Coronavirus: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Tue Aug 30 23:36:48 PDT 2022


https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-lab-leak-theory-isnt-dead/

The Lab-Leak Theory And What We Know About The Cover-Up

For more than a year after the onset of the pandemic, talking about the
possibility that the virus might have been lab-engineered was taboo. Then,
as the evidence continued to mount, it suddenly became acceptable to talk
about it in “respectable” circles. Today, however, we appear to have
gone full-circle: a determined effort is once again underway to dismiss
the lab-leak theory for good — even though no new evidence has emerged
to disprove it.

Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it
have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s
astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of
the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to
when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have
proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been
systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments:
America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories —
but it’s also true.

One of the main “conspiracy theorists” is none other than Jeffrey
Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia
University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
and [34]chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your typical
tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently co-authored [35]a paper
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an
independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes there is clear
proof that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public
health agency, and many members of the scientific community have been
impeding a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to
cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have played a role
in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Many are convinced that the debate is settled, largely because almost
immediately a public narrative surrounding the origin of the virus
emerged. This held that the virus was zoonotic in nature, meaning that it
had jumped from one or more animals (probably, it was argued, bats) to one
or more humans, possibly through one or more unidentified animal
intermediate hosts, and most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market  —
even though there was no conclusive evidence of any of this.

Early in the pandemic, an alternative theory emerged, suggesting that the
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — known, of all things, for its
research into SARS-related coronaviruses, and only eight miles from the
Huanan Seafood Market — might have had something to do with an
accidental outbreak. From a purely circumstantial standpoint, and
considering the [36]long history of safety breaches previously recorded at
various facilities in China and throughout the world, one could have been
justified for considering it, at the very least, a lead worth pursuing.

[37]More from this author

Is Giorgia Meloni an EU puppet?

By Thomas Fazi

As Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest
philanthropic research funding body, notes in his bestselling book Spike:
“It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off
in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab …
which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses” —
especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human
cells”. If this were a coincidence, he adds, it would be a “huge”
one.

Yet from the beginning the very notion that the virus might have a
laboratory-based origin was stifled. The hot denials came not only from
the Chinese authorities and [38]the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself,
but also from [39]the WHO and leading Western scientists, institutions and
media organisations. For around a year and a half, the “lab-leak”
hypothesis was ridiculed and dismissed as [40]a fringe conspiracy theory
and anyone who raised it deemed a crackpot — and even subject to
censorship on Twitter and Facebook.

The mood seemed to shift when, beginning in mid-2021, several high-profile
Western scientists, intelligence officials and politicians —
[41]including President Joe Biden — started to acknowledge the
plausibility of a laboratory accident. Almost overnight, the lab-leak
scenario went from being a “crackpot theory” to a credible and
legitimate hypothesis. On the same day Biden announced that his
administration would be investigating the origins of Covid-19,
“including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal
or from a laboratory accident”, [42]Facebook stated that it would “no
longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured” from
its apps.

More than a year later, there is simply no conclusive evidence of whether
the virus is zoonotic or artificial in nature — even though the public
narrative continues to be heavily skewed towards the natural origin
theory. What we do know, however, is that a massive cover-up was
orchestrated from the earliest days of the pandemic by leading members of
the scientific establishment and the Chinese authorities.

This incredible story sheds light on several key aspects of the entire
pandemic management, something that Toby Green and I go into in detail in
our forthcoming [43]book: the stifling of critical opinion, the lack of
transparency by public institutions, the deeply unscientific manner in
which the “scientific consensus” about many aspects of the pandemic
came about, and how some of the leading actors of the pandemic tragedy —
the WHO, Anthony Fauci, the NIH, leading scientific journals — were
already engaging in the publication of papers which traduced the
scientific method from the very first days of the pandemic.

[44]More from this author

Civil disobedience is coming

By Thomas Fazi

Here’s a brief recap of what we know about the cover-up — much of
which we are aware of thanks to a series of Freedom of Information Act
(FoIA) requests. Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was
part of [45]an active and highly collaborative US-China scientific
research programme funded by the US government — primarily through the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by
Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH — and coordinated by the
US-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The
group’s research work went beyond the simple analysis of existing
coronaviruses, and actually [46]involved the engineering of “chimeric”
bat coronaviruses, some of which proved to be potentially more infectious
to humans — a highly risky technique known as gain-of-function.

In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other institutions)
[47]sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into
existing bat coronaviruses — spots in the surface protein of a virus
that can boost its entry into human cells. The DARPA proposal was rejected
— and yet the presence of a furin cleavage site is precisely what sets
SARS-CoV-2 apart from all known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the
researchers carry out the research anyway, possibly using other sources of
funding? Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore [48]stated that
he considered this to be “the smoking gun for the origin of the
virus”.

In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of
the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment, the question
of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly
through research part-funded by the US government, was taken very
seriously. As a result of [49]an FoIA request, we know that on February 1,
2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call
with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of
whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the
virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the
Wuhan lab.

Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to
Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that it took an
early and active role in promoting the “zoonotic hypothesis” and the
rejection of the laboratory-associated hypothesis. Indeed, within days of
the February 1 call, a group of virologists, including some who were on it
and had endorsed the “artificial origin” theory, prepared the first
draft of a hugely influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
— [50]subsequently published in Nature — that argued for the exact
opposite.

Moreover, the NIH [51]has resisted the release of important evidence, such
as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has continued to
redact materials released under FoIA, including a remarkable [52]290-page
redaction in a recent release. Even more incredibly, at some point after
March 2020 a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences [53]were deleted
from the NIH’s own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.

[54]More from this author

The dangers of monkeypox hysteria

By Thomas Fazi

The strangeness doesn’t end here. In February 2020, an influential
letter signed by 27 global experts [55]was published in The Lancet,
strongly condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does
not have a natural origin”. The letter proved crucial, alongside the
aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud the lab-leak hypothesis
and giving the illusion of scientific consensus. In late 2020,
however, emails released following a FoIA request showed that the Lancet
statement [56]had been orchestrated by one of the 27 co-authors — none
other than Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. [57]It was also
revealed that all but one of the other 26 scientists were linked to the
Wuhan lab, their colleagues or funders.

Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as chair of the task force created
by the Lancet Covid-19 Commission with the aim of establishing none other
than “the origins of Covid-19”; and shortly thereafter as the only US
representative to a [58]WHO fact-finding mission to China tasked with the
same goal. Unsurprisingly, both task forces found that the virus was most
likely zoonotic (i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a
laboratory incident was extremely unlikely.

The WHO report, in particular, [59]came under heavy criticism, leading to
the establishment of a specific work group tasked with ascertaining the
origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of
Novel Pathogens, which published [60]its first preliminary report in June
2022. The results were inconclusive, largely because “key pieces of
data” from China were missing, leading the WHO to recommend in its
strongest terms yet that a deeper probe was required into whether a lab
accident may be to blame. As we have seen, however, it’s not only the
Chinese government that is covering up its tracks about its possible
involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 — but the American one as
well.

A new campaign is now underway to put the lab-leak theory to rest once and
for all. The recent publication of [61]two new studies providing more
evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans via the live animal trade at
the Huanan Seafood Market has led several outlets to emphatically claim
that [62]“the Covid lab leak theory is dead”, once again misleading
citizens into thinking that the debate is now really settled.

But the studies don’t provide any evidence that the virus didn’t
escape from the Wuhan lab — they simply argue that it’s not a
plausible scenario, also based on the fact that there’s no evidence that
the virus was present at the WIV before the pandemic started. But of
course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. [63]As Sachs notes,
“this [claim] is only as good as the limited data on which it is based,
and verification of this claim is dependent on gaining access to any other
unpublished viral sequences that are deposited in relevant US and Chinese
databases”.

Ultimately, the virus may indeed be conclusively proven to be natural in
origin. But in order to do that, as Sachs stresses, a real independent
scientific investigation is needed. The public deserves to be shown
incontrovertible proof that the Wuhan lab has nothing to do with all this
— but that means that the US and Chinese governments have to open up
their lab records instead of going out of their way [64]to prevent a real
investigation. Amid a time of heightened geopolitical tensions and
crumbling faith in political leadership across the West, transparency is
needed more than ever. If we can’t get this one right, how else can we
be expected to place our faith in authorities ever again?

34. https:/covid19commission.org/
35. https:/www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
36. https:/genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20040427-03
37. https:/unherd.com/2022/08/is-giorgia-meloni-an-eu-puppet/
38. https:/www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
39. https:/www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-statement-on-ihr-emergency-committee-on-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)
40. https:/www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
41. https:/eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/26/biden-urges-probe-wuhan-lab-leak/7449950002/
42. https:/fortune.com/2021/05/27/facebook-covid-19-man-made-ban-lift/
43. https:/www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-covid-consensus/
44. https:/unherd.com/2022/08/britains-elites-have-lost-control/
45. https:/grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-AI110964-06
46. https:/www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
47. https:/drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf
48. https:/www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-how-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-suddenly-became-credible/
49. https:/republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Letter-Re.-Feb-1-Emails-011122.pdf
50. https:/www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
51. https:/www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
52. https:/theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research-wuhan-redacted/
53. https:/www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/coronavirus-sequences-deleted-china-nih
54. https:/unherd.com/2022/08/the-dangers-of-monkeypox-hysteria/
55. https:/www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext
56. https:/usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Baric_Daszak_email.pdf
57. https:/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scientists-dismissed-wuhan-lab-theory-linked-chinese/
58. https:/www.who.int/publications-detail-redirect/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part
59. https:/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/04/us/covid-origins-letter.html
60. https:/cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/scientific-advisory-group-on-the-origins-of-novel-pathogens/sago-report-09062022.pdf
61. https:/www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-origins-wuhan-china-market-studies/
62. https:/theconversation.com/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-is-dead-heres-how-we-know-the-virus-came-from-a-wuhan-market-188163
63. https:/www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
64. https:/www.currentaffairs.org/2022/08/why-the-chair-of-the-lancets-covid-19-commission-thinks-the-us-government-is-preventing-a-real-investigation-into-the-pandemic


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