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

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Why Covid Numbers Will Get Worse Even With The Vaccines--A Surgeon Explains
by Duc C. Vuong
Dec 22, 2020

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Why Vaccines Won’t "Keep" You From Catching COVID--A Surgeon Explains It Easily
by Duc C. Vuong
Dec 25, 2020

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The New UK Coronavirus Strain Is Already In The USA--A Surgeon Explains Why
by Duc C. Vuong
Dec 23, 2020



The new UK strain is already in the United States. I promise you, they just haven't found it yet. Okay?

Now what happens when we combine a much more virulent strain PLUS the American "attitude"? And I'll finish it with that number 10.

This new, more virulent UK strain + American "attitude" + Christmas = Disaster.

I've been telling you guys that the peak is coming in mid-January and it's going to be awful. If you didn't see my video yesterday, 4-5 million Americans traveled for Thanksgiving. For Christmas it's predicted that 85 million Americans are going to travel for the holidays. We see what's happening with Thanksgiving service now. 2-3 weeks from now it's going to be a shit-show! A disaster! PLUS this new, more virulent strain is here in the United States, they just haven't told you. Y'all don't know about it. You know about it because you heard it from me. That's it.

[admin]

Long haul COVID-19 victims experiencing bizarre symptoms after recovery
by 60 Minutes Australia
Sep 20, 2020



9:03



[Alyssa Milano] Hi, everybody. I just wanted to show you the amount of hair that's coming out of my head as a result of COVID.

[60 Minutes] Alyssa Milano is one of the every-growing cohort of Coronavirus survivors being crippled by the conditions and unexpected aftereffects.

[Alyssa Milano] This is my hair loss from COVID19.

[60 Minutes] It's come as a total surprise to the actress who up until recently had lived a charmed life. But this is the 47-year-old in April, struggling to breathe, fearing she was about to die. Alyssa says that while she's since tested positive to coronavirus antibodies, hospitals in the U.S. were simply too overwhelmed to treat her properly at the time.

[Alyssa Milano] This is not a flu. I have never been sick like this in my life. It's very weird, because it literally feels like its' moving throughout your body. I get panicky just even thinking that I went through that in those nights where I couldn't breathe.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call.

[60 Minutes] Like so many coronavirus sufferers, Alyssa discovered that when you're supposed to have recovered, things can actually get worse. And she's been documenting the ongoing side effects, like hair loss in online video diaries

[Alyssa Milano] Wear a damn mask!

[60 Minutes] Was it hard for you to make that video, because I'd imagine part of you doesn't want anyone to see you looking like that.



[Alyssa Milano] It was hard, but I think you could tell that I'm kind of defiant in it. I just watched it recently and I was like, "Whoa, I seem pretty pissed." And I think it's about so many months we did not take this seriously in the United States, and I think a lot of personal stories are good, because we're writing these textbooks as we're going along. Right? Like people weren't talking about hair falling out in clumps three weeks ago before I made that video.

[60 Minutes] It's not just about hair loss though. Almost every aspect of Alyssa's life has suffered.

[Alyssa Milano] I have heart palpitations, muscle fatigue, my hair is falling out, and I think the hardest one for me, my brain is usually very quick, is I have this brain fog, and I lose track of my words. It could be a word like "coffee", and it'll just disappear for me. It is a really hard illness.

[60 Minutes] Is part of you scared that all these months on now that you might never recover fully from COVID=19?

[Alyssa Milano] Yes. For sure. And all of my friends that have had this, there's not anyone that is not a long hauler. No one has recovered completely from this that I know.

Day 55: Fatigue, chest pain, sick of being sick!
Day 144: Debilitating fatigue, shortness of breath, bitter taste, chills, ear pain
Day 95: Extreme muscle pain
Day 92: Chest pain and headache
Dizziness, nausea, stomach pain, fatigue, tinnitus, joint pain, muscle pain, night sweats, headaches, brain fog
Day 104: Fatigue, abdominal pain, nausea, muscle pain, blurred vision, severe acid reflux, chest pain, brain fog, headaches, shortness of breath #HELP
Day 90: Extreme fatigue, persistent headaches, muscle fatigue
Day 84: Fatigue, shortness of breath, pulsating headaches, fever, pins and needles
Day 61: Breathlessness/shortness of breath, severe joint and muscle pain
Day 56: Chest pain, fatigue, pins & needles, joint & muscle pain, headaches, chills & sweats, shortness of breath, numbness, excessive thirst, brain fog, and more!
Day 101: Tachycardia, shortness of breath, chest pain, headaches/dizziness

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A Massachusetts Republican Party leader says he thinks he got COVID-19 at a White House Hanukkah event
by Kelly McLaughlin
12/29/20

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee is recovering from COVID-19, which he says he likely contracted at a White House Hanukkah party earlier this month.

Tom Mountain, who was hospitalized and almost put on a ventilator after testing positive for COVID-19, told WJAR that while it's impossible to know exactly where he contracted the virus, he tested positive three days after going to the December 9 Hanukkah party.

"Lets put it this way: When I went down to Washington, DC, for the White House Hanukkah event, I was perfectly fine," 60-year-old Mountain, from Newton, Massachusetts, said. "And three days later after that event, I was in the hospital at Brigham and Women's ready to be put on a lifesaving ventilator."

The White House Hanukkah party was one of at least 25 indoor holiday celebrations held this year, according The Washington Post, and Mountain shared photos with WJAR showing him posing for a maskless photo during the event.

At the time of the party, public health officials were urging people not to gather for parties and celebrations over concerns that gatherings could spread COVID-19.

"I was one of the naysayers," Mountain told WJAR. "I am no longer a naysayer."

Mountain, who attended the event to represent the Massachusetts Republican Jewish Committee and wore a "Trump" jacket, said more than 100 people attended the three-hour party in Washington, DC, including President Donald Trump.

"People would just leisurely and gingerly take off their mask to mingle, to schmooze. I don't even think some people wore masks the entire time," he said. "And again, I was guilty as anyone else. I just wasn't wearing a mask."

Mountain told WJAR that after he tested positive for COVID-19, at least four of his immediate family members also contracted the virus.

He told The Boston Globe that weeks after contracting the virus, he's still experiencing some COVID-19 symptoms, including a cough.

The White House did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

***


[MSNBC] Given what you've been through, and knowing what you know now -- of course, New Year's Eve is coming up -- what's your message about gatherings, people coming together?

[Tom Mountain] Wear a mask. Stay as far away from people as possible.

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“Say Her Name: Dr. Susan Moore.” Black Female Doctors Condemn Racial Disparities in Healthcare
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow.org
DECEMBER 30, 2020

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

GUESTS:
Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones: family physician, epidemiologist and past president of the American Public Health Association. She teaches at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

When Black doctor Susan Moore died from COVID-19 after posting a video from her hospital bed describing racist treatment by medical staff, her chilling message was compared to the video of George Floyd begging for his life as he was killed by Minneapolis police. We speak to two leading Black women doctors fighting racial disparities in healthcare who wrote The Washington Post opinion piece, “Say her name: Dr. Susan Moore.” “It is a typical and ongoing devaluation of our lives and distrust of our word,” says Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, a family physician and former president of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, says Dr. Moore’s complaints about being disrespected by medical staff are “really familiar” to her. “We’ve found that Black patients, Black birthing people are not valued; they’re not listened to,” she says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we just reported, the death of a Black doctor from COVID-19 is shining stark new light on racism in medical care and how the virus is devastating Black communities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports Black and Latinx people are dying of COVID-19 at a rate almost three times that of white Americans.

Earlier this month, Dr. Susan Moore posted this now-viral video on Facebook describing racist treatment by medical staff who did not respond to her pleas for care, despite being in intense pain and being a doctor herself. She said in the video, “This is how Black people get killed.”

For more, we’re joined by two of the Black female physicians who wrote a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “Say her name: Dr. Susan Moore.” In it, they write, quote, “If anyone knew how to fight for herself, it would have been Moore. Still, she was sent home. Less than three weeks later, she was dead. … The deaths of [Mr.] George Floyd and so many others mistreated, injured or killed at the hands of our policing system have made us accustomed to seeing the video. But injustice in health care is rarely broadcast from cellphone videos or shared for thousands to witness,” they said.

Joining us in Atlanta is Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, family physician, epidemiologist, past president of the American Public Health Association. She teaches at Emory Rollins School of Public Health and the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. And in Washington, D.C., Dr. Joia Crear-Perry is with us, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Seeing that video that we just played of Dr. Susan Moore, she said, “I put forth, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.” Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, if you would first talk about your response when you saw this heartbreaking, enraging video that Dr. Moore made from her hospital bed just before she died?

DR. CAMARA PHYLLIS JONES: Well, first of all, hearing it again is making me tense. She was fighting for her life. Many patients know that they’re not getting — they feel a little devalued. But she knew exactly what she should have gotten, and so she knew exactly how bad the treatment was. And so, here she was, calling out racism.

And the people there were intimidated, they said, in later statement, intimidated by her, intimidated by her asking to be valued for her own full humanity. Since when do we have to diminish ourselves and hope for scraps of care?

So I was angry then. I’m angry now. It’s another — just another naming of racism in this racist society. So, racism is not limited to healthcare. It’s not limited to policing. It’s in education. It’s in housing. It’s everywhere. It’s woven throughout the fabric of this nation. It’s foundational in our history.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Jones, Dr. Moore described how a white doctor questioned the veracity of her pain. Dr. Moore said the doctor, quote, “made me feel like I was a drug addict,” and, quote, “he did not even listen to my lungs. He didn’t touch me in any way.” Respond.

DR. CAMARA PHYLLIS JONES: So, that also is typical. We know, historically, there are these ideas of biological differences between the races, which do not exist. We have mapped the human genome. There is no basis in the human genome for biological subspecies. But people have — since Marion Sims experimented and perfected his surgical techniques on enslaved women without using anesthesia, up to the neglect of people with sickle cell anemia, when they come in with pain and are disbelieved or undertreated, or people with kidney stones, it is a typical and ongoing devaluation of our lives and distrust of our word.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me bring Dr. Joia Crear-Perry into this conversation, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative. Can you talk about both Dr. Moore saying that she felt like they were treating her as a drug addict instead of a doctor, even though they knew she was a fellow physician — and it shouldn’t take that — and what that means in your profession, and what you see, the fact that African Americans, like Dr. Moore, are dying at an astronomical rate of COVID-19? Already the country is in — across the country, people are dying, the worst record for deaths in the world, but the African American community is particularly hard hit.

DR. JOIA CREAR-PERRY: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Every time I hear the video, it saddens me again. It feels really familiar. The work that we do with the National Birth Equity Collaborative, working on Black maternal health, we found that Black patients, Black birthing people are not valued; they’re not listened to. So it felt very familiar, because I’ve heard it many, many times. If you see the stories over the last few years around the fact that we’re three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than our white counterparts — in places like New York City, eight to 10 times more likely to die — she is explaining to us how that happened.

When you come to a place and people do not evaluate you for your pain, they don’t believe you — you have to have a CAT scan to prove that you have pain? That doesn’t seem logical to most providers, that if you were to come in, that’s actually — we complain about expending too much money in healthcare. That was a wasted resource. You don’t need to get a CAT scan to prove pain. That’s not something that we normally do. We only do that to Black patients, to patients we don’t believe, to Brown patients, to Indigenous folks, when we say, “Well, you’ve got to prove pain, because you’re superhuman.”

That goes also back to what Dr. Jones was talking about, this legacy and this history of a belief in a biological basis of race. They’ve done studies to prove that medical students believe we have thicker skin — medical students. And I’m not saying that we’re picking on the medical students, because they’re being taught by deans and professors who are saying things like Black people have thicker skin. I mean, I was taught in my own medical school in the late 1990s, which is not that long ago, that there were three biological races: Mongoloid, Caucasoid and Negroid. So, that belief and that language that there’s a biological reason that we don’t feel pain and that we’re superhuman and that we’re —

And it’s also — it’s interesting to see that she was fighting for herself. She knew the right words. He even threatened her. You hear her. She said, “I’ll put you out at 10:00 at night.” We’ve seen those kind of things happen, where we tell patients, “If you don’t act right, I’m not going to give you this epidural.” Right? This threatening around “If you don’t behave the way I want you to behave, I will then punish you, because you’re asking to be valued and not to be in pain. You’re asking for things that are basic human needs, and therefore I don’t think you deserve those things, so let me punish you for even asking to be seen as human.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, in the piece that the four of you wrote, all African American women doctors, in The Washington Post, you compare the death of Dr. Susan Moore with the police killing of George Floyd. Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, you are not only a doctor in the hospitals of this country, but you were in the streets protesting George Floyd’s death. Can you talk about what you see is the connection?

DR. JOIA CREAR-PERRY: Well, there’s an overriding, -arching policing of Blackness. It was in law from the beginning. If you think about like after Reconstruction, we were — that people were told that they should make sure that Black folks don’t go into certain neighborhoods. They were not allowed, refused. To catch a slave running away.

You see these videos of even like recently: In New York City, a woman saw her phone was missing, and she assumed that a Black child had taken it, and went to attack the child, and felt that she had perfect permission as a white woman to attack a 14-year-old child, assuming that they had stolen her phone.

So, that belief that we’re supposed to be policed and organized and planned and controlled is embedded in policing and in healthcare. How we police women’s bodies — and it’s women plus being Black, both things, gendered racism, together — really gets the outcomes that we see, so that throughline.

I don’t want us to blame — and sometimes we’ll focus on the doctor who took care of Dr. Moore in Indiana. And yes, perhaps he should get some kind of accountability for his individual behavior. But the structure, the structural racism, is the undergirding of both our police system and our healthcare system, the belief in needing to control, the belief in needing to not value, to not listen to people, that we’re not having a co-created patient plan.

When we talk about patients, we say things like we want to have — co-create it, and we want to make sure that we have shared decision-making. If you don’t believe in the person that you’re sharing this decision-making with, if you think that they are not fully capable and not fully human, then there’s never really any shared decision-making. It’s authoritarian. And so, that’s the same thing that happens in policing.

So, if we are going to undo the racism that’s in this country, we have to start first with some truth, some historical truth about how we got here and some current truth about what happens today.

So, Dr. Susan Moore’s video gives us a — just the same way that George Floyd’s video did, we’re not just looking at numbers or data. We actually see the people who are being murdered, who are dying, hear their stories, see them as fully human and say, “Why would we ever do that to any human being ever? Don’t we want all people to have justice and joy? Don’t we want them all to be able to thrive?” We wanted George Floyd to still be here, and we also want Dr. Susan Moore to still be here. So how do we use their history and their legacy to build a better world for all of us?

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received a COVID-19 vaccination on live TV at the United Medical Center in Washington’s predominantly Black Anacostia neighborhood.

VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT KAMALA HARRIS: I have now been vaccinated. As Joe likes to say, there’s a big difference between the vaccine and vaccinations. I want to encourage everyone to get the vaccine. It is relatively painless. It happens really quickly. It is safe, the Moderna, the Pfizer. Today, I had the Moderna vaccine. My husband is going to have it today, as well. I look forward to getting the second vaccine.

And literally, this is about saving lives. It’s literally about saving lives. I trust the scientists. And it is the scientists who created and approved this vaccine. So I urge everyone: When it is your turn, get vaccinated.

AMY GOODMAN: So, of course, the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, will be the first African American and African American woman vice president in U.S. history. And she was injected by Patricia Cummings. She was vaccinated by this African American nurse, who is the daughter of Guyanese immigrants.

The significance, Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, of seeing this image clearly in the Black community of Washington, D.C., being vaccinated by a Black woman, the Black woman vice president to be? The message that is being sent, as African Americans, studies show, are — perhaps 40% are now willing to get a vaccine? What do you think needs to be overcome for the Black community to feel more comfortable with this vaccine, given the history, you said, for example, of Marion Sims, considered the father of modern gynecology, experimenting on enslaved women?

DR. CAMARA PHYLLIS JONES: The first thing is that we don’t need to go out trying to convince people to get the vaccine. We need to honor and hear their questions, answer their questions. And in some cases, the answer to the question could be “I don’t know,” because there is a lot that we still don’t know about the long-term effects of the vaccine or the rare effects.

But I do have to say that when you look at the benefits and the risks, I have decided that when my turn in line comes, I will get the vaccine, because even though there is uncertainty — there are things that we don’t know, because the virus is new and the vaccine is newer. You know, we haven’t been studying it long, and we haven’t studied it in a whole lot of people. But we live with uncertainty in our lives. I am willing to live with the uncertainty associated with the vaccine, as opposed to dying with COVID-19, which is a much bigger risk. The whole issue is a risk-benefit analysis. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have shown themselves to be highly, highly effective.

So, what we need to do is not try to say, “Oh, those people, why don’t they just get over that history?” or, “Oh, those people, why do they have all these questions or this distrust?” First of all, we need to make sure that we evidence trustworthiness in all of our systems, going forward. Dr. Susan Moore’s example was not an example that engenders a feeling of, you know, trust, because the system was not trustworthy in her case. So, all of our systems, if we want to convince people to get the vaccine, have to evidence themselves to be trustworthy.

And we, as a nation, need to say, “We honor your lives, not just when you get the vaccine, but we honor your lives, and we’re going to provide the support you need to safely shelter in place. We are going to provide the regulations that the workplaces need, that if you have to go to work, they are safe workplaces. We’re going to provide you with the PPE that you need as a grocery clerk or as a bus driver or a warehouse worker to keep you safe.” It’s not just, “Oh, now that we have the vaccine, we want to convince you to take the vaccine, because, well, maybe we’re worried about herd immunity, and we’re really not worried about you at all, but, you know, to get to herd immunity, we need to do this.”

No, be trustworthy in all ways, and be about my people, my community, my health in all ways. That’s the evidence that is going to really convince people that, yes, maybe I should take the vaccine.

But I have to say, at the individual level right now, risk-benefit, I agree. I can live with the uncertainty, because these two vaccines, in particular, have shown themselves to be highly efficacious.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to put this question to Dr. Joia Crear-Perry. In 2018, tennis star Serena Williams and her husband, the Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, welcomed into the world their daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. The baby was born by an emergency C-section. Williams told Vogue magazine how she self-diagnosed a life-threatening emergency after giving birth. Shortly after delivering, the tennis star suddenly felt out of breath and assumed she was having a pulmonary embolism, given her history of blood clots.

I want to read from the 2018 piece in Vogue by Rob Haskell that describes Serena Williams’s birth experience: quote, “She walked out of the hospital room so her mother wouldn’t worry and told the nearest nurse, between gasps, that she needed a CT scan with contrast and IV heparin (a blood thinner) right away. The nurse thought her pain medicine might be making her confused. But Serena insisted, and soon enough a doctor was performing an ultrasound of her legs. 'I was like, a Doppler? I told you, I need a CT scan and a heparin drip,' she remembers telling the team. The ultrasound revealed nothing, so they sent her for the CT, and sure enough, several small blood clots had settled in her lungs. Minutes later she was on the drip. 'I was like, listen to Dr. Williams!'”

So, Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, you are president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative. Talk about the significance of what Serena Williams brought to life when it comes to postpartum deaths of African American women.

DR. JOIA CREAR-PERRY: Thank you. You know, I also want to show the throughline between Dr. Susan Moore and Serena Williams. Both of them are experts on their body, and they were seen as not experts, right? They both said, “This is what’s happening. This is what I need.” And the more that they could articulate expertise, the more that the people around them didn’t know what to do with them, because they were so accustomed to the bias inside of them saying, “These people aren’t experts. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I know better. I am the one that’s in control.” And that is the tension that we see when it comes to racism as a structure. I don’t want us to, once again, focus on individuals, but really the structures of how this plays out.

So, for us, we knew, when we found out, about six years ago, through Amnesty International, and the U.N. had sanctioned the United States around the fact that we had the worst outcomes for birthing people in the world, and then that Black people were three to four times more likely to die within a year of childbirth than their white counterparts, that we saw that — we knew that the language was going to be: “Of course they die. They are so fat. They don’t listen. They don’t go to the doctor.” All the blaming and shaming that normally happens to communities of color, the same thing that happened during COVID-19: “Of course they’re dying. They have all these preexisting illnesses. Of course. They all live together, and they don’t follow instruction.” Meanwhile, we’re more likely to put a mask on than anybody else. We’re more likely — we clean not only other people’s houses, we clean our own houses, so we’re usually extra sanitary, because we’re cleaning up for you and for ourselves. So this idea of blaming and shaming, we knew that was going to be the language.

So, Serena Williams was so important, because it showed that a person with wealth, with stature, with grace was, once again, not believed, seen as a poor historian of her own health, even though, if anybody, she’s paid her entire life, since she was a child, around her health. She knows her body better than anybody, because she’s a professional athlete. Professional athletes know everything about their bodies, because that’s how they make money. That’s how they live. For them not to listen to Serena, man, what does that mean for people like Susan Moore or like me or like any of us?

From birthing to elder care, it’s the same throughline of disbelief, of not having trust. When you talk to patients — our work, when we talk to patients that works with hospital systems, from big ones like Kaiser to little ones in Kalamazoo, Michigan, every one of them, what the patients want, when we talk to patients, is to be trusted. They want you to think and know that no matter their skin color, no matter their gender, no matter where they live, that they want justice and joy, that they want — that they are good historians. You don’t write things down like “noncompliant.” When you’re doing those things, you’re blaming and shaming the patient and really not thinking about all the things that could be happening.

So, Serena coming forth and talking about her — she also reminded me so much around how she walked outside because she didn’t want to scare her family members. That’s typical Black woman, right? Like, “I don’t anybody to get upset, so let me just go out here and just mention right quick that I might be dying, and this is what I need.” And then, she knew exactly, the same way that Dr. Susan Moore did: “These are the medicines that I need. This is the testing that I need.”

And unfortunately, when we show expertise as Black people, because we have not been historically seen as experts about anything, well, people don’t know what to do with that. So, nurses, doctors, systems, cultures, when we show up as the expert, we can feel the nervousness that others have around our expertise. But we’re like, “That’s your bias, not ours. That’s your assumptions about who I’m supposed to be, the box you’ve put me into.”

And wouldn’t it be amazing for all of us to let go of all of those boxes, to see Serena, Dr. Moore, to see our patients who live in Bogalusa, Louisiana, anywhere, as experts on their own bodies, that they have value, that they have thoughts and ideas that are amazing, no matter where you live, no matter your race or your gender?

And that’s really what we’ve learned through the Black maternal health work, working inside of hospitals, that when you look at your data, when you disaggregate your data, without question, Black patients will receive pain management later, they get their hypertension treated later. And you can really undo that. You can stop the structure of the system and say, “We are devaluing people, and we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to really see all of them and believe them and trust them and invest in them and make sure that they all can be seen in the future.”

AMY GOODMAN: Talking about throughlines, as we wrap up, Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, I think of Erica Garner, who was a guest on our show a number of times, fierce fighter against police brutality. Erica was the daughter, of course, of Eric Garner, who was killed by police in Staten Island. Erica would die just after giving birth to her second child, when she was just 27 years old. We did a show on Erica and Serena Williams showing that throughline. As we wrap up, a final thought on the Lancet study that you did, the respected international medical journal, called “Moving towards anti-racist praxis in medicine”?

DR. JOIA CREAR-PERRY: Yeah, and I just want to highlight that throughline. She died from cardiomyopathy. Her heart was enlarged. Just think about that. The stress of trying to fight for the value of her father and for his death not to be ignored and to hold the policemen accountable, ultimately, caused her heart to weaken — the stress of having to fight for humanity. For years, we liked to blame genetics on cardiomyopathy and looking for what the gene is that makes people’s heart weaker. But we know that your stress, your mental health, impacts your physical health. And until we undo racism, we’re going to see Black folks having higher rates of obesity, higher rates of hypertension and higher rates of cardiomyopathy. And that throughline of racism is consistent for all of us. And that’s what’s shortening all of our lives. So we need that to end.

And that’s what we talk about in this antiracism praxis. If I was taught in medical school, as I was — I was taught that there were three biological races — that’s racism. Racism was not created by God. Racism was not created by medicine. Those things have been — racism was created by people who wanted to hold power and wealth. And so, our job is to fight for equality and justice and joy, and to say, “How do we undo all these places inside of medicine where we say that Black people have different lungs or different kidney capacity or different pelvis shapes?” All this talk that we have a different shape of our pelvis, how could that possibly be, when it’s just melanin production that makes us different? That’s the only one difference. Our pelvis and our melanin have nothing to do with each other. So, really undoing those racist ideas that we were all taught inside of medicine —

AMY GOODMAN: Well —

DR. JOIA CREAR-PERRY: — so that we can have antiracism. Sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, and Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, family physician, epidemiologist, past president of the American Public Health Association, teaching at both Emory School of Public Health, as well as the Morehouse School of Medicine. We will link to the piece they co-authored with two other African American women doctors in The Washington Post, “Say her name: Dr. Susan Moore.”

When we come back, “The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.” Stay with us.

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

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
New York Magazine
January 4, 2021

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Illustration: Illustration by Robert Beatty for New York Magazine

I. Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.

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

-- 2019 Global Health Security Index: Building Collective Action and Accountability, by Nuclear Threat Initiative, Center for Health Security, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and The Economist Intelligence Unit

-- Is Considering a Genetic-Manipulation Origin for SARS-CoV-2 a Conspiracy Theory That Must Be Censored?, by Rossana Segreto, University of Innsbruck, and Yuri Deigrin, Youthereum Genetics Inc.

-- Laboratory Escapes and “Self-fulfilling prophecy” Epidemics, by Martin Furmanski MD, Scientist’s Working Group on Chemical and Biologic Weapons, Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, February 17, 2014

-- Master's Thesis: "The Analysis of Six Patients With Severe Pneumonia Caused By Unknown Viruses", by Li Xu, No. 1 School of Clinical Medicine, Kun Ming Medical University, May, 2013

-- Risk and Benefit Analysis of Gain of Function Research, Final Report, April 2016, by Gryphon Scientific

-- Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly, by Milton Leitenberg

Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003. While the first documented case of SARS was in November 2002, it became a pandemic in 2003, and the WHO issued its first alert about the virus in March of that year, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some.

And we were warned, repeatedly. The intentional creation of new microbes that combine virulence with heightened transmissibility “poses extraordinary risks to the public,” wrote infectious-disease experts Marc Lipsitch and Thomas Inglesby in 2014. “A rigorous and transparent risk-assessment process for this work has not yet been established.” That’s still true today.

-- Why Do Exceptionally Dangerous Gain-of-Function Experiments in Influenza?, by Marc Lipsitch

-- Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens, by Marc Lipsitch, Allison P. Galvani

In 2012, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lynn Klotz warned that there was an 80 percent chance, given how many laboratories were then handling virulent viro-varietals, that a leak of a potential pandemic pathogen would occur sometime in the next 12 years.

-- Danger of Potential-Pandemic-Pathogen Research Enterprises, by Lynn C. Klotz

-- Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat, by Lynn Klotz

-- Is there a Role for the States Parties to the BWC in Oversight of Lab-created Potential Pandemic Pathogens?, by Lynn C. Klotz, PhD

-- Letter to The NSABB Board [U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity], by Lynn C. Klotz, Ph.D., Senior Science Fellow and member of the Scientist Working Group on Biological and Chemical Weapons Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, Washington, DC, USA

-- The consequences of a lab escape of a potential pandemic pathogen, by Lynn C. Klotz, The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Washington, DC, USA; and Edward J. Sylvester, Science and Medical Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe.

II. “A Reasonable Chance”


Seeking Ebola strains in Sierra Leone’s wild-animal population for USAID’s Predict project in 2018. Photo: Simon Townsley

From early 2020, the world was brooding over the origins of COVID-19. People were reading research papers, talking about what kinds of live animals were or were not sold at the Wuhan seafood market — wondering where the new virus had come from.

Meanwhile, things got strange all over the world. The Chinese government shut down transportation and built hospitals at high speed. There were video clips of people who’d suddenly dropped unconscious in the street. A doctor on YouTube told us how we were supposed to scrub down our produce when we got back from the supermarket. A scientist named Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper saying that the novel coronavirus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China.

-- A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence, by Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Sudhakar Agnihothram, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Xing-Yi Ge, Eric F Donaldson, Scott H Randell, Antonio Lanzavecchia, Wayne A Marasco, Zhengli-Li Shi & Ralph S Baric

-- Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus WIV1 Encodes an Extra Accessory Protein, ORFX, Involved in Modulation of the Host Immune Response, by Lei-Ping Zeng, Yu-Tao Gao, Xing-Yi Ge, Qian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Xing-Lou Yang, Bing Tan, Jing Chen, Aleksei A. Chmura, Peter Daszak, and Zheng-Li Shi

-- Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus, by Ben Hu, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft,#1 Lei-Ping Zeng, Investigation, Methodology, Xing-Lou Yang, Investigation, Resources, Xing-Yi Ge, Formal analysis, Resources, Wei Zhang, Investigation, Bei Li, Investigation, Jia-Zheng Xie, Investigation, Xu-Rui Shen, Investigation, Yun-Zhi Zhang, Resources, Ning Wang, Investigation,1 Dong-Sheng Luo, Investigation, Resources,1 Xiao-Shuang Zheng, Investigation, Mei-Niang Wang, Resources,1 Peter Daszak, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing, Lin-Fa Wang, Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing, Jie Cui, Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Software, Writing – review & editing, and Zheng-Li Shi, Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Visualization, Writing – review & editing

On March 13, I wrote in my journal that there seemed to be something oddly artificial about the disease: “It’s too airborne — too catching — it’s something that has been selected for infectivity. That’s what I suspect. No way to know so no reason to waste time thinking about it.”

This was just a note to self — at the time, I hadn’t interviewed scientists about SARS-2 or read their research papers. But I did know something about pathogens and laboratory accidents; I published a book last year, Baseless, that talks about some of them. The book is named after a Pentagon program, Project Baseless, whose goal, as of 1951, was to achieve “an Air Force–wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date.”

A vast treasure was spent by the U.S. on the amplification and aerial delivery of diseases — some well known, others obscure and stealthy. America’s biological-weapons program in the ’50s had A1-priority status, as high as nuclear weapons. In preparation for a total war with a numerically superior communist foe, scientists bred germs to be resistant to antibiotics and other drug therapies, and they infected lab animals with them, using a technique called “serial passaging,” in order to make the germs more virulent and more catching.

And along the way, there were laboratory accidents. By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp Detrick, Maryland, in 1951, a microbiologist, attempting to perfect the “foaming process” of high-volume production, developed a fever and died. In 1964, veterinary worker Albert Nickel fell ill after being bitten by a lab animal.

His wife wasn’t told that he had Machupo virus, or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. “I watched him die through a little window to his quarantine room at the Detrick infirmary,” she said.

In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. In 1978, a hybrid strain of smallpox killed a medical photographer at a lab in Birmingham, England; in 2007, live foot-and-mouth disease leaked from a faulty drainpipe at the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey. In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014.

-- Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy, by Alison Young

In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years.

-- Review Committee Report: Inadvertent Shipment of Live Bacillus anthracis Spores by DoD, July 13, 2015

In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment.” They reopened in December 2019.

High-containment laboratories have a whispered history of near misses. Scientists are people, and people have clumsy moments and poke themselves and get bitten by the enraged animals they are trying to nasally inoculate. Machines can create invisible aerosols, and cell solutions can become contaminated. Waste systems don’t always work properly. Things can go wrong in a hundred different ways.

-- A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused, by Michael Gold

Hold that human fallibility in your mind. And then consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident,” Chan told me in July of last year. There was also, she added, a reasonable chance that the disease had evolved naturally — both were scientific possibilities. “I don’t know if we will ever find a smoking gun, especially if it was a lab accident. The stakes are so high now. It would be terrifying to be blamed for millions of cases of COVID-19 and possibly up to a million deaths by year end, if the pandemic continues to grow out of control. The Chinese government has also restricted their own scholars and scientists from looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. At this rate, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may just be buried by the passage of time.”

I asked Jonathan A. King, a molecular biologist and biosafety advocate from MIT, whether he’d thought lab accident when he first heard about the epidemic. “Absolutely, absolutely,” King answered. Other scientists he knew were concerned as well. But scientists, he said, in general were cautious about speaking out. There were “very intense, very subtle pressures” on them not to push on issues of laboratory biohazards. Collecting lots of bat viruses, and passaging those viruses repeatedly through cell cultures, and making bat-human viral hybrids, King believes, “generates new threats and desperately needs to be reined in.”

“All possibilities should be on the table, including a lab leak,” a scientist from the NIH, Philip Murphy — chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology — wrote me recently. Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, said in an email, “There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” Ebright said, “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan ***screamed*** lab release.”

III. “No Credible Evidence”

The new disease, as soon as it appeared, was intercepted — stolen and politicized by people with ulterior motives. The basic and extremely interesting scientific question of what happened was sucked up into an ideological sharknado.

Some Americans boycotted Chinese restaurants; others bullied and harassed Asian Americans. Steve Bannon, broadcasting from his living room, in a YouTube series called War Room, said that the Chinese Communist Party had made a biological weapon and intentionally released it. He called it the “CCP virus.” And his billionaire friend and backer, Miles Guo, a devoted Trump supporter, told a right-wing website that the communists’ goal was to “use the virus to infect selective people in Hong Kong, so that the Chinese Communist Party could use it as an excuse to impose martial law there and ultimately crush the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. But it backfired terribly.”

You know Ralph, I think the public has not been in on this debate. It has been a secret debate with the NIH and other people who funded it. I think COVID-19 is a product of this. And I know Trump wants to call it the China virus. Well, the money that went into the creation and the genetic engineering of these coronaviruses in Wuhan was supported by the NIH and the USAID. So why wouldn't it be the NIH virus, or the USAID virus?

-- Interview with Andrew Kimball on the Ralph Nader Radio Show

In The Lancet, in February, a powerful counterstatement appeared, signed by 27 scientists. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement said. “Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

The behind-the-scenes organizer of this Lancet statement, Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that (as veteran science journalist Fred Guterl explained later in Newsweek) has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans. “We have a choice whether to stand up and support colleagues who are being attacked and threatened daily by conspiracy theorists or to just turn a blind eye,” Daszak said in February in Science magazine.

[O]n April 16th Peter Daszak, who is the President of the EcoHealth Alliance, told Democracy Now! in a lengthy interview that the lab escape thesis was “Pure baloney”. He told listeners:

“There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus that’s anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible...”

Daszak is the named principal investigator on multiple US grants that went to the Shi lab at WIV. He is also a co-author on numerous papers with Zheng-Li Shi, including the 2013 Nature paper announcing the isolation of coronavirus WIV-1 through passaging (Ge et al., 2013). One of his co-authorships is on the collecting paper in which his WIV colleagues placed the four fully functional bat coronaviruses into human cells containing the ACE2 receptor (Hu et al. 2017). That is, Daszak and Shi together are collaborators and co-responsible for most of the published high-risk collecting and experimentation at the WIV.

If the Shi lab has anything to hide, it is not only the Chinese Government that will be reluctant to see an impartial investigation proceed. Much of the work was funded by the US taxpayer, channeled there by Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance. Virtually every credible international organisation that might in principle carry out such an investigation, the WHO, the US CDC, the FAO, the US NIH, including the Gates Foundation, is either an advisor to, or a partner of, the EcoHealth Alliance. If the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak originated from the bat coronavirus work at the WIV then just about every major institution in the global public health community is implicated.

-- The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin, by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

From 2004 on, the WIV published many dozens of partial or full genome sequences of coronaviruses in their collection. On June 1, Daszak and Shi published partial genetic sequences of 781 Chinese bat coronaviruses, more than one-third of which had never been published previously.36 There are also multiple published records of animal infection research with bat coronaviruses at the WIV. In order to carry out the research program described above, the WIV laboratory needs to use live viruses, and not just RNA fragments. This contradicts two of the assertions, made by some commentators, that Shi worked only with RNA fragments and that her laboratory did not maintain live viruses. On May 24, 2020, the director of the WIV acknowledged that the laboratory did have “three live strains of bat corona viruses on site,” but implied only three.37 Knowledgeable virologists assume that the number must be much higher, probably hundreds of live viral isolates.38

It is precisely in the course of the kind of gain of function research that the WIV conducted that there would be the greatest likelihood of infection of a laboratory researcher.

-- Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly, by Milton Leitenberg

How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years; 3. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which first reported signs of the novel coronavirus in hospital patients; 4. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an early suspected origin of the pandemic, where the first major outbreak occurred. Illustration: Map by Jason Lee

Vincent Racaniello, a professor at Columbia and a co-host of a podcast called This Week in Virology, said on February 9 that the idea of an accident in Wuhan was “complete bunk.” The coronavirus was 96 percent similar to a bat virus found in 2013, Racaniello said. “It’s not a man-made virus. It wasn’t released from a lab.”

Racaniello’s dismissal was seconded by a group of scientists from Ohio State, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina, who put out a paper in Emerging Microbes and Infections to quiet the “speculations, rumors, and conspiracy theories that SARS-CoV-2 is of laboratory origin.” There was “currently no credible evidence” that SARS-2 leaked from a lab, these scientists said, using a somewhat different argument from Racaniello’s. “Some people have alleged that the human SARS-CoV-2 was leaked directly from a laboratory in Wuhan where a bat CoV (RaTG13) was recently reported,” they said. But RaTG13 could not be the source because it differed from the human SARS-2 virus by more than a thousand nucleotides. One of the paper’s authors, Susan Weiss, told the Raleigh News & Observer, “The conspiracy theory is ridiculous.”

At first glance RaTG13 is unlikely to have evolved into SARS-CoV-2 since RaTG13 is approximately 1,200 nucleotides (3.8%) different from SARS-CoV-2. Although RaTG13 is the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2, this sequence difference still represents a considerable gap. In a media statement evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes has suggested this gap represents 20-50 years of evolution and others have suggested similar figures.

We agree that ordinary rates of evolution would not allow RaTG13 to evolve into SARS-CoV-2 but we also believe that conditions inside the lungs of the miners were far from ordinary. Five major factors specific to the hospitalised miners favoured a very high rate of evolution inside them.

i) When viruses infect new species they typically undergo a period of very rapid evolution because the selection pressure on the invading pathogen is high. The phenomenon of rapid evolution in new hosts is well attested among corona- and other viruses (Makino et al., 1986; Baric et al., 1997; Dudas and Rambaut 2016; Forni et al., 2017).

ii) Judging by their clinical symptoms such as the CT scans, all the miner’s infections were primarily of the lungs. This localisation likely occurred initially because the miners were exerting themselves and therefore inhaling the disturbed bat guano deeply. As miners, they may already have had damaged lung tissues (patient 3 had suspected pneumoconiosis) and/or particulate matter was present that irritated the tissues and may have facilitated initial viral entry.

In contrast, standard coronavirus infections are confined to the throat and upper respiratory tract. They do not normally reach the lungs (Perlman and Netland, 2009). Lungs are far larger tissues by weight (kilos vs grammes) than the upper respiratory tract. There was therefore likely a much larger quantity of virus inside the miners than would be the case in an ordinary coronavirus infection.

Comparing a typical coronavirus respiratory tract infection with the extent of infected lungs in the miners from a purely mathematical point of view indicates the potential scale of this quantitative difference. The human aerodigestive tract is approximately 20cm in length and 5cm in circumference, i.e. approximately 100 cm2 in surface area. The surface area of a human lung ranges from 260,000-680,000 cm2(Hasleton, 1972). The amount of potentially infected tissue in an average lung is therefore approximately 4500-fold greater than that available to a normal coronavirus infection. The amount of virus present in the infected miners, sufficient to hospitalise all of them and kill half of them, was thus proportionately very large.

Evolutionary change is in large part a function of the population size. The lungs of the miners, we suggest, supported a very high viral load leading to proportionately rapid viral evolution.

Furthermore, according to the Master’s thesis, the immune systems of the miners were compromised and remained so even for those discharged. This weakness on the part of the miners may also have encouraged evolution of the virus.

iii) The length of infection experienced by the miners (especially patients 2, 3 and 4) far exceeded that of an ordinary coronavirus infection. From first becoming too sick to work in the mine, patient 2 survived 57 days until he died. Patient 3 survived 120 days after stopping work. Patient 4 survived 117 days and then was discharged as cured. Each had been exposed in the mine for 14 days prior to the onset of severe symptoms; thus each presumably had nascent infections for some time before calling in sick (See Table 2 of the thesis).

In contrast, in ordinary coronavirus infections the viral infection is cleared within about ten to fourteen days after being acquired (Tay et al., 2020). Thus, unlike most sufferers from coronavirus infection, the hospitalised miners had very long-term bouts of disease characterised by a continuous high load of virus. In the cases of patients 3 and 4 their illnesses lasted over 4 months.

iv) Coronaviruses are well known to recombine at very high rates: 10% of all progeny in a cell can be recombinants (Makino et al., 1986; Banner and Lai, 1991; Dudas and Rambaut, 2016). In normal virus evolution the mutation rate and the selection pressure are the main foci of attention. But in the case of a coronavirus adapting to a new host where many mutations distributed all over the genome are required to fully adapt to the new host, the recombination rate is likely to be highly influential in determining the overall speed of adaptation by the virus population (Baric et al., 1997).

Inside the miners a large tissue was simultaneously infected by a population of poorly-adapted viruses, with each therefore under pressure to adapt. Even if the starting population of virus lacked any diversity, many individual viruses would have acquired mutations independently but only recombination would have allowed these mutations to unite in the same genome. To recombine, viruses must be present in the same cell. In such a situation the particularities of lung tissues become potentially important because the existence of airways (bronchial tubes, etc.) allows partially-adapted viruses from independent viral populations to travel to distal parts of the lung (or even the other lung) and encounter other such partially-adapted viruses and populations. This movement around the lungs would likely have resulted in what amounted to a passaging effect without the need for a researcher to infect new tissues. Indeed, in the Master’s thesis the observation is several times made that areas of the lungs of a specific patient would appear to heal even while other parts of the lungs would become infected.

v) There were also a number of unusual things about the bat coronaviruses in the mine. They were abnormally abundant but also there were many different kinds, often causing co-infections of the bats (Ge et al., 2016). Viral co-infections are often more infectious or more pathogenic (Latham and Wilson, 2007).

As the WIV researchers remarked about the bats in the mine:

“we observed a high rate of co-infection with two coronavirus species and interspecies infection with the same coronavirus species within or across bat families. These phenomena may be owing to the diversity and high density of bat populations in the same cave, facilitating coronavirus intra- and interspecies transmissions, which may result in recombination and acceleration of coronavirus evolution.” (Ge et al., 2016).

The diversity of coronaviruses in the mine suggests that the miners were similarly exposed and that their illness may potentially have begun as co-infections.

Combining these observations, we propose that the miners’ lungs offered an unprecedented opportunity for accelerated evolution of a highly bat-adapted coronavirus into a highly human-adapted coronavirus and that decades of ordinary coronavirus evolution could easily have been condensed into months. However, we acknowledge that these conditions were unique.

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

The most influential natural-origin paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” by a group of biologists that included Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, appeared online in a preliminary version in mid-February.
“We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the scientists said. Why? Because molecular-modeling software predicted that if you wanted to optimize an existing bat virus so that it would replicate well in human cells, you would arrange things a different way than how the SARS-2 virus actually does it — even though the SARS-2 virus does an extraordinarily good job of replicating in human cells. The laboratory-based scenario was implausible, the paper said, because, although it was true that the virus could conceivably have developed its unusual genetic features in a laboratory, a stronger and “more parsimonious” explanation was that the features came about through some kind of natural mutation or recombination. “What we think,” explained one of the authors, Robert F. Garry of Tulane University, on YouTube, “is that this virus is a recombinant. It probably came from a bat virus, plus perhaps one of these viruses from the pangolin.” Journalists, for the most part, echoed the authoritative pronouncements of Daszak, Racaniello, Weiss, Andersen, and other prominent natural-originists. “The balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature — be it the Wuhan market or somewhere else,” said the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column. “Dr. Fauci Again Dismisses Wuhan Lab As Source of Coronavirus,” said CBS News, posting a video interview of Anthony Fauci by National Geographic. “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what’s out there now,” Fauci said, “it’s very, very strongly leaning toward ‘This could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated’ — the way the mutations have naturally evolved.”

-- Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan: US-funded $3.7 million project approved by Trump's Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on 'monster-germ' research, by Christina Lin

--Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward, by Anthony S. Fauci

U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab.

-- Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research, by Fred Guterl, Newsweek

Everyone took sides; everyone thought of the new disease as one more episode in an ongoing partisan struggle. Think of Mike Pompeo, that landmass of Cold War truculence; think of Donald Trump himself. They stood at their microphones saying, in a winking, I-know-something-you-don’t-know sort of way, that this disease escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Whatever they were saying must be wrong. It became impermissible, almost taboo, to admit that, of course, SARS-2 could have come from a lab accident. “The administration’s claim that the virus spread from a Wuhan lab has made the notion politically toxic, even among scientists who say it could have happened,” wrote science journalist Mara Hvistendahl in the Intercept.

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.”

V. “A Serious Shortage of Appropriately Trained Technicians”

In the spring, I did some reading on coronavirus history. Beginning in the 1970s, dogs, cows, and pigs were diagnosed with coronavirus infections; dog shows were canceled in 1978 after 25 collies died in Louisville, Kentucky. New varieties of coronaviruses didn’t start killing humans, though, until 2003 — that’s when restaurant chefs, food handlers, and people who lived near a live-animal market got sick in Guangzhou, in southern China, where the shredded meat of a short-legged raccoonlike creature, the palm civet, was served in a regional dish called “dragon-tiger-phoenix soup.” The new disease, SARS, spread alarmingly in hospitals, and it reached 30 countries and territories. More than 800 people died; the civet-borne virus was eventually traced to horseshoe bats.

Later, smaller outbreaks of SARS in Taiwan, Singapore, and China’s National Institute of Virology in Beijing were all caused by laboratory accidents. Of the Beijing Virology Institute, the World Health Organization’s safety investigators wrote, in May 2004, that they had “serious concerns about biosafety procedures.” By one account, a SARS storage room in the Beijing lab was so crowded that the refrigerator holding live virus was moved out to the hallway. “Scientists still do not fully understand exactly where or how SARS emerged 18 months ago,” wrote Washington Post reporter David Brown in June 2004. “But it is clear now that the most threatening source of the deadly virus today may be places they know intimately — their own laboratories.”

I’m just asking, Is it a complete coincidence that this outbreak happened in the one city in China with a BSL-4 lab?

MERS arose in 2012, possibly spread by camels that had contracted the disease from bats or bat guano, then passed it to human drinkers of raw camel milk and butchers of camel meat. It was an acute sickness, with a high fatality rate, mostly confined to Saudi Arabia. Like SARS, MERS ebbed quickly — it all but disappeared outside the Middle East, except for an outbreak in 2015 at the Samsung Medical Center in South Korea, where a single case of MERS led to more than 180 infections, many involving hospital workers.

In January 2015, the brand-new BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, built by a French contractor, celebrated its opening, but full safety certification came slowly. According to State Department cables from 2018 leaked to the Washington Post, the new BSL-4 lab had some start-up problems, including “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” The staff had gotten some training at a BSL-4 lab in Galveston, Texas, but they were doing potentially dangerous work with SARS-like viruses, the memo said, and they needed more help from the U.S.

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats...

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

“Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”

The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments...

“The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.

There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.

Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China.

Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.

“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

-- State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses, by Josh Rogin, The Washington Post, April 14, 2020

In November or December of 2019, the novel coronavirus began to spread. Chinese scientists initially named it “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus,” but soon that idea went away. The market, closed and decontaminated by Chinese officials on January 1, 2020, was an amplifying hub, not the source of the outbreak, according to several studies by Chinese scientists. Forty-five percent of the earliest SARS-2 patients had no link with the market.

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Part 2 of 2

VI. Emergence

Now let’s take a step back. AIDS, fatal and terrifying and politically charged, brought on a new era in government-guided vaccine research, under the guidance of Anthony Fauci. A virologist at Rockefeller University, Stephen S. Morse, began giving talks on “emerging viruses” — other plagues that might be in the process of coming out of nature’s woodwork.

-- Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional?, by Leonard G. Horowitz, DMD, MA, MPH

In 1992, Richard Preston wrote a horrific account of one emergent virus, Ebola, in The New Yorker, which became a best-selling book in 1994; Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance appeared that same year and was also a best seller. The idea seemed to be everywhere: We were on the verge of a wave of zoonotic, emergent plagues.

-- Crisis in the Hot Zone: Lessons from an outbreak of Ebola, by Richard Preston

This new, useful term, emerging, began to glow in the research papers of some coronavirologists, who were out of the spotlight, working on common colds and livestock diseases. The term was useful because it was fluid. An emerging disease could be real and terrifying, as AIDS was — something that had just arrived on the medical scene and was confounding our efforts to combat it — or it could be a disease that hadn’t arrived, and might never arrive, but could be shown in a laboratory to be waiting in the wings, just a few mutations away from a human epidemic. It was real and unreal at the same time — a quality that was helpful when applying for research grants.


Where Did It Come From? This chart measures the genetic similarity of known viruses to the novel coronavirus (which appears in yellow). By far the closest is the bat virus RaTG13, which appears in blue, and which was recovered in 2013 and brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The first SARS, marked in red, is a much more distant relative. Graphic: Zhou, P., Yang, XL., Wang, XG. et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 579, 270–273 (2020)

Take, for instance, this paper from 1995: “High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis Viruses Suggest That Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging Viruses.” It was written by Dr. Ralph Baric and his bench scientist, Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina. Baric, a gravelly voiced former swim champion, described in this early paper how his lab was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there was more: “It is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect rats and primates,” Baric said. “The resulting virus variants are associated with demyelinating diseases in these alternative species.” (A demyelinating disease is a disease that damages nerve sheaths.) With steady prodding from laboratory science, along with some rhetorical exaggeration, a lowly mouse ailment was morphed into an emergent threat that might potentially cause nerve damage in primates. That is, nerve damage in us.

A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.

Not only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.” The method was named, he wrote, after a “very small biting insect that is occasionally found on North Carolina beaches.”

In 2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in 2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of coronavirus genetics.”

“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.

Baric and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began collaborating in 2015.

VII. “I Had Not Slept a Wink”


Virologist Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017. Photo: Feature China / Barcroft Studios / Future Publishing / Getty Images

Early in the pandemic, Scientific American profiled Shi Zhengli, known in China as the “bat woman.” Shi trapped hundreds of bats in nets at the mouths of caves in southern China, sampled their saliva and their blood, swabbed their anuses, and gathered up their fecal pellets. Several times, she visited and sampled bats in a mine in Mojiang, in southern China, where, in 2012, six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Shi’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

As Shi explained to Scientific American, late in December 2019, she heard from the director of the Wuhan Institute that there was an outbreak of a new disease in the city. Medical samples taken from hospital patients arrived at her lab for analysis. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen. The Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”

Shi made some WeChat posts early in 2020. “The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits,” she wrote. “I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory.” She advised those who believed rumors, and gave credence to unreliable scientific papers, to “shut their stinking mouths.”

[A]after seeing the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, conservative Christian pastor John McTernan had noted that “God is systematically destroying America” out of anger over “the homosexual agenda.”

-- Christian faith doesn’t just say disasters are God’s retribution, by Mathew Schmalz

VIII. “‘Bug to Drug’ in 24 Hours”

It wasn’t only AIDS that changed the way the NIH funded research. The War on Terror also influenced which diseases got the most attention. In the late ’90s, under Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush, biodefense specialists became interested — again — in anthrax. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency built a small anthrax factory in Nevada, using simulants, to demonstrate how easy it would be for a terrorist to build a small anthrax factory. And in the first year of the Bush presidency, the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote up plans to create a vaccine-resistant form of anthrax using state-of-the-art gene-splicery. A front-page article describing these initiatives, “U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits,” appeared in the New York Times on September 4, 2001, one week before 9/11. “Pentagon Says Projects Are Defense, Is Pressing Ahead,” was the subtitle.

After the 9/11 attacks, and the mysterious anthrax mailings that began a week later (which said, “TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW / DEATH TO AMERICA / DEATH TO ISRAEL / ALLAH IS GREAT”), the desire for biopreparedness became all consuming. Now there were emerging biothreats from humans as well as from the evolving natural world. Fauci’s anti-terror budget went from $53 million in 2001 to $1.7 billion in 2003. Setting aside his work toward an AIDS vaccine, which was taking longer than he’d foreseen, Fauci said he would be going all out to defend against a suite of known Cold War agents, all of which had been bred and perfected in American weapons programs many years before — brucellosis, anthrax, tularemia, and plague, for instance. “We are making this the highest priority,” Fauci said. “We are really marshaling all available resources.”

I would be afraid to look in their freezers.

Vaccine development had to progress much faster, Fauci believed; he wanted to set up “vaccine systems” and “vaccine platforms,” which could be quickly tailored to defend against a particular emergent strain some terrorist with an advanced biochemistry degree might have thrown together in a laboratory. “Our goal within the next 20 years is ‘bug to drug’ in 24 hours,” Fauci said. “This would specifically meet the challenge of genetically engineered bioagents.” The first Project BioShield contract Fauci awarded was to VaxGen, a California pharmaceutical company, for $878 million worth of shots of anthrax vaccine.

By 2005, so much money was going toward biothreat reduction and preparedness that more than 750 scientists sent a protest letter to the NIH. Their claim was that grants to study canonical biowar diseases — anthrax, plague, brucellosis, and tularemia, all exceptionally rare in the U.S. — had increased by a factor of 15 since 2001, whereas funds for the study of widespread “normal” diseases, of high public-health importance, had decreased.

Fauci was firm in his reply: “The United States through its leaders made the decision that this money was going to be spent on biodefense,” he said. “We disagree with the notion that biodefense concerns are of ‘low public-health significance.’ ”

In 2010, by one count, there were 249 BSL-3 laboratories and seven BSL-4 laboratories in the U.S., and more than 11,000 scientists and staffers were authorized to handle the ultralethal germs on the government’s select pathogen list. And yet the sole bioterrorist in living memory who actually killed American citizens, according to the FBI — the man who sent the anthrax letters — turned out to be one of the government’s own researchers. Bruce Ivins, an eccentric, suicidal laboratory scientist from Ohio who worked in vaccine development at Fort Detrick, allegedly wanted to boost the fear level so as to persuade the government to buy more of the patented, genetically engineered anthrax VaxGen vaccine, of which he was a co-inventor.(See David Willman’s fascinating biography of Ivins, Mirage Man.) Fauci’s staff at NIH funded Ivins’s vaccine laboratory and gave $100 million to VaxGen to accelerate vaccine production. (The NIH’s $878 million contract with VaxGen, however, was quietly canceled in 2006; Ivins, who was never charged, killed himself in 2008.)

“The whole incident amounted to a snake eating its own tail,” wrote Wendy Orent in an August 2008 piece titled “Our Own Worst Bioenemy” in the Los Angeles Times. “No ingenious biowarrior from Al Qaeda sent the lethal envelopes through the U.S. postal system. An American scientist did.” What confirmed Ivins’s guilt, according to the FBI, was that there was a genetic match between the anthrax used in the killings and the strain held at Fort Detrick.

Bruce Edwards Ivins (/ˈaɪvɪnz/; April 22, 1946 – July 29, 2008) was an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the suspected perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivins died on July 29, 2008, of an overdose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) in an apparent suicide after learning that criminal charges were likely to be filed against him by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an alleged criminal connection to the attacks.

At a news conference at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 6, 2008, FBI and DOJ officials formally announced that the Government had concluded that Ivins was likely solely responsible for "the deaths of five persons, and the injury of dozens of others, resulting from the mailings of several anonymous letters to members of Congress and members of the media in September and October 2001, which letters contained Bacillus anthracis, commonly referred to as anthrax." On February 19, 2010, the FBI released a 92-page summary of evidence against Ivins and announced that it had concluded its investigation. The FBI conclusions have been contested by many, including senior microbiologists, the widow of one of the victims, and several prominent American politicians. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who was among the targets in the attack, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), and Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) all argued that Ivins was not solely responsible for the attacks. No formal charges were ever filed against Ivins for the crime, and no direct evidence of his involvement has been uncovered.

The FBI subsequently requested a panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review its scientific work on the case. On May 15, 2011, the panel released its findings, which "conclude[d] that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins." The NAS committee stated that its primary finding was that "it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the B. anthracis in the mailings based on the available scientific evidence alone.

-- Bruce Edwards Ivins, by Wikipedia

IX. “Weapons of Mass Disruption”

After SARS appeared in 2003, Ralph Baric’s laboratory moved up the NIH funding ladder. SARS was a “dual use” organism — a security threat and a zoonotic threat at the same time. In 2006, Baric wrote a long, fairly creepy paper on the threat of “weaponizable” viruses. Synthetic biology had made possible new kinds of viral “weapons of mass disruption,” he wrote, involving, for example, “rapid production of numerous candidate bioweapons that can be simultaneously released,” a scattershot terror tactic Baric called [url]the “‘survival of the fittest’ approach[/url].”

Synthetic genomes can be devised fairly rapidly using a variety of bioinformatics tools and purchased fairly cheaply ($1.10/base at current rates), allowing for rapid production of numerous candidate bioweapons that can be simultaneously released (e.g., survival of the fittest approach) or lab tested and then the best candidate used for nefarious purposes. The latter approach assumes that an organization has funded the development of a secure facility, has provided trained personnel and is willing to test the agents and/or passage them in humans, as animal models may be unreliable predictors of human pathogenesis. Assuming the technology continues to advance and spread globally, synthetic biology will allow for rapid synthesis of large designer genomes (e.g., ~30 Kb genome in less than a couple of weeks); larger genomes become technically more demanding. It seems likely that a standard approach could be designed for recovering each synthetic virus, further minimizing the need for highly trained personnel.

-- Synthetic Viral Genomics: Risks and Benefits for Science and Society, by Ralph S. Baric

Lanz von Liebenfels and his mentor Guido von List can be viewed as archetypal Social Darwinists and the Third Reich as Social Darwinism carried to its logical conclusion. Similar to the rationale behind the race eugenics programs in the United States (which also influenced American immigration policies, both of which the Nazis regarded with admiration and approval), it was an ideology of the survival of the fittest, and the enslavement and destruction of the weakest, from Jews to women, from the mentally and physically handicapped to the aged, from Slavs and Gypsies to Communists.

-- Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement With the Occult, by Peter Levenda

Baric hoped to find a SARS vaccine, but he couldn’t; he kept looking for it, year after year, supported by the NIH, long after the disease itself had been contained. It wasn’t really gone, Baric believed. Like other epidemics that pop up and then disappear, as he told a university audience some years later, “they don’t go extinct. They are waiting to return.” What do you do if you run a well-funded laboratory, an NIH “center of excellence,” and your emergent virus is no longer actually making people sick? You start squeezing it and twisting it into different shapes. Making it stand on its hind legs and quack like a duck, or a bat. Or breathe like a person.

Baric’s safety record is good — although there was a minor mouse-bite incident in 2016, uncovered by ProPublica — and his motives are beyond reproach: “Safe, universal, vaccine platforms are needed that can be tailored to new pathogens as they emerge, quickly tested for safety, and then strategically used to control new disease outbreaks in human populations,” he wrote in a paper on public health. But the pioneering work he did over the past 15 years — generating tiny eager single-stranded flask monsters and pitting them against human cells, or bat cells, or gene-spliced somewhat-human cells, or monkey cells, or humanized mice — was not without risk, and it may have led others astray.

In 2006, for instance, Baric and his colleagues, hoping to come up with a “vaccine strategy” for SARS, produced noninfectious virus replicon particles (or VRPs) using the Venezuelan-equine-encephalitis virus (another American germ-warfare agent), which they fitted with various SARS spike proteins. Then, wearing Tyvek suits and two pairs of gloves each, and working in a biological safety cabinet in a BSL-3-certified laboratory, they cloned and grew recombinant versions of the original SARS virus in an incubator in a medium that held African-green-monkey cells. When they had grown enough virus, the scientists swapped out one kind of spike protein for a carefully chosen mutant, and they challenged their prototype vaccine with it in mice.

The scientists also tried their infectious SARS clones in something called an air-liquid interface, using a relatively new type of cell culture developed by Raymond Pickles of the University of North Carolina’s Cystic Fibrosis Center. Pickles had perfected a method of emulating the traits of human airway tissue by cultivating cells taken from lung-disease patients — nurturing the culture over four to six weeks in such a way that the cells differentiated and developed a crop of tiny moving hairs, or cilia, on top and goblet cells within that produced real human mucus. In fact, before infecting these HAE (human airway epithelial) cells with a virus, the lab worker must sometimes rinse off some of the accumulated mucus, as if helping the lab-grown tissue to clear its throat. So Baric was exposing and adapting his engineered viruses to an extraordinarily true-to-life environment — the juicy, sticky, hairy inner surface of our breathing apparatus.

SARS-2 seems almost perfectly calibrated to grab and ransack our breathing cells and choke the life out of them. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission,” Alina Chan and her co-authors have written, whereas SARS, when it first appeared in 2003, underwent “numerous adaptive mutations” before settling down. Perhaps viral nature hit a bull’s-eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric’s work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but — because anyone can now “print out” a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease — it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. No conspiracy — just scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things, and the fear of terrorism, and the fear of getting sick. Plus a whole lot of government money.

X. “Risky Areas for Spillover”

Project Bioshield began to fade by the end of the Bush administration, although the expensive high-containment laboratories, controversial preservers and incubators of past and future epidemics, remain. By 2010, some BioShield projects had dissolved into Obama’s Predict program, which paid for laboratories and staff in 60 “risky areas for spillover” around the world. Jonna Mazet, a veterinary scientist from the University of California, Davis, was in charge of Predict, which was a component of USAID’s “Emerging Pandemic Threats” program. Her far-flung teams collected samples from 164,000 animals and humans and claimed to have found “almost 1,200 potentially zoonotic viruses, among them 160 novel coronaviruses, including multiple SARS- and MERS-like coronaviruses.” The fruits of Predict’s exotic harvest were studied and circulated in laboratories worldwide, and their genetic sequences became part of GenBank, the NIH’s genome database, where any curious RNA wrangler anywhere could quickly synthesize snippets of code and test out a new disease on human cells.

Baric, Jonna Mazet, and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth worked together for years — and Daszak also routed Predict money to Shi Zhengli’s bat-surveillance team in Wuhan through his nonprofit, mingling it with NIH money and money from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. In 2013, Mazet announced that Shi Zhengli’s virus hunters, with Predict’s support, had, for the first time, isolated and cultured a live SARS-like virus from bats and demonstrated that this virus could bind to the human ACE2, or “angiotensin-converting enzyme 2,” receptor, which Baric’s laboratory had determined to be the sine qua non of human infectivity. “This work shows that these viruses can directly infect humans and validates our assumption that we should be searching for viruses of pandemic potential before they spill over to people,” Mazet said.

Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”

XI. “Lab-Made?”

There are, in fact, some helpful points of agreement between zoonoticists — those who believe in a natural origin of the SARS-2 virus — and those who believe that it probably came from a laboratory. Both sides agree, when pressed, that a lab origin can’t be conclusively ruled out and a natural origin can’t be ruled out either — because nature, after all, is capable of improbable, teleological-seeming achievements. Both sides also agree, for the most part, that the spillover event that began the human outbreak probably happened only once, or a few times, quite recently, and not many times over a longer period. They agree that bat virus RaTG13 (named for the Rinolophus affinus bat, from Tongguan, in 2013) is the closest match to the human virus that has yet been found, and that although the two viruses are very similar, the spike protein of the bat virus lacks the features the human spike protein possesses that enable it to work efficiently with human tissue.

Zoonoticists hold that SARS-2’s crucial features — the furin cleavage site and the ACE2 receptor — are the result of a recombinant event involving a bat coronavirus (perhaps RaTG13 or a virus closely related to it) and another, unknown virus. Early on, researchers proposed that it could be a snake sold at the seafood market — a Chinese cobra or a banded krait —but no: Snakes don’t typically carry coronaviruses. Then there was a thought that the disease came from sick smuggled pangolins, because there existed a certain pangolin coronavirus that was, inexplicably, almost identical in its spike protein to the human coronavirus — but then, no: There turned out to be questions about the reliability of the genetic information in that diseased-pangolin data set, on top of which there were no pangolins for sale at the Wuhan market. Then a group from China’s government veterinary laboratory at Harbin tried infecting beagles, pigs, chickens, ducks, ferrets, and cats with SARS-2 to see if they could be carriers. (Cats and ferrets got sick; pigs, ducks, and most dogs did not.)

In September, some scientists at the University of Michigan, led by Yang Zhang, reported that they had created a “computational pipeline” to screen nearly a hundred possible intermediate hosts, including the Sumatran orangutan, the Western gorilla, the Olive baboon, the crab-eating macaque, and the bonobo. All these primates were “permissive” to the SARS-2 coronavirus and should undergo “further experimentational investigation,” the scientists proposed.

Despite this wide-ranging effort, there is at the moment no animal host that zoonoticists can point to as the missing link. There’s also no single, agreed-upon hypothesis to explain how the disease may have traveled from the bat reservoirs of Yunnan all the way to Wuhan, seven hours by train, without leaving any sick people behind and without infecting anyone along the way.

The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?

In July, I discovered a number of volunteer analysts who were doing a new kind of forensic, samizdat science, hunched over the letter code of the SARS-2 genome like scholars deciphering the cuneiform impressions in Linear B tablets. There were the anonymous authors of Project Evidence, on GitHub, who “disavow all racism and violent attacks, including those which are aimed at Asian or Chinese people,” and there was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur from Canada, who wrote a massive, lucid paper on Medium, “Lab-Made?,” which illumined the mysteries of the spike protein. Jonathan Latham of the Bioscience Resource Project, with his co-author Allison Wilson, wrote two important papers: one a calm, unsparing overview of laboratory accidents and rash research and the other a close look at the small outbreak of an unexplained viral pneumonia in a bat-infested copper mine in 2012. I corresponded with Alina Chan (now the subject of a nicely turned piece in Boston magazine by Rowan Jacobsen) and with the pseudonymous Billy Bostickson, a tireless researcher whose Twitter photo is a cartoon of an injured experimental monkey, and Monali Rahalkar, of the Agharkar Research Institute in Pune, India, who wrote a paper with her husband, Rahul Bahulikar, that also sheds light on the story of the bat-guano-shoveling men whose virus was remarkably like SARS-2, except that it was not nearly as catching. I talked to Rossana Segreto, a molecular biologist at the University of Innsbruck, whose paper, “Is Considering a Genetic-Manipulation Origin for SARS-CoV-2 a Conspiracy Theory That Must Be Censored?,” co-authored with Yuri Deigin, was finally published in November under a milder title; it argued that SARS-2’s most notable features, the furin site and the human ACE2-binding domain, were unlikely to have arisen simultaneously and “might be the result of lab manipulation techniques such as site directed mutagenesis.” Segreto is also the person who first established that a bat-virus fragment named BtCoV/4991, identified in 2013, was 100 percent identical to the closest known cousin to SARS-CoV-2, the bat virus RaTG13, thereby proving that the virus closest to the SARS-2-pandemic virus was linked back not to a bat cave but to a mine shaft, and that this same virus had been stored and worked on in the Wuhan Institute for years. This made possible the first big investigative piece on SARS-2’s origins, in the Times of London, in July: “Nobody can deny the bravery of scientists who risked their lives harvesting the highly infectious virus,” the Times authors write. “But did their courageous detective work lead inadvertently to a global disaster?”

XII. “A New, Non-Natural Risk”

In 2011, a tall, confident Dutch scientist, Ron Fouchier, using grant money from Fauci’s group at NIH, created a mutant form of highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1, and passaged it ten times through ferrets in order to prove that he could “force” (his word) this potentially fatal disease to infect mammals, including humans, “via aerosols or respiratory droplets.” Fouchier said his findings indicated that these avian influenza viruses, thus forced, “pose a risk of becoming pandemic in humans.”

This experiment was too much for some scientists: Why, out of a desire to prove that something extremely infectious could happen, would you make it happen? And why would the U.S. government feel compelled to pay for it to happen? Late in 2011, Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health got together with several other dismayed onlookers to ring the gong for caution. On January 8, 2012, the New York Times published a scorcher of an editorial, “An Engineered Doomsday.” “We cannot say there would be no benefits at all from studying the virus,” the Times said. “But the consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk.”

These gain-of-function experiments were an important part of the NIH’s approach to vaccine development, and Anthony Fauci was reluctant to stop funding them. He and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, along with Gary Nabel, NIAID director of vaccine research, published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which they contended that the ferret flu experiments, and others like them, were “a risk worth taking.” “Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” they wrote; the work can “help delineate the principles of virus transmission between species.” The work was safe because the viruses were stored in a high-security lab, they believed, and the work was necessary because nature was always coming up with new threats. “Nature is the worst bioterrorist,” Fauci told a reporter. “We know that through history.”

Soon afterward, there followed some distressing screwups in secure federal laboratories involving live anthrax, live smallpox, and live avian influenza. These got attention in the science press. Then Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research.

Baric, in North Carolina, was not happy. He had a number of gain-of-function experiments with pathogenic viruses in progress. “It took me ten seconds to realize that most of them were going to be affected,” he told NPR. Baric and a former colleague from Vanderbilt University wrote a long letter to an NIH review board expressing their “profound concerns.” “This decision will significantly inhibit our capacity to respond quickly and effectively to future outbreaks of SARS-like or MERS-like coronaviruses, which continue to circulate in bat populations and camels,” they wrote. The funding ban was itself dangerous, they argued. “Emerging coronaviruses in nature do not observe a mandated pause.”

Hoping to smooth over controversy by showing due diligence, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, founded in the BioShield era under President Bush, paid a consulting firm, Gryphon Scientific, to write a report on gain-of-function research, which by now was simply referred to as GoF. In chapter six of this thousand-page dissertation, published in April 2016, the consultants take up the question of coronaviruses. “Increasing the transmissibility of the coronaviruses could significantly increase the chance of a global pandemic due to a laboratory accident,” they wrote.

The Cambridge Working Group continued to write letters of protest and plead for restraint and sanity. Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, said, “We have enough problems simply keeping up with the current flu outbreaks — and now with Ebola — without scientists creating incredibly deadly new viruses that might accidentally escape their labs.” David Relman of Stanford Medical School said, “It is unethical to place so many members of the public at risk and then consult only scientists — or, even worse, just a small subset of scientists — and exclude others from the decision-making and oversight process.” Richard Ebright wrote that creating and evaluating new threats very seldom increases security: “Doing so in biology — where the number of potential threats is nearly infinite, and where the asymmetry between the ease of creating threats and the difficulty of addressing threats is nearly absolute — is especially counterproductive.” Lynn Klotz wrote, “Awful as a pandemic brought on by the escape of a variant H5N1 virus might be, it is SARS that now presents the greatest risk. The worry is less about recurrence of a natural SARS outbreak than of yet another escape from a laboratory researching it to help protect against a natural outbreak.” Marc Lipsitch argued that gain-of-function experiments can mislead, “resulting in worse not better decisions,” and that the entire gain-of-function debate as overseen by the NIH was heavily weighted in favor of scientific insiders and “distinctly unwelcoming of public participation.”

Nariyoshi Shinomiya, a professor of physiology and nano-medicine at the National Defense Medical College in Japan, offered this warning: “Similar to nuclear or chemical weapons there is no going back once we get a thing in our hands.”

But in the end, Baric was allowed to proceed with his experiments, and the research papers that resulted, showered with money, became a sort of Anarchist’s Cookbook for the rest of the scientific world. In November 2015, Baric and colleagues published a collaboration paper with Shi Zhengli titled “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence.” Into a human SARS virus that they had adapted so that it would work in mice, Baric and Shi et al. inserted the spike protein of a bat virus, SHC014, discovered by Shi in southern China. They dabbed the mice nasally with virus and waited, looking for signs of sickness: “hunching, ruffled fur.” They also infected human airway cells with the mouse-adapted bat-spike-in-a-human-virus backbone. In both mice and human airway cells, the chimeric virus caused a “robust infection.”

This proved, Baric and Shi believed, that you did not need civets or other intermediate hosts in order for bats to cause an epidemic in humans and that therefore all the SARS-like viruses circulating in bat populations “may pose a future threat.” Peter Daszak, who had used Predict funds to pay Shi for her work on the paper, was impressed by this conclusion; the findings, he said, “move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger.”

Richard Ebright was trenchantly unenthusiastic. “The only impact of this work,” he said, “is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”

Early in 2016, Baric and Shi again collaborated. Shi sent Baric a fresh bat virus spike protein, and Baric inserted it into the backbone of a human SARS virus and then used that infectious clone to attack human airway cells. “The virus readily and efficiently replicated in cultured human airway tissues, suggesting an ability to potentially jump directly to humans,” reported the UNC’s website. This time, they also used the bat-human hybrid virus to infect transgenic humanized mice that grew human ACE2 protein. The mice, young and old, lost weight and died, proving, again, that this particular bat virus was potentially “poised to emerge in human populations.” It was “an ongoing threat,” Baric wrote. But was it? Civets and camels that are exposed to a lot of bat-guano dust may be an ongoing threat and a manageable one. But the bats themselves just want to hang in their caves and not be bothered by frowning sightseers in spacesuits who want to poke Q-tips in their bottoms. This 2016 “poised for human emergence” paper was supported by eight different NIH grants. In 2015, Baric’s lab received $8.3 million from the NIH; in 2016, it received $10.5 million.

Gain-of-function research came roaring back under Trump and Fauci. “The National Institutes of Health will again fund research that makes viruses more dangerous,” said an article in Nature in December 2017. Carrie Wolinetz of the NIH’s office of science policy defended the decision. “These experiments will help us get ahead of viruses that are already out there and pose a real and present danger to human health,” she told The Lancet. The NIH, Wolinetz said, was committed to a leadership role with gain-of-function research internationally. “If we are pursuing this research in an active way, we will be much better positioned to develop protection and countermeasures should something bad happen in another country.”

A reporter asked Marc Lipsitch what he thought of the resumption of NIH funding. Gain-of-function experiments “have done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics,” he said, “yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

XIII. “Proximity Is a Problem”

In April, four months into the coronavirus emergency, a deputy director at the NIH wrote an email to EcoHealth Alliance. “You are instructed to cease providing any funds to Wuhan Institute of Virology,” it said. In response, Daszak and the chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs (a company that sells seamless gene-splicing products to laboratories, among other things) got 77 Nobel Prize winners to sign a statement saying that the cancellation deprived the “nation and the world of highly regarded science that could help control one of the greatest health crises in modern history and those that may arise in the future.” Later, as a condition of further funding, the NIH wrote to say it wanted Daszak to arrange an outside inspection of the Wuhan lab and to procure from Wuhan’s scientists a sample of whatever they’d used to sequence the SARS-2 virus. Daszak was outraged (“I am not trained as a private detective”), and again he fought back. He was reluctant to give up his own secrets, too. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and emails to the NIH,” he told Nature. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”

But Daszak has survived — even prospered. Recently, The Lancet made him the lead investigator in its inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, and the World Health Organization named him to its ten-person origins investigation. (“We’re still close enough to the origin to really find out more details about where it has come from,” Daszak told Nature.)

The NIH has also set up an ambitious new international program, called CREID, which stands for Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it has put Daszak’s EcoHealth in charge of trapping animals and looking for obscure bat viruses in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Baric is one of Daszak’s partners in CREID. The virus hunting and collecting, which Richard Ebright likens to “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match,” will continue and widen with U.S. funding. “We’re going to work in remote parts of Malaysia and Thailand to get to the front line of where the next pandemic is going to start,” Daszak told NPR.

In May, an interviewer from the People’s Pharmacy website asked Baric if he had any thoughts on whether the coronavirus began with a natural bat-to-human transfer. “Or was there something a little bit more, perhaps, insidious involved?”

“Well, of course the answers to those questions are in China,” Baric replied. “Exactly how they work in that facility is something that would be very difficult for a Westerner to know,” he said. “The main problems that the Institute of Virology has is that the outbreak occurred in close proximity to that Institute. That Institute has in essence the best collection of virologists in the world that have gone out and sought out, and isolated, and sampled bat species throughout Southeast Asia. So they have a very large collection of viruses in their laboratory. And so it’s — you know — proximity is a problem. It’s a problem.”

Over the course of the fall, and especially after the election muffled Donald Trump’s influence over the country’s public-health apparatus, that proximity problem — and the uncomfortable questions of origins it raised — began to grow somewhat more discussable. The BBC, Le Monde, and Italy’s RAI have all recently taken seriously the scientific possibility of a lab leak. In late October, the World Health Organization convened the first meeting of its second inquiry into the origins of the disease. The WHO’s effort is perhaps the world’s best chance to satisfy its curiosity about goings-on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and at the Wuhan CDC’s virus lab near the Wuhan seafood market. But, as the New York Times has reported, the WHO’s information gathering has been hindered by Chinese secretiveness since February, when an initial investigative team sent to Beijing was told its members’ access to scientists would be restricted and that it couldn’t visit the seafood market, then considered a hub of the pandemic.

When a BBC video team tried to inspect the Yunnan mine shaft, they found the road to the mine blocked by a strategically parked truck that had “broken down” shortly before they arrived. Reporter John Sudworth asked Daszak, one of the ten members of the second WHO investigative team, whether he would push for access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “That’s not my job to do that,” Daszak replied.

In November, David Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, one of the most thoughtful of the voices warning against gain-of-function research, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the urgent need to unravel the origins of COVID-19. “If SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic,” he wrote, “it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.” Conflicts of interest by researchers and administrators will need to be addressed, Relman wrote; to reach the truth, the investigation must be transparent, international, and, as much as possible, unpolitical. “A more complete understanding of the origins of COVID-19 clearly serves the interests of every person in every country on this planet.”

“The world is sitting on a precedent-setting decision right now,” wrote Alina Chan on December 8. “It is unclear if SARS2 is 100 percent natural or emerged due to lab/research activities. If we walk away from this, demonstrating that we cannot effectively investigate its origins, it will pave the way for future COVIDS.”

Just before this issue of New York went to press, I reached Ralph Baric by phone and asked him where he now believed SARS-2 came from. (Anthony Fauci, Shi Zhengli, and Peter Daszak didn’t respond to emails, and Kristian Andersen said he was busy with other things.) Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”

XIV. Transmission

So how did we actually get this disease?

Here’s what I think happened. In April 2012, in a copper mine in Mojiang, China, three men were given an awful job — they were told to shovel bat guano out of a mine shaft. They went to work and shoveled guano for seven hours a day in the confined, insufficiently ventilated space of the mine shaft, and by the end of the week, they were sick with a viral pneumonia of unknown etiology. Three more, younger shovelers were hired to replace the ones who were out sick.

The viral load in their lungs was so huge, because of all the guano dust, that their lungs became a kind of accelerated laboratory passaging experiment, as Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson have written, forcing the virus to switch its allegiance from bats to humans. SARS experts were consulted, and the disease was judged to be SARS-like but not SARS. It was something new. (Shi Zhengli told Scientific American that the guano shovelers had died of a fungal disease, but, as Monali Rahalkar pointed out, they were treated with antivirals, and their symptoms were consistent with viral pneumonia with attendant secondary fungal infections.)

Although it was a severe disease, and in the end three of the shovelers died, there was no resultant epidemic. It was actually a case of industrial overexposure to an infectious substance — what we might call a massive OSHA violation. The bat disease that the men encountered wasn’t necessarily all that dangerous except in an environment of immunosuppressive overload.

Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli were interested, of course, because this unidentified coronavirus disease involved bats and people. Of the fragmentary bits of virus Shi retrieved from the mine shaft, one was SARS-like, and Shi sequenced it and called it BtCoV/4991 and published a paper about it. Several times — in 2016 and 2018 and 2019 — this most interesting sample, a portion of what we now know as RaTG13, was taken out of the freezers in Shi’s lab and worked on in undisclosed ways. (Peter Daszak claims that these samples have disintegrated and can’t be validated or studied.) Samples of the nameless human disease also traveled back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — few specifics about these valuable specimens have been released by Chinese sources, however.

This is the period in the story that demands a very close investigation, when chimeric assemblages may have been created and serially passaged, using BtCoV/4991, a.k.a. RaTG13, and other bat viruses, perhaps along with forms of the human virus. It’s when Shi and Baric both published papers that were about what happened when you hot-swapped mutant spike proteins between bat viruses and human viruses.

The link, via the renamed sample BtCoV/4991, to the copper mine is of exceptional importance because of the one huge difference between the unnamed guano shovelers’ virus and the SARS-2 virus that is now ravaging, for example, California: transmissibility. Airborne human-to-human transmissibility — the kind of thing that gain-of-functioneers like Ron Fouchier and Ralph Baric were aiming at, in order to demonstrate what Baric called “lurking threats” — is COVID-19’s crucial distinguishing feature. If six men had gotten extremely sick with COVID-19 back in 2012 in southern China, doctors and nurses in the hospital where they lay dying would likely have gotten sick as well. There might have been hundreds or thousands of cases. Instead, only the shovelers themselves, who had breathed a heavy concentration of guano dust for days, got it.

The existence of bat virus RaTG13 is therefore not necessarily evidence of a natural bat origin. In fact, it seems to me to imply the opposite: New functional components may have been overlaid onto or inserted into the RaTG13 genome, new Tinkertoy intermolecular manipulations, especially to its spike protein, which have the effect of making it unprecedentedly infectious in human airways.

This is where the uniquely peculiar furin insert and/or the human-tuned ACE2-receptor-binding domain may come in — although it’s also possible that either of these elements could have evolved as part of some multistep zoonotic process. But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenge disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people? And then what if, during an experiment one afternoon, this new, virulent, human-infecting, furin-ready virus got out?

For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.

This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.

I hope the vaccine works.

*This article appears in the January 4, 2021, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy
by Alison Young
USA TODAY
Published 8:41 a.m. ET Aug. 17, 2014 Updated 5:25 p.m. ET Aug. 17, 2014

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A scientist in a lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measures the growth of a bird flu virus in one of the agency's labs.


Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy. More than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bioterror germs were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012, reports show. Details of what happened are cloaked in secrecy.

More than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012, government reports obtained by USA TODAY show.

More than half these incidents were serious enough that lab workers received medical evaluations or treatment, according to the reports. In five incidents, investigations confirmed that laboratory workers had been infected or sickened; all recovered.

In two other incidents, animals were inadvertently infected with contagious diseases that would have posed significant threats to livestock industries if they had spread. One case involved the infection of two animals with hog cholera, a dangerous virus eradicated from the USA in 1978. In another incident, a cow in a disease-free herd next to a research facility studying the bacteria that cause brucellosis, became infected due to practices that violated federal regulations, resulting in regulators suspending the research and ordering a $425,000 fine, records show.

But the names of the labs that had mishaps or made mistakes, as well as most information about all of the incidents, must be kept secret because of federal bioterrorism laws, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates the labs and co-authored the annual lab incident reports with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The issue of lab safety and security has come under increased scrutiny by Congress in recent weeks after a series of high-profile lab blunders at prestigious government labs involving anthrax, bird flu and smallpox virus. On Friday, a CDC investigation revealed how a rushed laboratory scientist had been using sloppy practices when a specimen of a mild bird flu virus was unwittingly contaminated with a deadly strain before being shipped to other labs.

Earlier this summer, other researchers at CDC potentially exposed dozens of agency staff to live anthrax because of mistakes; nobody was sickened. Meanwhile, at the National Institutes of Health, long-forgotten vials of deadly smallpox virus were discovered in a cold-storage room where they weren't supposed to be.

The new lab incident data indicate mishaps occur regularly at the more than 1,000 labs operated by 324 government, university and private organizations across the country that are registered with the Federal Select Agent Program. The program is jointly run by the USDA and the CDC, which are required by law to annually submit short reports with incident data to Congress.

The reports, released by CDC in response to a request from USA TODAY, contain few details beyond a count of incidents by categories, such as incidents involving bites or scratches from infected animals, needle sticks, failures of personal protection equipment, spills or specimen packages that temporarily went missing after they were shipped. No thefts were reported.

Data for incidents reported in 2013 is not yet finalized, CDC said. In 2012, lab regulators received 247 reports of potential releases of dangerous pathogens. They also received 247 reports in 2011. There were 275 reports in 2010; 243 in 2009; and 116 in 2008. The reports come from regulated select agent research labs as well as clinical or diagnostic labs that are exempted from registration with federal officials but still must report incidents if they identify a select agent.

"More than 200 incidents of loss or release of bioweapons agents from U.S. laboratories are reported each year. This works out to more than four per week," said Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert at Rutgers university in New Jersey, who testified before Congress last month at a hearing about CDC's lab mistakes.

The only thing unusual about the CDC's recent anthrax and bird flu lab incidents, Ebright said, is that the public found out about them. "The 2014 CDC anthrax event became known to the public only because the number of persons requiring medical evaluation was too high to conceal," he said.

CDC officials were unavailable for interviews and officials with the select agent program declined to provide additional information. The USDA said in a statement Friday that "all of the information is protected under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002."

Such secrecy is a barrier to improving lab safety, said Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the UPMC Center for Health Security in Baltimore, an independent think tank that studies policy issues relating to biosecurity issues, epidemics and disasters.

"We need to move to something more like what they do in aviation, where you have no-fault reporting but the events are described so you get a better sense of what actually happened and how the system can be fixed," said Gronvall, an immunologist by training and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Gronvall notes that even with redundant systems in high-security labs, there have been lab incidents resulting in the spread of disease to people and animals outside the labs.

She said a lab accident is considered by many scientists to be the most likely source of the re-emergence in 1977 of an H1N1 flu strain that had disappeared in 1957 because the genetic makeup of the strain hadn't changed as it should have over those decades. A 2009 article in the New England Journal of Medicine noted the 1977 strain was so similar to the one that disappeared that it suggests it had been "preserved" and that the re-emergence was "probably an accidental release from a laboratory source."

"People understand that mistakes will happen," Gronvall said. "But you want it to be captured, you want it to be learned from, you want there to be a record of how it was dealt with. That's something I think should happen with biosafety."

In 2012, CDC staff published an article in the journal Applied Biosafety on select agent theft, loss and releases from 2004 through 2010, documenting 727 reported incidents, 11 lab-acquired infections and one loss of a specimen in transit among more than 3,400 approved shipments.

The article noted that the number of reports received by CDC likely underestimates the true number of suspected losses and releases. Still, the data "indicate that the risk of exposure to [select agents] managed by US laboratories to the general population is low." The number of reports submitted rose annually during the period, from just 16 in 2004 to 269 reports in 2010, the article said. It's unclear why the numbers in the journal article differ slightly from those in the select agent reports to Congress reviewed by USA TODAY.

The newly released reports give limited information about the handful of incidents where there was occupational illness or an animal becoming unexpectedly infected.

• 2012: Two workers in different select agent facilities showed signs of infection with the bacteria that causes Q fever, a select agent that primarily causes illness in livestock but can also sicken people with sudden or chronic symptoms including high fevers, headaches, nausea and vomiting. While most people recover, some will experience serious illness and complications, including pneumonia, hepatitis and an inflammation of heart tissue. The report says both of the lab workers returned to full work status, but their cases were not being counted as confirmed laboratory acquired infections because each may have been infected outside their labs. One also worked with vaccine strains of the bacteria that aren't counted as select agents; the other served as a large-animal vet outside of the lab work, the report says.

• 2011: A worker in a privately owned veterinary clinic had a confirmed occupational exposure to the bacteria that causes tularemia, which primarily sickens rabbits and rodents. It also can cause mild to life-threatening illness in people — from skin ulcers to pneumonia — depending on how they become infected. The worker fully recovered and there was no evidence of spread to anyone else, the report says.

• 2010: Three reports of confirmed releases were filed with the select agent program this year, the report says. "These releases resulted in two laboratory workers who were infected with Brucella suis in two separate states." Brucella bacteria cause brucellosis, a disease primarily of sheep, goats and cattle. When people are infected, it can cause recurrent fevers, arthritis, neurologic symptoms and chronic fatigue. The third incident involved a release of Classical Swine Fever virus, also known as hog cholera, which resulted in the illness of two animals, which were euthanized.

• 2009: A laboratory worker contracted tularemia, received medical treatment and recovered from the infection, the report says.

•2008: A research facility studying brucellosis was fined $425,000 and was ordered to suspend its research after a cow in a disease-free herd adjacent to the facility became infected with the disease. USDA officials would not answer USA TODAY's questions about the incident. CDC officials said: "The cow was destroyed. This release was determined not to be a threat to public, animal or plant health or safety." A second 2008 incident noted in the report involved a lab worker who became ill as a result of her working with brucella bacteria.

There were 76 reported incidents of potential lost specimens during 2008-2012, according to the reports. In most cases, the reports attribute these incidents to inventory or record-keeping errors. In 2012, one report of a possible loss involved an entity that is not required to register with the federal select agent program. It "could not account for the select agent that had been in its custody. The loss was reported to the FBI," the report says. "The FBI concluded that the most plausible explanation was that the entity inadvertently disposed of the select agent into the biomedical waste stream." The report doesn't say what kind of agent it was.

Follow USA TODAY investigative reporter Alison Young on Twitter:@alisonannyoung

[admin]

The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus
by Botao Xiao1,2* and Lei Xiao3
February, 2020
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21799.29601

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

1 Joint International Research Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Medicine, School of Biology and Biological Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China

2 School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

3 Tian You Hospital, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430064, China

* Corresponding author: [email protected], Tel / Fax: 86-20-3938-0631

The 2019-nCoV coronavirus has caused an epidemic of 28,060 laboratory-confirmed infections in human including 564 deaths in China by February 6, 2020. Two descriptions of the virus published on Nature this week indicated that the genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis [1,2]. It was critical to study where the pathogen came from and how it passed onto human.

An article published on The Lancet reported that 41 people in Wuhan were found to have the acute respiratory syndrome and 27 of them had contact with Huanan Seafood Market [3]. The 2019-nCoV was found in 33 out of 585 samples collected in the market after the outbreak. The market was suspicious to be the origin of the epidemic, and was shut down according to the rule of quarantine the source during an epidemic.

The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market. There was possible natural recombination or intermediate host of the coronavirus, yet little proof has been reported.

Was there any other possible pathway? We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) (Figure 1, from Baidu and Google maps). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification [4- 6]. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province [4]. The expert in collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019 [7,8]. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days [7]. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick [8].

Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing [4, 5]. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.

The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [1, 9, 10]. This laboratory reported that the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the 2002-3 pandemic [9]. The principle investigator participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence [10]. A direct speculation was that SARS-CoV or its derivative might leak from the laboratory.

In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.

Contributors

BX designed the comment and performed literature search. All authors performed data acquisition and analysis, collected documents, draw the figure, and wrote the papers.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11772133, 11372116).

Declaration of interests

All authors declare no competing interests.

References

1. Zhou P, Yang X-L, Wang X-G, et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2012-7.

2. Wu F, Zhao S, Yu B, et al. A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China. Nature 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2008-3.

3. Huang C, Wang Y, Li X, et al. Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The Lancet 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140- 6736(20)30183-5.

4. Guo WP, Lin XD, Wang W, et al. Phylogeny and origins of hantaviruses harbored by bats, insectivores, and rodents. PLoS pathogens 2013; 9(2): e1003159.

5. Lu M, Tian JH, Yu B, Guo WP, Holmes EC, Zhang YZ. Extensive diversity of rickettsiales bacteria in ticks from Wuhan, China. Ticks and tick-borne diseases 2017; 8(4): 574-80.

6. Shi M, Lin XD, Chen X, et al. The evolutionary history of vertebrate RNA viruses. Nature 2018; 556(7700): 197-202.

7. Tao P. Expert in Wuhan collected ten thousands animals: capture bats in mountain at night. Changjiang Times 2017.

8. Li QX, Zhanyao. Playing with elephant dung, fishing for sea bottom mud: the work that will change China's future. thepaper 2019.

9. Ge XY, Li JL, Yang XL, et al. Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor. Nature 2013; 503(7477): 535-8.

10. Menachery VD, Yount BL, Jr., Debbink K, et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nature medicine 2015; 21(12): 1508-13.


Figure 1. The Huanan Seafood Market is close to the WHCDC (from Baidu and Google maps).