Shi Zhengli

But it gets worse still for the zoonosis theory. The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

So, there is no natural example of a furin protein site in nature that could be introduced into CoV-2 by recombination, there is no natural example of the particular gene sequence for the furin protein site contained in CoV-2 being used to code for anything in nature, but this particular coding is exactly what Dr. Shi, Baric, and others have used previously in published experiments to insert or optimize arginine codons.

It is telling that when Dr. Shi introduced the world to CoV-2 for the first time in January 2020 she showed hundreds of gene sequences of this novel virus but stopped just short of showing the furin site, the one she is purported to have introduced, seemingly not wanting to call attention to her handywork. She apparently failed to realize that an accomplished but innocent virologist, finding the first furin site ever seen in this class of viruses apparently coming from nature, would have featured the presence of the furin site prominently, and also would have used its presence and her experience with furin sites in other viruses to predict what it would foretell for the world due to its aggressive nature.

She could have perhaps saved many lives just by telling the world that she saw a furin site in the virus sequence.