The world knows Dr Anthony Fauci as the lead member of the Trump’s Administration White House Coronavirus Task Force and the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID).
The United States President Donald Trump and Dr Anthony Fauci continue to disagree on critical strategies in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic in the US.
Both Trump and Dr Fauci have made their disagreements known publicly; while President Trump would like to reopen the US economy by May 1st this year, Dr Fauci has strongly advised Trump against it.
Interestingly and rather prophetically Dr Fauci during a forum on Pandemic Preparedness at Georgetown University held on January 10, 2017 had predicted and warned the incoming Trump-led administration that it would face a ’surprise outbreak of infectious disease’.
Dr Fauci had said that there in no doubt that the new administration will be confronted with a surprise disease outbreak. He further, added that, “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases.”
The moot question is whether it was Dr Fauci’s premonition or his knowledge based on research studies funded by US at Wuhan Institute of Virology that he made the predictive statement – ‘surprise outbreak of infectious disease’
On January 6, 2014, Professor Shi Zhengli received a US grant of USD 665,000 from the National Institute of Health for a study named ‘The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence’ (NIAID R01 AI1 10964).
On January 10, 2014, Shi Zhengli received an additional USD 559,500 grant from the United States Agency of International Development for a research study entitled ‘Emerging Pandemic Threats’.
Prof. Shi Zhengli is one of China’s most formidable virologist. She is a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wuhan Institute of Virology, houses China’s only P4-Level Biosafety Laboratory capable of storing, studying, or engineering Pathogen Level 4 microbes such as other coronaviruses, Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue.
It is important to highlight to our readers that Dr Zhengli research as early as 2007 indicated the human-to-human transmission:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by the SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which uses ACE2 as its receptor for cell entry. SL-CoVs and SARS-CoVs share identical genome organizations and high sequence identities, with the main exception of the N terminus of the spike protein, known to be responsible for receptor binding in CoVs. 2.
Whereas the SL-CoV spike protein was unable to use any of the three ACE2 molecules as its receptor, and the SARS-CoV spike protein failed to center cells expressing the bat ACE2, the chimeric spike protein the study created did gain its ability to center cells via human ACE, and 3.
A minimal insert region (amino acids 310 to 518) was found to be sufficient to convert the SL-CoV S from non- ACE2 binding to human ACE2 binding, indicating that the SL-CoV S is largely compatible with SARS-CoVs
