Everything you think about COVID's origins may be wrong

The Covid-19 virus, also known as SARS2, didn’t catch us (humanity) at a good time. Countries are disunited, even hostile to each other. We are stuck with the lowest level of competent leaders the western capitalist countries have had in a long time.

They have included Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Angela Merkel, who seems to be half way to retirement. Then there’s Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi. This is not to say that the virus is their fault. They just couldn’t control it when it came.

Covid-19 was the perfect killer virus to put up against these bumblers. It was so good, it was as if it had been engineered in a laboratory, which is precisely what happened.

In the U.S., the issue of the origin of Covid became politicalized early on. It was mainly Trump’s fault when he brazenly announced that the Chinese had created Covid, as a military weapon. There is no evidence to sustain this allegation. The Chinese seemed to be surprised at its sudden outbreak.

Anti-Trump politicians immediately took the opposite tack that the virus had appeared in the wild, jumping from an animal to humans, at the Wuhan wet market. There is no evidence to sustain this allegation, nor was their evidence at the time to back up Trump’s allegation. Early infections took place in victims who had no connection with the wet market.

Now, more than a year after its debut, we know the whole story, including where it was created, why, who funded it, and who didn’t want us to know. We have also been alerted to a far more dangerous project, the “Global Virome Project.”

The best article about this ill-fated venture that ended up killing millions of people worldwide, and half a million in the U.S. alone, is called The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? It was written and researched by Nicholas Wade for the May 5 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Wade, a Brit, previously worked as a science writer and editor for Nature, Science, and at the New York Times for 20 years. My article relies on Wade’s as its primary source.

Since Wade’s article was written there has been a new study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that estimates more than 900,000 people have died of Covid-related disorders in the US, and more than seven million worldwide, nearly double the official count.

Covid-19 Lab Accident No Longer a “Conspiracy Theory”

Especially since the Pandemic began, the public has come to respect and trust scientists as never before. But we know little about a subset of scientists, the virologists. The only virologist we know is Dr. Fauci, whom most people respect, and sympathize with due to the hard time he received from Donald Trump.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, an early proponent of Gain of Function. Now, not so much.

This is how the virologists, those scientists who focus on viruses, earn their livings:

Between 8 and 11 August 2016, representatives from across the globe – high level policy and decision makers, thought leaders, subject matter experts, researchers, and representatives from international organizations (including those involved with human, animal, and environmental health), academia, donors, foundations, and the private sector – gathered at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center to develop a vision on the importance and feasibility of the GVP in building a world safe from the threat of emerging viral diseases.

The Global Virome Project (GVP) wants to get the jump on nature by creating lab versions of deadly viruses (Gain of Function) before Mother Nature gets around to doing it. Think about the ramifications of a storehouse of deadly viruses supervised by a group of technocrats, who could easily be overruled by political leaders bent on winning a war or just settling scores with their opponents. To accomplish this calamitous undertaking all it needs is $1.2 billion taxpayer dollars.

Gain of Function Can Kill You

Even if evidence was found that Covid-19 was transmitted from an animal (none currently exists), the leaders of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), would not be off the hook. Gain of Function is an even bigger threat to humanity than just one deadly virus.

The project is called “gain of function” and it’s already underway. At least $220 million has already been spent to rev up viruses to the point where they can cause a pandemic.

In fact, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic was a gain-of-function creation that got out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology because of weak safety precautions.

Even though the GVP was not founded until 2016, virologists have been fooling around with creating, or recreating, viruses for about 20 years. Among those that they have revived from the dead include, the 1918 flu virus, the almost extinct polio virus, and the dreaded smallpox. Your tax dollars at work!

Recently, virologists have worked on souping up the SARS virus. The original SARS, and a related virus, MERS, did originate with bats in the wild, according to the evidence. The virologists wanted to make it much more human friendly, or unfriendly. It became a gain-of-function project.

Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance and bagman.

The paper trail went from the NIAID, whose Director is none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci. It was agreed that Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance would be the paymaster who conveyed $82 million for the Wuhan project. The actual work, with the help of humanized mice, was done in Wuhan China during the Trump regime.

One of the scientists involved in the actual work was Shi Zheng-li, who is known as the “Bat Lady” because of her frequent 1500 kilometer trips from Wuhan to the caves of Yunnan to collect bats and their viruses. She was joined by Ralph S. Basic, a coronavirus researcher from the University of North Carolina.

Shi had a very good reputation for her work, with one exception. She was lackadasical about safety and security. As a result the new human-focused virus was out-the-door and into our world. We all know what happened next, and is still happening in India, Brazil and other hot spots. According to New York Magazine, not paying enough attention to safety and security is an occupational habit, and hazard, with virologists.

Virologists have a four-level safety scale. Dangerous viruses should be handled only at level four, which calls for wearing a “space suit” and manipulating the virus material in a closed box with the virologists sticking their gloved hands through a sealed opening. The problem is that many virologists do not like using such a cumbersome setup, and many drastically relax the safety protocol.

Shi performed the work using a biosafety standard level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office - that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact…” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.

Another top CDC official, retired CDC Director Robert Redfield stated he subscribes to the lab breakout theory. He has since come under fire from Fauci and others.

Why It Matters Where Covid-19 Came From

If Covid came from the transmission of the virus from an animal to a human, then scientists are going to have to look harder for evidence.

To date, there is no evidence, but virologists, such as Peter Daszak, have sold this theory to the media while labeling the lab accident theory as a “conspiracy theory.”

In addition, President Trump’s ill-considered jump into the middle of a topic he knew nothing about, set back the search for the origin of Covid-19 by a year.

If Covid came from a lab break there should be more investigation on the safety and security and training procedures in labs. There should be an ironclad ban on “Gain-of-Function” experiments that can create even more deadly viruses.

We should urge China to open the sequestered files of Shi Zheng-li and the files of Chinese officials who investigated the outbreak.

Shi Zheng-li, Wuhan virologist...

Efforts should be made to de-politicize the origin debate. It doesn’t matter who believes what when there is not sufficient evidence to sustain that belief. While complete neutrality might be too much to hope for, we can make that the goal we strive for.

We should begin thinking what exactly is a suitable penalty for someone who funds a project, facilitates it or whose inattention causes lab leaks that results in the deaths of at least millions of people.

Is Dr. Fauci Backing Off the Animal Transmission Theory, or Is He Playing With US?

The May 11, 2021, Transcript from the Senate Health, Education and Pensions Committee:

Dr. Fauci, do you think it’s possible that COVID-19 arose from a lab accident at a lab in Wuhan and should it be fully investigated?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: (02:04:38)

That possibility certainly exists and I am totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened.

Where is the Media?

The May 11 Congressional Hearing caused a slight stir among some of the media, including the Wall Street Journal, The Hill Rising, and several science oriented publications, including Science Magazine and the MIT Technological Review. There was not a word from the New York Times, or other major newspapers.

It’s not surprising that your local paper wouldn’t cover this story, if the New York Times ignores it. If it’s a national or international story, local papers will usually reprint the NYT article. In this case, there was nothing to reprint, or even be aware of a major story. The control of the mainstream media starts with the New York Times.

Postscript: The Times caught up with the story on May 13.

The Bottom Line

Why does it matter if Covid was made in a lab? It means that we didn’t need to go through the past year. It means that up to seven million people could still be with us.

• Gain-of-Function research must be ended. The risks outweigh any imagined gain.

• If any U.S. or Chinese virologists are found to be culpable, they should, at least, be banned from working with dangerous viruses.

• An international (UN) commission should regulate all work with viruses. Violators of strict safety runs should be prosecuted.

• The International Commission, and national signatories, should insure that covert military research leading to biological warfare should not be permitted.

• Individuals and organizations such as NIH, NIAID and others should be investigated and if found to have facillitated the pandemic, or covered up its origins, should be required to compensate victims and families of victims.

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Addendum (from Science Magazine):

18 Top Biologists Call for Investigation of Origin of Covid-19

Signatories and Employers:

1. Jesse D. Bloom1,2, 

2. Yujia Alina Chan3, 

3. Ralph S. Baric4, 

4. Pamela J. Bjorkman5, 

5. Sarah Cobey6, 

6. Benjamin E. Deverman3, 

7. David N. Fisman7, 

8. Ravindra Gupta8, 

9. Akiko Iwasaki9,2, 

10. Marc Lipsitch10, 

11. Ruslan Medzhitov9,2, 

12. Richard A. Neher11, 

13. Rasmus Nielsen12, 

14. Nick Patterson13, 

15. Tim Stearns14, 

16. Erik van Nimwegen11, 

17. Michael Worobey15, 

18. David A. Relman16,17,*

1. 1Basic Sciences and Computational Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA.

2. 2Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD 20815, USA.

3. 3Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

4. 4Department of Epidemiology and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

5. 5Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.

6. 6Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

7. 7Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada.

8. 8Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease, Cambridge, UK.

9. 9Department of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519, USA.

10. 10Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

11. 11Biozentrum, University of Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, Switzerland.

12. 12Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

13. 13Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

14. 14Department of Biology and Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

15. 15Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.

16. 16Department of Medicine and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

17. 17Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

1. ↵* Corresponding author. Email: relman@stanford.edu

Science  14 May 2021:
Vol. 372, Issue 6543, pp. 694
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0016 

LETTER:

On 30 December 2019, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases notified the world about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China. Since then, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), its transmission, pathogenesis, and mitigation by vaccines, therapeutics, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Yet more investigation is still needed to determine the origin of the pandemic. Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable. Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.

In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In November, the Terms of Reference for a China–WHO joint study were released. The information, data, and samples for the study's first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis. Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9]. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident. Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility.

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general, the United States and 13 other countries, and the European Union that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.

Finally, in this time of unfortunate anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, we note that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus—often at great personal cost. We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue.