According to Charles Rixey, a COVID-19 analyst who combed through 100,000 pages of FOIA documents and reviewed more than 1,000 research articles, however, the five editors of the Nature Medicine paper, who he refers to as “the Proximals,” were aware of the existence of a furin cleavage site (FCS) on the virus as early as February 1, 2020, the day a conference call was organized by Farrar and Fauci “to address several aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that pointed towards an artificial origin, by means of generating adaptive changes through passaging and/or direct manipulation of the genome.”29
After the February 1, 2020, conference call, a February 3 meeting was held by Fauci, presidential science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier, Chris Hassell, senior science adviser for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and National Academies’ policy director Alexander Pope, during which the “group slapped the table on what the narrative was going to be — not what the science indicated.” Rixey wrote:30
“Therefore, the signal was sent to all scientists that pursuing the lab origins angle meant career death (no academy membership), no funding (via Fauci or Ross or Farrar), no publication in the big 4 journals during the historic pandemic (NEJM, Science, The Lancet & Nature [by virtue of their publishing of the tone-setting pieces]), no executive patronage for things like generic drugs, etc.”
Many have stated that we’ll never truly know the origin of SARS-CoV-2, short of China confessing or a whistleblower coming forward, but as Muller stated during his testimony, “We have a whistleblower, the virus itself.”31 Even as scientists who have worked closely on GOF research with WIV have tried to shut down investigations into the lab leak theory, the virus may ultimately reveal the truth.
SARS-CoV-2 has a unique trigger on the surface called a furin cleavage site and a unique code in the genes for that site called a CGG-CGG dimer; these markers do not exist in natural coronaviruses but are known to have been used in GOF research.32
Dr. Steven Quay, who holds 87 patents across 22 different fields of medicine and invented seven FDA-approved medicines, believes that SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory in China. His Bayesian analysis of SARS-CoV-2 origins revealed that finding a CGG-CGG codon pair in the furin site of SARS-CoV-2 is “a highly improbable event,” and this can be used to adjust the likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 is of zoonotic origin to only 0.5%, while the likelihood of laboratory origin is 99.5%.33