TheChek News Flow

Back on February 1, when the coronavirus pandemic was only just starting to attract broader attention and the China-influenced mainstream media was still politically inclined to minimize the severity of the disease before pulling a sharp U-turn and now going full bore with a narrative of just how dangerous it is for the Trump administration to reopen the economy (because if the economy recovers by November, Trump just might get re-elected), we published an article referencing an Arxiv pre-print which found that the covid-19 genome contained "HIV Insertions", stoking fears that the virus was an artificially created bioweapon. While the mere suggestion that this virus was man-made - nevermind sharing discrete segments of its genetic structure with HIV - sparked outrage among the well-paid mercenary enforcers of the First Amendment known as "fact-checkers" who are employed by such biased organizations as Twitter and Facebook to stifle any line of inquiry that runs contrary to whatever dominant narrative has been blessed by the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world, it was none other than the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983, that confirmed our suspicions saying that "the virus was man-made."

As we reported in April, Professor Luc Montagnier, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and added that the WUhan laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine.

Needless to say, since this narrative was destructive to China and all those self-proclaimed experts who had vowed there is no way the Wuhan virus was i) manmade, ii) released by a Chinese lab and iii) had HIV-insertions, the story was quickly buried and never received as much as a minute of airtime in conventional media sources.

That may all change now, as a result of the third, and perhaps most startling yet twist in the bizarre saga of the coronavirus, after the South China Morning Post reported that a new study by Chinese scientists has found that the novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV.

Specifically, both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers said in a non-peer reviewed paper titled "The ORF8 Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Mediates Immune Evasion through Potently Downregulating MHC-I", posted on pre-print website bioRxiv.org on Sunday (a paper which the great hordes of amateur epidemiologists will make sure is promptly taken down or else their carefully planted propaganda may be obliterated). They warned that this commonality could mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like HIV.

Separately, virologist Zhang Hui and a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou also said their discovery added weight to clinical observations that the coronavirus was showing “some characteristics of viruses causing chronic infection”.

Some more details on the Hui study: the researchers collected killer T cells from five patients who had recently recovered from Covid-19; those immune cells are generated by people after they are infected with Sars-CoV-2, and whose job is to find and destroy the virus. But the killer T cells used in the study were not effective at eliminating the virus in infected cells. When the scientists took a closer look they found that a molecule known as major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, was missing.

The molecule is an identification tag usually present in the membrane of a healthy cell, or in sick cells infected by other coronaviruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars. It changes with infections, alerting the immune system whether a cell is healthy or infected by a virus. However, there is one notable disease that makes MHC molecules disappears from the cell surface: HIV.

ORF8, which is also known to play an important role in viral replication, is the gene that is targeted by most commercial test kits to detect viral loads in nose or oral swabs.

Needless to say, the absence of MHC makes the creation of vaccines against covid problematic, although the study authors had a suggestion: while drugs used to treat Covid-19 patients mainly target enzymes or structural proteins needed for viral replication, Zhang and his team suggested compounds be developed “specifically targeting the impairment of MHC by ORF8, and therefore enhancing immune surveillance for Sars-CoV-2 infection”.

And here is where things gets very messy for the frauds known as "fact-checkers" who - without any actual facts or knowledge - threw up all over our February report that the coronavirus shared genetic material with HIV: while the mainstream media did everything in its power to censor any suggestions that Covid and HIV having genetic similarities (after all who wants to be threatened by an airborne version of AIDS) now it is none other than the South China Morning Post which writes that "earlier studies found the spike protein of the new coronavirus had a structure that allowed it to enter many types of human cells and bind with them. The same structure was also found in HIV, but not in other coronaviruses found in animals such as bats and pangolins."

Oops, the SCMP will have a a lot of explaining for reporting on, you know, the facts.

But wait there's more. Another study by researchers in New York and Shanghai also found that the Sars-CoV-2, sometimes called the "Wu Flu" could kill T cells, or as the SCMP puts it "the discovery came after autopsies in China found immune system destruction similar to that caused by AIDS."

At this point, the SCMP has pointed out all the exact same facts - that the coronavirus not only shares genetic material with HIV, but also evades and cripples the immune system in a similar way to HIV - that got the "highly respected" StatNews to accuse Zero Hedge of spreading an "infodemic." We wonder if StatNews author John Gregory will append his "analysis" now that actual "facts" have emerged showing that it's not the infodemic we should be afraid of, but the censordemic.

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Of course, if covid and HIV share a similar approach to hiding from, and crippling the host immune system, kiss any hope for a vaccine - or cure - goodbye. Four decades after HIV – a virus that attacks the immune system – emerged, it has killed about 32 million people globally and there is still no vaccine or drug that can completely cure the disease.

Which begs the question: who were the real conspiracy theorists - those who reported the facts, or all those countless "mainstream" publications who sought to stifle the facts, by accusing us - and many others - of peddling conspiracy theories. For the answer, we go back to what HIV-discovered Montagnier said in April: “Conspirators are the opposite camp, hiding the truth,” he said without wanting to accuse anyone, but hoping that the Chinese will admit to what he believes happened in their laboratory. "In any case, the truth always comes out, it is up to the Chinese government to take responsibility."

And while we admire Montagnier's optimism,we are not holding our breath until the truth finally does come out. Until then, the SCMP may want to watch the bank of its social media accounts - can't have the peasants realizing they were lied to all along. Twitter, for example, has developed a nasty habit of immediately banning anyone who dares to tell the truth about anything.

The full paper is below (link). Read it before it mysteriously disappears.