Shi Zhengli – the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s premier bat coronavirus researcher – celebrated her isolation of a coronavirus strain that could cause “direct human infection” in an annual lab report unearthed by The National Pulse.
The admission follows mounting evidence that COVID-19 traces its origins to the Wuhan-based lab and can be linked to risky “gain-of-function” research funded by Anthony Fauci. A “longtime collaborator” of several Fauci-funded researchers, Shi, also known as “Bat Lady,” has listed grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director on her resume.
Shi’s biography and research accomplishments, which appear in the lab’s 2013 annual report exclusively unearthed by The National Pulse, augment her ties to the scientific research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely led to COVID-19.
The subheading “Research Interests” included in Shi’s profile outlines the focus of her work in her capacity as the Director of the lab’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. “This group focuses on emerging viral pathogens and their infection mechanisms,” the synopsis begins before providing examples of her work on the “interspecies infection mechanism of zoonotic virus” such as SARS-like coronaviruses:
Viral isolation and characterization, diagnostic method development and genomic studies; molecular epidemiology and interspecies infection mechanism of zoonotic virus (SARS-like CoV, Nipah virus, Hantavirus, etc); viral metagenomics in particular niche samples (animals and environments)
Focusing solely on her work accomplished in 2013, Shi boasts that “we successfully isolated a bat SARS-like coronavirus” before adding that the isolated strain could result in “direct human infection”:
“It was proved that WIV-1 was able to utilize ACE-2 of human, civets, and Chinese horseshoe bats as the receptor to enter the cells, suggesting the virus is potential to cause a direct human infection.”
The summary also references how coronaviruses “achieved cross-species infection by mutation of key sites of the spike protein,” which is the mechanism that allows COVID-19 to enter human cells.
