitted and even promoted by the state and allied platforms on the proviso that they uphold the virus model. Which brings us back to the January 2020 Pradhan et al. paper that acted as one of the original triggers for the narrative that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered virus. The narrative was unlikely to be of any concern to virus model and pandemic industry beneficiaries because the fraud of the new “virus” helped propagate the fraud of an old “virus”. In this case it related to the claimed properties of gp120 - primarily that the protein and its corresponding genetic sequences belong to ‘HIV’.28
However, where does the evidence for gp120 belonging to any virus actually stand? In 1997, Bess et al. published “Microvesicles Are a Source of Contaminating Cellular Proteins Found in Purified HIV-1 Preparations,” in which they stated, “although HIV-1 particles are known to contain some cellular proteins, microvesicles from HIV-1 infected H9 cells appeared to contain little or no HIV-1 gp120SU [SU = ‘surface envelope’].”29 According to the described methodology, “HIV-1(MN)/H929 was purified from six liters of cell culture supernatant by continuous flow ultracentrifugation in a sucrose density gradient.” The paper included electron microcopy images of what they claimed were “purified HIV-1” preparations. It caught the attention of the Perth Group’s Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos because as she stated in August 1997:
…until March 1997, for unknown reasons, neither [Luc Montagnier’s or Robert Gallo’s] groups nor anyone else had ever published an electron micrograph of the banded (purified) material to show which if any of the many different variety of particles seen in gross cell cultures are present at 1.16 gm/ml.30
Bess et al. presented SDS–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis31 results from H9 cell lines32, the first (A) said not to be infected by ‘HIV’, the next two (B & C) said to be infected by ‘HIV”. The Perth Group provided a detailed commentary on this paper in 2011 and summarised the implications of the gel electrophoresis data as follows:
Anyone can see the electrophoretic patterns in all three gels are virtually identical. [Brent] Leung has drawn a line just below the 42.7kDa marker protein and above this33 line the gels are identical. Below the line there are some differences in the staining intensity in gels B and C compared to gel A…The same proteins are present in all three gels with some variation in the amounts of some proteins…Since the same proteins are present in gels A, B and C one has to conclude there are no “extra” proteins in B and C. That is, there are no HIV proteins in the “purified virus”.
No HIV proteins = no HIV. Why then, in gels B and C, did Bess label p6/p7, p17 and p24 as HIV proteins?34, *35
Fig 1. Bess et al., Virology 1997 gel electrophoresis data as
commented on by the Perth Group in 2011: A = uninfected; B, C =
“infected”.
Relevant to the present essay and the claim that gp120 is specific to HIV, it is instructive to go back to the Bess et al. 1997 gel electrophoresis and examine the bands at 120kDa. As Figure 2 clearly shows, all of the three gels whether from uninfected (A) or “infected” (B & C) cells demonstrated banding around 120kDa. In other words, according to their experiment there is no evidence that gp120 (or a protein of this size) is specific to ‘HIV’ - it can only be said to be a cellular protein.
The Bess et al. gel electrophoresis refuted their own claim that they were detecting proteins that were specific to HIV. The authors offered no explanation for the result and instead analysed relative concentrations of proteins by a radioimmunoassay technique from which they concluded, “there was some evidence that a little gp120SU may have been associated with microvesicles that banded at a slightly higher density than HIV-1 particles.”36 [my emphasis] While this comment raises another problem for “HIV specificity” it was a distraction from the overriding fatal flaw that, even by their own methodologies,*37 the protein claimed to be part of the “HIV envelope” can be found in cells that are not “infected” with the imagined “virus”.
Fig 2. Bess et al., Virology 1997 gel electrophoresis data focussed above the
116.3kDa marker protein: A = uninfected; B, C = “infected”
The claim that ‘SARS-CoV-2’ contains “HIV inserts” is emblematic of the propagation of decades of virological pseudoscience. Peng Zhou’s team could not engineer a virus as there was no evidence of a virus to begin with,38 just as there is no evidence of ‘HIV’.39 The debate over the origin of the COVID-19 “pandemic” has been presented as a false dichotomy where the uninitiated are asked to pick between: (1) ‘zoonotic spillover’ (wet market/bat cave, etc) or (2) ’lab leak’ (accident vs deliberate). The overall story is not disrupted by those throwing ‘HIV’ into option 2, in fact, it helps maintain the virus model on multiple fronts.
As it stands, over 60% of Americans believe that the COVID-19 event was the result of an engineered “virus” - by all accounts it is a mainstream theme permitted by governments and the globalist media. The maintenance of the virus model primarily serves corporate and sociopolitical ends rather than health or scientific advancement. It is dressed up as the latter but as we witnessed during the COVID era, aspects of it apparently now require enforcement through the state’s compulsory monopoly on coercion and violence. Those promulgating narratives involving “lab leak” and “gain of function” claims are implored to examine the foundational scientific evidence on which everything relies to avoid providing a disservice to both science and humanity.
“It might appear that we’re encountering a new challenge. How to avoid lockdown and takeover by model- (or idol-) worshipping science cults?”—Asa Boxer, 202440
References & Notes at https://drsambailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HIV-Inserts-Lies-Lab-Leaks.pdf
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