U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at cent

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NIH acknowledges US funded gain-of-function at Wuhan lab, Sen. Rand Paul reacts
by Allie Hennard
abc13 WBKO News
Published: Oct. 21, 2021 at 4:25 PM MST
https://www.wbko.com/2021/10/21/nih-ack ... ul-reacts/

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, they did do it,” said Sen. Rand Paul.

The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used on the funding.

“So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring,” Sen. Rand Paul said.

In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”

“Right now we have a virus where the hold world has been turned on its head, it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has a 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality,” Sen. Rand Paul said. “So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure that we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country, it needs to be looked at.”

Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.

“He’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months,” Sen. Rand Paul said.

Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.

“This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government,” Sen. Paul said.

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The National Institutes of Health has corrected what it calls the untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard spoke with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul this morning who has questioned Dr. Fauci on numerous occasions claiming he did fund the research.

[Senator Rand Paul] “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, we did do it.”

[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] The National Institutes of Health now admitting to funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used.

[Senator Rand Paul] “So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring.”

[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”

Department of Health & Human Services
Public Health Service
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 20892

October 20, 2021

The Honorable James Comer
Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight and Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Representative Comer:

Thank you for your continued interest in the work of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I am writing today to provide additional information and documents regarding NIH's grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.

It is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2 . Both the progress report and the analysis attached here again confirm that conclusion, as the sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant.

The fifth and final progress report for Grant R01AI110964, awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. is attached with redactions only for personally identifiable information. This progress report was submitted to NIH in August 2021 in response to NIH’s compliance enforcement efforts. It includes data from a research project conducted during the 2018-19 grant period using bat coronavirus genome sequences already existing in nature.

The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the humanACE2 receptor in a mouse model. All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, remained unchanged. In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do. Regardless, the viruses being studied under this grant were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2.

The research plan was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did not to fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans. As such, the research was not subject to departmental review under the HHSP3CO Framework. However, out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight, language was included in the terms and conditions of the grant award to EcoHealth that outlined criteria for a secondary review, such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth. These measures would prompt a secondary review to determine whether the research aims should be reevaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted.

EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant. EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award. Additional compliance efforts continue.

The second document is a genetic analysis demonstrating that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses used in experiments under the NIH grant from 2014-2018 are decades removed from SARS-CoV-2 evolutionarily. The analysis compares the sequence relationships between

• SARS-CoV- 1, the cause of the SARS outbreak in 2003;
• SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19 pandemic
• WIV-1, a naturally occurring bat coronavirus used in experiments funded by the NIH;
• RaTG13, one of the closest bat coronavirus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and
• BANAL-52, one of several bat coronaviruses recently identified from bats living in caves in Laos

While it might appear that the similarity of RaTG13and BANAL-52 bat coronaviruses to SARS CoV-2 is close because it overlaps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. For comparison, today's human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago.

The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. If you or your staff have questions, NIH would be pleased to brief you on these documents.

Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Principal Deputy Director

[Senator Rand Paul] “Right now we have a virus, you know, the whole world has been turned on its head, and it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses that they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality. So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country. It needs to be looked at.”

[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Dr. Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.

[Senator Rand Paul] “And he’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. And so, yes, Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months.”

Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.

Richard H. Ebright
@R_H_Ebright

The novel chimeric coronaviruses constructed under the NIH grant to EcoHealth unequivocally meet the definition of "enhanced potential pandemic pathogens" in the P3CO Framework.
8:03 PM · Oct 21, 2021·Twitter Web App

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/ ... 3795551242
Richard H. Ebright !R_H_Ebright Oct 20
NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964.

***

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 20
Replying to @R_H_Ebright
The NIH received the relevant documents in 2018 and reviewed the documents in 2020 and again in 2021.
The NIH -- specifically, Collins, Fauci, and Tabak -- lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public. Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.

***

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 20
See thread at:

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
How many times can one grantee violate the Terms and Conditions of one NIH grant without being penalized?
(Apparently, if the grantee is EcoHealth Alliance, the number is at least four.)
theintercept.com/2021/10/10/01/nih.
theintercept.com
NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years... The unusual timing of a bat coronavirus grant suggests that an earlier version may have been revised.

4:48 PM Oct 1, 2021

***

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Replying to @R_H_Ebright
Violation 1:
"No funds are provided and no funds can be used to support gain-of-function research covered under the October 17, 2014 White House Announcement (NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-15-011)."

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 2:
"[S]hould any of the MERS-like SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must stop all experiments with these viruses"

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 3:

"[S]hould any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must..provide..NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist..with..data"

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 4:

"Progress reports document grantee recipient accomplishments and compliance with terms of award. Progress reports... are due the 15th of the month preceding the month in which the budget period ends" (e.g., if the budget period ends 11/30, the due date is 10/15)."

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 5:

"Effective February 9, 2017, if the recipient organization has submitted a renewal application on or before the data by which a..Final-RPPR..would be required for the current competitive segment, then submission of an 'Interim-RPPR' via eRA Commons is now required."

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 6:

"NIAID defines a Highly Pathogenic Agent as an infectious Agent or Toxin that may warrant a biocontainment safety level of BSL3 or higher..When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report if your IBC or equivalent body or official has determined, for example, by conducting a risk assessment, that the work being planned or performed under this grant may be conducted at a..safety level that is lower than BSL3."

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 7:

"When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report:.. Any changes in the use of the Agent(s)..including its restricted experiments that have resulted in a change in the required biocontainment level, and any..change in location."

Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 8:

"When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report:.. If work with a new or additional Agent(s)..is proposed in the upcoming project period, provide..list of the new and/or additional Agent(s) that will be studied"

[Senator Rand Paul] “This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government.

[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Allie Hennard, WBKO News.

[admin]

NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years Late. The unusual timing of a bat coronavirus grant report suggests that an earlier version may have been revised.
by Mara Hvistendahl, Sharon Lerner
The Intercept
October 1 2021, 10:11 a.m.

A PROGRESS REPORT detailing controversial U.S.-funded research into bat coronaviruses in China was filed more than two years after it was due and long after the corresponding grant had concluded. The U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance submitted the report to its funder, the National Institutes of Health, in September 2020, while the group was engulfed in controversy surrounding its work with partners in China. The Intercept obtained the report, along with the grant proposal and other documents, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Scientists consulted by The Intercept described the late date as highly unusual and said it merited an explanation, given the controversy surrounding the EcoHealth Alliance’s work at the time that the report was submitted. The scientists spoke under the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic with the NIH, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.

The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.

Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.

The Intercept is seeking any missing progress reports, among other documents, through ongoing litigation against the NIH.

The agency has been criticized for withholding information that might relate to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which is now responsible for more than 4.5 million deaths around the world. “NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.”

The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them. “What [the NIH] really needs to do is not just react to FOIA requests. They need to be proactive and say, ‘OK, here’s the process, and here’s the outcome.’ And they haven’t done that,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. “That just raises questions about why they’re dragging their heels. They should have provided all relevant information months ago.”

The EcoHealth Alliance and its longtime partner the Wuhan Institute of Virology have come under intense scrutiny in the search for the pandemic’s origins. The two groups are at the center of the lab-origin hypothesis, the idea that the coronavirus could have emerged through a lab accident, the collection and storage of thousands of bat coronavirus samples, or through divisive research that makes viruses more transmissible in order to study how they evolve.

There has been no shortage of unsubstantiated ideas in circulation about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, several of which continue to be used as political wedges by former President Donald Trump and the far right. But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak helped organize scientists to tar any discussion of a possible lab origin, even if it was science-based, as a conspiracy theory.

In February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published a statement decrying the spread of “rumours and misinformation” around the origins of the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read the letter. Emails later obtained by U.S. Right to Know showed that Daszak had orchestrated the effort. Daszak has also served on two international committees tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic, despite having a clear conflict of interest. (Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of these committees, a task force convened by The Lancet, would be disbanded.)

For months, Daszak continued to push the notion that a lab origin was preposterous. “They’re coming at this with the belief system that there’s a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people,” he said in an online seminar in October 2020, of those who believe it’s possible that the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged from a lab. “They come at it with a belief system. So logic jumps out the window.”

The unusually dated EcoHealth Alliance progress report adds to a string of missing, incomplete, or disappeared information that could be relevant to the origins of the pandemic.

The report describes work done in year four of the five-year, $3.1 million NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It was due in April 2018. The version released by the NIH was submitted over two years later, after The Intercept had filed a public records request seeking the bat coronavirus and other NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance.

The NIH sends out automatic reminders ahead of key due dates and makes the distribution of new funding contingent upon receipt of the previous years’ annual reports. According to an NIH instruction manual, submission dates are automatically generated, meaning that the date could not be a typo.

Adding to the evidence that the annual update was submitted in 2020 are references to studies that were published after 2018, when the update was due. NIH progress reports include a section in which researchers list any papers that have been published or accepted for publication. In the EcoHealth Alliance progress report, the section lists papers published in 2019 and 2020.

Many researchers say the experiment that involved infecting humanized mice with altered bat coronaviruses described in the annual report qualifies as “gain-of-function research of concern.” None of the viruses described in the experiment are related to SARS-CoV-2 closely enough to have evolved into it. But scientists said the odd submission date raises questions about whether information in an earlier draft of the report had been altered — or omitted — amid controversy over the EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan.

Early on, several groups, media outlets, and individuals requested the grant documents and communications surrounding them, an effort that apparently irked Daszak. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and e-mails to the NIH,” he told Nature in August 2020. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”

The Intercept requested the grant documents from the NIH on September 3 of that year. The anomalous progress report was submitted less than two weeks later, on September 16.

The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.

Federal funding documents are routinely released under the Freedom of Information Act. In this case, public interest in the origins of the pandemic should have led to a timely and full release of documents, transparency experts say. “The presumption of disclosure is all the more crucial when dealing with documents that are squarely in the public interest,” said Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “And records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”

“Records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”

The origins of the pandemic remain hotly debated. In August, President Joe Biden announced that a three-month inquiry into the matter by U.S. intelligence agencies was inconclusive. Many scientists lean toward a natural origin, but in recent months an increasing number of prominent researchers have gone on record as saying that a lab origin deserves thorough investigation.

The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the city’s Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.

Then in July, after the Washington Post reported on other discrepancies in early WHO data, the WHO changed the virus sequence IDs associated with three early patients described in the joint report.

There are also important gaps in what we know about the history of RaTG13, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, which was sequenced and written about by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last summer, Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, admitted to Science magazine that RaTG13 was a renamed version of a virus found in a Chinese mineshaft where miners fell ill in 2012. But that admission only came following pressure from independent scientists.

Also unresolved are questions about revisions made to public databases of viruses that infect pangolins and about a database that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took offline in September 2019, claiming that it had been hacked.

In 2019, the NIH renewed the EcoHealth Alliance bat coronavirus grant for a second five-year period. The Trump administration suspended funding in April 2020. (The NIH reinstated the grant in July 2020, under strict terms that Daszak said his group could not meet.) It is unclear whether the EcoHealth Alliance would have been required to file a progress report for the final year of the grant, given that it was terminated.

Correction: October 3, 2021

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Peter Daszak did not sign a February 2020 letter in The Lancet. Although Daszak had originally suggested keeping his name off the letter, in the end he did in fact sign it.

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Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research. The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
by Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett
The Intercept
September 23 2021, 11:16 a.m.

A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.

Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.

The furin cleavage site enables the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell and is one of the reasons that the virus is so easily transmissible and harmful. But scientists are divided over how this particular site wound up in the virus, and the cleavage site became a major focus of the heated debate over the origins of the pandemic.

Many who believe that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a laboratory have pointed out that it is unlikely that the particular sequence of amino acids that make up the furin cleavage site would have occurred naturally.

Adherents of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a natural spillover from animal hosts have argued that it could have evolved naturally from an as-yet undiscovered virus. Further, they argued, scientists were unlikely to have engineered the feature.

“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” 23 scientists wrote earlier this month in an article in the journal Cell. “There is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”

But the proposal describes the process of looking for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses the scientists had sampled and inserting them into the spikes of SARS-related viruses in the laboratory.

“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 that we propose below is based on the case histories of these miners and their hospital treatment. This simple theory accounts for all the key features of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, including ones that have puzzled virologists since the outbreak began.

The theory can account for the origin of the polybasic furin cleavage site, which is a region of the viral spike protein that makes it susceptible to cleavage by the host enzyme furin and which greatly enhances viral spread in the body. This furin site is novel to SARS-CoV-2 compared to its near relatives (Coutard, et al., 2020). The theory also explains the exceptional affinity of the virus spike protein for human receptors, which has also surprised virologists (Letko et al., 2020; Piplani et al, 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020). The theory further explains why the virus has barely evolved since the pandemic began, which is also a deeply puzzling aspect of a virus supposedly new to humans (Zhan et al., 2020; van Dorp et al., 2020; Chaw et al., 2020). Lastly, the theory neatly explains why SARS-CoV-2 targets the lungs, which is unusual for a coronavirus (Huang et al., 2020).

-- A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic [W/Comments], by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

How I Learned to Start Worrying

Oh, come on. Lab-made? Nonsense! Back in January, that was my knee-jerk reaction when ideas that Covid-19 is caused by a laboratory leak had just surfaced. Bioweapon? Well, that is just Flat Earth crazies territory. Thus, whenever I kept hearing anything about non-natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, I brushed it aside under similar sentiments. So what if there is a virology institute in Wuhan? Who knows how many of those are sprinkled throughout China.

At some point, it became necessary to brush such theories aside in a substantiated manner, as their proponents began to back up their theses about the possible artificial nature of the virus with arguments from molecular biology, and when engaging them in debate, I wanted to smash their conspiracy theories with cold, hard scientific facts. Just like that Nature paper (or so I thought).

So it was then, in pursuit of arguments against the virus’s lab-madeness, that I got infected by the virus of doubt. What was the source of my doubts? The fact that the deeper you dive into the research activities of coronavirologists over the past 15–20 years, the more you realize that creating chimeras like CoV2 was commonplace in their labs.

And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not necessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. Most likely, it was thanks to this new furin site that the new mutant managed to jump species from its original host to humans.

Indeed, virologists, including the leader of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, have done many similar things in the past — both replacing the RBM in one type of virus by an RBM from another, or adding a new furin site that can provide a species-specific coronavirus with an ability to start using the same receptor (e.g. ACE2) in other species. In fact, Shi Zhengli’s group was creating chimeric constructs as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2017, when they created a whole of 8 new chimeric coronaviruses with various RBMs. In 2019 such work was in full swing, as WIV was part of a $3.7 million NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Under its auspices, Shi Zhengli co-authored a 2019 paper that called for continued research into synthetic viruses and testing them in vitro and in vivo...

A Killer Intro

It is impossible to ignore the introduction of a PRRA insert between S1 and S2: it sticks out like a splinter. This insert creates the furin cleavage site, which I mentioned at the very beginning. Let me explain what a furin site is....

-- Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research, by Yuri Deigin

IV. “Is It a Complete Coincidence?”

Even so, in January and February of 2020, there were thoughtful people who were speaking up, formulating their perplexities.

One person was Sam Husseini, an independent journalist. He went to a CDC press conference at the National Press Club on February 11, 2020. By then, 42,000 people had gotten sick in China and more than a thousand had died. But there were only 13 confirmed cases in the U.S. Halfway through the Q&A period, Husseini went to the microphone and asked the CDC’s representative, Anne Schuchat, where the virus had come from. His head was spinning, he told me later.

“Obviously the main concern is how to stop the virus,” Husseini said; nonetheless, he wanted to know more about its source. “Is it the CDC’s contention,” he asked, “that there’s absolutely no relation to the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan? It’s my understanding that this is the only place in China with a BSL-4 lab. We in the United States have, I think, two dozen or so, and there have been problems and incidents.” (A BSL-4 laboratory is a maximum-security biosafety-level-four facility, used to house research on the most dangerous known pathogens. New York has confirmed there are at least 11 BSL-4 facilities currently operating in the U.S.) Husseini hastened to say that he wasn’t implying that what happened in Wuhan was in any way intentional. “I’m just asking, Is it a complete coincidence that this outbreak happened in the one city in China with a BSL-4 lab?”

Schuchat thanked Husseini for his questions and comments. Everything she’d seen was quite consistent with a natural, zoonotic origin for the disease, she said.

That same month, a group of French scientists from Aix-Marseille University posted a paper describing their investigation of a small insertion in the genome of the new SARS-2 virus. The virus’s spike protein contained a sequence of amino acids that formed what Etienne Decroly and colleagues called a “peculiar furin-like cleavage site” — a chemically sensitive region on the lobster claw of the spike protein that would react in the presence of an enzyme called furin, which is a type of protein found everywhere within the human body, but especially in the lungs. When the spike senses human furin, it shudders, chemically speaking, and the enzyme opens the protein, commencing the tiny morbid ballet whereby the virus burns a hole in a host cell’s outer membrane and finds its way inside.

The code for this particular molecular feature — not found in SARS or any SARS-like bat viruses, but present in a slightly different form in the more lethal MERS virus — is easy to remember because it’s a roar: “R-R-A-R.” The letter code stands for amino acids: arginine, arginine, alanine, and arginine. Its presence, so Decroly and his colleagues observed, may heighten the “pathogenicity” — that is, the god-awfulness — of a disease.

Botao Xiao, a professor at the South China University of Technology, posted a short paper on a preprint server titled “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus.” Two laboratories, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were not far from the seafood market, which was where the disease was said to have originated, Xiao wrote — in fact, the WHCDC was only a few hundred yards away from the market — whereas the horseshoe bats that hosted the disease were hundreds of miles to the south. (No bats were sold in the market, he pointed out.) It was unlikely, he wrote, that a bat would have flown to a densely populated metropolitan area of 15 million people. “The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan,” Xiao believed. He urged the relocation of “biohazardous laboratories” away from densely populated places. His article disappeared from the server.

-- The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus, by Botao Xiao, and Lei Xiao

And late in the month, a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai, gave a lecture on the coronavirus in which he described the anomalous R-R-A-R furin cleavage site. The virus was “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once,” Fang said — natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.” When the Taiwan News published an article about Fang’s talk, Fang disavowed his own comments, and the video copy of the talk disappeared from the website of the Taiwan Public Health Association. “It has been taken down for a certain reason,” the association explained. “Thank you for your understanding.”

-- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?, by Nicholson Baker

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

Comparing the rival scenarios of SARS2 origin.

The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.

1) The place of origin. Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the COVID-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.

It’s a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.

2) Natural history and evolution. The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further four, the epidemic took off.

But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV,” they wrote.

Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Baric writes that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”

A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.

The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of a lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and that they have identified it — a humanized mouse from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

3) The furin cleavage site. The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.

Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2’s furin cleavage site to be generated, even though it can’t completely be ruled out. The site’s four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”

So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

4) A question of codons. There’s another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path for a natural emergence origin even further.

As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA unit can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus’s least popular codon for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.

Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its cousin viruses don’t, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The CCT codes for proline, the two CGG’s for two arginines, and the GC is the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2’s furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity.

“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”

Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance, any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

-- The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?, by Nicholas Wade

The new proposal, which also described a plan to mass vaccinate bats in caves, does not provide conclusive evidence that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a lab. And virus experts remain sharply divided over its origins. But several scientists who work with coronaviruses told The Intercept that they felt that the proposal shifted the terrain of the debate.

Tipping the Scales

“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.

“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”

“A possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”

Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”

But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana.

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email. He said he believed that the research being proposed had the potential to fall in the category of gain-of-function research of concern, as did an experiment that was detailed in another grant proposal recently obtained by The Intercept. The government funds such research, in which scientists intentionally make viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, only in a narrow range of circumstances. And DARPA rejected the proposal at least in part because of concerns that it involved such research.

While Racaniello acknowledged that the research in the DARPA proposal entailed some danger, he said “the benefits far, far outweigh the risk.” He also said the fact that the viruses described in the proposal were not known pathogens mitigated the concern. “This is not SARS,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused a 2003 outbreak. “It’s SARS-related.”

But SARS-CoV-2 is not a direct descendant of that virus — it’s a relative.

In fact, the viruses described in the grant proposal, which was first posted online by the research group DRASTIC, were not known pathogens. And the authors of the grant proposal make the case that because the scientists would be using SARS-related bat viruses, as opposed to the SARS virus that was known to infect humans, the research was exempt from “gain-of-function concerns.” But according to several scientists interviewed by The Intercept, the viruses presented a threat nevertheless.

“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Jesse Bloom, a professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and director of the Bloom Lab, which studies the evolution of viruses. Bloom pointed out that the scientists acknowledge the risk to humans in their proposal. “It’s an explicit goal of the grant to identify the bat SARS-related coronaviruses that they think pose the highest risk.”

Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology who directs the developmental biology laboratory at New York Medical College, also said the fact that the viruses weren’t known to be dangerous didn’t preclude the possibility that they might become so. “That’s really disingenuous,” Newman said of the argument. “The people that are claiming natural emergence say that it begins with a bat virus that evolved to be compatible with humans. If you use that logic, then this virus could be a threat because it could also make that transition.” Newman, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research and founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said that the proposal confirmed some of his worst fears. “This is not like slightly stepping over the line,” said Newman. “This is doing everything that people say is going to cause a pandemic if you do it.”

While the grant proposal does not provide the smoking gun that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, for some scientists it adds to the evidence that it might have. “Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center. “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place. The virus is going to undergo a whole bunch of changes to try and cope with its imperfections. So who knows what will come of it.” The risks of such research are profound and irreversible, he said. “You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”

DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense, said regulations prevented it from confirming that it had reviewed the proposal. “Since EcoHealth Alliance may or may not be the direct source of the material in question, and we are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from divulging bidders or any associated proposal details, we recommend that you reach out to them to confirm the document’s authenticity,” a DARPA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The British Daily Telegraph reported that it had confirmed the document’s legitimacy with a former member of the Trump administration.

The Telegraph story erroneously reported that the scientists proposed to inoculate bats with live viruses. In fact, they hoped to inoculate them with chimeric S proteins, which were proposed to be developed through a subcontract in the grant in Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not in Wuhan. Baric did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Conflict of Interest

Many questions remain about the proposal, including whether any of the research described in it was completed. Even without the DARPA funding, there were many other potential ways to pay for the experiments. And scientists interviewed for this article agreed that often researchers do some of the science they describe in proposals before or after they submit them.

“This was a highly funded group of researchers that wouldn’t let one rejection halt their work,” said Chan, the “Viral” author.

Perhaps the most troubling question about the proposal is why, within the small group of scientists who have been searching for information that could shed light on the origins of the pandemic, there has apparently been so little awareness of the planned work until now. Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it.

Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, has actively sought to quash interest in the idea that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab. In February 2020, as the pandemic began to grip major cities in the U.S., he began organizing scientists to write an open letter that was published in the Lancet addressing the origins of the virus. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” read the statement signed by Daszak and 26 co-authors. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Daszak directed and gathered signatures for the letter, all the while suggesting that he and his collaborators on the proposed DARPA project, Baric and Wang, distance themselves from the effort.

“I spoke with Linfa [Wang] last night about the statement we sent round. He thinks, and I agree with him, that you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote to Baric in February 2020, just weeks before it appeared in the journal, according to an email surfaced a year later by public health investigative research group U.S. Right to Know. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Ultimately, Daszak did sign the letter.

“I also think this is a good decision,” Baric replied. “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”

Baric and Wang — a professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore — did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept about their decision not to sign the letter in the Lancet.

Daszak was also a member of the joint team the World Health Organization sent to China in February 2020 to investigate the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had been released from a laboratory. (In March, WHO called for further investigation of the origins of the virus and stated that “all hypotheses remain open.”)

“I find it really disappointing that one of the members of the joint WHO-China team, which is essentially the group of scientists that were tasked as representatives of both the scientific community and the World Health Organization of investigating this, are actually on this proposal, knew that this line of research was at least under consideration, and didn’t mention it all,” said Bloom, of Fred Hutch. “Whatever information that relates to help people think about this just needs to be made transparently available and explained.”

Correction: September 24, 2021

A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that the EcoHealth Alliance proposal had been featured on Sky News Australia.

Correction: September 23, 2021, 3:30 p.m.

A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Linfa Wang was a member of the WHO-China team.

[admin]

Whistleblower US scientist who worked with Wuhan lab claims COVID WAS genetically engineered and leaked from the site - and says 'the US government is to blame' because it funded the research
by Aneeta Bhole
Daily Mail.com
PUBLISHED: 11:00 EST, 3 December 2022 | UPDATED: 16:47 EST, 3 December 2022
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ed-replace

• Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China
• Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised
• EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the National Institutes of Health
• Led by Dr Peter Daszak - there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant came in September 2021

A scientist who worked closely with a US-funded Wuhan lab has claimed that Covid was genetically engineered and leaked from the Chinese facility.

Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, called the pandemic 'one of the greatest cover-ups in history' and the 'biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.'

In his expert opinion, whistleblower Huff believes that grant funding provided by Anthony Fauci by way of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, was linked to the 'creation of SARS-CoV-2.'

He claims NIH '[funded] gain-of-function work and the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved' with this work.

Gain-of-function (GOF) work has been widely believed to have created SARS-CoV-2, Huff stressing that it was key in creating the aggressive and contagious disease.

[x]
Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claims that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China

[x]
Led by Dr Peter Daszak (left) there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant coming from Anthony Fauci in September 2021

[x]
Huff points to China's gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments and led to the leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology

The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high security lab specializing in coronaviruses, has been cast into the spotlight over the past two years, many questioning whether it could be the source of the highly contagious disease.

Both China and the lab have vehemently denied allegations, but evidence of a lab leak, have been gaining traction as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers.

Experts have suggested Covid may have escaped from the Wuhan facility through an infected researcher, improper disposal of waste or potential breaches in security at the site.

In explosive allegations made in his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, Huff claims that the pandemic was the result of the US government funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.

Speaking to The Sun, Huff said that 'the US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.'

He points to China's GOF experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments which led to a lab leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[x]
Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally'

[x]
In September, Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money

'EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,' he said.

The army veteran, from Michigan, said the organization taught the Wuhan lab the 'best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species' for many years.

'China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,' he said.

'I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.'

In his book, the infectious diseases expert claims 'greedy scientists killed millions of people globally,' and goes as far as to claim the US government covered it all up.

Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally.'

'The shocking part of all of this is how the United States government lied to all of us,' he said.

[x]
The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam'

[x]

EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the NIH - and developed close working ties with the Wuhan lab.

In September, Anthony Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money.

The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam,' according to the Wall Street Journal.

NIH have identified the region as 'high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first 'spilled over' from bats to people.'

While the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance's claim that Covid-19 emerged through a 'spill over' from animals.

Many scientists disagree and have said the circumstantial and biological evidence suggests a lab leak.

Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, serving as vice president from 2015, said he worked on the classified side of the research program as a US government scientist.

Former intelligence chiefs and diplomats have already claimed Covid was leaked from a Wuhan lab in the 'cover-up of the century.'

America's former top diplomat in East Asia, David Stilwell, telling The Sun in September 2021 that 'this makes Watergate look easy.'

'People are for some reason bent on insisting on having a slam-dunk, air-tight case that China produced this virus,' he said at the time.

'Of course, the PRC is not going to let you in there to see their labs, but so many people have used that problem to stop further inquiry.

'This isn't a legal case, we are not looking for indisputable evidence; there is enough circumstantial evidence.'

In 2019, the Wuhan lab started working with the EcoHealth Alliance on a USAID program called PREDICT, which focuses on emerging pandemic threats.

PREDICT had been designed to detect and find zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential – including coronaviruses.

EcoHealth Alliance states on their website that zoonotic diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans–represent approximately 75 percent of the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people.

Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan virologist who famously became known as 'Batwoman' had hoped the program would create an early-warning system for pandemics.

[x]
Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised

[x]
Huff alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology

[x]
But in 2014, Huff was asked to review a funding proposal which revealed that GOF work was being carried out to create SARS-CoV-2 - which causes Covid.

GOF work sees viruses accelerated to more easily infect humans to help researchers test scientific theories, develop new technologies and find treatments for infectious diseases.

The risky research method can pose safety and security concerns - and is banned in many countries.

It was originally banned in the US in 2014 but was reintroduced by the NIH in 2017.

Huff realized the EcoHealth Alliance was working closely with the Wuhan lab on this type of research, with the support of USAID - a US government department.

He claims that the virus would never occur in nature and had been developed into a much more powerful pathogen in the lab.

'EcoHealth Alliance developed SARS-CoV-2 and was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,' he said.

He said that he has no evidence China deliberately released the virus but believes the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics.

'At the time, I felt like the project seemed more like intelligence collection than scientific research and development,' he said in his book.

The scientist said the PREDICT program wasn't collecting the data it should have been and Huff told The Sun that it appeared to be a 'giant intelligence operation'.

He alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[x]
Huff claims the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics

[x]
The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019

[x]
Shortly after, a novel coronavirus was eventually identified, the first case outside China recorded in January 2020 in Thailand

During a meeting with top executives in 2015 and 2016 Huff claims that he tried to sound the alarm over the biosafety and biosecurity risks in contract labs.

'I was concerned that EcoHealth Alliance did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories contracted and managed by EcoHealth Alliance,' he said.

Huff said US government officials again issued warnings in January 2018 about the Wuhan lab - including the major shortage of experts needed to safely manage research on deadly coronaviruses.

'It could be reasonably argued that EcoHealth Alliance set up China to fail,' he said.

And when Covid emerged in late 2019, he said China 'and some of their US government collaborators at the Department of State, USAID, and the Department of Defense went into full cover-up mode.'

What did Fauci get wrong? From telling people not to wear masks to claiming vaccines stopped infections
Dr Anthony Fauci is due to step down from his position as one of America's top infectious disease advisors at the end of this year.

Below are listed some of his key blunders when the virus struck

Don't wear masks, do wear masks

As global concern for Covid was surfacing in March 2020, Fauci told Americans that there was 'no need' to wear a face mask.

He said they may only help people 'feel a little better', and 'might even block a droplet' — but would not provide good protection.

Less than a month later, he was forced into an embarrassing climbdown after it emerged the virus spread via droplets in the air.

Dr Fauci later insisted he advised people not to wear masks to ensure there were enough available for hospitals and healthcare centers.

Covid did not come from a lab

Dr Fauci has also repeatedly insisted that Covid did not leak from a lab in China.

He called the theory a 'shiny object that will go away', and brushed aside claims from other top experts as an 'opinion'.

Dr Fauci has now backpedalled, saying instead that he keeps an 'open mind' although insisting that it remains 'most likely' that the virus spilled over from animals to humans.

Two jabs will stop you catching Covid

When the Covid vaccine roll-out was in full swing, Dr Fauci said the immunity from shots made doubly-vaccinated people a 'dead end' for the virus, and even suggested they may no longer need to wear masks.

Schools shutdown

Schools were closed from March through to August 2020, something Dr Fauci later expressed regret about.

But he said last month that he 'should have realized' there would be 'deleterious collateral consequences'.

Children are now bearing the brunt of the US's tripledemic, after lockdowns left them without proper immune defense.

Funding Wuhan lab

In 2014, Dr Facui's agency issued a $3.7million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which some allege was used to support gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Huff said he believes that the US government was alerted to the outbreak in August or October of 2019 months before the first clusters were starting to emerge.

He quit EcoHealth Alliance in 2016 'due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.'

But in late 2019, he was suddenly offered a position at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - and was told he would need top security clearance and a polygraph for the job.

Huff now believes he was approached for the role to keep him quiet about the origins of Covid.

'It is my belief that people working within the US government potentially identified me as a risk to knowing first-hand that the SARS-CoV-2 disease emergence event was a consequence of the US government's sponsorship of the genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 domestically and abroad,' he said in his book.

'If I would have accepted the position, then I suspect that DARPA would have disclosed restricted information to me, which would have consequently prevented me from discussing any of this information publicly, like I have been and am doing now.'

About a month after the pandemic began in the early months of 2020, Huff said he was 'adamant that SARS-CoV-2 was a manmade agent.'

'I suddenly realized what the potential motivation and persistence for recruiting me were,' he said.

'The intelligence community realized that I was the only person in a senior position that had left EHA, and the fact I was working outside the government's control made me a threat to their agenda.'

Huff believes government officials offered him the role so he could be 'sworn into silence for the rest of my life.'

As he began to unravel the alleged cover-up by the US government, he claims that authorities have launched a massive campaign of harassment against him.

He claimed military-grade drones would often appear at his home, he was stalked at the supermarket, and he was followed by unknown vehicles.

Huff has since filed a lawsuit with Renz Law LLC against EcoHealth Alliance in the state of New York.

In September, Huff tweeted: 'Below is link to the copy of the report about the REAL Origin of SARS-CoV2 sent to the US Senate and Congress.

'My declaration in the document was provided under oath with penalty of perjury.'

The document issued by Renz Law LLC states: 'Donald Trump, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Rep. Jim Jordan and others were right.

'As early as later April or early May 2020 former President Trump spoke of the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab in Wuhan, China.

'Since that time both the investigation and the cover-up have continued but the evidence provided herein clearly demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed created in a lab in Wuhan China by EcoHealth Alliance and with funding from Anthony Fauci's NIH/NIAID.

The document goes on to say that the evidence gathered hopes to back five statements of claim.

'SARS-CoV-2 was created in lab in Wuhan China, Anthony Fauci funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function work, the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved with the funding of said gain-of-function work,' it read.

'A number of well-connected public and private partners were involved in gain-of-function work that resulted in the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2 and Anthony Fauci and other coordinated to cover-up the funding of the gain-of-function work which resulted in SARS-CoV-2.'

It goes on to say that the expectations are that there will be a 'immediate investigation that will see bi-partisan support in light of this newly compiled information.'

'Renz Law and Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) will provide any and all support possible in such an investigation and prosecutions,' the document continues.

[x]
Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa

'Further, with the additional high-profile revelations that certain segments of the government have promoted censoring this information, presumably as part of the cover up, we will voluntarily support any good faith efforts by the media to correct the record.

'[We] will continue to seek truth and justice in this matter for all that have been impacted by the worst man-made pandemic in human history.'

Huff provided a declaration alongside the documents stating that he would attest a true and accurate representation of facts and experiences.

In October, DailyMail.com revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had been handed nearly $7 million in taxpayer's money during the pandemic.

Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the NIH since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa.

Four of those grants were handed to the non-profit after it was uncovered EcoHealth Alliance channeled funds to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic.

It also collaborated on controversial virus-tinkering research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some scientists fear led to the Covid crisis.

Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who was accused of trying to cover-up serious inquiry into the so-called lab leak theory, is listed as the project lead on a majority of the research programs.

Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn told DailyMail.com: 'EcoHealth Alliance has still not answered key questions about its role in the pandemic.

'They should be held to account and not be receiving taxpayers' dollars until a full investigation is complete.'

Who IS Peter Daszak? The frog-focused zoologist and friend of Dr Anthony Fauci

[x]
One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak (pictured), who is known among friends as a 'funny northerner' but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory

The debate around the origins of Covid has been ongoing since the virus first began causing chaos in early 2020.

Some top virologists believe the coronavirus spread to humans from an infected animal, potentially in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Others think it leaked from a secretive laboratory in the same city. Whether or not it was deliberate or accidental is an even more contentious part of the 'lab leak' theory.

One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, who is known among friends as a 'funny northerner' but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory.

He became renowned for his role in facilitating 'risky' coronavirus research in China through EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit he is president of.

The New York-based organisation has secured $60million (£53million) of US Government funds for scientific research over the past decade.

Some of this cash, it has emerged, has since ended up in the pocket of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab at the centre of lab leak claims. Some of this research involved manipulating Covid-like viruses.

Now, it has been revealed that EcoHealth Alliance has gained another $650,000 (£580,000) from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to trawl through caves in Southeast Asia looking for bats carrying coronaviruses, despite fears similar work sparked the pandemic.

The new contract gives the green light to project leader Dr Daszak and his team to analyse the behaviour and environmental risk factors for coronaviruses to spillover into humans from animals.

It warns that that part of the world has a 'high diversity of wildlife coronaviruses' and a large proportion of the population is regularly exposed to wildlife that could be infected.

Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam are particularly high risk, according to the project details published by the US National Institutes of Health.

Over the course of five years, the team will identify cases where people become infected with coronaviruses, assess the risk and drivers of community transmission and spread and test public health interventions to contain an outbreak.

Scientists argue such research is vital to contain diseases like Covid. But others have raised alarm over its potential involvement in outbreaks.

The latest contract puts the spotlight back on Dr Daszak, who hails from the mining town Dukinfield, on the outskirts of Manchester.

The researcher, who grew up with a younger brother, Ukrainian father and Welsh mother, studied zoology at the University of Bangor in Wales and the University of East London.

The expert in zoonosis — the spread of viruses from animals to humans — has authored more than 300 scientific papers over his career, which has spanned more than three decades, and seen him become friendly with Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the US President.

Dr Daszak, who lives in New York with his wife Janet, joined EcoHealth — formerly The Wildlife Trust — in 2001. His early career focused on diseases spread by frogs.

But he has also worked with researchers in China for 15 years, including Dr Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV nicknamed 'Bat Woman'.

EcoHealth, which originally focused on conservation, now works around the world to find out the origins of viruses, map where they have spread and analyse them to find out where the next outbreak could occur.

Records show Dr Daszak raked in millions of dollars' worth of grants from US Government bodies on behalf of EcoHealth alliance and was paid $354,000 (£314,000) in 2019.

This funding was often dished out to other laboratories, including the WIV, to conduct research in mines to examine bat coronaviruses.

The partnership saw researchers sample thousands of bats and determine that Sars originated in horseshoe bats, which are common in southern and central China and traded in wet markets.

And two years before Covid emerged, Dr Daszak proposed working with WIV scientists to alter coronaviruses and release them into bats as part of a plan to inoculate them against the virus.

The most recent NIH grant awarded to EchoHealth Alliance came on September 21. The $653,392 package went towards studying Covid-like viruses in bats across Asia and Africa.

That five-year experiment will likely investigate 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence', with scientists set to trawl caves in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam in the hunt to prevent another viral crisis.

Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, told DailyMail.com: 'Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections.'

Daszak is a close friend of the US' top Covid doctor Fauci and even thanked him for publicly downplaying theories that Covid may have been created in a lab.

EcoHealth Alliance has been receiving federal research funding since 2002.

Daszak, who has maintained the view that the coronavirus jumped to humans from animal reservoirs, has a checkered history when it comes to the kind of research that his critics argue helped pave the way for highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 to escape the safety of a lab.

He has been slammed by Republicans in Congress for taking part in GOF research.

Those who believed there was a chance the virus escaped from the WIV were cast aside as fringe thinkers, in part due to Daszak's influence in the community of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts.

He and fellow infectious disease experts Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang circulated a statement that was later published in The Lancet in which 27 prominent scientists from nine countries to strongly condemned 'conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.'

But Daszak appeared to want to distance himself from the letter after a Freedom of Information Request revealed that he and his fellows 'should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.'

Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said in December 2021 that it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Daszak had links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Despite charges of having a conflict of interest, given that his organization had worked with the WIV on coronavirus research in the past, Daszak was appointed to the World Health Organization's team charged with going to China to investigate the origin of the virus.

The WHO dispelled those claims though, saying that 'all declared interests were assessed and found not to interfere with the independence and transparency of the work.'

Officials in the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus and hoodwinked WHO investigators when they arrived.

Daszak revealed in March 2021 that he and the team took China's word for it when officials there insisted that the virus could not have escaped from their lab.

'We met with them. We said, 'Do you audit the lab?' And they said, 'Annually.' 'Did you audit it after the outbreak?' 'Yes.' 'Was anything found?' 'No.' 'Do you test your staff?' 'Yes.' No one was —' Daszak said.

In response to Lesley Stahl, who said he was taking the Chinese researcher's word for it, Daszak said, 'Well, what else can we do?'

'We asked them tough questions. They weren't vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct and convincing,' Daszak said.

In April 2020, former President Donald Trump chose to axe Daszak's grant awarded in 2019 over unsubstantiated claims that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab that employs a Chinese virologist who had been receiving funding from the grant.

'NIH got it right when it canceled the funding for the experiments EcoHealth Alliance was conducting with China's state-run Wuhan Institute,' Ernst said.

She added, 'In addition to violating multiple federal laws, EcoHealth has still not turned over documents about these dangerous studies that NIH has requested on multiple occasions that could offer vital clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.'

[admin]

Interview with Bob Westbrooks, IG/watchdog over pandemic relief money with chilling tales of fraud
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 18, 2023

Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.

Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."



Interview Part 2: Bob Westbrooks, IG/watchdog over pandemic relief money w/chilling tales of fraud [500 Billion in fraud]
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 23, 2023

Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.

Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."

[admin]

Boris Johnson: "They Were Looking at Engineering the Virus & The Government Bribed Me!"
by the Diary Of A CEO
Oct 10, 2024



When Did You Call China To Address Covid

1:18:41
did you call China February had it February 2020 there was a call you made to the leader of China to Xin ping yeah
1:18:48
yeah I mean I would have called him I mean it'll be in the it'll be in it'll be in the book and you were sending supplies yeah that stage we were we were
1:18:55
still sending um supplies to help them there we were we were sending prote what did
1:19:00
he say about the virus well I said
1:19:08
um I look my remember the conversation is hazy now I I I think I you know
1:19:15
um congratulated him on what seemed to be his efforts to control the disease
1:19:20
but said I was I was anxious about the what was happening in these wet markets
1:19:25
because at that stage we were given to understand that these the disease had had
1:19:30
occurred um spontaneously in a in a market in Wuhan what did he say and I
1:19:37
can't remember what he said to to that um I don't think I he look I mean he's a
1:19:43
he a president of China I don't think he wanted to particularly the implication that China was in any way at at fault
1:19:50
and I can take understand that but I now think that wasn't right I know I think
1:19:55
it almost certainly was a um a lab accident or it was as a result of
1:20:01
something that went wrong in that lab

Can I ask about this, because this started as a conspiracy theory that is now widely accepted as the probable
1:20:09
likely outcome. Why were they messing around with a virus in a lab in Wuhan?

The Virus Was Actually Created In A Lab

Well you may well ask I mean I think it
1:20:16
I think they were why do you think they were someone that is so far away from why people do these s such a thing I I I
1:20:22
genuinely don't know but I think that they were they were exp you know science the
1:20:29
the point of science is to keep pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge everywhere and to see what you see what
1:20:34
they could do you think it was a weapon I don't I didn't have any reason to think so I didn't have any reason to
1:20:40
think so I think it was a terrible accident I think the thing um escaped from the lab I think you know they they
1:20:46
were uh looking at engineering these viruses a function gain of the of the um
1:20:54
of the virus and and ways that they could manipulate it and um sadly
1:21:00
something went wrong um that's that's my best guess and a lot of people now seem to think that.