Bat Lady & The Dark Knight
As second-published by Formosahut in May 2020, there was a pivotal WIV/Shi GoF experiment in 2008 that inserted a SARS S sequence into a bat virus to enable ACE-2 binding. The first publishers:
ACE2-binding activity of SL-CoVs was easily acquired by the replacement of a relatively small sequence segment of the S protein from the SARS-CoV S sequence.
Linfa Wang and Meng Yu, both employed by CSIRO, were a part of that GoF frontier virology team.
This work was jointly funded by .. a special fund from the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (no. 1009), the Knowledge Innovation Program Key Project (KSCX1-YW-R-07) to Z. Shi (Bat Lady), .. and the Australian Biosecurity CRC for Emerging Infectious Diseases (project 1.026RE) to L.-F. Wang (the Dark Knight, working at CSIRO)
(This is how rabbit-holey everything is: CRC, the funding arm for Linfa, was set up in 2002 (so pre-SARS) - one of its supporting members is Consortium for Conservation Medicine - which was one of Daszak’s & Epstein’s first incarnations of EcoHealth. What are they doing on an Australian bio-security org? CRC: The threats may be natural, accidental, or deliberate (as in bioterrorism). (CRC’s brackets))
As Science notes, the two have co-authored dozens of papers.
Together they rose to fame for finding the SARS-1 bat virus from the legendary Yunan caves.
In fact, it was nothing of the sort - less than 97% - same range as RaTG13 & the Lao sample but typical zoonati - never let the facts get in the way of a good zoonosis narrative. As Linfa admits in a different article:
Nature, Feb 26 2020: Even a 99% similarity between the RBDs of the two viruses is not necessarily enough to link them, says Linfa Wang, .. who was part of the team that found the origin of the SARS virus.
A neat example of how blithely Nature pedals misinformation - If 99% isn’t definitive, then how does nearly 97% = found the origin of SARS?
Together they launched a worldwide bat virus hunting movement. They were especially attracted to the Yunnan caves. Racking up a dizzying 16 000 bat viruses with 50 that could infect humans
Linfa and Zhengli’s collaborations don’t end there.
Science: They also like to team up in karaoke bars to sing classic Chinese ballads, says Peter Daszak, a researcher at the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City nonprofit, and a longtime collaborator with Wang and Shi. "
Pete: Linfa is an excellent singer and to see him and Shi Zhengli do a duet is very special.”
I’m sure it is! I’m wondering if we haven’t just seen one.
Regardless, they are kindred spirits.
Their relationship, like most things Covid, goes back to SARS. Technically, it goes back to Anthrax, but SARS provided a new rallying point once it became clear the whole Anthrax bioterrorism attack was literally a(/some) Fort Detrick scientist(s) drumming up business for vaccines.
Science: After WHO declared the epidemic over in July 2003, it put together a mission of eight scientists, including Wang, to investigate the origins of the virus in China.
Cool. Linfa was an original WHO investigator representing CSIRO. Pretty sure Dominic E. Dwyer (Westmead) was one of the eight too.
Wang had a hunch bats could be the source, but the rest of the team was skeptical.
At a meeting in Beijing, Wang met the head of WIV, who suggested he collaborate with a scientist at her institute: Shi Zhengli, who was then studying viruses in fish and shrimp. "She was the only virologist who believed me and was willing to collaborate with me," Wang says.
So a clear picture is emerging of Linfa and Shi Zhengli as a tightly bonded duo. Bat Lady & the Dark Knight. China loyalists at heart, going out into the world to spread their shared vision.