By TATIANA PROPHET

A healthy society should not only have one voice. - Dr. Li Wenliang, reluctant whistleblower, who died of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, after warning his fellow doctors to be alert in their facilities, on a private chat system. Someone leaked his comments and he was reprimanded publicly by police.

NOVEMBER 9, 2015 RALPH BARIC, AN INFECTIOUS-DISEASE RESEARCHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL, published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a chimeric virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine. The team included four scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one from the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens in Wuhan, China, one from Zurich and two from Harvard.