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

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Screw your freedom and wear mask
by Arnold Schwarzenegger
August 11, 2021

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Part 1 of 2

The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
by Nicholas Wade
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
May 5, 2021

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

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

A tale of two theories.

After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the major point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part of their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.” But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.

The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.

Doubts about natural emergence.

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Baric and Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, “may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at “a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.

Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Baric had developed, and taught Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. (“CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.)

“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”

“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

“It is also clear,” Ebright said, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” “Genomic context” refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID.

Even if the grant required the work plan described above, how can we be sure that the plan was in fact carried out? For that we can rely on the word of Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.

“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS,” Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger….

“Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?

“Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.” The insertions he referred to perhaps included an element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly increases viral infectivity for human cells.

In disjointed style, Daszak is referring to the fact that once you have generated a novel coronavirus that can attack human cells, you can take the spike protein and make it the basis for a vaccine.

One can only imagine Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” he declared in an April 2020 interview.

The safety arrangements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak was possibly unaware of, or perhaps he knew all too well, the long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.

One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Daszak mentioned in the December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have been as defenseless against the SARS2 virus, if it were generated in their lab, as their Beijing colleagues were against SARS1.

A second reason for the severe danger of novel coronaviruses has to do with the required levels of lab safety. There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a new BSL4 lab, but its state of readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote in a cable of January 19, 2018.

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL4 lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL4 conditions. You have to wear a space suit, do operations in closed cabinets, and accept that everything will take twice as long. So the rules assigning each kind of virus to a given safety level were laxer than some might think was prudent.

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Much of Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright says.

“It also is clear,” he adds, “that this work never should have been funded and never should have been performed.”

This is a view he holds regardless of whether or not the SARS2 virus ever saw the inside of a lab.

Concern about safety conditions at the Wuhan lab was not, it seems, misplaced. According to a fact sheet issued by the State Department on January 15, 2021, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

David Asher, a fellow of the Hudson Institute and former consultant to the State Department, provided more detail about the incident at a seminar. Knowledge of the incident came from a mix of public information and “some high end information collected by our intelligence community,” he said. Three people working at a BSL3 lab at the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe symptoms that required hospitalization. This was “the first known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be COVID-19.” Influenza could not completely be ruled out but seemed unlikely in the circumstances, he said.

Comparing the rival scenarios of SARS2 origin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said. [1]

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Part 2 of 2

A third scenario of origin.

There’s a variation on the natural emergence scenario that’s worth considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans — it didn’t need to because it could already attack human cells efficiently.

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn’t.

“Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection,” write a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.

Still, Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with COVID-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature of 8 similar viruses that Shi reports she collected at the same time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the ancestry of SARS2. But all that is a story for another time. The point here is that bat viruses can infect people directly, though only in special conditions.

So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus researchers do. Shi says she and her group collected more than 1,300 bat samples during some eight visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012 and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan caves.

Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.

The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the bat-preferred codons.

Where we are so far. Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.

That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?

Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.

The records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly hold much relevant information. But Chinese authorities seem unlikely to release them given the substantial chance that they incriminate the regime in the creation of the pandemic. Absent the efforts of some courageous Chinese whistle-blower, we may already have at hand just about all of the relevant information we are likely to get for a while.

So it’s worth trying to assess responsibility for the pandemic, at least in a provisional way, because the paramount goal remains to prevent another one. Even those who aren’t persuaded that lab escape is the more likely origin of the SARS2 virus may see reason for concern about the present state of regulation governing gain-of-function research. There are two obvious levels of responsibility: the first, for allowing virologists to perform gain-of-function experiments, offering minimal gain and vast risk; the second, if indeed SARS2 was generated in a lab, for allowing the virus to escape and unleash a world-wide pandemic. Here are the players who seem most likely to deserve blame.

1. Chinese virologists. First and foremost, Chinese virologists are to blame for performing gain-of-function experiments in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions which were far too lax to contain a virus of unexpected infectiousness like SARS2. If the virus did indeed escape from their lab, they deserve the world’s censure for a foreseeable accident that has already caused the deaths of three million people. True, Shi was trained by French virologists, worked closely with American virologists and was following international rules for the containment of coronaviruses. But she could and should have made her own assessment of the risks she was running. She and her colleagues bear the responsibility for their actions.

I have been using the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a shorthand for all virological activities in Wuhan. It’s possible that SARS2 was generated in some other Wuhan lab, perhaps in an attempt to make a vaccine that worked against all coronaviruses. But until the role of other Chinese virologists is clarified, Shi is the public face of Chinese work on coronaviruses, and provisionally she and her colleagues will stand first in line for opprobrium.

2. Chinese authorities. China’s central authorities did not generate SARS2, but they sure did their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and China’s responsibility for it. They suppressed all records at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and closed down its virus databases. They released a trickle of information, much of which may have been outright false or designed to misdirect and mislead. They did their best to manipulate the WHO’s inquiry into the virus’s origins, and led the commission’s members on a fruitless run-around. So far they have proved far more interested in deflecting blame than in taking the steps necessary to prevent a second pandemic.

3. The worldwide community of virologists. Virologists around the world are a loose-knit professional community. They write articles in the same journals. They attend the same conferences. They have common interests in seeking funds from governments and in not being overburdened with safety regulations.

Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with gain-of-function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014, and it was raised in 2017.

The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2. Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world have been playing with fire.

Their behavior has long alarmed other biologists. In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a SARS2-like virus. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” they wrote. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”

When molecular biologists discovered a technique for moving genes from one organism to another, they held a public conference at Asilomar in 1975 to discuss the possible risks. Despite much internal opposition, they drew up a list of stringent safety measures that could be relaxed in future — and duly were — when the possible hazards had been better assessed.

When the CRISPR technique for editing genes was invented, biologists convened a joint report by the US, UK and Chinese national academies of science to urge restraint on making heritable changes to the human genome. Biologists who invented gene drives have also been open about the dangers of their work and have sought to involve the public.

You might think the SARS2 pandemic would spur virologists to re-evaluate the benefits of gain-of-function research, even to engage the public in their deliberations. But no. Many virologists deride lab escape as a conspiracy theory, and others say nothing. They have barricaded themselves behind a Chinese wall of silence which so far is working well to allay, or at least postpone, journalists’ curiosity and the public’s wrath. Professions that cannot regulate themselves deserve to get regulated by others, and this would seem to be the future that virologists are choosing for themselves.

4. The US role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[2] From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to the death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. When the moratorium expired in 2017, it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.

The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “[a]n exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the federal reporting system of her research.

“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’—thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.

But it’s not so clear that the NIH thought it necessary to invoke any loopholes. Fauci told a Senate hearing on May 11 that “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

This was a surprising statement in view of all the evidence about Shi’s experiments with enhancing coronaviruses and the language of the moratorium statute defining gain-of-function as “any research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

The explanation may be one of definition. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, for one, believes that the term gain-of-function applies only to enhancements of viruses that infect humans, not to animal viruses. “So gain-of-function research refers specifically to the manipulation of human viruses so as to be either more easily transmissible or to cause worse infection or be easier to spread,” an Alliance official told The Dispatch Fact Check.

If the NIH shares the EcoHealth Alliance view that “gain of function” applies only to human viruses, that would explain why Fauci could assure the Senate it had never funded such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the legal basis of such a definition is unclear, and it differs from that of the moratorium language which was presumably applicable.

Definitions aside, the bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting research of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions.

In conclusion.

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue. Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Andersen and Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the second and third names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020.

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: Neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says, “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”

Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration in handling the COVID-19 epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such funding would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?

The virologists’ omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss.

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

Notes

[1] This quotation was added to the article after initial publication.

[2] Section revised May 18, 2021

Acknowledgements

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2 virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus’s origins. Deigin packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some intelligence agency must have authored it. But the essay is written with greater lightness and humor than I suspect are ever found in CIA or KGB reports, and I see no reason to doubt that Deigin is its very capable sole author.

In Deigin’s wake have followed several other skeptics of the virologists’ orthodoxy. Nikolai Petrovsky calculated how tightly the SARS2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptors of various species and found to his surprise that it seemed optimized for the human receptor, leading him to infer the virus might have been generated in a laboratory. Alina Chan published a paper showing that SARS2 from its first appearance was very well adapted to human cells.

One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.

Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe.

In June 2020 Milton Leitenberg published an early survey of the evidence favoring lab escape from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Many others have contributed significant pieces of the puzzle. “Truth is the daughter,” said Francis Bacon, “not of authority but time.” The efforts of people such as those named above are what makes it so.

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Part 1 of 4

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins: Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
by Katherine Eban
Vanity Fair
JUNE 3, 2021

I. A Group Called DRASTIC

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild animals—a possible source of the virus.

That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections of bat samples and bat-virus strains. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as the natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally. After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and Shi became known in China as “Bat Woman” for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples. More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.

To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has strenuously denied.

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.


Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, is frequently pictured in a full-body positive-pressure suit, though not all the labs there require one. BY JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occurring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.

State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box.”

At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade.

With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the DRASTIC researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness, working on the world’s most urgent mystery. They weren’t alone. But investigators inside the U.S. government asking similar questions were operating in an environment that was as politicized and hostile to open inquiry as any Twitter echo chamber. When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.

The question is: Why?

II. “A Can of Worms”

Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.


Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, said he received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he thought the virus likely escaped from a lab. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,” he said. BY ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.

On May 26, the steady crescendo of questions led President Joe Biden to release a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios,” and announce that he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days. His statement noted, “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” But that wasn’t the only failure.

In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”

III. “Smelled Like a Cover-Up”

On December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the World Health Organization. The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation, with unfettered access to markets, hospitals, and government laboratories. The conversation then turned to the more sensitive question: What should the U.S. government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started.

As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.

Only two other labs in the world, in Texas and North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” Dr. Richard Ebright said. “It’s three places.”

Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”

Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.”

Reached for comment, Chris Park told Vanity Fair, “I am skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.” He added that he was simply arguing that it “is making an enormous and unjustifiable leap…to suggest that research of that kind [meant] that something untoward is going on.”

IV. An “Antibody Response”

There were two main teams inside the U.S. government working to uncover the origins of COVID-19: one in the State Department and another under the direction of the National Security Council. No one at the State Department had much interest in Wuhan’s laboratories at the start of the pandemic, but they were gravely concerned with China’s apparent cover-up of the outbreak’s severity. The government had shut down the Huanan market, ordered laboratory samples destroyed, claimed the right to review any scientific research about COVID-19 ahead of publication, and expelled a team of Wall Street Journal reporters.

In January 2020, a Wuhan ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang, who’d tried to warn his colleagues that the pneumonia could be a form of SARS was arrested, accused of disrupting the social order, and forced to write a self-criticism. He died of COVID-19 in February, lionized by the Chinese public as a hero and whistleblower.

“You had Chinese [government] coercion and suppression,” said David Feith of the State Department’s East Asia bureau. “We were very concerned that they were covering it up and whether the information coming to the World Health Organization was reliable.”

As questions swirled, Miles Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, noted that the WIV had remained largely silent. Yu, who is fluent in Mandarin, began mirroring its website and compiling a dossier of questions about its research. In April, he gave his dossier to Secretary of State Pompeo, who in turn publicly demanded access to the laboratories there.

It is not clear whether Yu’s dossier made its way to President Trump. But on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”


State Department official Thomas DiNanno wrote a memo charging that staff from his bureau were “warned…not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.” SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

“It was pure panic,” said former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger. “They were getting flooded with queries. Someone made the unfortunate decision to say, ‘We basically know nothing, so let’s put out the statement.’”

Then, the bomb-thrower-in-chief weighed in. At a press briefing just hours later, Trump contradicted his own intelligence officials and claimed that he had seen classified information indicating that the virus had come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Asked what the evidence was, he said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Trump’s premature statement poisoned the waters for anyone seeking an honest answer to the question of where COVID-19 came from. According to Pottinger, there was an “antibody response” within the government, in which any discussion of a possible lab origin was linked to destructive nativist posturing.

The revulsion extended to the international science community, whose “maddening silence” frustrated Miles Yu. He recalled, “Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.”

V. “Too Risky to Pursue”

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.[/b]

By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”


Peter Daszak, who repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated the funds to research institutes including the WIV, arrives there on February 3, 2021, during a fact-finding mission organized in part by the World Health Organization. BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

As they combed open sources as well as classified information, the team’s members soon stumbled on a 2015 research paper by Shi Zhengli and the University of North Carolina epidemiologist Ralph Baric proving that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they inserted the protein from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat into the molecular structure of the SARS virus from 2002, creating a new, infectious pathogen.

This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors flagged the danger themselves, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies…too risky to pursue.” In fact, the study was intended to raise an alarm and warn the world of “a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” The paper’s acknowledgments cited funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and from a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which had parceled out grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development. EcoHealth Alliance is run by Peter Daszak, the zoologist who helped organize the Lancet statement.

That a genetically engineered virus might have escaped from the WIV was one alarming scenario. But it was also possible that a research trip to collect bat samples could have led to infection in the field, or back at the lab.

The NSC investigators found ready evidence that China’s labs were not as safe as advertised. Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories.

In 2018, a delegation of American diplomats visited the WIV for the opening of its BSL-4 laboratory, a major event. In an unclassified cable, as a Washington Post columnist reported, they wrote that a shortage of highly trained technicians and clear protocols threatened the facility’s safe operations. The issues had not stopped the WIV’s leadership from declaring the lab “ready for research on class-four pathogens (P4), among which are the most virulent viruses that pose a high risk of aerosolized person-to-person transmission.”

Memo
MRN: 18 BEIJING 138
Date/DTG: Jan 19, 2018 / 190739Z Jan 18
From: AMEMBASSY BEIJING
Action: WASHDC, SECSTATE ROUTINE
E.O.: 13526
TAGS: SHLH, ETRD, ECON, PGOV, CN
Captions: SENSITIVE
Reference: 17 WUHAN 48
Subject: China Opens First Bio Safety Level 4 Laboratory

1. (SBU) Summary and Comment: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has recently established what is reportedly China's first Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in Wuhan. This state-of-the-art facility is designed for prevention and control research on diseases that require the highest level of biosafety and biosecurity containment. Ultimately, scientists hope the lab will contribute to the development of new antiviral drugs and vaccines, but its current productivity is limited by a shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a BSL-4 laboratory and a lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines. (b)(5) [DELETE] (b)(5) (b)(5) End Summary and Comment.

China Investing in Infectious Disease Control

2. (U) Between November 2002 and July 2003, China faced an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which, according to the World Health Organization, resulting in 8,098 cases and leading to 774 deaths reported in 37 countries. A majority of cases occurred in China, where the fatality rate was 9.6%. This incident convinced China to prioritize international cooperation for infectious disease control. An aspect of this prioritization was China's work with the Jean Merieux BSL-4 Laboratory in Lyon, France, to build China's first high containment laboratory at Wuhan's Institute of Virology (WIV), an institute under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Construction took 11 years and $44 million USD. and construction on the facility was completed on January 31, 2015. Following two years of effort, which is not unusual for such facilities, the WIV lab was accredited in February 2017 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment. It occupies four floors and consists of over 32,000 square feet. WIV leadership now considers the lab operational and ready for research on class-four pathogens (P4), among which are the most virulent viruses that pose a high risk of aerosolized person-to-person transmission.

Unclear Guidelines on Virus Access and a Lack of Trained Talent Impede Research

3. (SBU) In addition to accreditation, the lab must also receive permission from the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) to initiate research on specific highly contagious pathogens. According to some WIV scientists, it is unclear how NHFPC determines what viruses can or cannot be studied in the new laboratory. To date, WIV has obtained permission for research on three viruses: Ebola virus, Nipah virus, and Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus (a strain of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever found in China's Xinjiang Province). Despite this permission, however, the Chinese government has not allowed the WIV to import Ebola viruses for study in the BSL-4 lab. Therefore, WIV scientists are frustrated and have pointed out that they won't be able to conduct research project with Ebola viruses at the new BSL-4 lab despite of the permission.

(b)(6) [DELETE]

(b)(6) Thus, while the BSL-4 lab is ostensibly fully accredited, its utilization is limited by lack of access to specific organisms and by opaque government review and approval processes. As long as this situation continues, Beijing's commitment to prioritizing infectious disease control -- on the regional and international level, especially in relation to highly pathogenic viruses, remains in doubt.

(b)(6) [DELETE] noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB), which has one of several well-established BSL-4 labs in the United States (supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID of NIH)), has scientific collaborations with WIV, which may help alleviate this talent gap over time. Reportedly, researchers from TMB are helping train technicians who work in the WIV BSL-4 lab. Despite this (b)(6) [DELETE] they would welcome more help from U.S. and international organizations as they establish "gold standard" operating procedures and training courses for the first time in China. As China is building more BSL-4 labs, including one in Harbin Veterinary Research Institute subordinated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) for veterinary research use (b)(6) [DELETE] the training for technicians and investigators working on dangerous pathogens will certainly be in demand.

Despite Limitations. WIV Researchers Produce SARS Discoveries

6. (SBU) The ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research despite limitations on the use of the new BSL-4 facility is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origins of SARS. Over a five-year study, (b)(6) [DELETE] (and their research team) widely sampled bats in Yunnan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies. The study results were published in PLoS Pathogens online on Nov. 30, 2017 (1), and it demonstrated that a SARS-like corona viruses isolated from horseshoe bats in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronavirus originated in this bat population. Most importantly, 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 disease. 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 corona virus outbreak prediction and prevention (b)(5) [DELETE] (b)(5) WIV scientists are allowed to study the SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats while they are precluded from studying human-disease causing SARS coronavirus in their new BSL-4 lab until permission for such work is granted by the NHFCP.

1. Hu B, Zeng L-P, Yang X-L, Ge X-Y, Zhang W, Li B, et a1. (2017) Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus. PLoS Pathog 13(11): e1006698. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698

Signature: BRANSTAD
Drafted By: (b)(6) [DELETE]
Cleared By: (b)(6) [DELETE]
Approved By: (b)(6) [DELETE]
Released By: (b)(6) [DELETE]
Info: CHINA POSTS COLLECTIVE ROUTINE
Dissemination Rule: Archive Copy

UNCLASSIFIED
SBU

On February 14, 2020, to the surprise of NSC officials, President Xi Jinping of China announced a plan to fast-track a new biosecurity law to tighten safety procedures throughout the country’s laboratories. Was this a response to confidential information? “In the early weeks of the pandemic, it didn’t seem crazy to wonder if this thing came out of a lab,” Pottinger reflected.

Apparently, it didn’t seem crazy to Shi Zhengli either. A Scientific American article first published in March 2020, for which she was interviewed, described how her lab had been the first to sequence the virus in those terrible first weeks. It also recounted how:

[S]he frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising them flagged one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

Believing they had uncovered important evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response was very negative.”

VI. Sticklers for Accuracy

By the summer of 2020, Gilles Demaneuf was spending up to four hours a day researching the origins of COVID-19, joining Zoom meetings before dawn with European collaborators and not sleeping much. He began to receive anonymous calls and notice strange activity on his computer, which he attributed to Chinese government surveillance. “We are being monitored for sure,” he says. He moved his work to the encrypted platforms Signal and ProtonMail.

As they posted their findings, the DRASTIC researchers attracted new allies. Among the most prominent was Jamie Metzl, who launched a blog on April 16 that became a go-to site for government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. A former executive vice president of the Asia Society, Metzl sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and served in the Clinton administration as the NSC’s director for multilateral affairs. In his first post on the subject, he made clear that he had no definitive proof and believed that Chinese researchers at the WIV had the “best intentions.” Metzl also noted, “In no way do I seek to support or align myself with any activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest, nationalistic, racist, bigoted, or biased in any way.”

Blocking pro-democracy activist from attending event

Pro-democracy activist and secretary-general of Demosisto Joshua Wong was allegedly disallowed by Asia Society Hong Kong from speaking at a book launch originally scheduled to take place at its Hong Kong venue on June 28, 2017. It was understood that Asia Society Hong Kong was approached by PEN Hong Kong to co-curate the book launch, but negotiations stalled upon the former's request for a more diverse panel of speakers. PEN Hong Kong, a non-profit organization supporting literature and freedom of expression, eventually decided to relocate the launch of Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place – of which Wong was one of the authors – to the Foreign Correspondents Club. Joshua Wong says that Asia Society Hong Kong needs to give a “reasonable explanation” for the incident.

“The mission of PEN Hong Kong is to promote literature and defend the freedom of expression. To bar one of the contributors to our anthology, whether it is Joshua Wong or somebody else, from speaking at our launch event would undermine and in fact contravene that mission,” said PEN Hong Kong President Jason Y. Ng.

Back to November 2016, Asia Society Hong Kong also canceled a scheduled screening of Raise The Umbrellas, a documentary on the 2014 Occupy protests with appearance of Joshua Wong. Asia Society Hong Kong has similarly cited the lack of balanced speaker representation at the pre-screening talk as the reason for not screening the film.

US Congressman Chris Smith, co-chairperson of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, expressed that “The Asia Society has some explaining to do after two events that featured Joshua Wong prominently were canceled over the past nine months,” said the New Jersey representative. “I commend PEN Hong Kong for not appeasing the Asia Society’s demands.”....

On July 10, 2017, Forbes magazine ran an article revealing Hong Kong real estate magnate and Asia Society Co-chair Ronnie Chan (a US citizen) to be the political force behind the Joshua Wong incident. It alleged that wealthy Asians have been behind US think tanks and NGOs and effectively turning them into foreign policy tools of the People's Republic of China (Beijing).

-- Asia Society, by Wikipedia

On December 11, 2020, Demaneuf—a stickler for accuracy—reached out to Metzl to alert him to a mistake on his blog. The 2004 SARS lab escape in Beijing, Demaneuf pointed out, had led to 11 infections, not four. Demaneuf was “impressed” by Metzl’s immediate willingness to correct the information. “From that time, we started working together.”

“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”

Metzl, in turn, was in touch with the Paris Group, a collective of more than 30 skeptical scientific experts who met by Zoom once a month for hours-long meetings to hash out emerging clues. Before joining the Paris Group, Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, had pushed back online against wild conspiracies. No, COVID-19 was not a bioweapon used by the Chinese to infect American athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

The 2019 Military World Games and Sick Athletes

The 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games (MWGs) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019. The games are similar to the Olympic games but consist of military athletes with some added military disciplines. The MWGs in Wuhan drew 9,308 athletes, representing 109 countries, to compete in 329 events across 27 sports. Twenty-five countries sent delegations of more than 100 athletes, including Russia, Brazil, France, Germany, and Poland. [65] ["Military Games to Open Friday in China.” China Daily, 17 Oct. 2019, http://www.china.org.cn/sports/2019- 10/17/content_75311946.htm.]

The PRC government recruited 236,000 volunteers for the games, which required 90 hotels, three railroad stations, and more than 2,000 drivers. [66] [“2019 Military World Games Kicks off in Central China's Wuhan.” CISION, 17 Oct. 2019, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... orldgames- kicks-off-in-central-chinas-wuhan-300940464.html.] An archived version of the competition’s website from October 20, 2019, lists the more than thirty venues that hosted events for the MWGs across Wuhan and the broader Hubei province. [67] [“Competition Venues.” Wuhan 2019 Military World Games, https://web.archive.org/web/20191020154 ... on_venues/.] The live website is no longer accessible – it is unclear why it was removed.

During the games, many of the international athletes became sick with what now appear to be symptoms of COVID-19. In one interview, an athlete from Luxembourg described Wuhan as a “ghost town,”[68] [Houston, Michael. “More athletes claim they contracted COVID-19 at Military World Games in Wuhan.” Inside the Games, 17 May 2020, https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles ... s-covid-19] and recalls having his temperature taken upon arriving at the city’s airport. In an interview with The Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper, one member of the Canadian Armed Forces who participated in the games said (emphasis added):

This was a city of 15 million people that was in lockdown. It was strange, but we were told this was to make it easy for the Games’ participants to get around. [I got] very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia.… On our flight to come home, 60 Canadian athletes on the flight were put in isolation [at the back of the plane] for the 12-hour flight. We were sick with symptoms ranging from coughs to diarrhea and in between. [69] [Francis, Diane. “Diane Francis: Canadian Forces Have Right to Know If They Got COVID at the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan.” Financial Post, 25 June 2021, https://financialpost.com/diane-francis ... taryworld- games-in-wuhan.]

The service member also revealed his family members became ill as his symptoms increased, [70] [Ibid.] a development that is consistent with both human-to-human transmission of a viral infection and COVID-19. Similar claims about COVID-19 like symptoms have been made by athletes from Germany, France, Italy, [71] [Houston.] and Sweden. [72] [Liao, George. “Coronavirus May Have Been Spreading since Wuhan Military Games Last October.” Taiwan News, 13 May 2020, http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3932712.]

By cross referencing the listed MWG venues with publicly available mapping data, it is possible to visualize the venues (in black) in relation to the WIV Headquarters (in red) and the abovementioned hospitals (in blue). The green figures represent athletes who have publicly expressed their belief they contracted COVID-19 while in Wuhan and are mapped at the venues which hosted the events in which they competed. Some of these athletes resided in the military athletes’ village.


Map 2: WIV Headquarters, Hospitals, MWG Venues, and Sick Athletes

At least four countries who sent delegations to the MWGs have now confirmed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 cases within their borders in November and December 2019, before the news of an outbreak first became public....

As stated above, athletes from France, Italy, and Sweden also complained of illnesses with symptoms similar to COVID-19 while at the MWGs in Wuhan. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 in four countries, on two separate continents, suggests a common source. If, as presumed, SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans in Wuhan before spreading to the rest of the world, the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan appears to be a key vector in the global spread – in other words, potentially one of the first “super spreader” events.

-- The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, by House Foreign Affairs Committee

But the more she researched, the more concerned she became that not every possibility was being explored. On May 1, 2020, she published a careful assessment in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing just how a pathogen could have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Alina Chan, a young molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, found that early sequences of the virus showed very little evidence of mutation. Had the virus jumped from animals to humans, one would expect to see numerous adaptations, as was true in the 2002 SARS outbreak. To Chan, it appeared that SARS-CoV-2 was already “pre-adapted to human transmission,” she wrote in a preprint paper in May 2020.

But perhaps the most startling find was made by an anonymous DRASTIC researcher, known on Twitter as @TheSeeker268. The Seeker, as it turns out, is a young former science teacher from Eastern India. He had begun plugging keywords into the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, a website that houses papers from 2,000 Chinese journals, and running the results through Google Translate.

One day last May, he fished up a thesis from 2013 written by a master’s student in Kunming, China. The thesis opened an extraordinary window into a bat-filled mine shaft in Yunnan province and raised sharp questions about what Shi Zhengli had failed to mention in the course of making her denials.

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Part 2 of 4

VII. The Mojiang Miners

In 2012, six miners in the lush mountains of Mojiang county in southern Yunnan province were assigned an unenviable task: to shovel out a thick carpet of bat feces from the floor of a mine shaft. After weeks of dredging up bat guano, the miners became gravely ill and were sent to the First Affiliated Hospital at the Kunming Medical University in Yunnan’s capital. Their symptoms of cough, fever, and labored breathing rang alarm bells in a country that had suffered through a viral SARS outbreak a decade earlier.

The hospital called in a pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan, who had played a prominent role in treating SARS patients and would go on to lead an expert panel for China’s National Health Commission on COVID-19. Zhong, according to the 2013 master’s thesis, immediately suspected a viral infection. He recommended a throat culture and an antibody test, but he also asked what kind of bat had produced the guano. The answer: the rufous horseshoe bat, the same species implicated in the first SARS outbreak.

Within months, three of the six miners were dead. The eldest, who was 63, died first. “The disease was acute and fierce,” the thesis noted. It concluded: “the bat that caused the six patients to fall ill was the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat.” Blood samples were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which found that they were positive for SARS antibodies, a later Chinese dissertation documented.


A memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, who was celebrated as a whistleblower in China after sounding the alarm about COVID-19 in January 2020. He later died of the disease. BY MARK RALSTON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

But there was a mystery at the heart of the diagnosis. Bat coronaviruses were not known to harm humans. What was so different about the strains from inside the cave? To find out, teams of researchers from across China and beyond traveled to the abandoned mine shaft to collect viral samples from bats, musk shrews, and rats.

In an October 2013 Nature study, Shi Zhengli reported a key discovery: that certain bat viruses could potentially infect humans without first jumping to an intermediate animal. By isolating a live SARS-like bat coronavirus for the first time, her team had found that it could enter human cells through a protein called the ACE2 receptor.

In subsequent studies in 2014 and 2016, Shi and her colleagues continued studying samples of bat viruses collected from the mine shaft, hoping to figure out which one had infected the miners. The bats were bristling with multiple coronaviruses. But there was only one whose genome closely resembled SARS. The researchers named it RaBtCoV/4991.

The significance of the Master’s thesis

These findings of the thesis are significant in several ways.

First, in the light of the current coronavirus pandemic it is evident the miners’ symptoms very closely resemble those of COVID-19 (Huang et al, 2020; Tay et al., 2020; M. Zhou et al., 2020). Anyone presenting with them today would immediately be assumed to have COVID-19. Likewise, many of the treatments given to the miners have become standard for COVID-19 (Tay et al., 2020).

Second, the remote meeting with Zhong Nanshan is significant. It implies that the illnesses of the six miners were of high concern and, second, that a SARS-like coronavirus was considered a likely cause.

Third, the abstract, the conclusions, and the general inferences to be made from the Master’s thesis contradict Zheng-li Shi’s assertion that the miners died from a fungal infection. Fungal infection as a potential primary cause was raised but largely discarded.

Fourth, if a SARS-like coronavirus was the source of their illness the implication is that it could directly infect human cells. This would be unusual for a bat coronavirus (Ge et al., 2013). People do sometimes get ill from bat faeces but the standard explanation is histoplasmosis, a fungal infection and not a virus (McKinsey and McKinsey, 2011; Pan et al., 2013).

Fifth, the sampling by the Shi lab found that bat coronaviruses were unusually abundant in the mine (Ge at al., 2016). Among their findings were two betacoronaviruses, one of which was RaTG13 (then known as BtCoV/4991). In the coronavirus world betacoronaviruses are special in that both SARS and MERS, the most deadly of all coronaviruses, are both betacoronaviruses. Thus they are considered to have special pandemic potential, as the concluding sentence of the Shi lab publication which found RaTG13 implied: “special attention should particularly be paid to these lineages of coronaviruses” (Ge at al., 2016). In fact, the Shi and other labs have for years been predicting that bat betacoronaviruses like RaTG13 would go pandemic; so to find RaTG13 where the miners fell ill was a scenario in perfect alignment with their expectations.

The Mojiang miners passaging proposal

How does the Master’s thesis inform the search for a plausible origin of the pandemic?

In our previous article we briefly discussed how the pandemic might have been caused either by a virus collection accident, or through viral passaging, or through genetic engineering and a subsequent lab escape. The genetic engineering possibility deserves attention and is extensively assessed in an important preprint (Segreto and Deigin, 2020).

We do not definitively rule out these possibilities. Indeed it now seems that the Shi lab at the WIV did not forget about RaTG13 but were sequencing its genome in 2017 and 2018. However, we believe that the Master’s thesis indicates a much simpler explanation.

We suggest, first, that inside the miners RaTG13 (or a very similar virus) evolved into SARS-CoV-2, an unusually pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans. Second, that the Shi lab used medical samples taken from the miners and sent to them by Kunming University Hospital for their research. It was this human-adapted virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2­, that escaped from the WIV in 2019.

We refer to this COVID-19 origin hypothesis as the Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) hypothesis.

Passaging is a standard virological technique for adapting viruses to new species, tissues, or cell types. It is normally done by deliberately infecting a new host species or a new host cell type with a high dose of virus. This initial viral infection would ordinarily die out because the host’s immune system vanquishes the ill-adapted virus. But, in passaging, before it does die out a sample is extracted and transferred to a new identical tissue, where viral infection restarts. Done iteratively, this technique (called “serial passaging” or just “passaging”) intensively selects for viruses adapted to the new host or cell type (Herfst et al., 2012).

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. They and their scale have no exact scientific precedent we can refer to and they would be hard to replicate in a lab; thus it is important to emphasize that our proposal is fully consistent with the underlying principles of viral evolution as understood today.

In support of the MMP theory we also know something about the samples taken from the miners. According to the Master’s thesis, samples were taken from patients for “scientific research” and blood samples (at least) were sent to the WIV.

“In the later stage we worked with Dr. Zhong Nan Shan and did some sampling. The patient* tested positive for serum IgM by the WuHan Institute of Virology. It suggested the existence of virus infection” (p62 in the section “Comprehensive Analysis”.)

(*The original does not specify the number of patients tested.)

The Master’s thesis also states its regret that no samples for research were taken from patients 1 and 2, implying that samples were taken from all the others.

We further know that, on June 27th, 2012, the doctors performed an unexplained thymectomy on patient 4. The thymus is an immune organ that can potentially be removed without greatly harming the patient and it could have contained large quantities of virus. Beyond this the Master’s thesis is unfortunately unclear on the specifics of what sampling was done, for what purpose, and where each particular sample went.

Given the interests of the Shi lab in zoonotic origins of human disease, once such a sample was sent to them, it would have been obvious and straightforward for them to investigate how a virus from bats had managed to infect these miners. Any viruses recoverable from the miners would likely have been viewed by them as a unique natural experiment in human passaging offering unprecedented and otherwise-impossible-to-obtain insights into how bat coronaviruses can adapt to humans.

The logical course of such research would be to sequence viral RNA extracted directly from unfrozen tissue or blood samples and/or to generate live infectious clones for which it would be useful (if not imperative) to amplify the virus by placing it in human cell culture. Either technique could have led to accidental infection of a lab researcher.

Our supposition as to why there was a time lag between sample collection (in 2012/2013) and the COVID-19 outbreak is that the researchers were awaiting BSL-4 lab construction and certification, which was underway in 2013 but delayed until 2018.

We propose that, when frozen samples derived from the miners were eventually opened in the Wuhan lab they were already highly adapted to humans to an extent possibly not anticipated by the researchers. One small mistake or mechanical breakdown could have led directly to the first human infection in late 2019.

Thus, one of the miners, most likely patient 3, or patient 4 (whose thymus was removed), was effectively patient zero of the COVID-19 epidemic. In this scenario, COVID-19 is not an engineered virus; but, equally, if it had not been taken to Wuhan and no further molecular research had been performed or planned for it then the virus would have died out from natural causes, rather than escaped to initiate the COVID-19 pandemic....

Further questions

The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 evolved in the Mojiang miner’s lungs potentially resolves many scientific questions about the origin of the pandemic. But it raises others having to do with why this information has not come to light hitherto. The most obvious of these concern the actions of the Shi lab at the WIV.

Why did the Shi lab not acknowledge the miners’ deaths in any paper describing samples taken from the mine (Ge et al., 2016 and P. Zhou et al., 2020)? Why in the title of the Ge at al. 2016 paper did the Shi lab call it an “abandoned” mine? When they published the sequence of RaTG13 in Feb. 2020, why did the Shi lab provide a new name (RaTG13) for BtCoV/4991 when they had by then cited BtCoV/4991 twice in publications and once in a genome sequence database and when their sequences were from the same sample and 100% identical (P. Zhou et al., 2020)? If it was just a name change, why no acknowledgement of this in their 2020 paper describing RaTG13 (Bengston, 2020)? These strange and unscientific actions have obscured the origins of the closest viral relatives of SARS-CoV-2, viruses that are suspected to have caused a COVID-like illness in 2012 and which may be key to understanding not just the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic but the future behaviour of SARS-CoV-2.

These are not the only questionable actions associated with the provenance of samples from the mine. There were five scientific publications that very early in the pandemic reported whole genome sequences for SARS-CoV-2 (Chan et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020; P. Zhou et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020). Despite three of them having experienced viral evolutionary biologists as authors (George Gao, Zheng-li Shi and Edward Holmes) only one of these (Chen et al., 2020) succeeded in identifying the most closely related viral sequence by far: BtCoV/4991 a viral sequence in the possession of the Shi lab at the WIV that differed from SARS-CoV-2 by just 5 nucleotides.

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

On February 3, 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak already spreading beyond China, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genetic code was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, which caused the 2002 outbreak. But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.

In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the shaft where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.

In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine.

Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.

In October 2020, as questions about the Mojiang mine shaft intensified, a team of journalists from the BBC tried to access the mine itself. They were tailed by plainclothes police officers and found the road conveniently blocked by a broken-down truck.

Shi, by now facing growing scrutiny from the international press corps, told the BBC: “I’ve just downloaded the Kunming Hospital University’s student’s master’s thesis and read it…. The conclusion is neither based on evidence nor logic. But it’s used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me. If you were me, what would you do?”

VIII. The Gain-of-Function Debate

On January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got a phone call from his counterpart Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Gao described the appearance of a mysterious new pneumonia, apparently limited to people exposed at a market in Wuhan. Redfield immediately offered to send a team of specialists to help investigate.

But when Redfield saw the breakdown of early cases, some of which were family clusters, the market explanation made less sense. Had multiple family members gotten sick via contact with the same animal? Gao assured him there was no human-to-human transmission, says Redfield, who nevertheless urged him to test more widely in the community. That effort prompted a tearful return call. Many cases had nothing to do with the market, Gao admitted. The virus appeared to be jumping from person to person, a far scarier scenario.


Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said the “conflicted” status of leading experts who had either approved or received funding for gain-of-function research “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.” BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES.

Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies. Redfield formally reiterated his offer to send specialists, but Chinese officials didn’t respond to his overture.

Redfield, a virologist by training, was suspicious of the WIV in part because he’d been steeped in the yearslong battle over gain-of-function research. The debate engulfed the virology community in 2011, after Ron Fouchier, a researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, announced that he had genetically altered the H5N1 avian influenza strain to make it transmissible among ferrets, who are genetically closer to humans than mice. Fouchier calmly declared that he’d produced “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you could make.”

In the ensuing uproar, scientists battled over the risks and benefits of such research. Those in favor claimed it could help prevent pandemics, by highlighting potential risks and accelerating vaccine development. Critics argued that creating pathogens that didn’t exist in nature ran the risk of unleashing them.

In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. (An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that “information about individual unfunded applications is not public to preserve confidentiality and protect sensitive information, preliminary data, and intellectual property.”)

Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

As the pandemic raged, the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV wound up in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. At a White House COVID-19 press briefing on April 17, 2020, a reporter from the conspiratorial right-wing media outlet Newsmax asked Trump a factually inaccurate question about a $3.7 million NIH grant to a level-four lab in China. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?” the reporter asked.

Trump responded, “We will end that grant very quickly,” adding, “Who was president then, I wonder.”

Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017.

-- Presidency of Barack Obama, by Wikipedia

A week later, an NIH official notified Daszak in writing that his grant had been terminated. The order had come from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci later testified before a congressional committee. The decision fueled a firestorm: 81 Nobel Laureates in science denounced the decision in an open letter to Trump health officials, and 60 Minutes ran a segment focused on the Trump administration’s shortsighted politicization of science.

77 US Nobel Laureates in Science

May 21, 2020

Dear Secretary Azar and Director Collins:

The 77 signatories of this letter, American Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics, are gravely concerned about the recent cancellation of a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Dr. Peter Daszak at the EcoHealth Alliance in New York. We believe that this action sets a dangerous precedent by interfering in the conduct of science and jeopardizes public trust in the process of awarding federal funds for research.

For many years, Dr. Daszak and his colleagues have been conducting highly regarded, NIH-supported research on coronaviruses and other infectious agents, focusing on the transmission of these viruses from animal hosts to human beings. Their work depends on productive collaborations with scientists in other countries, including scientists in Wuhan, China, where the current pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus arose. Now is precisely the time when we need to support this kind of research if we aim to control the pandemic and prevent subsequent ones.

As has now been widely reported, the grant to the EcoHealth Alliance was abruptly terminated by NIH on April 24, 2020, just a few days after President Trump responded to a question from a reporter who erroneously claimed that the grant awarded millions of dollars to investigators in Wuhan. Despite the misrepresentation of Dr. Daszak’s grant, despite the high relevance of the studies to the current pandemic, and despite the very high priority score that his application for renewal had received during peer review, the NIH informed Dr. Daszak and his colleagues that the grant was being terminated because “NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities.” Such explanations are preposterous under the circumstances.

We are scientists who have devoted our careers to research, both in medical and related scientific disciplines that bear on the overall health and well-being of society, as well as fundamental scientific research, much of it supported by NIH and other federal agencies. We take pride in our nation’s widely admired system for allocating funds based on expert review and public health needs. The abrupt revoking of the award to Dr. Daszak contravenes these basic tenets and deprives 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.

We ask that you act urgently to conduct and release a thorough review of the actions that led to the decision to terminate the grant, and that, following this review, you take appropriate steps to rectify the injustices that may have been committed in revoking it.

Peter Agre Chemistry 2003 James P. Allison Medicine 2018
Sidney Altman Chemistry 1989 Frances H. Arnold Chemistry 2018
David Baltimore Medicine 1975 Barry Clark Barish Physics 2017
Paul Berg Chemistry 1980 J. Michael Bishop Medicine 1989
Elizabeth H. Blackburn Medicine 2009 Michael S. Brown Medicine 1985
William C. Campbell Medicine 2015 Mario R. Capecchi Medicine 2007
Thomas R. Cech Chemistry 1989 Martin Chalfie Chemistry 2008
Steven Chu Physics 1997 Elias James Corey Chemistry 1990
Robert F. Curl Jr. Chemistry 1996 Johann Deisenhofer Chemistry 1988
Andrew Z. Fire Medicine 2006 Edmond H. Fischer Medicine 1992
Joachim Frank Chemistry 2017 Jerome I. Friedman Physics 1990
Walter Gilbert Chemistry 1980 Sheldon Glashow Physics 1979
Joseph L. Goldstein Medicine 1985 Carol W. Greider Medicine 2009
David J. Gross Physics 2004 Roger Guillemin Medicine 1977
Leland H. Hartwell Medicine 2001 Dudley R. Herschbach Chemistry 1986
Roald Hoffmann Chemistry 1981 H. Robert Horvitz Medicine 2002
Louis J. Ignarro Medicine 1998 William G. Kaelin Jr. Medicine 2019
Eric R. Kandel Medicine 2000 Wolfgang Ketterle Physics 2001
Brian K. Kobilka Chemistry 2012 Roger D. Kornberg Chemistry 2006
Robert J. Lefkowitz Chemistry 2012 Anthony J. Leggett Physics 2003
Michael Levitt Chemistry 2013 Roderick MacKinnon Chemistry 2003
John C. Mather Physics 2006 Craig C. Mello Medicine 2006
William E. Moerner Chemistry 2014 Mario J. Molina Chemistry 1995
Ferid Murad Medicine 1998 Douglas D. Osheroff Physics 1996
James Peebles Physics 2019 Saul Perlmutter Physics 2011
William D. Phillips Physics 1997 H. David Politzer Physics 2004
Sir Richard J. Roberts Medicine 1993 Michael Rosbash Medicine 2017
James E. Rothman Medicine 2013 Randy W. Schekman Medicine 2013
Richard R. Schrock Chemistry 2005 Gregg L. Semenza Medicine 2019
Phillip A. Sharp Medicine 1993 Hamilton O. Smith Medicine 1978
George P. Smith Chemistry 2018 Horst L. Stormer Physics 1998
Thomas C. Sudhof Medicine 2013 Jack W. Szostak Medicine 2009
Joseph H. Taylor Jr. Physics 1993 Kip Stephen Thorne Physics 2017
Susumu Tonegawa Medicine 1987 Daniel C. Tsui Physics 1998
Harold E. Varmus Medicine 1989 Steve Weinberg Physics 1979
Rainer Weiss Physics 2017 Carl E. Wieman Physics 2001
Eric F. Wieschaus Medicine 1995 Torsten N. Wiesel Medicine 1981
Frank Wilczek Physics 2004 Robert Woodrow Wilson Physics 1978
Michael W. Young Medicine 2017

Daszak appeared to be the victim of a political hit job, orchestrated to blame China, Dr. Fauci, and scientists in general for the pandemic, while distracting from the Trump administration’s bungled response. “He’s basically a wonderful, decent human being” and an “old-fashioned altruist,” said the NIH official. “To see this happening to him, it really kills me.”

Department of Health & Human Services
National Institutes of Health
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Bethesda, Maryland 20892

8 July 2020

Drs. Aleksei Chmura and Peter Daszak
EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.
460 W. 34th St.
Suite 1701
New York, NY 100001

Re: NIH Grant R01 A11 10964

Dear Drs. Chmura and Daszak:

In follow-up to my previous letter of April 24, 2020, I am writing to notify you that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an Institute within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has withdrawn its termination of grant R01AI110964, which supports the project Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Accordingly, the grant is reinstated.

However, as you are aware, the NIH has received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a subrecipient of EcoHealth Alliance under R01AI110964, has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns and, as a result, create health and welfare threats to the public in China and other countries, including the United States. Grant award R01AI110964 is subject to biosafety requirements set forth in the NIH Grants Policy Statement (e.g., NIH GPS, Section 4.1.24 “Public Health Security”) and the Notice of Award (e.g., requiring that “Research funded under this grant must adhere to the [CDC/NIH Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL)].”). Moreover, NIH grant recipients are expected to provide safe working conditions for their employees and foster work environments conducive to high-quality research. NIH GPS, Section 4. The terms and conditions of the grant award flow down to subawards to subrecipients. 45 C.F.R. § 75.101.

As the grantee, EcoHealth Alliance was required to “monitor the activities of the subrecipient as necessary to ensure that the subaward is used for authorized purposes, in compliance with Federal statutes, regulations, and the terms and conditions of the subaward . . .” 45 C.F.R. § 75.352(d). We have concerns that WIV has not satisfied safety requirements under the award, and that EcoHealth Alliance has not satisfied its obligations to monitor the activities of its subrecipient to ensure compliance.

Moreover, as we have informed you through prior Notices of Award, this award is subject to the Transparency Act subaward and executive compensation reporting requirement of 2 C.F.R. Part 170. To date you have not reported any subawards in the Federal Subaward Reporting System.

Therefore, effective the date of this letter, July 8, 2020, NIH is suspending all activities related to R01AI110964, until such time as these concerns have been addressed to NIH’s satisfaction. This suspension is taken in accordance with 45 C.F.R. § 75.371, Remedies for Noncompliance, which permits suspension of award activities in cases of non-compliance, and the NIH GPS, Section 8.5.2, which permits NIH to take immediate action to suspend a grant when necessary to protect the public health and welfare. This action is not appealable in accordance with 42 C.F.R. § 50.404 and the NIH GPS Section 8.7, Grant Appeals Procedures. However, EcoHealth Alliance has the opportunity to provide information and documentation demonstrating that WIV and EcoHealth Alliance have satisfied the above-mentioned requirements.

Specifically, to address the NIH’s concerns, EcoHealth must provide the NIH with the following information and materials, which must be complete and accurate:

1. Provide an aliquot of the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus that WIV used to determine the viral sequence.

2. Explain the apparent disappearance of Huang Yanling, a scientist / technician who worked in the WIV lab but whose lab web presence has been deleted.

3. Provide the NIH with WIV’s responses to the 2018 U.S. Department of State cables regarding safety concerns.

4. Disclose and explain out-of-ordinary restrictions on laboratory facilities, as suggested, for example, by diminished cell-phone traffic in October 2019, and the evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility from October 14-19, 2019.

5. Explain why WIV failed to note that the RaTG13 virus, the bat-derived coronavirus in its collection with the greatest similarity to SARS-CoV-2, was actually isolated from an abandoned mine where three men died in 2012 with an illness remarkably similar to COVID-19, and explain why this was not followed up.

6. Additionally, EcoHealth Alliance must arrange for WIV to submit to an outside inspection team charged to review the lab facilities and lab records, with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019. The inspection team should be granted full access to review the processes and safety of procedures of all of the WIV field work (including but not limited to collection of animals and biospecimens in caves, abandoned man-made underground cavities, or outdoor sites). The inspection team could be organized by NIAID, or, if preferred, by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

7. Lastly, EcoHealth Alliance must ensure that all of its subawards are fully reported in the Federal Subaward Reporting System

During this period of suspension, NIH will continue to review the activities under this award, taking into consideration information provided by EcoHealth Alliance, to further assess compliance by EcoHealth Alliance and WIV, including compliance with other terms and conditions of award that may be implicated. Additionally, during the period of suspension, EcoHealth Alliance may not allow research under this project to be conducted. Further, no funds from grant R01AI110964 may be provided to or expended by EcoHealth Alliance or any subrecipients; all such charges are unallowable. It is EcoHealth Alliance’s responsibility as the recipient of this grant award to ensure that the terms of this suspension are communicated to and understood by all subrecipients. EcoHealth Alliance must provide adequate oversight to ensure compliance with the terms of the suspension. Any noncompliance of the terms of this suspension must be immediately reported to NIH. Once the original award is reinstated, NIH will take additional steps to restrict all funding in the HHS Payment Management System in the amount of $369,819. EcoHealth Alliance will receive a revised Notice of Award from NIAID indicating the suspension of these research activities and funding restrictions as a specific condition of award.

Please note that this action does not preclude NIH from taking additional corrective or enforcement actions pursuant to 45 CFR Part 75, including, but not limited to, terminating the grant award. NIH may also take other remedies that may be legally available if NIH discovers other violations of terms and conditions of award on the part of EcoHealth Alliance or WIV.

Sincerely,

Michael S Lauer, MD
NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research
Email: Michael.Lauer@nih.gov

cc: Dr. Erik Stemmy
Ms. Emily Linde

In July, the NIH attempted to backtrack. It reinstated the grant but suspended its research activities until EcoHealth Alliance fulfilled seven conditions, some of which went beyond the nonprofit’s purview and seemed to stray into tinfoil-hat territory. They included: providing information on the “apparent disappearance” of a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, who was rumored on social media to be patient zero, and explaining diminished cell phone traffic and roadblocks around the WIV in October 2019.

But conspiracy-minded conservatives weren’t the only ones looking askance at Daszak. Ebright likened Daszak’s model of research—bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent—to [b]“looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.” Moreover, Ebright believed that Daszak’s research had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing pandemics through its global collaborations.

It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.

Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the “Statement” Ralph!!,” he wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”

Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”

Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other signers had either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: “We declare no competing interests.”

Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: “If zoonosis was the origin, it was a validation… of his life work…. But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.” It could mire the field indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.

IX. Dueling Memos

By the summer of 2020, the State Department’s COVID-19 origins investigation had gone cold. Officials in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance went back to their normal work: surveilling the world for biological threats. “We weren’t looking for Wuhan,” said Thomas DiNanno. That fall, the State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed. In November, that lead turned up classified information that was “absolutely arresting and shocking,” said a former State Department official. Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three government officials told Vanity Fair.

While it is not clear what had sickened them, “these were not the janitors,” said the former State Department official. “They were active researchers. The dates were among the absolute most arresting part of the picture, because they are smack where they would be if this was the origin.” The reaction inside the State Department was, “Holy shit,” one former senior official recalled. “We should probably tell our bosses.” The investigation roared back to life.

[W]e now believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak. We also believe the preponderance of the evidence proves the virus did leak from the WIV and that it did so sometime before September 12, 2019.

This is based upon multiple pieces of evidence laid out in the report, including:

• The sudden removal of the WIV’s virus and sample database in the middle of the night on September 12, 2019 and without explanation;
• Safety concerns expressed by top PRC scientists in 2019 and unusually scheduled maintenance at the WIV;
• Athletes at the Military World Games held in Wuhan in October 2019 who became sick with symptoms similar to COVID-19 both while in Wuhan and also shortly after returning to their home countries;
• Satellite imagery of Wuhan in September and October 2019 that showed a significant uptick in the number of people at local hospitals surrounding the WIV’s headquarters, coupled with an unusually high number of patients with symptoms similar to COVID-19;
• The installation of a People’s Liberation Army’s bioweapons expert as the head of the WIV’s Biosafety Level 4 lab (BSL-4), possibly as early as late 2019; and
• Actions by the Chinese Communist Party and scientists working at or affiliated with the WIV to hide or coverup the type of research being conducted at there.

-- The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, by House Foreign Affairs Committee

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

A classified study of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 conducted a year ago by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s premier biodefense research institution, concluded the novel coronavirus at the heart of the current pandemic may have originated in a laboratory in China, Sinclair has learned.

Researchers at Livermore’s “Z Division,” the lab’s intelligence unit, issued the report May 27, 2020, classified “Top Secret.” Its existence is previously undisclosed. The Z Division report assessed that both the lab-origin theory and the zoonotic theory were plausible and warranted further investigation. Sinclair has not reviewed the report but confirmed its contents through interviews with multiple sources who read it or were briefed on its contents.

In an email to Sinclair, a Livermore spokesperson confirmed the existence of the report but declined to provide additional information. “Because the report you are referring to is classified,” wrote Lynda Seaver, director of public affairs, “it would be inappropriate for our lab to discuss this.”

-- Classified study found COVID-19 could have originated in Chinese lab, by James Rosen, ABC7 News, 5/3/21

Jamie Metzl’s blog became a go-to site for government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. In his first post on the subject, he wrote, “In no way do I seek to support or align myself with any activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest, nationalistic, racist, bigoted, or biased in any way.” BY ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES.

Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.

Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.

Christopher Ashley Ford (born 1967) is an American lawyer and government official who served from January 2018 until January 2021 as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation. He was nominated to that position by President Donald Trump, and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate on December 21, 2017. After October 21, 2019, Ford also, by delegation from Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, performed the duties of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security until his resignation from the Department of State on January 8, 2021.

Before his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State, Ford served in the Trump Administration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the United States National Security Council staff, and a senior U.S. State Department official in the George W. Bush Administration working on issues of nuclear proliferation and arms control verification and compliance policy. He has also worked as a Senate staffer, as well as for the Hudson Institute.

-- Christopher Ashley Ford, by Wikipedia

There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself, and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of “creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?

He was not the only one with concerns. As one senior government official with knowledge of the State Department’s investigation said, “They were writing this for certain customers in the Trump administration. We asked for the reporting behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not something you could go back and find.”

After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” Ford recalled.

The State Department team, for its part, believed that Ford was the one trying to impose a preconceived conclusion: that COVID-19 had a natural origin. A week later, one of them attended the meeting where Christopher Park, who worked under Ford, allegedly advised those present not to draw attention to U.S. funding of gain-of-function research.

With deep distrust simmering, the State Department team convened a panel of experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The idea was to pummel the theory and see if it still stood. The panel took place on the evening of January 7, one day after the insurrection at the Capitol. By then, Ford had announced his plan to resign.

Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that lasted three hours, according to meeting minutes obtained by Vanity Fair. The scientific experts included Ralph Baric, Alina Chan, and the Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

Asher invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the probability of a lab origin versus a natural one. Scissoring Quay’s analysis, Baric noted that its calculations failed to account for the millions of bat sequences that exist in nature but remain unknown. When a State Department adviser asked Quay whether he’d ever done a similar analysis, he replied there’s “a first time for everything,” according to the meeting minutes.

Though they questioned Quay’s findings, the scientists saw other reasons to suspect a lab origin. Part of the WIV’s mission was to sample the natural world and provide early warnings of “human capable viruses,” said Relman. The 2012 infections of six miners was “worthy of banner headlines at the time.” Yet those cases had never been reported to the WHO.

Baric added that, if SARS-CoV-2 had come from a “strong animal reservoir,” one might have expected to see “multiple introduction events,” rather than a single outbreak, though he cautioned that it didn’t prove “[this] was an escape from a laboratory.” That prompted Asher to ask, “Could this not have been partially bioengineered?”

[admin]

Part 3 of 4

Ford was so troubled by what he viewed as the panel’s weak evidence, and the secretive inquiry that preceded it, that he stayed up all night summarizing his concerns in a four-page memo. After saving it as a PDF so it couldn’t be altered, he emailed the memo to multiple State Department officials the next morning.

Memo
From: Ford, Christopher A <FordCA@state.gov>
Sent: Friday, January 8, 2021 4:15:55 PM
To: Biegun, Stephen E <BiegunSE@state.gov>; StilwellDR@state.gov>; Berkowitz, Peter <BerkowitzP@state.gov> [DELETE] Krach, Keith J <KrachKJ@state.gov>
Cc: [DELETE] DiNanno, Thomas G <DiNannoTG@state.gov>; [DELETE]; Yu, Miles <YuMM@state.gov>; [DELETE]; Feith, David <FeithD@state.gov> [DELETE]
Subject: Summary of January 7, 2021, scientific panel discussion organized by AVC on the origins of SARS-CoV-2

Good afternoon, all:

We had a really valuable discussion yesterday evening with a fascinating panel of scientific experts organized by AVC on the question of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It was something of a marathon session that lasted nearly three hours, and produced important insight on a number of fronts. I wrote up a summary of the event last night, and want to share it with all of you. I've attached in-line text below, as well as a PDF of the same information. (I didn't know what form will be more useful to you, so I adopted a "belt and suspenders" approach.) It's a long document, but hopefully interesting, and the issues are important.

Best.

- Chris

The Hon. Christopher A. Ford
Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation
Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security ("T")
U.S. Department of State
Washington, D.C.
United States of America
Tel. (202) 647-1522
fordca@state.gov

TEXT FOLLOWS:

SUMMARY OF JANUARY 7, 2021, AVC PANEL DISCUSSION ORIGINS OF SARS-CoV-2 AND THE PANDEMIC

Yesterday evening, at my insistence, AVC convened a panel of scientists to discuss arguments made by a contractor on AVC's payroll that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was most likely the origin of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. AVC has apparently been briefing this argument inside the Department and some interagency partners for some weeks, apparently on instructions from a staffer at S/P who told them they should not inform me or others of this work, nor involve the Intelligence Community. (I learned of this project only in mid-December, when AVC came to brief me on their contractor's findings, and immediately asked AVC to set up an opportunity for these scientific claims to be discussed and evaluated by scientific experts.) If well-founded, AVC's findings would be extremely significant, and have huge policy and political consequences, so I asked the Bureau to set up a scientific panel in order to help assess the validity of AVC's assessments. Several outside scientists picked by AVC served on the panel, and representatives from my office, AVC, ISN, OES, EAP, and INR, as well as NSC staff, also attended and took part in the nearly three-hour meeting. (I myself also attended.) It was a very valuable discussion.

AVC's argument is heavily based upon what it claims is the statistical improbability of SARS-CoV-2 occurring naturally, through zoonotic transmission outside of a laboratory. Under examination at the expert panel, however, these claims largely fell apart.

The panel did seem to agree on the importance of pressing China to show more transparency and asking tough questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In particular, it was generally agreed that it's important to collect more data, including through widespread sampling of coronaviruses in the wild. There was also agreement that China's so far unexplained failure to report details of a cluster of six cases of pneumonia in 2013, three of which proved lethal, connected to a mine shaft in Yunnan where scientists later found the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 (a virus known as "RaTG13") was a grave public health failure that needs to be investigated. Beijing should have reported these prior illnesses to the international health community, and the viruses potentially associated with them, in order to inform coronavirus researchers and public health officials about the potential threat. All participants seemed also to agree that China should be pressed for answers about such things as the nature of any work done at WIV on novel coronaviruses, whether any safety incidents occurred, what data is in WIV's virus sequencing database (which was mysteriously taken offline early in the pandemic), and when exactly the PRC realized (despite its early representations) that SARS-CoV-2 was only in its "wet market" environmental samples -- and not its live animal samples -- leading them to conclude that the market was not the source of the outbreak.

These sorts of questions should indeed provide us with lots of grist for pressing China for answers and highlighting its non-transparency and history of failing to report (or even covering up) critical information. I am asking AVC and ISN to collaborate on drawing up a list of questions and points that could be useful in this regard.

When it comes to the statistical analysis AVC has used to show that SARS-CoV-2 was most probably the product of a laboratory release, to include genetic engineering of the virus, however, AVC's case rests primarily on a non-published Bayesian statistical analysis prepared for AVC by one scientist -- a pathologist, rather than a virologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease modeler, who admitted to us that he had "never done a Bayesian analysis before" this -- who participated in the panel. AVC did not provide us with the actual paper before yesterday's discussion, so most other participants had not had the chance to study it in detail. (INR's resident epidemiologist, who has used Bayesian analysis frequently, has concerns about the validity of applying this underlying model and data to this hypothesis, and is presently reviewing the document.)

On the basis even of what was discussed in the meeting yesterday, however, AVC's statistical case seems notably weak. Their analysis revolves around drawing conclusions about how statistically likely it is that SARS-CoV-2 appeared naturally (zoonotically) compared to being engineered in or released from a laboratory, largely based upon differences between SARS-CoV-2 and other bat coronaviruses.

Over the course of a nearly three-hour discussion, however, it appeared that this statistical analysis is crippled by the fact that we have essentially no data to support key model inputs. Critically, we have no data on the vast majority of bat coronaviruses that exist in the wild -- which is to say, we have very little of baseline information against which AVC's analysis compares SARS-CoV-2. (At present, only perhaps 0.02 percent of such bat viruses, and perhaps 20 percent of bats though to carry coronaviruses have apparently been sampled, and there is enormous diversity in the bat virus population.) This is certainly a good argument for doing much more sample collection, and for pressing the PRC to do things like restore public access to WIV's virus sequencing database (and presumably excoriating and embarrassing the CCP if it refuses). But our general lack of knowledge about the diversity of bat coronaviruses that exist that is, the comprehensiveness of the comparison set -- undermines AVC's arguments about laboratory origin being likely because of the improbability of SARS-CoV-2 developing from any known coronavirus. (By loose analogy, in politics, it 's hard to learn much from comparing poll results if you have only a very small sample size and have no idea whether your samples are actually representative of the population at large.)

The assertion that WIV kept "thousands of coronaviruses" was also questioned in our discussion, since while it is true that WIV sequenced great numbers of viruses, such sequencing most commonly involves the possession of viral genomic material rather than live viruses. (This may have bearing on the risk of accidental release from a laboratory, since only live viruses entail a risk of infection, and genetic material is not infectious.) One of the panelists also noted the incredible difficulty of isolating live virus from bat samples, which are usually fecal samples, and that this is extremely unreliable and usually not successful. We don't seem to know anything about how many, and which, live viruses were actually kept at WIV -- which is, again, a powerful reason to ask more tough questions of the PRC, but not at this point reason to conclude laboratory escape.

Similarly, AVC has argued that based on the degree of difference between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives -- the above mentioned "Ra TG 13" coronavirus from the mine in Yunnan -- it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 occurred through natural genetic evolution, and thus more likely to have been engineered. This analysis is also gravely flawed, however, since it assumes that RaTG13 is the immediate precursor of SARS-CoV-2. But the panelists seemed to agree that RaTG13 was probably not the immediate precursor of SARS-CoV-2: it is merely the closest known relative -- which is a big difference -- and they all freely admitted we still have an exceedingly poor grasp of what's really "out there" in the bat virus world. As one panelist put it, we'd do better to collect more data than to "mess around with" trying to do statistical probabilities on the basis of such an incomplete data set; the resulting uncertainties are just too huge to make that approach useful.

(Note: The panelists agreed that AVC's supposedly statistical claims about WIV as a point of origin might be much more compelling if we discovered that WIV had actually done work with a precursor virus that really was much closer to SARS-CoV-2 than any yet known. End Note.)

Another problem related to assertions made about the likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 came from WIV that were based on WIV's proximity to "patient zero" for the COVID-19 pandemic, and the claim that there's no known evidence of human exposure to SARS-like coronaviruses in the Wuhan area compared to looking at exposure rates in human populations near a cave in Yunnan known to have SARS-like bat coronaviruses. There was disagreement, however, about the degree to which these geographic matters tell us anything useful. One panelist pointed out that although a point of origin in Wuhan seems more likely than transit from Yunnan, we actually don't know when or where "patient zero" actually was in the first place. Moreover, it was also pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 symptoms vary hugely from asymptomatic to very symptomatic (raising the possibility that cases will be missed, especially early in an outbreak before everyone knows to be looking for the disease), contagion can occur days before symptoms manifest, large numbers of people go back and forth between Yunnan and Wuhan all the time, and large parts of China, particularly rural areas where exposure to animals in higher, have poor health care systems and disease surveillance. Accordingly, conclusions on such bases, multiple participants noted, are not likely to be strongly compelling. While there did seem to be agreement that while there are likely more potential virus precursors in the Yunnan area than in Wuhan, it is still hard to draw too many conclusions at this point because relatively little was known about the total universe of bat coronavirus anywhere. (This lack of data was perhaps the strongest recurring theme of the scientific discussion.)

I hope this summary of the discussion was useful, for those of us involved found it very much so. In concluding this account, let me add two notes that were not discussed in yesterday's marathon scientific discussion, but that I believe to be important:

First, I would strongly caution against arguing that the PRC was "required" by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) to report all of its work at WIV, for that is not the case. In fact, the confidence-building mechanisms (CBMs) of the BWC expressly require only reporting on Biosafety Level Four (BS L-4) facilities, which China has done. (Work with most coronaviruses is not, in fact, normally conducted under BSL-4 conditions, whether in China or the United States.) The BWC's CBMs merely "suggest" reporting on BSL- 3 facilities if they are the highest-level ones that a given country possesses, and despite AVC's suggestions, it is not suspicious that the PRC stopped reporting on BSL-3s when their first BSL-4 facility opened (at WIV): doing exactly that is permissible under the BWC CBMs, and in fact this is what one would expect if they actually followed the instructions set forth in the BWC's CBM guide. (As I pointed out to David Stilwell last weekend, that guide is available online at https://unoda-web.s3-accelerate.amazona ... e-2015.pdf.)

I would also caution you against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious -- and suggestive of biological warfare activity -- about People's Liberation Army (PLA) involvement at WIV on classified projects. It's certainly possible that the PLA did secret BW work at WIV, but we have no information to suggest this. And it would be difficult to say that military involvement in classified virus research is intrinsically problematic, since the U.S. Army has been deeply involved in virus research in the United States for many years.

In any event, thanks for your patience with a long message. I thought the scientific discussion yesterday evening was extraordinarily valuable, and it should be very helpful in allowing us to fine-tune our messaging to and about the PRC. In the event that the Chinese suddenly respond to such questioning with an uncharacteristic degree of transparency and honesty, the global health community will be able to acquire more and better data, which may help clear up these critical questions, and increase the world's preparedness for the next pandemic. If, on the other hand, the PRC stonewalls and dissimulates, its refusal to entertain or respond to such pointed and important questions will help us expose the CCP even further as being disingenuously irresponsible in an area critical to global health security. In either event, therefore, yesterday evening's discussion will have been very helpful. My thanks to Tom DiNanno, Janey Wright, Thomas Cherry, and David Asher for setting up the meeting.

In the memo, Ford criticized the panel’s “lack of data” and added, “I would also caution you against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious—and suggestive of biological warfare activity—about People’s Liberation Army (PLA) involvement at WIV on classified projects. [ i]t would be difficult to say that military involvement in classified virus research is intrinsically problematic, since the U.S. Army has been deeply involved in virus research in the United States for many years.”

Response to Former Assistant Secretary Ford's "SUMMARY OF JANUARY 7, 2021, AVC PANEL DISCUSSION ORIGINS OF SARS-CoV-2 AND THE PANDEMIC"
12/9/2021 [actually 1/9/2021]

AVC is providing the following response in light of the fact that Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s memo was an inaccurate and misleading rendition of the event that mischaracterized the panel's exchanges and used references out of context.

• This event was not convened at the former assistant secretary’s “insistence”

It was conceived, organized, and hosted by AVC following weeks of emails and discussions between AVC personnel and several eminent scientists. The ground work that led to this concept was part of AVC’s preparation for the drafting of the annual compliance report and was further advanced by the knowledge, provided by S/P staff, that Department leadership desired to have the issue examined by a panel of outside experts. Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s only “insistence” in this matter was to insist on attending at the last minute, and to insist on disrupting the discussions between the experts by posing long-winded and ill-informed questions the purpose of which appeared to be to disrupt the proceedings and discredit the entire effort. That violated the ground rules established for what was to be an exchange of views between the scientific panel members with time reserved at the end of the panel discussion for questions or comments by the State attendees.

• The panel was NOT convened to “discuss arguments made by a contractor on AVC’s payroll”

The panel was convened to conduct a peer level review of draft studies by two scientists. The comments of the participants were not for attribution and the panel was understood to be only a starting point in a continuing dialogue. The panelists were never briefed on any AVC assessment or working hypothesis nor were they made aware of internal USG deliberations. AVC’s draft findings were never the topic of discussion – though the discussions went a long way toward validating some of AVC’s current findings. AVC is at a loss to understand Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s apparent confusion or previous lack of interest in this topic, one of the most important matters of the past twelve months.

• Former Assistant Secretary Ford was briefed on AVC’s initial classified and unclassified findings back on December 2nd.

AVC took the initiative to brief the former assistant secretary and ISN technical experts on AVC’s initial findings. AVC received no comments from, nor any followup by, the former assistant secretary nor his staff after the brief. During that brief, however, T staff made clear their apprehension and contempt for AVC engagement on SARS-COV-2 origins as part of our compliance analysis.

• Since AVC’s engagement with the interagency on this issue, the NIC has amended its previous assessment and is now much closer to AVC’s initial findings which did not accept the proposition of a natural occurrence of the virus to the exclusion of a lab escape possibility (despite the NIC’s apparent refusal to consider a number of important technical and open source evidence). A chronology of AVC interagency engagement is attached.

• When Former Assistant Secretary Ford implied agreement among panelists on various points, his summary mischaracterized the nature and content of the exchange of views.

This was not a policy deliberation within the department. As the moderator clearly explained in the introduction, the focus of the exchange was NOT to find agreement, it was to discover where there were questions or uncertainty such that the hypotheses and associated data sets before the panel could be refined and improved. The panel did not take a poll, and silence never implied consent. The panel was not there to validate the former assistant secretary’s notions of what policy should be pursued, but to critique and refine the draft analyses of Dr. Quay and Dr. Chan.

• AVC’s findings to date have never included “a non-published Bayesian statistical analysis”.

AVC requested the NIC to conduct a Bayesian analysis of COVID-19’s origin based on scientific and intelligence evidence in December. Despite the importance of this question and the resources at the NIC’s disposal, the NIC, to our knowledge, has not conducted the requested analysis. Having not received the requested analysis from the NIC, AVC requested that Dr. Steven Quay extend his current investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to include a Bayesian analysis of two important competing hypotheses in his findings. AVC knows of no similar substantive scientific analysis prior to AVC’s request to Dr. Quay. It was this work which was the focus of the scientific panel – NOT AVC’s findings.

• The Bayesian statistical analysis that was the subject of the evening’s discussion was NOT prepared by a pathologist.

Dr. Quay is a renowned biochemist Phd, MD, and biotech entrepreneur with 78 patents to his name (bio attached). Moreover, Former Assistant Secretary Ford failed to acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Chan, whose work was also the subject of this panel’s discussion. Her deep expertise of Chinese duplicity and lack of transparency was very insightful and helpful as AVC looks at compliance issues. The fact that AVC was able to attract such eminent scientists, across multiple biological disciplines, all focused on the question of COVID-19’s origin, for more than two and a half hours, to review Dr. Quay’s and Dr. Chan’s work, speaks very highly of their competence to make original contributions on this important matter. Despite the cynical attempt to impugn Dr. Quay’s qualifications in this matter Dr. Ford praised the panel diversity and qualifications the same day he penned his memo. Most who attended this review of Dr. Quay’s work do not know that he has also collaborated with a very highly qualified bio statistician regarding this and previous work. This individual was not available and thus his contributions were not included in the discussion. The CVs of the panelists are attached, which demonstrate the extraordinarily high and diversified level of scientific expertise present on this panel.

• AVC and Dr. Quay welcomed any inputs from INR’s epidemiologist.

• The former assistant secretary misunderstood a key point of the scientific discussion when he states, “this statistical analysis is crippled by the fact that we have essentially no data to support key model inputs. Critically, we have no data on the vast majority of bat coronaviruses that exist in the wild”.

On the contrary, we don’t need to know every bat coronavirus genome to understand the likelihood of a zoonotic vs. lab origin. We merely need to reliably estimate the number of bat coronaviruses there are, and factor this into our weighting of our present knowledge about bat coronaviruses. This is how Bayesian analysis works. Fortunately for the world, and unbeknownst to some of the panelists, this calculation had already been done, conservatively so, by Dr. Daszak who is one of the world’s greatest proponents of the zoonotic origin hypothesis.

• The former assistant secretary’s identification of what is NOT known about the parthenogenic contents of the Chinese labs, while true, is totally irrelevant to the Bayesian approach which focuses on what we DO know, specifically what current evidence can be quantified and weighed.

This approach allows us to consider all relevant quantifiable evidence in order to calculate the likelihood of a given hypothesis. Bayesian analysis was designed to help determine the probability of an event when there is uncertainty and data is incomplete, which as Dr. Muller, the moderator, pointed out, is the circumstance in almost all scientific inquiry. Dr. Ford’s injection of personal viewpoints was entirely inappropriate and disruptive of the flow of the panel members’ discussion.

• The former assistant secretary’s RaTG13 strawman completely misrepresented AVC’s findings.

AVC has never assumed that RaTG13 is the immediate precursor of SARS-CoV-2. RaTG13 is significant for other reasons having to do with its potential as a backbone for the creation of a parthenogenic chimeric viruses. It is also significant given the suspect behavior of PRC scientists regarding disclosure of information about this virus and the clouded and questionable nature of previous disclosures about its origin, genomic structure, and laboratory experimentation.

• The former assistant secretary is mistaken if he is implying that AVC, or any of the scientists, would “conclude laboratory escape” based on Dr. Quay’s paper or any of the discussions.

Again, this was not a policy discussion aimed at reaching a consensus conclusion. The purpose of the panel was to assist Dr. Quay in refining his Bayesian analysis of two different hypotheses, laboratory origin being one and zoonotic origin being the other. This entire effort was intended to be a discussion among scientific experts on the two presentations, deliberately avoiding the introduction of any policy issues or attempts to force a conclusion or consensus – as was made clear by the ground rules, the opening comments by Dr. Muller as moderator, and AVC SBO DiNanno as host. It should be noted that no panelist questioned the Bayesian approach. The moderator of the panel, Dr. Muller, and the majority of the panel, without objection from any member, believed that a Bayesian analysis was an appropriate tool for an investigation of this question and that the appropriate next step was to identify elements of that analysis that were in question and attempt to refine the model. The only significant questions raised dealt with the weighting, or ability to assign weights, to individual elements of the Dr. Quay’s 19-element assessment. That being said, inputs were solicited by the panel and are welcome.

• Either through misunderstanding of the moderator’s instructions, or on purpose, the former assistant secretary managed on multiple occasions to sidetrack the panel discussion away from its scientific mission by interjecting comments and questions in violation of the ground rules under which the panel members agreed to participate in this event.

• Over the past months, members of Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s staff, and some AVC staff members, warned AVC leadership not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19. Both AVC and ISN staff members stated that AVC would “open a can of worms” if it continued.

When asked, none of these staff members could or would elaborate, but their reluctance to pursue this effort was evidenced by failure to provide information when requested and a complete lack of responses to briefings and presentations that were undertaken by AVC. AVC will continue to pursue its statutory mandate to investigate all matters dealing with BWC compliance including aspects of this pandemic that may indicate a failure by the PRC to honor its treaty obligations and commitments.

• The actions of Dr. Ford regarding this entire effort, including his interruption of the panel discussion and the parting shot of his memorandum to the Secretary, appears to be part of a continuing effort to impose his pre-conceived conclusion about the origin of the virus uninformed by the mass of open source material presented by AVC or the substance of the exchanges that took place during the panel discussion. His attitude and that of his staff was also demonstrated by a hostility to even posing questions to the PRC related to the Biological Weapons Convention or the WHO International Health Regulations, the latter of which are legally-binding, clearly violated, and related to the origin of the virus and the activities that took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

On January 7th AVC was honored to host a scientific discussion involving several of the world’s most accomplished experts in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, zoonotic diseases, immunology, biological warfare, aerosol physics, and synthetic biology, regarding the first substantive scientific Bayesian analysis of two COVID-19 origin hypotheses. They graciously devoted almost three hours of their time without compensation to help refine Dr. Quay’s outstanding work, agreed to consider further refinement of his analysis, and are to be commended for those selfless contributions to get to the root causes of the global pandemic.

Thomas DiNanno sent back a five-page rebuttal to Ford’s memo the next day, January 9 (though it was mistakenly dated “12/9/21”). He accused Ford of misrepresenting the panel’s efforts and enumerated the obstacles his team had faced: “apprehension and contempt” from the technical staff; warnings not to investigate the origins of COVID-19 for fear of opening a “can of worms”; and a “complete lack of responses to briefings and presentations.” He added that Quay had been invited only after the National Intelligence Council failed to provide statistical help.

A year’s worth of mutual suspicions had finally spilled out into dueling memos.

The State Department investigators pushed on, determined to go public with their concerns. They continued a weeks-long effort to declassify information that had been vetted by the intelligence community. On January 15, five days before President Joe Biden’s swearing in, the State Department released a fact sheet about activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, disclosing key information: that several researchers there had fallen ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in autumn 2019, before the first identified outbreak case; and that researchers there had collaborated on secret projects with China’s military and “engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

The statement withstood “aggressive suspicion,” as one former State Department official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. “I was very pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,” said Chris Ford, who personally signed off on a draft of the fact sheet before leaving the State Department. “I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had been vetted and cleared.”

X. A Fact-Finding Mission to Wuhan

In early July, the World Health Organization invited the U.S. government to recommend experts for a fact-finding mission to Wuhan, a sign of progress in the long-delayed probe of COVID-19’s origins. Questions about the WHO’s independence from China, the country’s secrecy, and the raging pandemic had turned the anticipated mission into a minefield of international grudges and suspicion.

Within weeks, the U.S. government submitted three names to the WHO: an FDA veterinarian, a CDC epidemiologist, and an NIAID virologist. None were chosen. Instead, only one representative from the U.S. made the cut: Peter Daszak.

It had been evident from the start that China would control who could come and what they could see. In July, when the WHO sent member countries a draft of the terms governing the mission, the PDF document was titled, “CHN and WHO agreed final version,” suggesting that China had preapproved its contents.

Part of the fault lay with the Trump administration, which had failed to counter China’s control over the scope of the mission when it was being hammered out two months earlier. The resolution, forged at the World Health Assembly, called not for a full inquiry into the origins of the pandemic but instead for a mission “to identify the zoonotic source of the virus.” The natural-origin hypothesis was baked into the enterprise. “It was a huge difference that only the Chinese understood,” said Jamie Metzl. “While the [Trump] administration was huffing and puffing, some really important things were happening around the WHO, and the U.S. didn’t have a voice.”


In 2012, the prominent pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan consulted on a case of miners who fell ill after digging bat feces out of a cave in Mojiang county. Their symptoms of cough, fever, and labored breathing recalled the 2002 SARS outbreak but also foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic. FROM TPG/GETTY IMAGES.

On January 14, 2021, Daszak and 12 other international experts arrived in Wuhan to join 17 Chinese experts and an entourage of government minders. They spent two weeks of the monthlong mission quarantined in their hotel rooms. The remaining two-week inquiry was more propaganda than probe, complete with a visit to an exhibit extolling President Xi’s leadership. The team saw almost no raw data, only the Chinese government analysis of it.

They paid one visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi Zhengli, as recounted in an annex to the mission report. One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”

In fact, the database had been taken offline on September 12, 2019, three months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail uncovered by Gilles Demaneuf and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.

[admin]

Part 4 of 4

After two weeks of fact finding, the Chinese and international experts concluded their mission by voting with a show of hands on which origin scenario seemed most probable. Direct transmission from bat to human: possible to likely. Transmission through an intermediate animal: likely to very likely. Transmission through frozen food: possible. Transmission through a laboratory incident: extremely unlikely.

On March 30, 2021, media outlets around the world reported on the release of the mission’s 120-page report. Discussion of a lab leak took up less than two pages. Calling the report “fatally flawed,” Jamie Metzl tweeted: “They set out to prove one hypothesis, not fairly examine all of them.”

The report also recounted how Shi rebutted conspiracy theories and told the visiting team of experts that “there had been no reports of unusual diseases, none diagnosed, and all staff tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.” Her statement directly contradicted the findings summarized in the January 15 State Department fact sheet. “That was a willful lie by people who know it’s not true,” said a former national security official.

United States Government Expert Analysis on the WHO-Convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 Joint China-WHO Report
April 5, 2021

TOPLINE POINTS

• While the report includes some new relevant information potentially related to the origins of COVID-19, the report has not significantly improved our understanding of how the virus might have started circulating in Wuhan, which was called for in the study’s Terms of Reference (TOR) for the investigation.

• Conclusions made by the joint expert team lack raw data and/or supporting information in the final report and annexes. In fact, some sections of the report appear to contradict or undermine conclusions in other parts of the report.

• The information and analyses presented in the report did not provide clear scientific support for any one hypothesis, and additional work is needed to identify the origins and circumstances leading to the emergence of SAR-CoV-2 in the hopes of reducing the probability of a similar event.

• The report does not provide substantive guidance for future investigations, such as prevention of new outbreaks/spillover events, design of studies of novel outbreaks of unknown origin, or lessons on treatments/risk factors for patients.

Methodology

• When reviewed by the international experts, Phase 1 studies appear to have needed additional data and analyses, and some of those analyses may still be underway. The need to refine the design of the studies and interpretation of the analyses suggests problems in the initial parts of the investigation.

• The report does not appear to have fulfilled the TOR, which lays out more extensive studies, such as comprehensive epidemiological analyses and mapping of supply chains of animals and products.

• Summary data were presented to the external panel, but raw data did not seem to be available for analyses, other than viral genome sequence data.

• The report revealed several types of tests and studies that were not yet completed, despite the long time elapsed and potential relevance to the origins of the virus, for example retrospective testing of all available clinical and surveillance samples from Wuhan.

• Some referenced articles have not been peer-reviewed and others appear to have been withdrawn. References claimed to support infectivity actually appear to describe stability.4

Key Findings

• The report lists four possible pathways of emergence, but it does not include a description of how these hypotheses were generated, would be tested, or how a decision would be made between them to decide that one is more likely than another. Therefore, it is difficult to understand how each of these could have a probability assigned to it.

• The qualitative risk assessment does not discuss the level of uncertainty associated with different classifications.

• The analysis of the possible pathways of emergence (p.115-123) does not link up well to the three sections presenting the analyses by the working groups. They are a blanket statement of likely versus unlikely, with no link to why the data presented in the report makes one more or less likely.

• The report only provides a cursory look at the laboratory incident hypothesis, and the evidence presented seems insufficient to deem the hypothesis “extremely unlikely.”

• The joint team’s assessment is that “introduction through cold/ food chain products is considered a possible pathway.” Although such a pathway is theoretically possible, there is no evidence presented in the report to indicate that it is, in reality, an actual pathway. The report notes the probability of a cold-chain contamination with the virus from a reservoir is very low, it is not emphatically stated in the up-front summary.

• Lack of key data and information on fomite transmission, such as infectious dose, undermines the conclusions about transmission via cold-chain products.

• Alternate explanations for contamination of containers or packaging, such by handling through a COVID-19 infected person, are not adequately explored.

• The three sections presenting working group analyses read more like generalized literature reviews without linkages to the possible pathways of emergence. The report does not bring the three analyses together or discuss how the data from across the analyses informed their conclusions. For example, data from the Huanan Seafood Market is examined by all three working groups, but at no point is that information all clearly brought together to make an overall statement about the role of the Huanan Seafood Market in the early spread of SARS-Cov_2.

Report Recommendations

• The report does not appear to prioritize among the various recommendations, and recommendations may have feasibility challenges at this stage of the pandemic. For example, results of farm surveys could be confounded by human to animal transmission over the past year.

• Phase 2 studies are not well laid-out, with specific, targeted questions to ask to resolve origins questions.

USG EXPERT ANALYSIS

Main Findings of Working Groups

• Epidemiology

• The report concluded that none of the data analyzed showed evidence of widespread circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan before December 2019, although could not exclude the possibility of undetected low-level circulation, and suggested additional research to investigate this issue.

• Contrary to the TOR’s mandate for the mission to analyze “in-depth reviews of hospital records for cases compatible with COVID-19 before December (page 6), most data analysis and interpretation has been performed on previously compiled assessments from limited sources (a few hospitals and centers). Data are primarily presented as already processed, summary data. It is not evident that raw data was made available to be examined or re-analyzed by the team, or that the team had access to ask for more information beyond what was presented. The data presented do not show the extensive mild/asymptomatic cases that should have been likely before the severe cases were detected. The selection of only two hospitals in Wuhan which show extremely low cases of influenza (e.g., Annex: Figure 3 shows only 20-60 adult confirmed influenza cases in peak influenza season) warrants further discussion.

• The epidemiologic data provided was difficult to follow and the different pieces didn’t seem to be consistent with each other. For example, the trends in Influenza-like illness (ILI) data seemed relatively flat year-round in previous years and early in 2019, which was surprising given the seasonal nature of influenza (page 19, figure 1). The 2017-2018 influenza season was a severe epidemic in the Northern hemisphere (as documented by China in the peer-reviewed literature: e.g. https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/ articles/10.1186/s12879-019-4181-2 ) and thus Wuhan data showing a flat baseline was inconsistent with previously published data, with the graphic presented in Annex: Figure 1 (page 137), and not expected. Furthermore, Figures 4 and 5 do not correlate to the data presented in Figures 1-3 reporting ILI cases and percent influenza in adults and pediatrics from one hospital each.

• Several types of disease surveillance and mortality data presented from Fall 2019 indicate no evidence of the early circulation of SARS-CoV-2, however the possibility was not excluded and follow-on studies were recommended to further explore this issue. It is unclear why some of the follow-on work is recommended. For example, it is suggested that next steps include further review of data on respiratory illnesses from on-site clinics at the Military Games in October 2019. However, in the discussion of the Military Games and other international events -- it is noted that there are no clusters of fever or respiratory illness.

• Additionally, an increase in ILI and laboratory confirmed influenza cases was noted in December 2019, particularly in children. Details were not provided on which subtype(s) were present in these children or if samples were also tested for COVID-19. These results were also not consistent and did not correlate with data on deaths during the same time period, or in next month, as those were found to be in older adults. Without access to the raw data it is difficult to understand the trends in respiratory cases before and during December 2019, and into January 2020.

• Although early reported cases were linked to the Huanan market (or other markets), there were as many cases not linked to markets and also sporadic cases in the community earlier than the first markets cases. This suggests that the virus was circulating unnoticed in the community prior to the first clusters detected associated with the Huanan market.

• The report is not clear about which team considered the 92 cases to be compatible with SAR-CoV-2 infection, the team from 233 health institutions or the international team.

• Investigation into possible earlier cases should have occurred and is still needed. This is another example of a missed opportunity to further evaluate the initial cases.

• It is not clear how many “other cases” were reviewed and how they were excluded as incompatible. This appears to be a missed opportunity to thoroughly review the epidemiological studies to identify other possible exposures.

• USG Position

• The report’s conclusions are based on limited data sets which likely should be expanded. The recommendations to look further into details and an expanded data set derived from more hospitals and local, regional and national registers are reasonable and justified. However, it seems rather unlikely that new conclusions will be drawn from surveillance data. Thus, new approaches should be considered such as intensified testing of archived material and blood bank specimens (mentioned by the team) to find answers for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

• Molecular Epidemiology

• Combining worldwide and early molecular epidemiology was well done. Overall, this section has the format of a manuscript/review article rather than an investigation report. Conclusions, such as linking genomic with epidemiological data, sequence quality control and studying closely related bat sequences, are supported and justified. Other conclusions, such as spreading event at the Huanan Market and unrecognized circulations/introductions, are rather hypothetical. Environmental sample sequences from other countries need to be further verified and supported by additional investigations. This seems very vague and lacks strategy/concept.

• Some new genetic analyses were generated as part of this study, which is useful to the origin questions. One of the conclusions is that genetic sequences diversity indicates additional sources or unrecognized circulation, but that is not correlated with the epidemiologic data section.

• Viral genome sequences from the earliest human cases in December 2019 were not included for analysis and comparison, only sequences available after January 2020. Based on sequences available to date, molecular analyses suggest the virus most likely emerged between September and November 2019.

• The sequences available for analysis from January 2020 already showed different sequences clusters present in the infected people.

• Access to viral genomes from the first cases in December, if they exist, would be more informative to better characterize the earliest sequences and cases, and perhaps better inform on timeline and source of emergence.

• USG Position:

• There is a need for more early sequences if material is still available/ accessible. This would include specimens from human cases (e.g., blood draws), animals (wildlife and domestic) and environment. A worldwide accessible database needs to be implemented with quality control at entering level. Data analysis needs to be performed by a team of international experts rather than local/national entities. A global effort seems possible on this topic if all countries and researchers agree to a joint concept/strategy.

• Animal and Environmental Studies

• The report concludes that coronaviruses that are phylogenetically related to SARS-CoV-2 have been identified in multiple animals, but did not identify a specific host. This section of the report includes material on possible cold chain transmission.

• A significant amount of work has been summarized in this section, unfortunately, with little outcome in identifying the source/reservoir/intermediate host. Some of the presentations, such as the presentation on SARS-CoV-2 in mink in the Netherlands, is odd and appears peripheral to information requested in the TOR. The link to bats has some evidence based on coronavirus diversity in bats (based on the literature, not findings from the investigation) but this report does not present sufficient data to make conclusions.

• Environmental sampling seems insufficient as it is largely related to the Huanan Market. The same holds true for frozen food and cold-chain products, as the portion of the report looking at cold-chain transmission is 2 pages long (p.110-111) and includes minimal data to analyze the possibility of infection as a result of frozen foods, nor citations to support the assertions. All laboratory evidence so far speaks against frozen food as a source, but current investigations seem insufficient for final conclusions.

• Samples (sample types not clear besides feces) were collected and tested from a number of different wild and domestic animal species, including rabbits, cats, dogs, rodents, porcupines, poultry, swine etc., from different locations and times (total numbers, timing and locations are a bit hard to follow and summarize). All samples tested as a part of this effort were negative for SARS Cov-2 and for antibodies to SARS CoV-2.

• Previous and other published data were also presented and summarize the SARS CoV-2 related viruses sequences detected in bats and pangolins to date. These data support the potential for bats and/or pangolins to be a potential part of the transmission chain of spillover of the virus from animals to people.

• USG Position:

• An area with little attention so far seems to be wildlife farms/traders and breeding farms of wildlife species (nearby or far-away) including illegal farming .If a potential animal source cannot be identified on the nearby consumer market, one should go up the trading and production line. This could be geographically far away as wildlife products are often brought in from long distances. Environmental sampling on different markets within and outside the province may be helpful. The identification of the origin is less likely to be determined through environmental sampling, but data could be supportive. While frozen food and cold-chain products have not been excluded by the current investigations, it is noteworthy that no evidence has been presented is occurring. Further investigations are warranted because viruses are rather stable in cold environments and while contaminated food products could theoretically be a source of infection, there remains no direct evidence of transmission of COVID-19 via cold chain products to date nor does the report present any such evidence. However, highest priority would be investigations into wildlife farms and breeding facilities around Wuhan and greater China, and discussion of frozen or cold-chain food products should differentiate between frozen wildlife products and commercial products. In addition, studies examining wildlife for potential reservoir/amplifying species in China should be expanded. Finally, a global effort should be initiated to look into reservoir/intermediate host species.

Possible Pathways of Emergence

• Direct zoonotic transmission

• Data from this report did not shed any additional light on this hypothesis.

• While the global scientific community agrees that this is a likely source, the studies documented in the report did not uncover much new information on the original virus reservoir—no analysis of new data, or visits to possible locations in Wuhan or elsewhere.

• The published data to date show that the most closely related viruses, but not any sequences identical to SARS CoV-2, have been found in a number of Rhinolophid bats species in China, Japan Cambodia and Thailand. This is also the group of bats that has been shown to carry SARS CoV-1 related viruses. This is still the strongest evidence to date based on the published literature that bats may be linked in some way to the emergence of SAR CoV-2.

• USG Position:

• The evidence provided in the report does not support this hypothesis over others; however, the published data fit best with the hypotheses of either a direct zoonotic transmission or transmission via an intermediate animal host.

• Introduction through intermediate host followed by zoonotic transmission

• Data from this report did not shed much additional light on this hypothesis. There is some evidence to support an intermediate animal host or hosts may be linked to transmission to people.

• Published data to date show that pangolins also carry viruses related to SARS CoV-2 (90% similarity). Additionally, also from the literature and/or experimental studies, other species have been shown to be susceptible to COVID-19 infection.

• Introduction via an intermediate host is not well separated from “direct zoonotic transmission,” and it is not clear what evidence would distinguish these two hypotheses.

• USG Position:

• The evidence provided in the report does not support this hypothesis over others; however, the published data fit best with the hypotheses of either a direct zoonotic transmission or transmission via an intermediate animal host.

• Introduction through the cold/food chain

• The joint team’s assessment is that “introduction through cold/ food chain products is considered a possible pathway.” Although such a pathway is theoretically possible, the evidence presented in the report does not suggest that it is, in reality, an actual pathway.

• Currently, there are no data to support the hypothesis that the introduction came through foodborne transmission; therefore, it is not likely that the introduction came through foodborne transmission. However, this route of transmission cannot be excluded either at the moment.

• Not only is infection via frozen food items considered low likelihood, for this to be the source of the original Wuhan infections, there would need to be a high level of SARSCoV- 2 infection in another community for food products to carry enough virus to provide an infectious dose. It seems unlikely that such a high rate of infection in any other city or country would have been missed.

• This section included discussion of environmental sampling and description of vendors at the Huanan market, a description of the supply chain for and sampling of animals at the market (in Jan – March, 2020), domestic animal testing, and further testing of livestock and captive wildlife for SARS-CoV-2. It also includes discussion of what is termed the “study on cold-chain products”. However, it does not appear to be a well-designed study, but rather some opportunistic surveillance; the sampling design and any rationale for it is not discussed.

• They present data from China that indicate that some imported cold-chain samples have tested positive and that some workers at import facilities had Covid-19 which demonstrates an association, but not causality.

• Furthermore, they do not provide any details about the analytical methods or provide any details of the handling of the product before it was sampled to control for potential contamination within China. Note that from our understanding the imported products are sampled at a special warehouse that the products are moved to after they clear Chinese customs and many of the positives were from samples collected on the outside packaging, leaving opportunity for contamination from workers to have occurred.

• Lastly, they do not discuss the false positive rate of the tests used (or provide data on the performance of positive and negative controls). Note that we heard at one point, only about 40 samples of imported cold-chain product out of about 1.5 million samples tested positive (or < 0.003%).

• The report does not discuss the temporal relationship between tests and cases or any potential confounding factors (e.g., person-to-person spread, or transfer of RNA from already infected, asymptomatic cases to the packaging), which are key considerations for drawing conclusions about causality rather than associations.

• Documented evidence or peer-reviewed scientific publications are needed to support these statements.

• This paragraph points to the potential for other exposures besides cold-chain seafood.

• The report focuses a great deal on the exterior packaging of frozen products. More information is needed about the potential for the shipping container itself to serve as the point of contamination. More information is needed to document the traceability of particular shipping containers. Consideration needs to be given to the point at which the shipping container may have become contaminated, such as when it was in a shipping yard in China.

• This is noteworthy, as there is a recommendation to conduct further testing of stored product. It is also interesting that no domestic products were sampled and tested.

• There is no further information about these “index cases” and how they were evaluated for other exposures.

• This supports the argument against this theory and is the same conclusion many other countries, including the United States has reached.

• USG Position:

• Although it might be theoretically possible that the cold-chain could be involved in transmission of CoV-2, there is no credible evidence presented in the report to support that it actually occurred. If contaminated food entered markets such as the Huanan Market, one would likely have to assume that clusters/outbreaks would have occurred in another location, which has not yet been detected.

• Introduction through a laboratory incident

• The main report does not describe sufficient investigation into a potential laboratory incident, and there are no data presented in the report on this scenario. In the Annex, there are short visits described to Hubei CDC, Wuhan CDC and Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), though there is limited discussion of potential laboratory accidents or examination of records to dismiss the possibility. Possibilities for a lab-associated origin could include: direct infection of a laboratory worker; infection of a field worker collecting animal specimens; or improper disposal of an infected animal from a laboratory resulting in a human being infected.

• The report reveals that WIV leadership said none of the staff tested positive for the virus or antibodies to the virus, however there were few details provided on employee health monitoring, dates of antibody and PCR screening, and numbers of lab members tested on those dates.

• Data presented regarding laboratory visits by the team to investigate possible sources of the outbreak also does not include adequate data to examine possible exposure by laboratory workers in the field while sampling bats or other animals, which could have led to the first case.

• USG Position:

• There was minimal investigation into this possibility. The assessment of this hypothesis being extremely unlikely is justified based on the narratives provided by the labs, however one should not give the impression that this is based on data derived from a forensic investigation of the laboratory.

Recommendations for Next Steps

The lack of definitive conclusions in the report is not surprising given the mandate of the team and the circumstances in interacting with the Chinese colleagues and the difficulty tracing the origins of emerging infectious diseases.

On a positive note, the report summarizes a tremendous amount of data (published or unpublished) and provides reasonable and justified recommendations for second-phase investigations. It also lays out many deficiencies as well as needs for future investigations. Finally, it provides two likely (not surprising) scenarios for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the human population. Future investigations should be more timely and better prepared with direct involvement of the team leading the investigation and countries/laboratories performing it. On a negative note, the report does not exclude any of the four scenarios or provide support for any scenario beyond what was known previously. There was no direct investigation into the scenario of a laboratory incident – something that the investigation was not set up to allow. One could view the report as a decent start into a second-phase investigation. Future studies need to focus on broader searching for virus hosts (e.g., expanding animals sampled), more coherent hypothesis testing, and specific targeted questions that refine details about the origins of the virus/outbreak. Every recommendation for Phase 2 work should specify joint review to ensure the WHO team has access to data it needs to conduct thorough analyses.

Identifying the source of an epidemic/pandemic is not an easy task and success is not a given. The biggest lesson learned from the investigation/report is that transparency and real-time information/data sharing is key in the fight against infectious disease events of global dimension. It is also important to acknowledge that trying to do these "origin" studies after outbreaks/ epidemics/ pandemics start is never going to be easy. For many outbreaks, the source and spillover mechanism were not conclusively identified during or after the outbreaks, or the understanding of the origins came many years later. We must understand that expanded efforts to understand new pathogens and where they come from before there are widespread outbreaks is needed. Otherwise, we will continue to do the same thing over and over again—that is, wait until after outbreaks start while hoping for better results on sources of the pathogens.

Origins Review USG Expert Group
Mara Burr, JD, LLM
Director, Multilateral Relations
Office of Global Affairs
US Department of Health and Human Services
Mara.Burr@hhs.gov
Ray Arthur, PhD

An internal U.S. government analysis of the mission’s report, obtained by Vanity Fair, found it to be inaccurate and even contradictory, with some sections undermining conclusions made elsewhere and others relying on reference papers that had been withdrawn. Regarding the four possible origins, the analysis stated, the report “does not include a description of how these hypotheses were generated, would be tested, or how a decision would be made between them to decide that one is more likely than another.” It added that a possible laboratory incident received only a “cursory” look, and the “evidence presented seems insufficient to deem the hypothesis ‘extremely unlikely.’”

The report’s most surprising critic was the WHO’s director himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. With the credibility of the World Health Organization on the line, he appeared to acknowledge the report’s shortcomings at a press event the day of its release. “As far as WHO is concerned all hypotheses remain on the table,” he said. “We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do.”

His statement reflected “monumental courage,” said Metzl. “Tedros risked his entire career to defend the integrity of the WHO.” (The WHO declined to make Tedros available for an interview.)

By then, an international coalition of roughly two dozen scientists, among them DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf and EcoHealth critic Richard Ebright at Rutgers, had found a way around what Metzl described as a “wall of rejections” by scientific journals. With Metzl’s guidance, they began publishing open letters in early March. Their second letter, issued on April 7, condemned the mission report and called for a full investigation into the origin of COVID-19. It was picked up widely by national newspapers.

A growing number of people were demanding to know what exactly had gone on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Were the claims in the State Department’s fact sheet—of sick researchers and secret military research—accurate?

Metzl had managed to question Shi directly a week before the release of the mission report. At a March 23 online lecture by Shi, hosted by Rutgers Medical School, Metzl asked if she had full knowledge of all the research being done at the WIV and all the viruses held there, and if the U.S. government was correct that classified military research had taken place. She responded:

We—our work, our research is open, and we have a lot of international collaboration. And from my knowledge, all our research work is open, is transparency. So, at the beginning of COVID-19, we heard the rumors that it’s claimed in our laboratory we have some project, blah blah, with army, blah blah, these kinds of rumors. But this is not correct because I am the lab’s director and responsible for research activity. I don’t know any kind of research work performed in this lab. This is incorrect information.

A major argument against the lab-leak theory hinged on the presumption that Shi was telling the truth when she said the WIV was not hiding any virus samples that are closer cousins to SARS-CoV-2. In Metzl’s view, if she was lying about the military’s involvement, or anything else, then all bets were off.

XI. Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology

In January 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a press release hailing Shi Zhengli’s “distinguished and pioneering achievement in discovery and characterization of important bat-borne viruses.” The occasion was her election as a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Microbiology—just the latest milestone in a glittering scientific career. In China, the celebrated “Bat Woman” was easily recognizable from photos showing her in a full-body positive-pressure suit inside the WIV’s BSL-4 lab.

Shi was a fixture at international virology conferences, thanks to her “state-of-the-art” work, said James LeDuc, the longtime director of the BSL-4 Galveston National Laboratory in Texas. At the international meetings he organized, Shi was a regular, along with Ralph Baric from UNC. “She’s a charming person, completely fluent in English and French,” said LeDuc. Sounding almost wistful, he added, “This is how science works. You get everyone together, they share their data, go out and have a beer.”

Shi’s journey to the top of the virology field had begun with treks to remote bat caves in southernmost China. In 2006, she trained at the BSL-4 Jean Merieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon, France. She was named director of the WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2011, and its BSL-3 lab director in 2013.

It’s hard to think of anyone, anywhere, who was better prepared to meet the challenge of COVID-19. On December 30, 2019, at around 7 p.m., Shi received a call from her boss, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to an account she gave to Scientific American. He wanted her to investigate several cases of patients hospitalized with a mysterious pneumonia: “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now.”

The next day, by analyzing seven patient samples, her team became one of the first to sequence and identify the ailment as a novel SARS-related coronavirus. By January 21, she had been appointed to lead the Hubei Province COVID-19 Emergency Scientific Research Expert Group. At a terrifying moment, in a country that exalted its scientists, she had reached a pinnacle.

But her ascent came at a cost. There is reason to believe she was hardly free to speak her mind or follow a scientific path that didn’t conform to China’s party line. Though Shi had planned to share isolated samples of the virus with her friend James LeDuc in Galveston, Beijing officials blocked her. And by mid-January, a team of military scientists led by China’s top virologist and biochemical expert, Major General Chen Wei, had set up operations inside the WIV.

Under scrutiny from governments including her own, with bizarre conspiracy theories and legitimate doubts swirling around her, she began lashing out at critics. “The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment from nature for humanity’s uncivilized habits,” she wrote in a February 2 post on WeChat, a popular social media app in China. “I, Shi Zhengli, guarantee on my life that it has nothing to do with our lab. May I offer some advice to those people who believe and spread bad media rumors: shut your dirty mouths.”

Though Shi has portrayed the WIV as a transparent hub of international research beset by false allegations, the State Department’s January fact sheet painted a different picture: of a facility conducting classified military research, and hiding it, which Shi adamantly denies. But a former national security official who reviewed U.S. classified materials told Vanity Fair that inside the WIV, military and civilian researchers are “doing animal research in the same fricking space.”

While that, in and of itself, does not prove a lab leak, Shi’s alleged lies about it are “absolutely material,” said a former State Department official. “It speaks to the honesty and credibility of the WIV that they kept this secret…. You have a web of lies, coercion, and disinformation that is killing people.”

Vanity Fair sent Shi Zhengli and the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology detailed questions. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment by email and phone.

As officials at the NSC tracked collaborations between the WIV and military scientists—which stretch back 20 years, with 51 coauthored papers—they also took note of a book flagged by a college student in Hong Kong. Written by a team of 18 authors and editors, 11 of whom worked at China’s Air Force Medical University, the book, Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, explores issues surrounding the development of bioweapons capabilities.

Claiming that terrorists using gene editing had created SARS-CoV-1 as a bioweapon, the book contained some alarming practical trade craft: “Bioweapon aerosol attacks are best conducted during dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather because ultraviolet rays can damage the pathogens.” And it cited collateral benefits, noting that a sudden surge of hospitalizations could cause a healthcare system to collapse. One of the book’s editors has collaborated on 12 scientific papers with researchers at the WIV.


University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric collaborated with Shi Zhengli on a gain-of-function coronavirus experiment in 2015. In February 2020, he privately expressed support for Peter Daszak’s Lancet statement dismissing the lab-leak theory. More recently, he signed a letter calling for a transparent investigation of all hypotheses. BY CHRISTOPHER JANARO /BLOOMBERG /GETTY IMAGES.

The book’s dramatic rhetoric could have been hype by Chinese military researchers trying to sell books, or a pitch to the People’s Liberation Army for funding to launch a biowarfare program. When a reporter with the Rupert Murdoch–owned newspaper The Australian published details from the book under the headline “Chinese Held Talks on Bioweapons Benefits,” the Global Times, a Chinese state-owned media outlet, ridiculed the article, noting that the book was for sale on Amazon.

No results for "The Unnatural Origin of Sars and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons" in Books
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BEIJING: Chinese military scientists allegedly investigated weaponising coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic and may have predicted a World War III fought with biological weapons, according to media reports referring to documents obtained by the US State Department.

According to 'The Sun' newspaper in the UK, quoting reports first released by 'The Australian', the "bombshell" documents obtained by the US State Department reportedly show the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) commanders making the sinister prediction.

US officials allegedly obtained the papers which were written by military scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015 as part of their own investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Chinese scientists described SARS coronaviruses, of which COVID is one example, as presenting a "new era of genetic weapons".

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, several of which cause respiratory diseases in humans – ranging from a common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The PLA papers referenced seem to fantasise that a bioweapon attack could cause the "enemy's medical system to collapse".

It references work by US Air Force colonel Michael J. Ainscough, who predicted World War III may be fought with bioweapons.

The paper also includes musing that SARS "which hit China in 2003" could have been a man-made bioweapon deliberately unleashed by "terrorists".

They reportedly boasted the viruses could be "artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before".

The document lists some of China's top public health figures among the authors and has been revealed in an upcoming book on the origins of COVID, titled 'What Really Happened In Wuhan'.

China reported the first COVID-19 case in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and since then the deadly disease has become a pandemic, affecting more than 157,789,300 people and causing over 3,285,200 deaths worldwide.

Tom Tugendhat MP and Australian politician James Paterson said the document raises major concerns about China's transparency on the origins of COVID-19.

Tugendhat, chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, was quoted in ‘The Sun' as saying: "China's evident interest in bioweapons is extremely concerning.

Even under the tightest controls these weapons are dangerous.

"This document raises major concerns about the ambitions of some of those who advise the top party leadership."

Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), told news. com. au that the document is as close to a "smoking gun" as we've got.

"I think this is significant because it clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed," said Jennings.

"It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use," added Jennings.

He also said that the document may explain why China has been so reluctant for outside investigations into the origins of COVID-19.

"If this was a case of transmission from a wet market it would be in China's interest to co-operate, we've had the opposite of that."

Among the 18 listed authors of the document are People's Liberation Army scientists and weapons experts.

Robert Potter, a cyber security specialist who analyses leaked Chinese government documents was asked by The Australian to verify the paper.

He says the document definitely is not fake.

"We reached a high confidence conclusion that it was genuine. It's not fake but it's up to someone else to interpret how serious it is," Potter told news. com.au.

"It emerged in the last few years, they (China) will almost certainly try to remove it now it's been covered."

Questions remain over the origins of the deadly virus after a much derided World Health Organisation (WHO) probe earlier this year, with the organisation ordering a further investigation which factors in the possibly of a lab leak.

Most scientists have said there is no evidence that COVID-19 is manmade, but questions remain whether it may have escaped from a secretive biolab in Wuhan, from where the pandemic originated.

China is known to have been carrying out high risk "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is near the outbreak's ground zero at the Huanan Seafood Market.

There is no evidence so far to suggest it was intentionally released by China.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, the state-run Global Times newspaper slammed The Australian for publishing the article to smear China.

An academic book that explores bioterrorism and possibilities of viruses being used in warfare was interpreted as a conspiracy theory by The Australian, which deliberately and malignantly intends to invent pretexts to smear China, Chen Hong, a professor and director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, told the newspaper.

"It is a shame for anti-China forces in Australia to back their own ideology against China at the expense of basic professional journalistic ethics, conspiring to twist the real meaning of the book," Chen said.

-- Chinese scientists discussed weaponising coronavirus in 2015: A paper titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons suggested that World War Three would be fought with biological weapons, by The New Indian Express, 5/10/21

The inflammatory idea of SARS-CoV-2-as-bioweapon has gained traction as an alt-right conspiracy theory, but civilian research under Shi’s supervision that has yet to be made public raises more realistic concerns. Shi’s own comments to a science journal, and grant information available on a Chinese government database, suggest that in the past three years her team has tested two novel but undisclosed bat coronaviruses on humanized mice, to gauge their infectiousness.

In April 2021, in an editorial in the journal Infectious Diseases & Immunity, Shi resorted to a familiar tactic to contain the cloud of suspicion enveloping her: She invoked scientific consensus, just as the Lancet statement had. “The scientific community strongly dismisses these unproven and misleading speculations and generally accepts that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin and was selected either in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, or in humans following zoonotic transfer,” she wrote.

But Shi’s editorial had no muzzling effect. On May 14, in a statement published in Science Magazine, 18 prominent scientists called for a “transparent, objective” investigation into COVID-19’s origins, noting, “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.”

Among the signers was Ralph Baric. Fifteen months earlier, he had worked behind the scenes to help Peter Daszak stage-manage the Lancet statement. The scientific consensus had been smashed to smithereens.

XII. Out of the Shadows

By spring of 2021, the debate over COVID-19’s origins had become so noxious that death threats were flying in both directions.

In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a source, and it hadn’t been.

After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”

Peter Daszak was getting death threats too, some from QAnon conspirators.

Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two “plausible theories” were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence.

Even so, lab-leak talk was mostly confined to right-wing news outlets through April, gleefully flogged by Tucker Carlson and studiously avoided by most of the mainstream media. In Congress, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Republican minority had launched its own inquiry, but there was little buy-in from Democrats and the NIH didn’t provide responses to its lengthy list of demands for information.

The ground began to shift on May 2, when Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer known in part for writing a controversial book about how genes shape the social behavior of different races, published a lengthy essay on Medium. In it, he analyzed the scientific clues both for and against a lab leak, and excoriated the media for its failure to report on the dueling hypotheses. Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.

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

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

Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.

With questions growing, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins released a statement on May 19 asserting that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

On May 24, the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, kicked off a virtual edition of its annual conference. In the weeks leading up to it, a parade of high-profile stories broke, including two front-page reports in The Wall Street Journal and a long Medium post from a second former New York Times science reporter. Not surprisingly, China’s government fired back during the conference, saying that it would not participate in further inquiries within its borders.

On May 28, two days after President Biden announced his 90-day intelligence review, the U.S. Senate passed a unanimous resolution, which Jamie Metzl had helped shape, calling on the World Health Organization to launch a comprehensive investigation into the origins of the virus.

Will we ever know the truth? Dr. David Relman of Stanford University School of Medicine has been advocating for an investigation like the 9/11 Commission to examine COVID-19’s origins. But 9/11 took place in one day, he said, whereas “this has so many different manifestations, consequences, responses across nations. All of that makes it a hundred-dimensional problem.”

The bigger problem is that so much time has gone by. “With every passing day and week, the kinds of information that might prove helpful will have a tendency to dissipate and disappear,” he said. “The world ages and things get moved, and biological signals degrade.”

China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.

The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.

Now, at least, there appears to be the prospect of a level inquiry—the kind Gilles Demaneuf and Jamie Metzl had wanted from the start. “We needed to create a space where all of the hypotheses could be considered,” Metzl said.

If the lab-leak explanation proves accurate, history may credit Demaneuf and his fellow doubters for breaking the dam—not that they have any intention of stopping. They are now knee-deep in examining the WIV’s construction orders, sewage output, and cell phone traffic. The thought driving Paris Group cofounder Virginie Courtier forward is simple: “There are unanswered questions,” she says, “and a few human beings know the answers.”

Additional reporting by Lili Pike, with research assistance from Stan Friedman.

[admin]

Fight Over Covid’s Origins Renews Debate on Risks of Lab Work
by Carl Zimmer and James Gorman
New York Times
June 20, 2021

At a Senate hearing on efforts to combat Covid-19 last month, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky asked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci whether the National Institutes of Health had funded “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses in China.

“Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans,” the senator said.

Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, flatly rejected the claim: “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect, that the N.I.H. has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute.”

This exchange, and the bit of scientific jargon at the heart of it, has gained traction in recent weeks, usually by people suggesting that the coronavirus was engineered, rather than having jumped from animals to humans, the explanation favored by most experts on coronaviruses. The uproar has also drawn attention back to a decade-long debate among scientists over whether certain gain-of-function research is too risky to allow.

Spurred by some contested bird flu experiments in 2012, the U.S. government adjusted its policies for oversight of certain types of pathogen studies. But some critics in the scientific community say that the policy is overly restrictive and that its enforcement has been far from transparent.

The stakes of the debate could not be higher. Too little research on emerging viruses will leave us unprepared for future pandemics. But too little attention to the safety risks will increase the chances that an experimental pathogen may escape a lab through an accident and cause an outbreak of its own.

Sorting out the balance of risks and benefits of the research has proved over the years to be immensely challenging. And now, the intensity of the politics and rhetoric over the lab leak theory threatens to push detailed science policy discussions to the sidelines.

“It’s just going to make it harder to get back to a serious debate,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has urged the government to be more transparent about its support of gain-of-function research.

read the rest of the nyt article ...

[admin]

Part 1 of 4

The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology
by House Foreign Affairs Committee
Lead Republican Michael T. McCaul
Report Minority Staff
One Hundred Seventeenth Congress
August 2021

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today [December 19, 2017] lifted a 3-year moratorium on funding gain-of-function (GOF) research on potential pandemic viruses such as avian flu, SARS, and MERS, opening the door for certain types of research to resume.

Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2017 and ended on January 20, 2021.

-- Presidency of Donald Trump, by Wikipedia

“The Godfather of [gain-of-function virology research], the head of the pyramid, is a guy you may have heard of called Anthony Fauci,” Rogin said. “So, Anthony Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, is the most important person in the world of gain-of-function research there is . . . Basically, he is the one disbursing all the grants for this, he is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it off, that’s another crazy story, he turned it back on without really consulting the White House.”

“He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is part of the White House, but the White House put a pause on it and he undid the pause,” Rogin continued. “The details are a little sketchy. I’m not saying he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal, but I’m saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea that he had turned this back on. He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns, so you could get things done if you knew how to work the system.”

As Rogin himself admits, “the details are a little sketchy,” and we’ll have to take a look at the sourcing included in whatever article this piece of news appears in before alleging any wrongdoing.

-- Fauci Reportedly Relaunched NIH Gain-of-Function Research without Consulting White House, by Jack Crowe, National Review, April 27, 2021

The action coincides with today's release of a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) framework for guiding funding decisions about proposed research involving pathogens that have enhanced potential for creating pandemics.

Experts involved in the discussions welcomed the development, but some said the new framework still leaves key unanswered questions, such as how to responsibly report findings from the funded lab work in medical journals. Meanwhile, in research labs, some scientists plan to resume experiments and are relieved the pause has ended. Both groups are eager to see how the new review process works in real life.

In a statement today, NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, said "We have a responsibility to ensure that research with infectious agents is conducted responsibly, and that we consider the potential biosafety and biosecurity risks associated with such research." He added that he is confident that the review process spelled out in the new framework "will help to facilitate the safe, secure, and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health."...

In light of controversial research on H5N1 viruses in 2012, the Obama administration in 2014 announced a pause of federally funded GOF research and asked a government advisory group to reevaluate federal GOF funding policies and put together recommendations to help officials make their decisions.

The expert group, called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), commissioned a 1,000-page risk-benefit assessment to help them make their final guidance, which they finalized in June 2016, along with an ethics white paper. As part of the process, the NSABB held two National Academies symposia on GOF issues....

The framework, condensed into a 6-page document, spells out a multidisciplinary review process that involved the funding agency and a department-level review group that considers the merits and possible research benefits and the potential to create, transfer, or use an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP). In January in the final days of the Obama administration, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released guidance the departments can use to follow through with the reviews.

There are eight criteria in the framework for guiding HHS funding decisions, which stipulate, for example, that the research has been evaluated by an independent expert review as scientifically sound, that the potential risks and benefits are justified, that there are no other equally effective but less risky options for answering the research question, and that the research team and facility have the capacity to do the work safety and securely and to respond rapidly if there are any accidents, protocol lapses, or security breaches.

Regarding issues surrounding publication, the criterion says that the research results are expected to be responsibly communicated, based on applicable laws, regulations, and policies, along with terms and conditions of funding.

Also, the framework stipulates that the work will be done with the support of funding mechanisms that allow appropriate risk management and ongoing institution and federal oversight of the research. And finally, the criteria state that the research must be ethically justifiable...

Marc Lipsitch, PhD, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been deeply involved in the GOF discussions and has argued for a much more rigorous approach for evaluating the experiments. He has pushed for experts to consider safer ways to assess potential pandemic virus threats and for an international approach to tackling the issues.

"My overall take is that this is a small step forward," he said, adding that it includes a department-level review of the most concerning types of research, which have been defined appropriately after extensive time and debate. "The question is how such reviews will play out in practice."

However, Lipsitch said one problem is that the guidance specifies that research groups that propose work with enhanced pathogens will need to convince reviewers that there is no feasible, equally effective alternative way of addressing the scientific question with a less risky approach.

"If this means no alternative to answer with certainty the question of whether a specific strain that occurs in nature can very easily evolve to acquire a ferret-transmissible phenotype, then this criterion will always be satisfied," he said. "This is a scientific question that can uniquely be answered with dangerous experiments, and cannot be answered safely. But it is not a very useful one, because every strain in nature is different."

Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, who was a member of the NSABB during the controversy over the H5N1 papers, said he believes the GOF work can be done safely, but he doesn't agree that scientists doing the federally funded work should be unfettered.

Osterholm said his main concern regards the public health implications of the publicly available details about how the work is communicated, which the new framework doesn't spell out. "How we detail that information needs to be considered," such as more finely specifying when findings are open to the general public, when they're disseminated on a "need to know" basis, and when the information is classified.

"Until we have that part solved, I'm concerned about the work being done," he said.

Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, which publishes CIDRAP News, added that some research is needed to answer key questions, such as what it would take for Ebola to become a respiratory virus, findings that would have implications for preparedness. "If it were the case, I don't want the public to have a blueprint on how to do it," he said.

Tom Inglesby, MD, director and chief executive officer at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has also been deeply involved in discussions about issues related to the research pause. He said the requirements for the multidisciplinary, department-level pre-funding review and the involvement of the White House OSTP are excellent.

He added that the emphasis on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens is correct and focuses the framework on where it should be, such as on harmful consequences, immunity disruption, conferred resistance, and reconstructed extinct pathogens. "Though for the policy to be successful it needs to, at a minimum, be able to oversee the creation of novel strains that may be highly transmissible and highly virulent and should probably focus on that most intently to start."

A potentially serious weakness of the new framework is that surveillance activities involving potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs), including sampling and sequencing, aren't considered to be enhanced PPPs and would be exempt from reviews, Inglesby said, adding that surveillance as a rationale doesn't change potential risks of novel PPP strains. "There are serious debates about whether specific enhanced PPP projects are materially useful to on-the-ground surveillance programs," he said.

Inglesby's other concerns revolve around the lack of hard details of how the experiment reviews will work, such as the process for weighing the risks and benefits and the criteria for judging if researchers and institutions have the capacity to do the work safely. "I would have liked to see if this framework was working as intended before the moratorium was ended," he said, suggesting that agencies funding the work publish their experiences using the new framework to show how it functions.

-- Feds lift gain-of-function research pause, offer guidance, by Lisa Schnirring, December 19, 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS: [PDF HERE]

• INTRODUCTION TO ADDENDUM TO THE FINAL REPORT
• EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• GLOSSARY OF TERMS
• KEY PEOPLE
• ADDENDUM TO THE FINAL REPORT
o I. The City of Wuhan: Epicenter of a Pandemic
o II. Evidence of a Lab Leak
o III. Evidence of Genetic Modification
o IV. Evidence of a Lab Leak Cover-Up
o V. Hypothesis: A Lab Leak That Caused a Pandemic
o VI. Recommendations
o VII. Conclusion
o VIII. Appendix
• Timeline of the WIV Lab Leak and the Start of the COVID-19 Pandemic
• China Center for Disease and Control Memo on Supplementary Regulations
• JPCM Confidential Notice on the Standardization of the Management of Publication of Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Scientific Research
• February 6, 2020, Email at 12:43am from Peter Daszak to Ralph Baric, Linfa Wang, and Others Inviting Them to Sign the Statement
• February 6, 2020, Email at 3:16pm from Peter Daszak to Ralph Baric Relaying Wang’s Request Not to Sign the Statement
• February 8, 2020, Email at 8:52pm from Peter Daszak to Rita Colwell Alleging WIV Researchers Requested the Statement

Introduction

Five hundred and four days ago, on March 16, 2020, Committee Minority Staff began its investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 global pandemic at the direction of Ranking Member Michael T. McCaul. The House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Final Report on The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization was published in late September 2020. At the time of its release, there were an estimated 30.8 million cases of COVID-19 around the world, and a death toll of approximately 958,000. Today, the cumulative count stands at more than 196.4 million cases and 4,194,061 dead.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff has continued to investigate the origins of COVID-19, examining new information as it became available, including through expert testimony. We have done so because approximately 48 million of our population are under the age of 12 and without access to a vaccination, while others remain unvaccinated due to underlying medical conditions, leaving a large portion of American citizens at risk of infection. We prepared this addendum as reports increase regarding various strains around the globe, and as PRC authorities continue to withhold critical information about the early months of the pandemic. We have strongly urged our Majority colleagues to take this investigation seriously and conduct a full bipartisan investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and will continue to do so. President Biden has said he wants to discover how the pandemic began, and it is our duty to the American people to use all the tools in our arsenal in pursuit of that goal. As always, we stand ready to address this and other foreign policy challenges together and in a bipartisan manner. We must not let up on pressing General Secretary Xi and CCP authorities for answers.

Here we share the result of these efforts in an addendum to our September 2020 Final Report. In particular, this update focuses on whether the virus may have leaked from a medical research laboratory in Wuhan, Hubei Province, PRC, and the efforts to conceal such a leak. The evidence used to inform this report is based upon open source information and includes published academic work, official PRC publications (both public and confidential), interviews, emails, and social media postings.

Since the publication of the September 21, 2020 Final Report new questions have been raised pertaining to the origins of COVID-19. The PRC’s continued lack of transparency resulted in President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s May 26, 2021, order to the United States Intelligence Community to prepare a report in 90 days on the origins of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”1 [“Statement by President Joe Biden on the Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19.” The White House, 26 May 2021, http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room ... -covid-19/.]

Based on the material collected and analyzed by the Committee Minority Staff, the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019. The virus, or the viral sequence that was genetically manipulated, was likely collected in a cave in Yunnan province, PRC, between 2012 and 2015. Researchers at the WIV, officials within the CCP, and potentially American citizens directly engaged in efforts to obfuscate information related to the origins of the virus and to suppress public debate of a possible lab leak. It is incumbent on these parties to respond to the issues raised herein and provide clarity and any exonerating evidence as soon as possible. Until that time, it must be assumed General Secretary Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, prioritizes preserving the Party over the lives of its own people and those around the global suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Executive Summary

More than one year after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the world is still reeling from the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. More than four million people have lost their lives worldwide, including more than 612,000 Americans, while economies around the world have been devastated by the fallout. This report investigates the origin of this virus and looks at how it became a deadly pandemic.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology

Last September, the House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff, under the direction of Ranking Member Michael T. McCaul, released a report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. That report highlighted the possibility SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). However, as we continued our investigation and uncovered more information, we now believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak. We also believe the preponderance of the evidence proves the virus did leak from the WIV and that it did so sometime before September 12, 2019.

This is based upon multiple pieces of evidence laid out in the report, including:

• The sudden removal of the WIV’s virus and sample database in the middle of the night on September 12, 2019 and without explanation;
• Safety concerns expressed by top PRC scientists in 2019 and unusually scheduled maintenance at the WIV;
• Athletes at the Military World Games held in Wuhan in October 2019 who became sick with symptoms similar to COVID-19 both while in Wuhan and also shortly after returning to their home countries;
• Satellite imagery of Wuhan in September and October 2019 that showed a significant uptick in the number of people at local hospitals surrounding the WIV’s headquarters, coupled with an unusually high number of patients with symptoms similar to COVID-19;
• The installation of a People’s Liberation Army’s bioweapons expert as the head of the WIV’s Biosafety Level 4 lab (BSL-4), possibly as early as late 2019; and
• Actions by the Chinese Communist Party and scientists working at or affiliated with the WIV to hide or coverup the type of research being conducted at there.

Genetic Modification

This report also lays out ample evidence that researchers at the WIV, in conjunction with U.S. scientists and funded by both the PRC government and the U.S. government, were conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV, at times under BSL-2 conditions. Much of this research was focused on modifying the spike protein of coronaviruses that could not infect humans so they could bind to human immune systems. The stated purpose of this work was to identified viruses with pandemic potential and to create a broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine. In many instances, the scientists were successful in creating “chimeric viruses” -– or viruses created from the pieces of other viruses –- that could infect human immune systems. With dangerous research like this conducted at safety levels similar to a dentist’s office, a natural or genetically modified virus could have easily escaped the lab and infected the community.

Committee Minority Staff has also identified scientists who are directly tied to the WIV, and who worked on gain-of-function research in the years prior to the start of the current pandemic, who had the ability to modify genetically modify coronaviruses without leaving any trace evidence. An American scientist, Dr. Ralph Baric, assisted in creating a method to leave no trace of genetic modification as early as 2005. And as early as 2016, scientists working at the WIV were able to do the same. This makes it clear that claims by the scientific community that SARS-CoV-2 could not be man-made because it has no genetic modification markers are disingenuous.

We conclude there is ample proof that the virus could have been genetically manipulated, and that it is vitally important we fully investigate this hypothesis to determine if that happened here.

The Cover-Up

In the original report, we laid out many of the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) went to great lengths to cover up the initial epidemic, and how their cover-up likely turned what could have been a local outbreak into a global pandemic. The CCP detained doctors in order to silence them, and disappeared journalists who attempted to expose the truth. They destroyed lab samples, and hid the fact there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. And they still refuse to allow a real investigation into the origins. At the same time, the WHO, under Director General Tedros, failed to warn the world of the impending pandemic. Instead, he parroted CCP talking points, acting as a puppet of General Secretary Xi.

In this addendum, we have uncovered further evidence of how top scientists at the WIV and Dr. Peter Daszak, an American scientist, furthered that cover-up. Their actions include bullying other scientists who questioned whether the virus could have leaked from a lab; misleading the world about how a virus can be modified without leaving a trace; and, in many, instances directly lying about the nature of the research they were conducting, as well as the low-level safety protocols they were using for that research.

These actions not only delayed an initial investigation into the possibility of a lab leak costing valuable time, but provide further proof the virus likely leaked from the WIV. These actions also call into question the way in which U.S. government grants are used in overseas labs and call for more oversight of those grants.

Next Steps

After this extensive investigation, we believe it is time to call Peter Daszak to testify before Congress. There are still many outstanding questions about the type of research he funded at the WIV that only he can answer. In addition, we believe there is legislation Congress can pass that would not only hold those responsible accountable but also help to prevent a future pandemic, including but not limited to:

• Institute a ban on conducting and funding any work that includes gain-of-function research until an international and legally binding standard is set, and only where that standard is verifiably being followed.
• Sanction the Chinese Academy of Sciences and affiliated entities.
• List the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its leadership on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List and apply additional, appropriate secondary sanctions.
• Authorize new sanctions for academic, governmental, and military bioresearch facilities that fail to ensure the appropriate levels of safety and information sharing.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Gain-of-Function Research: “Research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.” – U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Spike Protein: A protein structure on the surface of an enveloped virus responsible for anchoring the virus to the host cell’s surface and enabling the injection of the virus’ genetic material into the host cell.

RBD: Receptor-Binding Domain. The specific short fragment in a spike protein of a virus that binds the virus to a specific receptor on the host cell.

Primary Author: The first listed author of an academic paper, usually the person who contributes the most to a paper.

Corresponding Author: The point of contact for editors and outside readers who have questions about an academic paper.

USAID Predict: An epidemiological research grant program funded by the United States Agency for International Development. PREDICT provided funding for biological sampling aimed at virus identification and collection. The program provided grant funding to EcoHealth Alliance.

SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. A viral respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV, a betacoronavirus. First identified as the cause of a 2002-2003 epidemic.

MERS: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. A viral respiratory disease caused by MERS-CoV, a betacoronavirus. First identified as the cause of a 2012 outbreak.

SARS-CoV-2: The betacoronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Coronavirus: An RNA virus that causes disease in mammals and birds. Range in severity from the common cold to SARS-CoV-2.

Betacoronavirus: One of the four subclassifications of coronaviruses. Found in bats and rodents, this is the genus includes SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2.

Biosafety Level 1 (BSL1): Designed for work on microbes not known to cause disease in healthy adults and present minimal potential hazard to laboratorians and the environment. Work can be performed on an open lab bench or table.

Biosafety Level 2 (BSL2): For work with microbes that pose moderate hazards to laboratorians and the environment. The microbes are typically indigenous and associated with diseases of varying severity. Personal protective equipment includes lab coats and gloves. Work can be performed in the open or in a biological safety cabinet. Commonly compared to the level of safety observed in a dentist’s office.

Bio Safety Level 3 (BSL3): For work with microbes that are either indigenous or exotic, and that can cause serious or potentially lethal disease through respiratory transmission. Respiratory transmission is the inhalation route of exposure. Researchers should be under medical surveillance and potentially immunized for the microbes they work with. Respirators may be required, in addition to standard personal protective equipment. Work must be performed within a biological safety cabinet. Exhaust air cannot be recirculated, and the laboratory must have sustained directional airflow by drawing air into the laboratory from clean areas towards potentially contaminated areas.

Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4): This is the highest level of biological safety. The microbes in a BSL-4 lab are dangerous and exotic, posing a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections. Infections caused by these microbes are frequently fatal and without treatment or vaccines. Researchers must change clothing prior to entering the lab, shower upon exiting, and decontaminate all materials before exiting. All work with microbes must be performed in a Class III biological safety cabinet or while wearing a full body, air-supplied, positive pressure suit. The lab must be in a separate building or in a restricted zone, and must have a dedicated supply and exhaust air, as well as vacuum lines and decontamination systems.

Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): A research institute in Wuhan, PRC focused on focused on virology, that consists of at least two facilities – the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology Headquarters.”

Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory: The WIV’s new campus, located in the Zhengdian Scientific Park in Jiangxia District, Wuhan. The location of the WIV’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratory space.

WIV Headquarters: The older WIV facility, located in Wuchang District, Wuhan near the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academies of Science.

Chinese Academy of Sciences: The national academy for natural sciences in the PRC. Reports to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China.

WIV1: The first novel coronavirus isolated by WIV researchers. Isolated from bat fecal samples in 2013. A SARS like coronavirus.

WIV16: The second coronavirus isolated by WIV researchers. Isolated from a single bat fecal sample in 2016. A SARS like coronavirus.

Rs4874: The third coronavirus isolated by WIV researchers. Isolated from a single bat fecal sample in 2017. A SARS like coronavirus.

ID4491/RaTG13: A SARS like coronavirus collected in 2013 in a mining cave. 96.1% similar to SARS-CoV-2.

ACE2: Angiotensin-converting enzyme-2, found on the surface of certain cells in a variety of animals, including humans, mice, and civets. The entry point for coronaviruses.

hACE2: The human version of ACE2. Primarily found on the surface of cells and tissues throughout the human body, including the nose, mouth, and lungs. In the lungs, hACE2 is highly abundant on type 2 pneumocytes, an important cell type present in chambers within the lung called alveoli, where oxygen is absorbed, and waste carbon dioxide is released. The primary entry point for SARS-CoV-2 into human cells.

Chimeric Virus: An artificial, man-made virus. Created by joining two or more viral fragments.

Natural Virus: A virus found in nature; “wild type.”

Reverse Genetics System: A method in molecular genetics that is used to help understand the function(s) of a gene by analyzing the phenotypic effects caused by genetically engineering specific nucleic acid sequences within the gene. Can be used to create chimeric viruses indistinguishable from natural viruses.

Furin Cleavage Site: An enzyme in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 that increases how infectious the virus is in humans. SARS-CoV-2 is the only betacoronavirus to have this structure.

Phylogenetic Analysis: The study of the evolutionary development of a species or a group of organisms or a particular characteristic of an organism. Used to identify the relationship between different viruses in the same family.

CGG Double Codon: “CGG-CGG.” This group of six nucleotides (a group of three nucleotides is also know as a codon) is half of the 12 nucleotides that create the furin cleavage site. The CGG double codon is relatively rare in coronaviruses, and SARSCoV- 2 is the only coronavirus in its family to have one.

KEY PEOPLE

Dr. Wang Yanyi: Director General of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Yuan Zhiming: Director of the WNBL BSL-4 lab. General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Committee within the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to which the WIV belongs.

Dr. Shi Zheng-li: Senior scientist as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Serves as Director, Research Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases; Director, Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens; Director, Biosafety Working Committee; and Deputy Director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory’s Biosafety-Level 4 lab.

Dr. Ben Hu: WIV researcher and former doctoral student of Shi Zheng-li. Deeply involved in the WIV’s coronavirus research.

Dr. Linfa Wang: PRC national, Director and Professor of the Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Center for Emerging Diseases at the WIV.

Dr. Peter Daszak: CEO of EcoHealth Alliance. Longtime collaborator of Shi and others at the WIV. Provided subgrants to the WIV to help fund coronavirus research.

Dr. Ralph Baric: Researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has collaborated with Shi and other WIV researchers on coronavirus research.

ADDENDUM TO THE REPORT

I. THE CITY OF WUHAN: EPICENTER OF A PANDEMIC

Wuhan is the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. Located in central PRC where the Yangtze River, the PRC’s longest river, and the Han River meet, Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei Province and boasts a population of about 11.1 million in about 3,280 square miles. [2] [“WHO-convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part.” Joint WHO-China Study. 30 March 2021, https://www.who.int/health-topics/coron ... -the-virus] It is home to the PRC’s tallest skyscrapers, multiple colleges and universities, including the prominent Wuhan University, major historical and cultural sites, and an influential research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). To put the scale of Wuhan in perspective, the city covers an area five times the size of Houston and has a larger population than New York City and Chicago combined.

Wuhan is home to the Hankou railway station, central PRC’s biggest European-style Railway station, and two other major train stations. Hankou Station connects directly to the Tianhe International Airport, the busiest airport in central PRC and the geographic center of the PRC’s airport network. From the Tianhe airport, travelers can fly direct to New York City, San Francisco, Paris, Milan, Rome, Hamburg, Bangkok, Tokyo, Seoul, and Dubai, among many other destinations around the world.

The PRC calls Wuhan one of its nine “National Central Cities,” an official state label that means it leads the way, along with the capital Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities, in developing culture, politics, and the economy. [3] [Xu, Zongwei. “China Unveils National Central City Strategy.” China Watch, 29 Mar. 2018, http://www.chinawatch.cn/a/201803/29/WS ... 67c6c.html.] An August 2016 report by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, a government agency that operates under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, identified Wuhan as a major hub not just within the PRC, but also globally within the Chinese “One Belt One Road” initiative due to its accessibility. [4] [Van de Bovenkamp, Judith and Yuan Fei. “Economic Overview of Hubei Province.” Neatherlands Business Support Office Wuhan, Aug. 2016, https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/ ... -China.pdf] The city is also home to significant railway commerce. A 2018 report from Xinhua news expected an estimated 500 freight trains from Wuhan to Europe for the export of goods. [5] [“Central China-Europe Rail Freight to Surge in 2018.” Xinhua, 1 Feb. 2018. http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2018- 02/01/content_50372222.htm]

France, the U.S., the Republic of Korea, and the UK maintain Consulates in the city, which was selected to host the 7th International Military Sports Council (CISM) Military World Games. During the games, more than 9,000 military personnel from over 100 countries stayed in Wuhan in accommodations at an athletes’ village built specifically for the games.

II. EVIDENCE OF A LAB LEAK

As discussed in the previously issued report, the WIV continues to be a focal point of debate concerning the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent months, new information about the WIV has come to light, enabling us to better understand the institute, the type of research conducted by scientists working there, and its ties to the CCP and their military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). We now believe the preponderance of evidence shows the virus accidentally leaked from one of the WIV’s facilities.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology

The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory and has operated under the administration of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1978. [6] [“History.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://english.whiov.cas.cn/About_Us2016/History2016/.] The institute currently occupies at least two campuses – the much-discussed Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (WNBL) in Zhengdian Scientific Park (see Figure 1), and the older facility (hereafter WIV Headquarters) located in the Xiaohongshan park in the Wuchang District of Wuhan (see Figure 2). The WNBL is a large complex with multiple buildings that house 20 Biosafety Level II (BSL-2) laboratories, two Biosafety Level III (BSL-3) laboratories, and 3000 square meters of Biosafety Level IV (BSL-4) space, “including four independent laboratories areas and two animal suites.” [7] [World Health Organization. “WHO Consultative Meeting on High/Maximum Containment (Biosafety Level 4) Laboratories Networking.” Meeting Report, Lyon, France, 13-15 Dec. 2018. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/han ... HO-WHECPI- 2018.40-eng.pdf] Construction was completed in 2015, but due to delays the BSL-4 space did not become operational until early 2018. [8] [Zhiming, Yuan. “Current status and future challenges of high-level biosafety laboratories in China.” Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity, 1 Sept. 2019, 1(2): 123-127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobb.2019.09.005]


Fig. 1: Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (WNBL)

Missing from the majority of public debates regarding the WIV is the research conducted at the WIV Headquarters, the older location in the Wuchang District of Wuhan. Located 12 miles northeast of the WNBL, in the Wuchang District, this facility remains the administrative headquarters of the WIV. In addition to the BSL-2 labs at this location, the WIV constructed a BSL-3 laboratory at the facility in 2003. [9] [Zheng Qianli, “Jiang Xia plays new essays and plays Yoko on the crane——The construction and research team of P4 laboratory of Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” Chinese Journal of Science, 1 Jan. 2018, https://archive.is/V3GHk#selection-517.35-517.202]

It was here, in the center of Wuhan, that Dr. Shi Zheng-li and her team conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.


Fig. 2: WIV Headquarters in Wuchang

According to the WIV’s website, Shi Zheng-li serves as the Director of the WIV’s Research Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Deputy Director of the WNBL BSL-4 lab, the Director of the BSL-3 lab, and the Director of the Biosafety Working Committee. [10] [“Shi Zhingli.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://www.whiov.cas.cn/sourcedb_whiov_ ... 00074.html] Shi is also the Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, [11] [“Prof. SHI Zhengli elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201903/t ... 06697.html] which includes the majority of scientists who are conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV.

It should be noted that the WIV has a Chinese Communist Party Committee within the institute, as well as a Commission for Discipline Inspection. The Party Committee is divided into four party branches, which are then divided into subbranches organized around the individual WIV departments, research centers, and offices. Each subbranch has its own Propaganda Committee. Committee Minority Staff were able to identify eight WIV researchers on these committees, including several who are affiliated with the Key Laboratory that Shi directs.

Table 1: WIV Researchers on CCP Propaganda Committees

WIV Researcher / Lab Affiliation / Propaganda Committee [12] [“Party Branch.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://www.whiov.cas.cn/djkxwh/dqzz/dzb/]

Liu Qiaojiue / Key Laboratory of Special [13] [Wang Q, et. al. “Structural Basis for RNA Replication by the SARS-CoV-2 Polymerase.” Cell, 23 July 2020, 182(2):417-428.e13, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32526208/] Pathogens and Biosafety / Party Branch of Research Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases

Zhang Xiaowei / Key Laboratory of Special [14] [Zhang, Xiaowei et al. “Tick-borne encephalitis virus induces chemokine RANTES expression via activation of IRF-3 pathway.” Journal of Neuroinflammation, 30 Aug. 2016, 13(1):209. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27576490/] Pathogens and Biosafety and Key Laboratory of Virology / Party Branch of the Research Center for Microbiology and Nanobiology

Shen Xurui / Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety [15] [Zhou, Peng et al. “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin.” Nature March 2020, 579(7798): 270- 273. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32015507/] / Graduate Party Branch of the Research Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases

Tang Shuang / State Key Laboratory of Virology [16] [Abudurexiti, Abulikemu, et al. “Taxonomy of the order Bunyavirales: update 2019.” Archives of Virology, July 2019, 164(7): 1949-1965. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31065850/] / Party Branch of the Research Center for Microbial Resources and Bioinformatics

Wu Yan / State Key Laboratory of Virology [17] [Su, Hai-Xia et al. “Anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities in vitro of Shuanghuanglian preparations and bioactive ingredients.” Acta Pharmacologica Sinica, September 2020, 41(9): 1167-1177. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32737471/] Party Branch of Molecular Virus and Pathology Research Center

He Lihong / State Key Laboratory of Virology [18] [Shao, Wei et al. “Functional Characterization of the Group I Alphabaculovirus Specific Gene ac73.” Virologica Sinica, Dec. 2019, 34(6): 701-711. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31317397/] / Party Branch of the Research Center for Microbial Resources and Bioinformatics

Wang Qingxing / State Key Laboratory of Virology [19] [Su, Haixia et al. “Identification of pyrogallol as a warhead in design of covalent inhibitors for the SARS-CoV-2 3CL protease.” Nature Communications, 15 June 2021, (2(1): 3623. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34131140/] / Graduate Party Branch of the Research Center for Molecular Viruses and Pathology

Yang Mengsi / State Key Laboratory of Virology [20] [Zhang, Juan, et. al. “Passive cancer targeting with a viral nanoparticle depends on the stage of tumorigenesis.” Nanoscale, 8 July 2021, 13(26):11334-11342, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34165123/] / Graduate Party Branch of the Research Center of Microbiology and Nanobiology

The Committee for Discipline Inspection is charged with “the implementation of the party's line, policy, party discipline, relevant laws and regulations, and the institute's rules and regulations.” [21] [“Commission for Discipline Inspection.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://www.whiov.cas.cn/djkxwh/dqzz/jw/]

In addition to the researchers serving on propaganda committees, other key figures at the WIV also serve as CCP officials. Dr. Wang Yanyi serves as the Director of the WIV and joined the China Zhi Gong Party, a CCP controlled minority party, in 2010. In 2018, the same year she became the Director General of the WIV, she was elected the Deputy Director of the Wuhan Municipal Party Committee.

Until late 2019, the BSL-4 lab was managed by Dr. Yuan Zhiming. Yuan is the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Committee within the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to which the WIV belongs. Local CCP leaders not only run the WIV itself but also directly managed the BSL-4 lab. [22] [Izambard, Antoine. “L'histoire Secrète Du Laboratoire P4 De Wuhan Vendu Par La France à La Chine.” Challenges, 30 Apr. 2020 http://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/san ... a-lachine_ 707425.]

Director Wang’s 2021 New Year’s speech makes reference to the Party Committee of Wuhan Institute of Virology, pledging that the party committee will “effectively play the role of a battle fortress of grassroots party organizations.” [23] [“New Year's Speech by the Director in 2021.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://www.whiov.cas.cn/gkjj/szzc_160220/] The WNBL also has its own party branch, the Zhengdian Laboratory Party Branch, which was “awarded the title of ‘Red Flag Party Branch’ by the Hubei Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Organization Working Committee, effectively playing an advanced and exemplary role.” [24] [“New Year’s Message from the Director in 2020.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, https://web.archive.org/web/20200701032 ... zc_160220/] Notably, in discussing the COVID-19 pandemic, Director Wang’s 2021 speech takes pains to address questions of lab safety – “The institute's high-level biosafety laboratory operates safely for more than 300 days throughout the year.” [25] [Ibid.] Her 2020 address, posted sometime after April 2020, makes no such mention.

The WNBL’s BSL-4 lab was constructed as a result of an agreement between the PRC and France that was signed after the 2003 SARS pandemic. [26] [“About WIV.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://english.whiov.cas.cn/About_Us201 ... ction2016/.] At the time, all BSL-3 labs in the PRC were controlled by the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Then-President of France, Jacques Chirac, and his Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, approved the project despite concerns from both the French Ministry of Defense and French intelligence services – Raffarin himself described it as “a political agreement.” [27] [Izambard, Antoine. “L'histoire Secrète Du Laboratoire P4 De Wuhan Vendu Par La France à La Chine.” Challenges, 30 Apr. 2020, http://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/san ... a-lachine_ 707425.] The PRC was suspected of having a biological warfare program, and the military and intelligence services were worried that the dual-use technology required to build a BSL- 4 lab could be misused by the PRC government. The uneasy compromise reached within the French government was that the agreement would require joint PRC-France research to be conducted in the lab, with French researchers present. [28] [Ibid.]

In 2016, the PRC requested dozens of the containment suits required to work in the lab. The French Dual-Use Commission, tasked with considering exports of sensitive equipment, rejected their request. According to French reporting, the request was “well above the needs of the Wuhan [lab].” [29] [Ibid.] This continued to fuel concerns within the French Ministry of Defense that the PRC was seeking to engage in military research or open a second BSL-4 lab for military means. Despite the agreement that the BSL-4 lab would be a site of joint research, and an announcement at the 2017 inauguration by then Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of €5 million in funding, there has only been one French scientist assigned to the lab. His tour ended in 2020. [30] [Izambard.]

Safety Concerns and Unusual Maintenance

There have been several reports of safety concerns at PRC labs starting as early as 2004, when it was discovered SARS leaked from a lab in Beijing. Several other accidental releases have happened in the years since.

As discussed in our original report released last year, in 2018 U.S. State Department officials sent cables to Washington, D.C. highlighting concerns with safety issues at the WIV. The cables reported that scientists at the WIV noted “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [31] [Rogin, Josh. “Opinion | State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab Studying Bat Coronaviruses.” The Washington Post, 14 Apr. 2020, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... -wuhanlab- studying-bat-coronaviruses/.] The cables also questioned the PRC’s commitment to prioritizing the important research for which the lab was designed.


Fig. 4: Excerpt from January 19, 2018 Cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to State Department Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

(b)(6) [DELETE] Thus, while the BSL-4 lab is ostensibly fully accredited, its utilization is limited by lack of access to specific organisms and by opaque government review and approval processes. As long as this situation continues, Beijing's commitment to prioritizing infectious disease control -- on the regional and international level, especially in relation to highly pathogenic viruses, remains in doubt.

One year later, in June 2019, George Gao, the Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, expressed concerns about safety protocols at the WIV. In an almost prophetic statement published in Biosafety and Health, Gao wrote (emphasis added):

Advances in biomedical technologies, such as genome editing and synthetic biotechnology, have the potential to provide new avenues for biological intervention in human diseases. These advances may also have a positive impact by allowing us to address risks in new approaches. However, the proliferation of such technologies means they will also be available to the ambitious, careless, inept, and outright malcontents, who may misuse them in ways that endanger our safety. For example, while CRISPR-related techniques provide revolutionary solutions for targeted cellular genome editing, it can also lead to unexpected off-target mutations within genomes or the possibility of gene drive initiation in humans, animals, insects, and plants. Similarly, genetic modification of pathogens, which may expand host range as well as increase transmission and virulence, may result in new risks for epidemics. For example, in 2013, several groups showed that influenza H5N1 viruses with a few nucleotide mutations and H7N9 isolates reasserted with 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus could have the ability for airborne transmission between ferrets. Likewise, synthetic bat-origin SARS-like coronaviruses acquired an increased capability to infect human cells. Thus, modifying the genomes of animals (including humans), plants, and microbes (including pathogens) must be highly regulated. [32] [Gao, George F. “For a better world: Biosafety strategies to protect global health.” Biosafety and Health, June 2019, 1(1): 1-3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7147920/]

Three months later, in September 2019, Yuan Zhiming, the Director of the BSL-4 lab at the WNBL and Shi’s superior, published an article in the Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity.

Entitled, “Current status and future challenges of high-level biosafety laboratories in China,” [33] [Yuan Zhinming. “Current status and future challenges of high-level biosafety laboratories in China.” Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity, Sept. 2019, 1(2): 123-127. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0391#b0080] the article discusses at length the construction of the WNBL. Yuan identifies multiple key issues, including inadequate biosafety management systems, insufficient resources for efficient laboratory operation, and deficiency of professional capacity. With a surprising level of transparency, Yuan admits that the enforcement of pathogen, waste, and laboratory animal management regulations “needs to be strengthened.” [34] [Ibid.] Discussing the insufficient level of resources being provided by the PRC government, he stated:

The maintenance cost is generally neglected; several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes. Due to the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all. [35] [Ibid.]

Yuan also raised concerns about a lack of specialized biosafety managers and engineers to run the labs. [36] [Ibid.] It is important to note that researchers at the WIV had previously conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the BSL-2 and BSL-3 levels. This is important given that both the head of the China CDC and the head of the WIV’s BSL-4 labs had expressed concern about the safety of this research and the labs in which it was being conducted.

Interestingly, there appears to have been ongoing maintenance and repairs projects occurring at the WIV in 2019, before Yuan published his article raising these concerns. It is important to note that at the time of the hazardous waste treatment system renovation project, the WNBL had been operational for less than two years. Such a significant renovation so soon after the facility began operation appears unusual. Procurement announcements published on the PRC’s government procurement website provide evidence of ongoing work at what appears to be both WIV locations.

Table 2: WIV Procurement Projects in 2019

Project Name / Location / Date / Budget (USD)

Maintenance Project of P3 Laboratory and Laboratory Animal Center in Zhengdian Park [37] [“Announcement of Competitive Consultation on Maintenance Project of P3 Laboratory and Laboratory Animal Center in Zhengdian Park, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 1 March 2019, https://archive.is/7eCPU#selection-229.0-229.185] / WNBL / March 1, 2019 / $401,284.10

Procurement of Positive Pressure Protective Clothing [38] [“Announcement of a single source for the purchase of positive pressure protective clothing project by Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 21 March 2019, https://archive.is/VUcNA#selection-229.0- 229.157] / WNBL / March 21, 2019 / $177,161.40

Hazardous Waste Treatment System Renovation Project [39] [ “Announcement on the transaction of the hazardous waste treatment system renovation project in Zhengdian Park, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 31 July 2019, https://archive.is/3CW03#selection- 229.0-229.166] / WNBL / July 31, 2019 / $1,521,279.28

Procurement Project of The Environmental Air Disinfection System and The Scalable Automated Sample Storage Management System [40] [“Announcement of winning the bid for the procurement project of the environmental air disinfection system and the scalable automated sample storage management system of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 14 Aug. 2019, https://archive.is/1nXLD#selection-229.0-229.228] / Unclear / August 14, 2019 / $132,200,025.47

Security Service Procurement Project [41] [“Competitive consultation on the procurement project of security services in Zhengdian Science Park, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 12 Sept. 2019,https://archive.is/tUi75#selection-229.0- 229.156] / WNBL / September 12, 2019 / $1,281,022.33

Central Air Conditioning Renovation Project [42] [“Competitive Consultation on Central Air Conditioning Renovation Project of Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.” China Government Procurement Network, 16 Sept. 2019, https://archive.is/bfoTD#selection-229.0-229.131] / Unclear / September 16, 2019 / $606,382,986.11

Procurement of Air Incinerator and Testing Service [43] [“The Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences plans to use a single-source procurement method to publicize the procurement of air incineration devices and test service projects.” China Government Procurement Network, 3 Dec. 2019, https://archive.is/Jifqr#selection-229.0-229.197] / Unclear / December 3, 2019 / $49,388.81

The references to maintenance at the BSL-3 and animal center at the WNBL, the procurement of an environmental air disinfection system, and renovations to the hazardous waste treatment system and central air conditioning system all raise questions about how well these systems were functioning in the months prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The Disappearing Database

On September 12, 2019 the WIV’s online, public database of samples and virus sequences was taken offline in the middle of the night between 2:00AM and 3:00AM local time. [44] [“Status breakdown of the database of characteristic wild animals carrying virus pathogens (September 2019).” Scientific Database Service Monitoring & Statistics System. https://archive.is/AGtFv#selection-1553.0-1567.2] The database contained more than 22,000 entries consisting of sample and pathogen data collected from bats and mice. The database contained key information about each sample, including what type of animal it was collected from, where it was collected, whether the virus was successfully isolated, the type of virus collected, and its similarity to other known viruses.


Fig. 6: Example Database Entry [45] [“Database of pathogens of bat and murine viruses.” Wikisource, https://zh.wikisource.org/zhhant/% E8%9D%99%E8%9D%A0%E6%BA%90%E5%92%8C%E9%BC%A0%E6%BA%90%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E7 %97%85%E5%8E%9F%E6%95%B0%E6%8D%AE%E5%BA%93]

Table 1: Virus data display of bat samples

Data element name / Example

Sample ID / 162387A
Sample tissue type / Anal
Animal type / bat
Source species / Rousettus leschenaultil
Species molecular identificatno / Rousettus sp.
Collection date / 2016-08-21
country / China
province / Yunnan
city / Miaoxin village, Mengna county, Sipsongpanna
GPS information: 101.51944.21.78127
Whether high-throughput sequencing / No
Whether the virus is isolated / No
publishing / Luo Y, Yi B. Jiang RD, et al. Virol. Sin. 2018;33(1):87-95. doi:10.1007/s12250-018-0017-2
Remarks / --
Detection Method / PCR-based
Virus name / Coronaviridae
Test results / Positive
blast result / btcov HKU9
Virus classification / HKU9
Virus sequence / See references for details
Similarity / 9436
Sequence length / 398bp
Sequence-encoded gene / Partial RdRp

To date, there has been no consistent answer provided as to why the database was removed or when or if it will be put back online.

Shi is listed as the data correspondence author for the project. When questioned about the database being taken offline, Shi has given several conflicting answers. During a December 2020 interview with BBC, Shi said the database was taken offline for “security reasons” after cyberattacks against the work and personal emails of WIV staff. She also insisted that WIV virus sequences were saved in the GenBank database, run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Shi stated, “It's completely transparent. We have nothing to hide." [46] [Sudworth, John. “Covid: Wuhan Scientist Would 'Welcome' Visit Probing Lab Leak Theory.” BBC News, 21 Dec. 2020, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55364445.]

In a January 26, 2021 email to someone inquiring about the database, however, Shi stated the database was taken down due to cyberattacks “during [the] COVID-19 pandemic.” [47] [Cleary, Tommy. “Prof Zheng-Li Shi Replied to Me, to CNRI,中⽂DOI运维 I Can Only Conclude @PeterDaszak &amp; the Rest of the @WHO Organisation Were given the Same Information Access Ultimatum:No Trust, No Conversation.@SciDiplomacyUSA Has Its Work Cut Out.Data Hostage? Pic.twitter.com/KhiFs42U7j.” Twitter, 10 Mar. 2021, https://twitter.com/tommy_cleary/status ... 25602?s=20.] She also claimed that researchers had “only entered a limit[ed] data in this database” despite it having more than 22,000 entries.

In an apparent contradiction of her BBC interview, Shi admitted that “access to the visitors is limited,” [48] [Sudworth.] but maintains:

…all our work regarding the different type of bat coronavirus (partial sequences or full-length genome sequences) have been published and the sequence and sample information have been submitted to GenBank. [49] [Ibid.]

At the end of her email, Shi writes, “I’ll not answer any of your questions if your curiosity is based on the conspiracy of ‘man made or lab leak of SARS-CoV-2’ or some non-sense questions based on your suspicion. No trust, no conversation” [50] [Ibid.] (emphasis added).

[admin]

Part 2 of 4

New Leadership and PLA Involvement

The WIV’s website indicates that Yuan Zhiming serves as the Dean of the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the WNBL BSL-4 lab. [51] [“Yuan Zhiming.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, http://www.whiov.cas.cn/sourcedb_whiov_ ... 00080.html] However, news posted on Weibo Douban, a PRC website, on February 7th, 2020 stated that PLA officials were dispatched to assume control of the response. The report says PLA Major General Chen Wei, an expert in biology and chemical weapon defenses, was deployed to Wuhan in January 2020 and took control of the WNBL BSL-4 lab. The posting of this information to Douban is significant given the website’s history of censoring posts critical of the CCP, including censoring words related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. [52] [Gertz, Bill. “Chinese Maj. Gen. Chen Wei TAKES Leading Role in Coronavirus Fight.” The Washington Times, 16 Feb. 2020, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/202 ... le-in-cor/.] [53] [Guli. “Major General Chen Wei, China's Chief Biochemical Weapons Expert, Takes Over Wuhan P4 Virus Laboratory.” Radio France Internationale, https://www.rfi.fr/cn/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD/20200208- %E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E9%A6%96%E5%B8%AD%E7%94%9F%E5%8C%96%E6%AD%A6%E5%99%A8%E 4%B8%93%E5%AE%B6%E9%99%88%E8%96%87%E5%B0%91%E5%B0%86%E6%8E%A5%E7%AE%A1%E6%AD %A6%E6%B1%89p4%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E5%AE%9E%E9%AA%8C%E5%AE%A4] [54] [Honorof, Marshall. “China Marks Tiananmen Massacre with 'Internet Maintenance Day.'” NBC News, 4 June 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna52096871] The post’s survival on a heavily CCP censored site confirms its legitimacy.



Committee Minority Staff have also received testimony from a former senior U.S. official that Gen. Chen actually took control of the WNBL BSL-4 lab in late 2019, not January 2020 as was publicly reported. Gen. Chen taking over part of the WIV demonstrates the CCP was concerned about the activity happening there as news of the virus was spreading. If she took control in 2019, it would mean the CCP knew about the virus earlier, and that the outbreak began earlier – a topic discussed further in this section.

Gen. Chen is a researcher at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, and served as a delegate to the 12th National People’s Congress. [55] ["List of Deputies to the Twelfth National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China.” Sohu, http://news.sohu.com/20130227/n367313787.shtml] In January 2018, Gen. Chen was made a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). According to the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, the CPPCC is a “critical coordinating body that brings together representatives of China’s other interest groups and is led by a member of China’s highest-level decision-making authority, the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee.” [56] [Bowe, Alexander. “China’s Overseas United Front Work: Background and Implications for the United States.” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/file ... inal_0.pdf]

According to a January 15, 2021 fact sheet published by the State Department, in the years leading up to the pandemic, researchers at the WIV were engaged in classified research, including experiments on animals, on behalf of the PLA. [57] [United States, Department of State. “Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” 15 Jan. 2021, https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet- ... index.html] Dr. Shi has repeatedly denied any involvement of the PLA at the WIV. During a lecture hosted only by Rutgers Medical School, Shi stated:

We—our work, our research is open, and we have a lot of international collaboration. And from my knowledge, all our research work is open, is transparency. So, at the beginning of COVID-19, we heard the rumors that it’s claimed in our laboratory we have some project, blah blah, with army, blah blah, these kinds of rumors. But this is not correct because I am the lab’s director and responsible for research activity. I don’t know any kind of research work performed in this lab. This is incorrect information. [58] [Eban, Katherine. “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins.” Vanity Fair, 3 June 2021, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/ ... 9s-origins.]

This statement is demonstrably false. The WIV had multiple connections to PLA researchers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic; several were listed on the WIV’s English language website. The Academic Committee of State Key Laboratory of Virology at the WIV included a Deputy Director from the Second Military Medical University and a member from the 302 Military Hospital of China. The Scientific Advisory Committee for the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases had among its members a researcher from the Institute of Military Veterinary at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. [59] [“Committees.” Wuhan Institute of Virology, https://web.archive.org/web/20200527045 ... ommittees/] This website was scrubbed on May 28, 2020, and the lists of committee members removed. However, archived copies of the website are available online.

Fig. 3: Archived Versions of the WIV Committees Page

Academic Committee of State key laboratory of virology, WIV, CAS

Director:
Zihe RAO, Tsinghua University, China.
Deputy Directors:
Hongyang WANG, The Second Military Medical University, China.
Hongbin SHU, Wuhan University, China.
Members
Jianfang GUI, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
Fusheng WANG, 302 Military Hospital of China, China.
Hualan CHEN, Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China.
Zhenghong YUAN, Fudan University, China.
Ningshao XIA, Xiamen University, China.
Linqi ZHANG, Tsinghua University, China.
Musheng ZENG, Sun Yat-sen University, China.
Jianguo WU, Wuhan University, China.
Xinwen CHEN, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
Ke LAN, Wuhan University, China.

This raises the obvious question of why Shi, who served on one of the committees, would lie about military researchers working with the WIV. Her denial and the scrubbing of the website appear to be obvious attempts to obfuscate the PLA’s involvement with the WIV.

Geospatial Analysis of Traffic Patterns at Wuhan Hospitals Near the WIV

Around the time the WIV’s virus database went offline, car traffic at hospitals in downtown Wuhan began to increase. Researchers from Boston University School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School used satellite imagery to examine parking lot volume of hospitals in Wuhan for the two and a half years prior to December 2019. They found that five of six hospitals analyzed had the highest relative daily volume of cars in the parking lot in September and October 2019, before the first reported cases of COVID-19.


Fig. 7: Time-series of Different Influenza-like Illnesses, Symptoms and Surveillance signals [62] [Nsoesie]

This peak corresponded with an increase in searches for “cough” and “diarrhea” in Wuhan on Baidu, a Chinese search engine. [60] [Nsoesie, Elaine Okanyene, et. al. “Analysis of hospital traffic and search engine data in Wuhan China indicates early disease activity in the Fall of 2019 (2020).” Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, 2020. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42669767] According to the CDC, both cough and diarrhea are symptoms of COVID- 19. [61] [“Symptoms of COVID-19.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nc ... mstesting/ symptoms.html] This study suggests a virus with similar symptoms as COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan in September and October.

The Initial Outbreak’s Proximity to the WIV

When people get sick, they are likely to seek healthcare near their home or work. Each of the hospitals that saw a rise in traffic with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms are located within 6.5 miles of the WIV Headquarters and are connected by public transit lines. The below map shows the location of the WIV Headquarters (in red) and the six hospitals (in blue) which experienced increase vehicle traffic in September and October 2019. When plotted on a map, these six hospitals are clustered around the WIV Headquarters in Wuchang, Wuhan, and are connected to that facility via the Wuhan Metro – various lines are shown in black, yellow, pink, and green on the map. The pink line represents Line 2, whose daily passenger volume exceeded one million trips in 2017. [63] [“Wuhan Metro is bursting with passengers, breaking records for two consecutive days.” 5 April 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170825184 ... 89625.html]


Map 1: Harvard Study Hospitals in Relation to the WIV Headquarters

It is also important to note, according to an Australian scientist who worked in the BSL-4 lab, a daily shuttle bus transfers WIV researchers from the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to the WNBL facility and back again. [64] [Cortez, Michelle Fay. “The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out.” Bloomberg, 27 June 2021, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ ... speaks-out.] According to public mapping data, the shuttle pick up and drop off point is less than 500 meters from the WIV Headquarters. As such, it is likely that researchers from both the WIV Headquarters, as well as the WNBL, used the Wuhan metro and/or the WNBL shuttle bus, as part of their daily work commute.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude, based on the WIV’s extensive sample library and history of genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that in early September, one or more researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and carried it out into the city. Based on the WIV’s publications, researchers could have been exposed while experimenting with a natural virus collected from the wild or infected with a virus they genetically manipulated. Those researchers likely traveled to and from the WIV via the Wuhan metro or via the shuttle service, providing a vector for the virus to spread. This corresponds with the first signs of a growing wave of ill people in Wuhan centered around the WIV’s Wuchang facility.

The 2019 Military World Games and Sick Athletes

The 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games (MWGs) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019. The games are similar to the Olympic games but consist of military athletes with some added military disciplines. The MWGs in Wuhan drew 9,308 athletes, representing 109 countries, to compete in 329 events across 27 sports. Twenty-five countries sent delegations of more than 100 athletes, including Russia, Brazil, France, Germany, and Poland. [65] ["Military Games to Open Friday in China.” China Daily, 17 Oct. 2019, http://www.china.org.cn/sports/2019- 10/17/content_75311946.htm.]

The PRC government recruited 236,000 volunteers for the games, which required 90 hotels, three railroad stations, and more than 2,000 drivers. [66] [“2019 Military World Games Kicks off in Central China's Wuhan.” CISION, 17 Oct. 2019, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... orldgames- kicks-off-in-central-chinas-wuhan-300940464.html.] An archived version of the competition’s website from October 20, 2019, lists the more than thirty venues that hosted events for the MWGs across Wuhan and the broader Hubei province. [67] [“Competition Venues.” Wuhan 2019 Military World Games, https://web.archive.org/web/20191020154 ... on_venues/.] The live website is no longer accessible – it is unclear why it was removed.

During the games, many of the international athletes became sick with what now appear to be symptoms of COVID-19. In one interview, an athlete from Luxembourg described Wuhan as a “ghost town,”[68] [Houston, Michael. “More athletes claim they contracted COVID-19 at Military World Games in Wuhan.” Inside the Games, 17 May 2020, https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles ... s-covid-19] and recalls having his temperature taken upon arriving at the city’s airport. In an interview with The Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper, one member of the Canadian Armed Forces who participated in the games said (emphasis added):

This was a city of 15 million people that was in lockdown. It was strange, but we were told this was to make it easy for the Games’ participants to get around. [I got] very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia.… On our flight to come home, 60 Canadian athletes on the flight were put in isolation [at the back of the plane] for the 12-hour flight. We were sick with symptoms ranging from coughs to diarrhea and in between. [69] [Francis, Diane. “Diane Francis: Canadian Forces Have Right to Know If They Got COVID at the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan.” Financial Post, 25 June 2021, https://financialpost.com/diane-francis ... taryworld- games-in-wuhan.]

The service member also revealed his family members became ill as his symptoms increased, [70] [Ibid.] a development that is consistent with both human-to-human transmission of a viral infection and COVID-19. Similar claims about COVID-19 like symptoms have been made by athletes from Germany, France, Italy, [71] [Houston.] and Sweden. [72] [Liao, George. “Coronavirus May Have Been Spreading since Wuhan Military Games Last October.” Taiwan News, 13 May 2020, http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3932712.]

By cross referencing the listed MWG venues with publicly available mapping data, it is possible to visualize the venues (in black) in relation to the WIV Headquarters (in red) and the abovementioned hospitals (in blue). The green figures represent athletes who have publicly expressed their belief they contracted COVID-19 while in Wuhan and are mapped at the venues which hosted the events in which they competed. Some of these athletes resided in the military athletes’ village.

[I got] very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia.… On our flight to come home, 60 Canadian athletes on the flight were put in isolation [at the back of the plane] for the 12-hour flight. We were sick with symptoms ranging from coughs to diarrhea and in between.

-- Canadian Athlete

Map 2: WIV Headquarters, Hospitals, MWG Venues, and Sick Athletes

At least four countries who sent delegations to the MWGs have now confirmed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 cases within their borders in November and December 2019, before the news of an outbreak first became public.

1. Italy. In February 2021, researchers from Italy published a research letter in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal describing a case involving a 4-year-old boy from Milan. A retrospective analysis of samples taken in 2019 identified the boy, who developed a cough on November 21, 2019, as having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 three months before Italy’s first reported case. The boy had no reported travel history. [73] [Amendola, Antonella¸ et. al. “Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in an Oropharyngeal Swab Specimen, Milan, Italy, Early December 2019.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, Feb. 2021, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2702.204632]

2. Brazil. A March 2021 article by researchers in Brazil examined wastewater samples from October to December 2019. Previous studies have confirmed that humans infected with the virus can experience prolonged viral shedding via their gastrointestinal tract. A sample from November 27th tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, confirming the virus was circulating in Santa Catarina, Brazil months before January 21, 2020, when the first case in the Americas was reported. [74] [Fongaro, Gislaine et al. “The presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in human sewage in Santa Catarina, Brazil, November 2019.” The Science of the Total Environment, 8 March 2021, 778: 146198. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.scitotenv.2021.146198]

3. Sweden. Sweden’s Public Health Agency said it is likely that individuals in the country were infected with SARS-CoV-2 as early as November 2019. [75] [“Coronavirus May Have Arrived in Sweden in November: Public Health Agency.” The Local, 5 May 2020, http://www.thelocal.se/20200505/the-cor ... -november/.]

4. France. Researchers in France also re-tested samples from late 2019 in an effort to identify early COVID-19 cases. They identified a 42-year-old male who presented to the emergency room on December 27th with an influenza-like illness. He had no connection to the PRC and no recent travel history. Upon re-testing, the patient’s samples were positive for SARS-CoV-2. It should be noted that one of his children also had similar symptoms before the man became sick, suggesting that the first case in France was likely earlier than December 27th. [76] [Deslandes, A et al. “SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019.” International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 3 May 2020, 55(6): 106006. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ijantimicag.2020.106006]

As stated above, athletes from France, Italy, and Sweden also complained of illnesses with symptoms similar to COVID-19 while at the MWGs in Wuhan. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 in four countries, on two separate continents, suggests a common source. If, as presumed, SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans in Wuhan before spreading to the rest of the world, the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan appears to be a key vector in the global spread – in other words, potentially one of the first “super spreader” events.

Conclusion

While much of the public debate was initially focused on the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan as the origin of the pandemic, the preponderance of evidence now suggests that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given the WIV’s demonstrated history of conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses, including genetically manipulating viruses specifically to make them infectious to humans in BSL-2 labs, as well as their possession of one of the world’s largest collections of coronaviruses, it is completely plausible that one or more researcher(s) was accidentally infected and carried the virus out of the lab. The evidence outlined above, combined the cover-up conducted CCP authorities, strongly suggest the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the current pandemic. [77] [Stahl, Lesley. “What Happened In WUHAN? Why Questions Still Linger on the Origin of the Coronavirus.” CBS News, 28 Mar. 2021, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-wu ... 021-03-28/.]

III. EVIDENCE OF GENETIC MODIFICATION

The other topic of debate is whether the virus could have been genetically modified. The WIV was conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and testing them against human immune systems in the months leading up to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, however the scientific community has claimed it is not possible it was anything but a naturally occurring virus. But, as this report lays out, we believe it is a viable hypothesis that the virus could have been modified.

“You can engineer a virus without leaving any trace. The answers you are looking for, however, can only be found in the archives of the Wuhan laboratory.”

– Dr. Ralph Baric

Research Regarding SARS Like Coronaviruses from 2004-2017

The WIV’s work on bat coronaviruses dates back to the aftermath of SARS in the early 2000s. Shi met Peter Daszak, an American citizen, in 2004 during an effort to find the origins of the 2002 SARS pandemic. Daszak is the CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based NGO that funds scientific research around the world. [78] [Zaugg, Julie. “In Wuhan with Bat Woman, at the origins of the Covid-19.” L’Illustre, 22 Jan. 2021, https://www.illustre.ch/magazine/a-wuhanavec- bat-woman-aux-origines-du-covid-19] For the last year and a half, questions have been raised about how and why EcoHealth Alliance provided the WIV with U.S. taxpayer dollars. Those funds were provided to EcoHealth Alliance in the form of grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).



Beginning in 2005, and continuing over the next 16 years, Shi and Daszak have collaborated on coronavirus research. Together, they “led dozens of expeditions to caves full of bats, to collect samples and analyze them.” [79] [Ibid.] They have identified more than 500 novel coronaviruses, including roughly 50 related to SARS or MERS, and they have repeatedly engaged in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses designed to make them more infectious in humans. [80] [Ibid.] As discussed below, the vast majority of the most relevant scientific publications that have emerged from the WIV regarding coronaviruses was conducted with funding provided by Peter Daszak through EcoHealth Alliance.

Article and Publication: “Bats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses,” in Science (2005).

Participants: Li Wendog, primary author; Shi, second author and one of three corresponding authors; Peter Daszag; additional scientists from Australia and China.

Funding: The paper was supported in part by funding from the PRC government, who provided a special grant for Animal Reservoirs of SARS-CoV from the State Key Program for Basic Research (grant no. 2005CB523004) and the State High Technology Development Program (grant no. 2005AA219070) from the Ministry of Science and Technology.

It was also funded by the U.S. government, through the NIH and NSF, who provided funding in the form of an ‘Ecology of Infectious Diseases’’ award (no. R01-TW05869) from the John E. Fogarty International Center and the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation.

Purpose: The scientists hoped to identify the origins of SARS by identifying species of bats which are a natural host for SARS-like coronaviruses.

Conclusion: “These findings on coronaviruses, together with data on henipaviruses (23–25, 28), suggest that genetic diversity exists among zoonotic viruses in bats, increasing the possibility of variants crossing the species barrier and causing outbreaks of disease in human populations. It is therefore essential that we enhance our knowledge and understanding of reservoir host distribution, animal-animal and human-animal interaction (particularly within the wet-market system), and the genetic diversity of bat-borne viruses to prevent future outbreaks.” [81] [Ibid.]

Relevance: This conclusion would drive the next fifteen years of collaboration between the WIV and Peter Daszak, with Shi directing the laboratory work.

In 2006, Shi and Daszak collaborated with a researcher in Australia to publish “Review of bats and SARS” in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a peer-reviewed journal published monthly by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shi was again listed as the second author, and the work was funded by the same PRC and NIH/NSF grants referenced above. [82] [Wang L-F, Shi Z, Zhang S, Field H, Daszak P, Eaton BT. “Review of bats and SARS.” Emerg Infect Dis, Dec. 2006; 12(12): 1834-1840., http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1212.060401] The following year, these grants supported the publication of “Evolutionary Relationships between Bat Coronaviruses and Their Hosts” in Emerging Infectious Diseases. Shi is listed as the sixth author, followed by another WIV researcher, and Peter Daszak is listed as one of two corresponding authors. [83] [Cui J, et. al. “Evolutionary relationships between bat coronaviruses and their hosts.” Emerg Infect Dis., Oct. 2007; 13(10):1526-32. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/13/10/07-0448_article]

In 2007, Shi and several other WIV researchers joined additional scientists in publishing another paper on coronaviruses.

Article and Publication: “Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin” in Journal of Virology.

Participants: WIV researchers and Linfa Wang. Shi is listed as the corresponding author.

Funding: This work was funded by the PRC government and grants from Australia and the European Commission.

Purpose: This study focused on the receptors used by the spike protein of SARS-like coronaviruses, which are the major surface structures that enable coronaviruses to bind to receptors on cells. To test this, researchers created multiple chimeric viruses by inserting different sequences of the SARS-CoV spike protein into the spike protein of the SARS-like virus being examined, and tested them against bat, civet, and human ACE2 expressing cells.

Conclusion:

One of these chimeric viruses was able to enter cells through the human ACE2 receptor. ACE2 is an abbreviation for angiotensin converting enzyme-2, which is a protein found on the surface of cells and tissues throughout the human body, including the nose, mouth, and lungs. “In the lungs, ACE2 is highly abundant on type 2 pneumocytes, an important cell type present in chambers within the lung called alveoli, where oxygen is absorbed and waste carbon dioxide is released.” [84] [Sriram, Krishna, et al. “What Is the ACE2 Receptor, How Is It Connected to Coronavirus and Why Might It Be Key to Treating COVID-19? The Experts Explain.” The Conversation, 25 May 2021, https://theconversation.com/what-is-the ... ing-covid- 19-the-experts-explain-136928.] ACE2 is also the location where SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein binds to human cells. Researchers concluded that “a minimal insert region” is “sufficient to convert the SL-COV S [SARS-like coronavirus spike protein] from non- ACE2 binding to human ACE2 binding.” [85] [Ren.]

Relevance: In other words, WIV researchers were able to take a SARS-like coronavirus that does not infect humans and modify it so it was able to do so. Also importantly, this work was done under BSL-2 conditions.

Shi and Daszak do not appear as coauthors on a paper again until 2013.

Article and Publication: “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor” in Nature. [86] [Ge, Xing-Yi et al. “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor.” Nature, 30 Oct. 2013, 503(7477): 535-8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/]

Participants: WIV and EcoHealth researchers, including Hu,. Shi, Daszak, and Wang who are credited for designing the experiments. Shi and Daszak listed as corresponding authors.

Funding: The study was funded by grants from the PRC government (including grant no. 2013FY113500), as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (no. R01AI079231), a NIH/NSF “Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases” award (no. R01TW005869), an award from the NIH Fogarty International Center supported by International Influenza Funds from the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (no. R56TW009502), and USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT program. [87] [Ibid.]

Purpose: This work marked “the first recorded isolation of a live SL-CoV” [88] [Ibid.] [SARS-live coronavirus], which researchers isolated from bat fecal samples and named WIV1. Additionally, they identified two novel bat coronaviruses (SCH014 and Rs3367) and reported “the first identification of a wild-type bat SL-CoV capable of using ACE2 as an entry receptor.” [89] [Ibid.]

Conclusion: “Finally, this study demonstrates the public health importance of pathogen discovery programs targeting wildlife that aim to identify the ‘known unknowns’—previously unknown viral strains closely related to known pathogens. These programs, focused on specific high-risk wildlife groups and hotspots of disease emergence, may be a critical part of future global strategies to predict, prepare for, and prevent pandemic emergence.” [90] [Ibid.]

Relevance: By isolating a wild-type (common strain in nature) SARS-like coronavirus that binds to ACE2, and testing it in human lung tissue, the authors proved that bat coronaviruses are capable of infecting humans directly, without having to pass through an intermediate host.

In 2014, Shi and Daszak coauthored two more joint WIV-EcoHealth Alliance papers. The lead author for one of the papers, entitled “Detection of diverse novel astroviruses from small mammals in China,” was Ben Hu, a WIV researcher who was a coauthor of earlier Shi/Daszak papers. Shi is listed as the corresponding author, and the paper was again jointly funded by the PRC government (including grant no. 2013FY113500) and USAID’s PREDICT program. [91] [Hu, Ben, et. al. “Detection of diverse novel astroviruses from small mammals in China.” J Gen Virol. Nov 2014, 95(Pt 11): 2442-2449. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25034867/]

The next year, in 2015, Shi provided Ralph Baric and other researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with spike protein sequences and plasmids of SCH014, one of the viruses Shi, Daszak, and WIV researchers identified in bat feces samples in 2013. American researchers used those samples to create “a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” [92] [Menachery, Vineet, et. al. “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” Nat Med, 9 Nov. 2015, 21:1508–1513. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985] In other words, they removed the spike protein from SHC014 and inserted it into a SARS coronavirus that was genetically manipulated to better infect mice. This work was done under BSL-3 conditions. The newly created virus was then shown to bind to ACE2 in humans, replicate “efficiently” [93] [Menachery.] in primary human airways cells, and withstand antibodies and vaccines. Researchers concluded that the work “suggests a potential risk of SARSCoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” [94] [Ibid.] This research was funded by NIAID and the NIH under multiple awards (nos. U19AI109761, U19AI107810, AI085524, F32AI102561, K99AG049092, DK065988), USAID’s PREDICT program via EcoHealth Alliance, and the PRC government. Baric was the corresponding author. [95] [Ibid.]

2015 also saw the publication of another Shi/Hu/Wang/Daszak paper. Entitled “Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Bat Coronavirus Closely Related to the Direct Progenitor of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus,” it was published in the Journal of Virology. Nine of the twelve authors were WIV researchers, including Hu and Shi, who was the corresponding author. Here the WIV reported the successful isolation of a second novel coronavirus, WIV16. The SARS-like coronavirus was isolated from a single sample of bat fecal matter collected in Kunming, Yunnan Province of the PRC in July 2013. Like previous papers, this work was supported by a NIAID grant (no. R01AI110964) and by grants from the PRC government (including grant no. 2013FY113500). [96] [Yang, Xing-Lou et al. “Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Bat Coronavirus Closely Related to the Direct Progenitor of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus.” Journal of Virology, 30 Dec. 2015, 90(6): 3253-6. https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02582-15]

In addition to her aforementioned work with researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, Shi also provided them with additional bat coronavirus sequences and plasmid of WIV1’s spike protein. The resulting paper, “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in March 2016. While neither Shi nor Daszak (nor any WIV researcher) are listed as coauthors, Baric was the corresponding author.

This paper is significant because the authors discuss moving from disease surveillance to creating chimeric viruses as a means of pandemic preparedness; “this manuscript describes efforts to extend surveillance beyond sequence analysis, constructing chimeric and full-length zoonotic coronaviruses to evaluate emergence potential.” [97] [Menachery, Vineet, et al. “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 14 March 2016, 113(11): 3048-53. https://dx.doi.org/10.1073%2Fpnas.1517719113]

During this work, researchers produced chimeric viruses created by inserting the spike protein from WIV1 into a strain of SARS-CoV adapted to infecting mice. They subsequently tested this chimeric virus in human airway epithelial cells as well as in mice. [98] [Ibid.] In addition to standard BALB/c mice (a strain of albino, lab-breed house mice used in experimentation [99] [“Inbred Strains: BALB.” MGI, http://www.informatics.jax.org/inbred_s ... BALB.shtml.]), researchers genetically manipulated the mice to create a strain of mice expressing the human ACE2 (hACE2) receptor. While hACE2 was found primarily in the lungs of the mice, it was also present in the brain, liver, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract. The WIV1 chimeric virus was then tested in these hACE2 expressing mice, proving that the chimeric virus could infect humans. This work was funded by NIAID and NIH awards (nos. U19AI109761, U19AI107810, AI1085524, F32AI102561, K99AG049092, DK065988, AI076159, and AI079521). [100] [Menachery 2016.]

In 2016, Shi and Daszak also coauthored two additional papers focused on infectious diseases that year. One, entitled “Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus WIV1 Encodes an Extra Accessory Protein, ORFX, Involved in Modulation of the Host Immune Response,” was coauthored by Wang and represents a major step forward in the WIV’s work. While working on this project, WIV researchers created a reverse genetics system and used it to genetically modify WIV1, the live coronavirus that was successfully isolated in 2013 and that UNC researchers manipulated months earlier. WIV researchers created multiple versions of this virus by deleting or adding genetic information to the virus’ RNA. According to the paper, all experiments with live virus for this paper were done under BSL-2 conditions, which does not require respirators or biological safety cabinets. Nine of the eleven authors are WIV researchers, and Shi is the corresponding author. The experimentation for the paper was supported by a grant from NIAID (no. R01AI110964) and funding from the PRC government. [101] [Zeng, Lei-Ping et al. “Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus WIV1 Encodes an Extra Accessory Protein, ORFX, Involved in Modulation of the Host Immune Response.” Journal of Virology, 24 June 2016, 90(14): 6573-6582. https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.03079-15]

The following year, Ben Hu was the lead author of a paper entitled “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.” As with previous papers, the overwhelming majority (14 out of 17) of the authors worked at the WIV. Daszak, Shi, and Wang are all listed as coauthors. Hu is the lead author and Shi is one of two corresponding authors. Daszak is credited for “funding acquisition.” [102] [Hu, Ben et al. “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.” PLOS Pathogens, 30 Nov. 2017, 13(11). https://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1006698]

Additionally, using the reverse genetics system they debuted the previous year, WIV researchers created eight separate chimeric viruses by inserting the spike protein of various SARS-like coronaviruses into WIV1. Two of these chimeric viruses (WIV1-Rs4231S and WIV1-Rs7327S), and one natural virus, Rs4874, all replicated within hACE2 expressing cells. [103] [Hu, 2017.]

To reiterate, WIV researchers created chimeric coronaviruses able to infect humans in 2017, before the WNBL BSL-4 lab became operational. This work was jointly funded by NIAID (no. R01AI110964), USAID’s PREDICT program, and the PRC government (including grant no. 2013FY113500).

Research Regarding SARS-Like Coronaviruses at the WIV or in Conjunction with WIV Scientists from 2018-2019

While Shi and Daszak coauthored several additional papers in 2018 and 2019 regarding coronaviruses, none include gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses designed to make them more infectious to humans. This is especially odd given that in 2018 the Chinese Academy of Science launched a new special project titled “Pathogen Host Adaption and Immune Intervention.” [104] [“Guidelines for the application of the ‘Pathogen Host Adaptation and Immune Intervention’ project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Leading Technology.” Chinese Academy of Sciences, 6 Sept. 2018, https://archive.is/spmNg#selection-3389.0-3389.160] One of the five subprojects was titled “Research on Virus Traceability, Cross-Species Transmission, and Pathogenic Mechanism,” – Shi is listed as one of the two scientists in charge. [105] [Ibid.] This subproject had three areas of focus: 1) the traceability, evolution and transmission mechanism of new pathogens; 2) molecular mechanisms of viral cross-species infection and pathogenicity, and 3) the interaction mechanism between virus and host.

A second WIV scientist, Cui Zongqiang, was one of two researchers in charge of another subproject entitled, “New methods and new technologies for infection and immune research.” [106] [Ibid.] This project focused on, among other things, evaluating new vaccines and establishing “humanized small animal models” [107] [Ibid.] for in vitro pathogen testing. [108] [Ibid.]

In January 2018, Shi was appointed Principal Investigator for a new Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant no. XBD29010101, $1.35 million USD), investigating “genetic evolution and transmission mechanism of important bat-borne viruses.” [109] [Shi, Zheng-li. “Curriculum Vitae.” https://www.ws-virology.org/wp-content/ ... li-Shi.pdf “Study on the evolutionary mechanism of bat SARS-like coronavirus adapted to host receptor molecules and the risk of cross-species infection.”] This project, especially with its focus on transmission mechanisms, aligns with the first focus area mentioned above. That same month, Shi began work on a project titled “Study on the evolutionary mechanism of bat SARS-like coronavirus adapted to host receptor molecules and the risk of crossspecies infection.” [110] [MedSci, https://archive.is/g35C6#selection-1425.0-1425.139] The project was funded at a value of roughly $850,000 USD (grant no. 31770175) and is slated to run until December 2021. [111] [Ibid.] This grant aligns with the second focus area, the description of which specifically mentions replicating and modifying coronaviruses (emphasis added):

For important emerging emergencies and virulent viruses (influenza virus, Ebola virus, coronavirus, Marburg virus, arenavirus, etc.), by studying their ability to invade different host cells and their ability to replicate in different host cells, analyze the key molecules affecting their cross-species infections and their pathogenic mechanisms. Including: virus invasion, virus replication and assembly, and infection model. [112] [“Guidelines for the application of the ‘Pathogen Host Adaptation and Immune Intervention’ project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Leading Technology.” Chinese Academy of Sciences, 6 Sept. 2018, https://archive.is/spmNg#selection-3389.0-3389.160]

Shi did not publish any papers funded by this grant before the start of the pandemic. As such, it is impossible to know what experiments she was conducting in the months prior to the pandemic.

Further evidence expands on Shi’s work in 2018 and 2019. In January 2019, Shi and several other scientists were awarded a National Natural Science Award Second Prize for a project entitled, “Research on Important Viruses Carried by Chinese Bats.” [113] [“Catalogue and introduction of the 2018 National Natural Science Award winning projects.” Ministry of Science and Technology, 8 Jan. 2019, https://archive.is/jKq7B#selection-187.0-187.86] Five out of the six researchers on the award were coauthors of the previously discussed 2013 paper entitled, “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor.”

In January 2019, Ben Hu, was awarded $385,850 in grant money (grant no. 31800142) by the Youth Science Fund Project (YSFP) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. [114] [“Pathogenicity of two new bat SARS-related coronaviruses to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2.” MedSci, https://archive.is/shrM2#selection- 1545.0-1558.0] The YSFP “supports the young researchers to independently select topics within the scope of the scientific funding and carry out basic research.” [115] [“[Good News] 100% winning bid! All applications of the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC) were approved.” Faculty of Economics and Management, ECNU Academy of Statistics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, 11 May 2020, http://asis.ecnu.edu.cn/asisenglish/64/ ... 0/page.htm] This project, selected by Ben Hu, was titled, “Pathogenicity of two new bat SARS-related coronaviruses to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2.” [116] [“Pathogenicity of two new bat SARS-related coronaviruses to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2.” MedSci, https://archive.is/shrM2#selection- 1545.0-1558.0] To date, the two novel SARS-related coronaviruses have not been identified, and the grant money has only been cited in papers published about SARS-CoV-2.

WIV researchers confirmed to the WHO investigative team that they were conducting experimentations testing chimeric coronaviruses in 2018 and 2019. [117] [Joint Report – ANNEXES.] According to an interview with Shi published by Science, all coronavirus experimentation, including infecting hACE2 mice and civets, was done at the BSL-2 and BSL-3 levels – “the coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.” [118] [Shi, Zheng-li. “Reply to Science Magazine.” Science Magazine, https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/defaul ... 0Q%26A.pdf]

This ongoing work appears to coincide with Peter Daszak’s stated goal of developing a broadspectrum coronavirus vaccine. In a May 19, 2020, interview with “This Week in Virology,” Daszak discussed the goal of the gain-of-function work he funded on coronaviruses with the WIV (emphasis added):

Coronaviruses are pretty good – I mean you’re a virologist, you know all this stuff – but the… you can... um manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. The spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus – zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert it into a backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab. So, you can get more predictive when you find a sequence – you’ve got this diversity. Now, the logical progression for vaccines is, if you’re going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert some of these other related [viruses] and get a better vaccine. [119] [Racaniello, Vincent. “TWiV 615: Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance.” YouTube, interview by Vincent Racaniello,19 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w]

Shi, Hu, and others at the WIV were the ones collecting, identifying, genetically modifying, and testing these novel coronaviruses against human immune systems for Peter Daszak.

In sum, in the years leading up to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, there was:

• Research by Shi and others at the WIV on how to alter the spike protein of non-infectious
SARS-like coronaviruses so that they can bind to human ACE2 receptors;
• Repeated collaboration between Shi, Hu, Daszak, Wang, and other researchers on
genetically manipulating coronaviruses to increase their infectiousness in humans;
• A new PRC Strategic Priority Research Program, run by Shi, that was actively
manufacturing chimeric viruses in BSL-2 and BSL-3 conditions and seeking out novel
viruses;
• Evidence of ongoing collaboration between Shi and the other scientists who first isolated
a live coronavirus in 2013;
• A second grant awarded to Hu to test novel coronaviruses against human immune
systems in BSL-2 and BSL-3 conditions;
• A stated effort to develop a broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine.

Given the above, it is self-evident that Shi and her colleagues, with funding and support from Daszak, were actively genetically manipulating coronaviruses and testing them against human immune systems in 2018 and 2019, before the beginning of the pandemic.

Unusual Features of SARS-CoV-2

Committee Minority Staff interviews with scientists and current and former U.S. government officials raised several questions about the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, including:

1. The highly infectious nature of SARS-CoV-2, which they consider as infectious as measles;

2. The lack of an identified intermediate host (found 4 months after the outbreak of SARS and 9 months after MERS); and

3. The highly efficient binding to human ACE2.

The highly contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 has been a hot topic of conversation since the virus began to spread around the world. Some scientists and other experts point to the incredibly high case numbers as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is inherently different from known natural betacoronaviruses. For example, MERS first appeared in 2012 and has infected less than 4,000 people. SARS first appeared in 2002 and infected less than 10,000. At the time of writing, less than two years from when it has first appeared, SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 196.4 million people.

SARS-CoV-2 also has a highly unusual affinity for binding to human ACE2 receptors over other hosts. In February 2020, American researchers examined this issue closely. They found that SARSCoV- 2’s spike protein “binds at least 10 times more tightly than the corresponding spike protein of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)–CoV to their common host cell receptor.” [120] [Wrapp, Daniel et al. “Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation.” Science, 13 March 2020, 367(6483): 1260-1263. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7164637/] In other words, SARS-CoV-2 binds more than 10 times more tightly to human ACE2 than the virus that causes SARS. The researchers found this likely explains why the virus is so contagious. [121] [Ibid.]

Australian and British researchers also examined how SARS-CoV-2 binds to the ACE2 of various animals, publishing their research in Scientific Reports on June 24, 2021. The scientists found that SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein binds the strongest to human ACE2. They reported (emphasis added):

This finding was surprising as a zoonotic virus typically exhibits the highest affinity initially for its original host species, with lower initial affinity to receptors of new host species until it adapts. As the virus adapts to its new host, mutations are acquired that increase the binding affinity for the new host receptor. Since our binding calculations were based on SARS-CoV-2 samples isolated in China from December 2019, at the very onset of the outbreak, the extremely high affinity of S protein for human ACE2 was unexpected. [122] [Piplani, S., et. al. “In silico comparison of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein-ACE2 binding affinities across species and implications for virus origin.” Scientific Reports, 24 June 2021, 11(13063) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5]

The first preprint version of this paper went further, concluding, “the data indicates that SARS-CoV- 2 is uniquely adapted to infect humans, raising important questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins might lie elsewhere” emphasis added. [123] [Piplani, S., et. al. Preprint of “In silico comparison of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein-ACE2 binding affinities across species and implications for virus origin.” ArXiv, 13 May 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199v1] This research provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely well adapted to humans, suggesting a non-zoonotic source of the outbreak.

The Furin Cleavage Site

One of the most discussed questions centers around the furin cleavage site (FCS) of SARS-CoV-2. The FCS is part of the virus’ spike protein, which enables it to bind to and enter human cells. In February 2020, French and Canadian scientists reported SARS-CoV-2 contains an FCS that is absent in other coronaviruses of the same clade, or branch of viruses believed to have a similar common ancestor. The scientists also reported that when a bronchitis virus was modified by inserting a similar cleavage site, the virus’ pathogenicity was increased. [124] [Coutard, B et al. “The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent in CoV of the same clade.” Antiviral Research, Feb. 2020, 176: 104742 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7114094/] While some scientists have noted that other coronaviruses contain furin cleavage sites, phylogenetic analysis shows that SARS-CoV-2 is the only identified sarbecovirus (a subsection of betacoronaviruses) with this feature. [125] [Wu, Yiran, and Suwen Zhao. “Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses.” Stem Cell Research, 9 Dec. 2020, 50:102115. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/]

In January 2021 a group of American researchers published “Loss of furin cleavage site attenuates SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis” in Nature. In the article, researchers reported the FCS “may have facilitated the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” [126] [Johnson, B.A., et. al. “Loss of furin cleavage site attenuates SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis.” Nature, 25 Jan. 2021, 591: 293-299. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03237-4] Using a reverse genetic system, they created a mutant strain of SARS-CoV-2 which lacked the FCS. The result was a virus that was weakened in human respiratory cells and that exhibited reduced development in hACE2 expressing mice. This demonstrates the importance of the FCS in the rapid spread of COVID-19.

In other words, did the FCS develop naturally, or was it added in via genetic manipulation? Part of the genetic sequence for the FCS includes a CGG double codon (CGG-CGG). This group of six nucleotides (a group of three nucleotides is also known as a codon) is half of the 12 nucleotides that create the FCS. SARS-CoV-2 is the only identified coronavirus within its class to feature this combination. Some believe this is evidence of genetic manipulation, arguing this double codon is a telltale sign of the FCS being artificially inserted into the virus. [127] [Quay, Steven, and Richard Muller. “The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak.” The Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2021, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science ... 1622995184.]

The “No-See-Um” Method

Critics of the theory that the virus was genetically modified or man-made have repeatedly pointed to the apparent lack of telltale signs of genetic manipulation in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. They claim this is “proof” the virus was not only naturally occurring, but that the COVID-19 pandemic could only be the result of a zoonotic spillover event. Such arguments ignore key pieces of evidence to the contrary.

Molecularly cloned viruses were indistinguishable from wild type.

– Dr. Ralph Baric

In 2005, Ralph Baric, one of the researchers at UNC Chapel Hill with whom Shi would later collaborate with between 2014 and 2016, published a paper entitled, “Development of mouse hepatitis virus and SARS-CoV infectious cDNA constructs.” [128] [Baric R.S., Sims A.C. “Development of Mouse Hepatitis Virus and SARS-CoV Infectious cDNA Constructs.” Curr Top Microbiol Immunol, 2005; 287:229-52. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26765-4_8] In this paper, Baric references using a novel genetic engineering system he developed with other UNC colleagues to engineer full-length SARSCoV genomes via a “no-see-um” method. This method allows for the assembly of various partial genomic sequences into a full-length genome, creating a new and infectious coronavirus. [129] [Ibid.] The publication includes the below figure, which is titled, “Systemic Assembly Strategy for the SARS-CoV infectious clone.” It clearly shows the various SARS fragments and how they were used to create a full-length, custom genomic sequence.


Fig. 5: Baric’s “No-See-Um” System

The paper stated these viruses were “indistinguishable from wild type,” [130] [Ibid.] meaning that it is impossible to tell they were synthetically created.

Baric himself confirmed this interpretation in a September 2020 interview, where he stated, “You can engineer a virus without leaving any trace. The answers you are looking for, however, can only be found in the archives of the Wuhan laboratory.” [131] [Renda, Silvia. “Possibile Creare Un Virus in Laboratorio Senza Lasciare Traccia? La Risposta Dell'autore Della Chimera Del 2015 Di Cui Parlò Tg Leonardo.” L'HuffPost, 14 Sept. 2020, http://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/e-po ... alasciare- traccia-la-risposta-dellesperto_it_5f5f3993c5b62874bc1f7339.] Referring to chimeric viruses he generated in 2015 with WIV researchers, Baric said his team intentionally left signature mutations to show that it was genetically engineered. “Otherwise there is no way to distinguish a natural virus from one made in the laboratory.” [132] [Ibid.]

Shi and Baric have collaborated on multiple papers regarding coronaviruses. The most recent of which was in May 2020, when they joined other researchers in publishing “Pathogenesis of SARSCoV- 2 in Transgenic Mice Expressing Human Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2.” [133] [Jiang, Ren-Di et al. “Pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 in Transgenic Mice Expressing Human Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2.” Cell, 21 May 202, 182(1): 50-58.e8. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cell.2020.05.027] One year later, Baric signed onto a May 14, 2021, letter published in Science which argued that the lab leak theory must be taken seriously and should be fully evaluated. [134] [Bloom, Jesse D., et. al. “Investigate the origins of COVID-19.” Science, 14 May 2021; 372(6543): 694. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1]

In 2017, a dissertation was submitted to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences by Zeng Leiping, a doctoral student working at the WIV, entitled “Reverse Genetic System of Bat SARS-like Coronaviruses and Function of ORFX.” [135] [Leiping, Zeng. Reverse Genetic System of Bat SARS-like Coronaviruses and Function of ORFX. 2017. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, PhD dissertation. English translation first made available by @TheSeeker268 on Twitter, https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status ... 07776?s=20] The referenced reverse genetic system is the same that was used by the WIV in 2016 to create genetically modified viruses and conduct experiments with live viruses under BSL-2 conditions. In his dissertation, Zeng stated the he and other WIV researchers used this system to "construct an S gene chimeric recombinant viral infectious BAC clone with WIV1 as the backbone and without leaving any trace sequences (e.g. incorporated enzymatic sites) in the recombinant viral genome” (emphasis added).

In an end-of-chapter discussion in the dissertation, Zeng reiterates this lack of evidence of genetic manipulation, stating:

We established a reverse genetics system for coronaviruses, and based on the genomic backbone of WIV1, we established a scheme to replace the S gene without traces, constructed infectious BAC clones of 12 S-gene chimeric recombinant viruses, and successfully rescued. Four of these recombinant viral strains (including Rs4231, Rs4874, Rs7327, and SHC014) were tested for ACE2 utilization by these strains in humans, civets, and bats.

Zeng was employed at the WIV when he submitted his dissertation, and Shi was his advisor. As such, it is clear that Shi and others at the WIV not only possessed the capability to genetically modify coronaviruses “without traces,” but were actively doing so in the years leading up to the current pandemic. It appears Zeng Leiping is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in bioengineering at Stanford University.