Apr 5, 2020: The Most Plausible Explanation . . .
Link to another video worth watching.
Link to Link to NORAD and NORCOM deployment.
What do you want to do about this?
Prof. Francis Boyle on SARS-CoV-2 Offensive Biological Weapon
From "The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent in CoV of the same clade." Antiviral Research, Volume 176, April 2020, 104742 — paper | pdf
"Since furin is highly expressed in lungs, an enveloped virus that infects the respiratory tract may successfully exploit this convertase to activate its surface glycoprotein (Bassi et al., 2017; Mbikay et al., 1997).
Before the emergence of the 2019-nCoV, this important feature was not observed in the lineage b of betacoronaviruses. However, it is shared by other CoV (HCoV-OC43, MERS-CoV, MHV-A59) harbouring furin-like cleavage sites in their S-protein (Fig. 2; Table 1), which were shown to be processed by furin experimentally (Le Coupanec et al., 2015; Mille and Whittaker, 2014).
Strikingly, the 2019-nCoV S-protein sequence contains 12 additional nucleotides upstream of the single Arg↓ cleavage site 1 (Fig. 1, Fig. 2) leading to a predictively solvent-exposed PRRAR↓SV sequence, which corresponds to a canonical furin-like cleavage site (Braun and Sauter, 2019; Izaguirre, 2019; Seidah and Prat, 2012).
This furin-like cleavage site, is supposed to be cleaved during virus egress (Mille and Whittaker, 2014) for
- S-protein “priming” and
- may provide a gain-of-function to the 2019-nCoV for efficient spreading in the human population compared to other lineage b betacoronaviruses.
This possibly illustrates a convergent evolution pathway between unrelated CoVs. Interestingly, if this site is not processed, the S-protein is expected to be cleaved at site 2 during virus endocytosis, as observed for the SARS-CoV.