Lab Leak?
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https://www.city-journal.org/covid-origin-conspiracy
From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.
he story begins with a January 31, 2020, email to Fauci from a group of four virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 had been published three weeks before, giving virologists their first look at the virus’s structure and possible origin.
Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.The rest of the article talks about the emails and the sudden about-face of the (cough) scientists regarding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The repudiation by Andersen, Garry, and Holmes of their original conclusion, expressed in the January 31, 2020, email was of enormous benefit to Collins and Fauci. Though primary responsibility for any lab leak would rest with Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with Chinese regulatory authorities, Collins and Fauci could share a portion of the blame for having funded gain-of-function research despite its obvious risks and then failing to ensure that grant recipients were taking all necessary precautions.
If there really was a conspiracy surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Congress should search for it—first, in the still-closed records of the National Institutes of Health and the EcoHealth Alliance. Congress then needs to ask scientists free of outside pressures or conflicts to reassess the probable origin of a virus that has now killed some 5 million people worldwide. -
Matt Taibi: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-mashup-the-lab-leak-conspiracy
A common explanation for the propaganda is that once Donald Trump suggested the disease might have had a laboratory origin, it became mandatory to denounce the idea for political reasons.
We still don’t know what caused the pandemic, but that’s not the issue here. The concept of telling the public you’re this certain of something when you quite obviously are not is at least somewhat new, both in politics and in media. The crucial problem shown in this reel is the complete absence of humility about the possibility of error. The most well-meaning scientists make mistakes — even the famous tale of the discovery of HIV’s “Patient Zero” later fell into question thanks to genetic analysis — and there was a time not long ago when no responsible press outlet would have declared any hypothesis off-limits before the mystery had been solved.
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In some of the other COVID threads, I believe that I stated that it would definitely not be a surprise if it had come from a Chinese laboratory.
But, even if this were known, do you think that the world would have handled things differently? I think we probably would have followed the same path.
(I know a lot of "if's")
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""Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident."
Thread on the studies:
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We gained a function!
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https://public.substack.com/p/covid-origins-scientist-denounces
Our reporting led several people sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis to demand the release of all the emails and Slack messages. “This calls for more transparency,” tweeted Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Times, “rather than selective, partial releases —especially since the messages imply coordinated efforts for manipulating journalists etc…”
We agree and are thus happy today to release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential “Proximal Origin,” paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the US government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
The messages vindicated researchers like the Broad Center’s Alina Chan, who coauthored a major book, Viral: The Search For Covid’s Origin, with British science journalist Matt Ridley, who Public interviewed for a podcast last month.
“It's ironic,” Chan told Public, “that these scientists who wanted to shut down conspiracy theories ended up starting their own conspiracy to prematurely dismiss a lab origin of Covid-19. Whether intentionally or not, their actions have steered a large portion of journalists and other scientists away from asking reasonable questions about how the pandemic started.”
tl;dr
- The scientists never really blamed the pangolins
- Scientists thought lab leak was “Friggin’ likely”
- Scientists thought lab leak was possible months after saying otherwise
- I’m dismissing him” said top scientist about Times reporter
- Scientists suspected the Bat Lady of the lab leak
- The scientists’ conspiracy was driven by obedience to “higher-ups” in US and UK governments
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Taibbi and others:
Fauci Diverted US Government Away From Lab Leak Theory
The former director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the US government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, visited CIA headquarters to “influence” its review of COVID-19 origins, the House Oversight Committee reported yesterday.
Last month, Committee Chair Brad Wenstrup made headlines when he revealed that seven CIA analysts “with significant scientific expertise” on the agency’s COVID-19 Discovery Team (CDT) received performance bonuses after changing a report to downplay concerns about a possible lab origin of the virus.
Now, a months-long investigation by Racket and Public, which included interviews with the CIA whistleblower behind last month’s revelations and others in a position to know, reveals that Fauci not only visited the CIA but also pushed the controversial “Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2” paper, published by Nature Medicine, in meetings at the State Department and the White House.
Previous reporting already showed that Fauci “prompted” the “Proximal Origin” paper, according to its authors. Lead author Kristian Andersen expressed grave doubts about the natural origin theory even months after Nature Medicine published the paper. And they described themselves as pressured by “higher ups,” referring to individuals in the White House and other government agencies.
Now, the new information from multiple sources, including a CIA whistleblower, a senior government investigator, and a senior official, suggests a broad effort by Fauci to go agency by agency, from the White House to the State Department to the CIA, in an effort to steer government officials away from looking into the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab.
“Fauci’s expert opinions were a significant consideration and were part of our classified assessment,” said the CIA whistleblower, a decorated and long-serving CIA officer with expertise in Asia. “His opinion substantially altered the conclusions that were subsequently drawn.”
Fauci had reasons to push scientists and intelligence analysts to believe the virus had a zoonotic origin since his agency had issued a grant to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
The Wenstrup press release noted that the whistleblower’s information suggested Fauci was escorted in “without record of entry.” According to the CIA whistleblower, the CIA purposely did not “badge” Fauci in and out of the building so as to hide any record that he had been there.
“Fauci came to our building, to promote the natural origin of the virus,” the CIA whistleblower said. “He knew what was going on. I mean, you see all the redacted documents that are coming out. He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community… I know he came multiple times and he was treated like a rockstar by the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center. And, he pushed the Kristian Anderson paper.”
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WSJ:
New documents bolster the theory that it not only escaped from a laboratory but was developed in one.
By Nicholas Wade
Feb. 28, 2024In the four years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unleashed on the world, data have steadily accumulated supporting the hypothesis that it emerged from a laboratory. The latest information, released last month, makes a formidable case that the virus is the product of laboratory synthesis, not of nature.
This startling fact will probably take some time to sink into the national consciousness, given the mainstream media’s sustained inability to report the issue objectively. Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis. Science journalists are too beholden to their sources to suspect that virologists would lie to them about the extent of their profession’s responsibility for a catastrophic pandemic.
Here are some salient facts that haven’t been clearly reported to readers of the mainstream press:
In March 2018 a team of American and Chinese virologists applied to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, seeking a $14 million grant to manipulate viruses related to SARS-CoV-1, the bat virus that caused a minor epidemic in 2002. Their goal was to identify bat viruses in Asia with the highest potential for jumping to people and to immunize bats so they wouldn’t infect soldiers in the region.
The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site.
In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process.
Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team.
The new documents, which are background planning papers and drafts for the DEFUSE proposal, call for assembling SARS-like viruses from six sections of DNA, and include a cost estimate for purchase of the BsmBI restriction enzyme—exactly as the three authors had inferred. This clearly strengthens, perhaps conclusively, their contention that the virus is synthetic. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, says it raises “to the level of a smoking gun” the genetic evidence that the virus was manufactured.
Other strong indicators of the virus’s laboratory birth include the furin cleavage site, possessed by none of the other more than 1,500 members of its viral family with which in nature it might swap genetic material. The codons—“words” used by the genetic code to specify the units of proteins—that define the cleavage site are those preferred by humans, not coronaviruses, pointing to their likely origin in a lab kit. And whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol.
The authors of the proposal were a team led by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Although Mr. Baric is the leading expert on the technology, Mr. Daszak intended for much or most of the work to be done in Ms. Shi’s laboratory, despite giving a different impression to Darpa. He writes in the recently discovered documents that “I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan.”
Ms. Shi did most of her work with SARS-type viruses in the minimal-containment condition known as BSL2, whereas Mr. Baric, who regarded the viruses as seriously dangerous, worked in a more secure lab known as BSL3. Mr. Daszak noted that the lower-security labs would save money: “The BSL-2 nature of work on SARSr-CoVs makes our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” Mr. Baric replied to this comment that the viruses might be grown under BSL2 safety conditions in China, but “US researchers will likely freak out.”
Mr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance last year asserted that the DEFUSE project was never implemented: “The proposal was not funded and the work was never done, therefore it cannot have played a role in the origin of COVID-19.” But science is a competitive business. After Darpa turned down the DEFUSE proposal in February 2019, the researchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government funding and gone ahead by themselves. Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin. (Mr. Daszak, Mr. Baric and Ms. Shi didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. Chinese officials have demanded that the U.S. “stop defaming China” by raising the possibility of a lab leak.)
One piece is missing from the puzzle—the identity of the parent viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 was derived. The Chinese authorities have rigorously suppressed all information about the viruses being kept in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the documentary and scientific evidence already assembled seems sufficient to understand the genesis of the pandemic that killed millions.
Mr. Wade is a former science editor of the New York Times.
