In the poorly-written NEJM paper, the "Methods" section states that the cell line used in the culture solution consisted of "human airway epithelial cells” obtained “from patients undergoing surgery for lung cancer and were confirmed to be special-pathogen-free by [next-generation sequencing]."
So they used airway cells from cancer patients instead of healthy people, and 'confirmed' they were pathogen-free by dubious computerized sequencing.
In the "Results" section, however, we further discover that they also had a go at viral isolation using "Vero E6" and "Huh-7" cell lines.
I discussed Vero cells in my previous article. To recap, they are kidney cells extracted from African green monkeys. They are commonly used cell lines in the viral cell culture charade.
The HuH-7 cell line was established in 1982, originally taken from a liver tumor in a 57-year-old Japanese male.
The China CDC researchers claim that after 96 hours, "cytopathic effects" were observed on human airway epithelial cells, while "No specific cytopathic effects were observed in the Vero E6 and Huh-7 cell lines until 6 days after inoculation."
That’s all well and good, but the mythical Sars-Cov-2 is allegedly a respiratory virus that infects healthy human lungs, so the obvious question here is why are researchers tooling around with monkey kidney cells and immortal tumour cell lines obtained from cancer patients?
The answer to that question is because these cell lines give researchers the results they are looking for.
Back in March 2005, researchers examined 30 different cell lines to see which ones would support in vitro replication of the original 1.0 version of "SARS-CoV". Thirteen of those cell lines were obtained from humans, and three of those human cell lines were derived from lung/airway tissue.
The researchers were able to detect "SARS-CoV" in only six cell lines: three African green monkey kidney cell lines (Vero, Vero E6, and MA104), a human colon epithelial line (CaCo-2), a pig kidney epithelial line [PK(15)], and mink lung epithelial cells (Mv 1 Lu). They then further admitted that SARS-CoV produced no visible cytopathic effect in the Caco-2, Mv 1 Lu, or PK(15) cells.
So of thirty cell lines, a 'cytopathic effect' of the original Sars-CoV could only be detected in three - and none of them were human cell lines.