Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why would they stop when DARPA blocked it? Funding can’t only come from the US. Did CCP also block this research?
> there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China.
Original letter: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Lancet responding to criticism: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
Source: https://archive.ph/dXc0n
Suppose something strange happened and there were suspicions that it was CERN that was involved. Now a letter gets penned by the world's top particle physicists saying it's highly unlikely that the experiments at CERN would be involved. What do you suppose the likelihood would be that those particle physicists would have links to the researchers, colleagues or funders of CERN?
Particle physics (or gravitational wave research for example) is the odd one out here. Maybe because it is 100% fundamental research, where it is known to not produce applicable results.
If you don't believe this then look at the failure rate of the projects.
The other thing is that the funding agencies really, really, really don't like this - they want high risk research not handle turning. So if you get caught out you will get blacklisted - it's misconduct.
It's almost like if you move your research to a country who has no regards for safety or ethical concerns, that suddenly isn't a problem.
It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe. Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.
Not to me.
>Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.
Got any names/years so I watch them?
It's the first time I heard of anything of the sort.
Do you have any reference pointing out, or is this just Facebook hearsay?
If millions of people died and you were right there when it happened, a likely suspect, you might want to deflect blame as well.
Populism and Politics have little to do with the truth. If the masses are fired up over one theory, or if the highly politicized academic community is fired up over one of their own sensitivities, it can be destructive for many involved.
Refusing legitimate investigation - now that's a bad sign because people should want to clear their names.
We don't know what the answers are but it warrants further investigation.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
As a reference never hurts, specially in a topic prone to disinformation, here's a link to the WHO's page on its official list of members of their "Global Study of the Origins of SARS-COV2".
Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA) is listed as a member.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
Because the Trump administration decided that along with a bunch of other offshore collaboration funding decided to pull the money (America First!). There's a Vincent Racaniello episode on Microbe TV that explained what happened there. I don't remember the episode but here's his channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/VincentRacaniello/videos
I think if folks would listen more to virologists than the press they'd find out that it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses (that's actually in his coursework - also on his channel), but it's also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function" (for weaponising) which has been suggested as the source of SARS2 and that whole Wuhan conspiracy theory thing.
Are virologists the only humans who, thwarted by one jurisdiction's limits, give up without considering doing their career-making, essential-to-humanity work elsewhere?
> …it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses… [and] …also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function"…
Indeed, but humans do incredibly difficult things all the time. In fact, they're often attracted to the challenge, and seek funding to help them do it, and often don't let a 'no' from any one funder stop them from bootstrapping work in other ways.
It's also incredibly difficult to engineer & get approval for vaccines to a brand-new disease, but that got done, recently, faster than ever before.
It was incredibly difficult to create nuclear weapons, but a lot of countries have done it independently.
Given the significant number of dangerous pathogen escapes from disease labs, it's also "incredibly difficult" to keep dangerous contagions safely contained. It's comparatively easy to accidently let them out!
My point is it would have required a virtual miracle for the proposed gain of function research to have produced something that could have escaped in the time framed that is possible regarding the rejected grant request. Additionally, good research has proven that Covid couldn't have been due to gain of function research either.
2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites
5. Furin cleavage sites have independently evolved in multiple different branches of coronaviruses, probably a dozen times that we know of now.
6. The furin cleavage site is short and can easily happen through recombination with another virus due to coinfection.
7. This is very likely what happened due to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 ancestor and an HKU9-like virus.
It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites.
There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but what they claimed was the closest match in the database was not, in fact, as close as a sequence they had published. Given that demonstrable lie, there is no way to verify any claim about what sequences were or were not known and possibly involved in this research.
Furthermore the person who submitted the proposal was also the person who broke ethical standards to preemptively shut down all discussion of a human release.
That isn't to take away from the possibility of a natural spillover. The facts that you say about that are facts. But accidental release is also possible. And the lack of transparency from those who are most likely to have made the mistake heightens suspicions, it does not lessen them.
It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human-animal contact happens in rural areas or in big population centers. SARS was eventually traced back to palm civets which are farmed animals. In this industry wild animals, many of which are susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses, are being bred in large numbers. To me this sounds like a perfect breeding ground for the viruses as well.
Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.
How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.
Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact.
I'm sure that the Chinese government would love to have definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, but that evidence likely went up in smoke (January 1st, 2020) weeks before anyone realized that COVID-19 would turn into a legitimate pandemic (January 23rd, 2020).
The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke.
> Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness.
At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.
"The grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2." The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2.
"If they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like." I do not personally know how to evaluate the accuracy of this claim, but if true, it resonates with the first claim: this proposal funded elsewhere would not lead to SARS-CoV-2.
The argument claims about it being hard/expensive I think are less compelling, as there is a lead time of several years with experts in field performing research. A more compelling version of this argument would look like (completely making up numbers): "On average, it takes 4.5 years to develop the first samples of a novel virus using a selected backbone, CRISPR technology, and gain-of-function culturing. Therefore, even if this research was funded in 2018 we would not expect it to have led to SARS-CoV-2". I'm not saying that argument is accurate at all, just saying it's more specific than "it's difficult".
The argument claims about the evidence being missing I think isn't going to be motivating for a person who has a reasonable expectation that secret research is done and does not have trust in government transparency (either US, China, or otherwise). I'm not making a point here that evidence isn't needed (far from it, evidence IS needed). I'm evaluating from a polemic perspective what kinds of claims and arguments are useful for advancing the conversation with someone who holding a dissonant viewpoint.
Thank you by the way for making specific claims that can be fact checked such as the two referenced at the top of this comment.
It isn't as simple as altering the proposal. You're speculating a very large and hidden process using sequences that were kept perfectly secret and have not been leaked, with virus backbones that would take considerable effort to create but which were never shared publicly (and kept perfectly secret before SARS-CoV-2 happened before there was any need for perfect secrecy). We have this leaked information from 2018 about the proposal with the WIV1/SHC014 backbones which leaked because it was not kept with perfect secrecy. Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. It requires a bit of a time machine because Daszak would have to have known in 2018 to tighten up his "OpSec" in response to the pandemic that hadn't happened yet and leaks that hadn't yet occurred.
Things are also getting worse for the lab leak theory on other fronts, I just stumbled across this a few minutes ago:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02519-1
If there's multiple lineages from multiple zoonotic spillover events that makes the lab leak theory a poor fit and will require a lot more mental gymnastics.
Also, I'm not sure why the lab leak hypothesis is suddenly trickier. They had all sorts of samples.
Labeling this all as "mental gymnastics" as in the article, or "a dagger in the heart of the lab leak hypothesis" is just the sort of motivated analysis confirmatory bias that caused all this in the first place. I'm not sure how arguing that SARS-CoV-2 involved two spillover events with crossover from multiple species is less mental gymnastics than "a lab had multiple samples".
Honestly I'd like to see more dispassionate discussion of this. That Nature piece is shameful.
At some level I don't care if it was a lab leak or not but I wish there wasn't this level of motivation behind both sides.
In any event, the grant proposal should raise a lot of red flags regardless. What bothers me often is this implied assumption that if the lab leak hypothesis is false, everything else is fine. It's all fine that a plausible biosecurity failure scenario was ridiculed, that major research groups clearly lied about and tried to cover up conflicts of interest, that we can trust these (GoF) lines of research are safe, that we can just trust the authority figures to not cause another pandemic, etc. etc. etc.
But, this nature piece is really problematic. When removing likely sequencing errors, the independent "spillover events" appear to fit perfectly into a single phylogeny with each node separated by a single mutation. And the A clade descends cleanly from the B clade. There are not enough mutations between them to support a complex explanation like multiple spillovers. This is linked but not explained properly by the nature piece https://virological.org/t/evidence-against-the-veracity-of-s...
But maybe some things just haven't leaked yet? Or were kept secret by others even more skilled at secrecy & misdirection than Daszak?
But nobody is alleging that they did all the work in perfect secrecy. Clearly we know about a lot of the work: you'd use the same equipment, location, and so forth. Only a few things are left that need to be secret; namely, the origin of the viral sequences that preceded SARS-CoV-2. And if those were present in the wild it seems not entirely surprising that WIV could have simply obtained them.
Furthermore, it is not really that surprising that research which potentially develops weapons of mass destruction is kept secret, pandemic or no. Whether it caused the pandemic or not, people are still generally concerned that this kind of thing was occurring.
That sounds like a very tenuous line of reasoning to me. Almost like saying "We know that Mr. A proposed shooting Mr. B, so let's reconsider that Mr C. may have stabbed Mr. D."
The investigation will continue and those missing items you mention just might turn up since it appears from the leak that there are might be a significant number of unpublished sequences at WIV and EHA, etc.
If science is unsatisfied by what is found, actual scientists will move on and look elsewhere. This leak evidence is compatible with the man origin suspicions however.
There seems to be an extraordinary amount of CYA here.
But that doesn't invalidate the animal transfer hypothesis. Because that isn't how science works -- or even just how KNOWLEDGE works. No one[1] operates under perfect certainty; we collect stronger or weaker evidence for various possibilities.
This grant application doesn't "prove" that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab. But nothing "proves" it wasn't. The existence of this grant application is evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis, demonstrating conclusively that someone in the world was thinking, prior to the pandemic, about performing modifications to coronaviruses similar to what we have observed in the virus.
[1] Except mathematicians: https://xkcd.com/263/
Every single denial comment around here hinges on this confusion in terms and then tries to stick the "no proof" meaning to all the evidence, instead of bringing whatever evidence there is that it was a natural strain evolution or debating the various points.
Funny how instead a meta analysis of the discussion show one side piling up evidences while the other insists in trying to convince people that no proof equals no evidence.
> 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on.
> It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
It isn't. What is suspicious is the following:
1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place.
2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city.
3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take.
4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior.
If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on.
This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.
Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anything.
You will only accept hard evidence, yet you are aware that parties in China have actively removed some possible evidentiary sources. And others in USA promoted a campaign to shut down lines of enquiry, whilst withholding relevant information.
Many disciplines use Bayesian statistical models. In this case it may be the only way to "prove" a lab leak - assuming that were actually true.
I understand how this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. I hate that. It would certainly be better to have hard evidence. I belive we have to reserve judgement in it's absence. And keep investigating both avenues.
We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.
A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.
This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.
Where did I say it was engineered? We have no evidence of its natural origin either. Can you provide its natural reservoir? An animal sample? Another coronavirus with this furin cleavage site? Anything?
What we are trying to do is ascertain the likelihoods of various scenarios given the evidence we have. Not the evidence we wish we had. I do not believe, nor have I anywhere asserted, that we have proven the virus was unnatural in origin. I also do not believe we have proven that the virus was natural in origin.
What I believe is that the evidence is presently insufficient to determine, and fairly ambiguous. What is unambiguous is the extraordinarily shady and self serving behavior of Peter Daszak. Why it is that he's doing that, I don't know. It could be because he participated in the engineering of this virus, but it could be for entirely separate reasons that pertain to him. I do think we should at least make a serious effort to find out, though.
And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other
One of the reasons i despise the Silicon Valley tone of conversation is how naive (read removed from the brutality that exists in the world outside the US' protected borders) the line is.
Like, are you kidding me? - Research Lab near outbreak - Connected to person that proposed a similar GoF research for a grant in the US and was turned down - History of loose ethical standards and evidence of published works connecting the CCP to military usage of viruses - Absolutely no evidence of natural origin circumstantial or otherwise in spite of over 18 months of looking
And we have people here closing their eyes, fingers in their ears going "la la la" with moronic arguments like : "Can you show me the evidence?"
I mean, can you constructively participate in the discussion with an attempt to push it forward and call out the clear risks of weaponizing infectious vectors instead of saying "Nothing to see here, show me more" in the face of all we've seen.
All that does is gives a pass to the people doing this in the dark. Accident or not, that work is ongoing and if a literal global mass casualty event doesn't help regulate it, what will ?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeo...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847...
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
From your second link: "Finally, the poly-basic (furin) site present in SARS-CoV-2 is absent in both RshSTT182 and RshSTT200."
Your third link doesn't discuss furin cleavage sites very much.
Your fourth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your fifth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your sixth link at least partially supports your claim with a single mention of furin, saying "The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2", but the whole truth is that while they have insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site in the spike protein, they do not contain the full furin cleavage site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02
From your seventh link: "None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site in the spike."
(Protip: in this claim #4 of yours under discussion, you should change "sarbecoviruses" to "betacoronaviruses".)
I have not evaluated 2-7.
The more important part here is an investigation on the origins of the virus is more about beurecracy than the actual science so unless you can conclusively prove that this virus could have never been engineered by a human you should stop bringing “improbability” of all of these processes as why we should trust these scientists.
Given that prior, "can you disprove the lab" is the Russell's Teapot hypothesis. No, I can't. I also can't disprove it rode in on a meteorite or was beamed in by aliens. And I'm not about to start.
>All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way?
What you're proposing isn't science and it isn't what 'real scientists' do.
And as far as I understand it, they are correct. Science doesn't convict an effect, it provides a lower bound on the likelihood of the effect's existence.
I've worked with many "real scientists" who will consider possiblity unless they see conclusive evidence against it. On the frontiers, there is very little conclusive evidence; this is why they are the frontiers.
I have also met "real scientists" who actively dismiss conclusive evidence if it doesn't line up with what they think will get funded.
It doesn't seem the first flavor is the one you are talking about.
Personally I think it's naive that people are omitting human and government intentions from all this, as if they are not actors in complex political world. These huge world changing events don't happen in a vacuum, and government actors are usually aware of all these ongoing research efforts for agendas and specific goals, which of course includes misleading the public.
It does seem unlikely that the SARS-CoV-2 genome, or spike protein, or even just a small segment including the furin cleavage site, was synthesized. Although without knowing what protein folding modeling capabilities and synthesis capabilities the WIV had, who knows for sure?
And the rest of it is that you're arguing in favor of a science fiction explanation for the capabilities of the WIV lab.
Using this figure, we could have some parameters around how much time such a project must have taken and its latest start date (assuming its evolved from known or closely-related-to-known viruses).
Using this figure, and a theoretical timetable, we can also specify how close a cousin virus we would need to have for such a process to develop SAR-CoV-2.
This could give us a more specific understanding of the feasibility of such research.
For example, RaTG13 is closest known virus was discovered in 2013. Does the rate of serial passage enable evolution from RaTG13 over ~7 years? If not, this provides a factual argument allowing us to determine even if gain-of-function research was imposed on RaTG13 the moment of its discovery, it could not have been developed into SARS-CoV-2. (I don't know how to evaluate the actual accuracy of this, but provided as a example of how knowing the serial passage rate would be helpful).
This has nothing to do with the corona virus strains we are currently dealing with, and more importantly, there has never been any credible research proving that Covid was made in a lab. The only paper that got any traction suggested it was non-manipulation based gain of function research, but that was disproved only a few weeks after the paper's release as well. I know we all want to know where it came from, but the odds against us ever having actual evidence of it being from a lab are virtually zero. And no, rejected research proposals do not constitute proof of anything.
> Two, their proposal was for genetic manipulation of an existing virus, which research on the existing corona virus shows was not the case.
I think that’s invalidated if your first point is valid right? Since the proposal wasn’t accepted.
Doesn’t mean they didn’t go on to do it anyway (possibly in slightly different form), someone was clearly thinking about it.
No. There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation.
If they did it, it's not COVID-19.
So then the work would have to have happened and the virus escape happened in 10 months. In the proposal they are looking at q5 of the project for the genetic engineering to happen.
I don't think that the time lines work - also the genetic engineering was slated to happen in North Carolina...
This is honestly the most damning part of evidence.
China has shown over and over their current strategy is to snap up resources, countries and partnerships that the West, and specifically the United States, refuse or ignore.
China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country.
So we have a country with strong motivation, lots of money and a repeated willingness to ignore ethical & safety concerns... I don't see how it isn't a big question mark. Especially considering how quickly and forcefully China shut down the conversation and refuse to allow in investigators.
If it wasn’t made in the lab, then it was already naturally occurring. Which means it didn’t need to escape anything, on account of it existing in the wild before it ever got near a lab.
The lab in Wuhan was studying Coronaviruses because of the threat they potentially posed to humans, and because the nearby bat populations were know to carry them.
Saying that the existence of a lab studying novel viruses in their natural habitat is evidence that I can from a lab, is like saying the existence of fire stations in a cities is evidence that fire fighters start fires.
There is only circumstancial evidence for it, but it is reasonable to suspect COVID-19 is the result of a researcher getting infected, not noticing, and introducing the virus to the human population. There is no evidence for, and it is very unreasonable to believe it was created in a lab.
If I was near a bank robbery at the time of occurrence, it does not count as evidence that I did it. Not even if I have a history of robbing banks. It must be combined with other, stronger evidence (I was inside the bank, my fingerprints were there, I was caught on camera) to build a case.
The Russian agents videoed wandering about with bottles of poison are evidence of another mechanism of introduction. Perhaps the presence of a market full of various wild animals known to carry coronavirus's is also worth considering.
I'm mystified why this hasn't already happened. I mean, his career depends on government largesse so it shouldn't even require coercion. Full cooperation or no cash.
That said, I think the context around this is extremely damning for Daszak. I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab origin for Covid-19 as conspiracy theories. But how could he do this while conveniently leaving out that his own organization was involved in highly risky coronavirus research?
Again, I don't think this news puts us much closer to uncovering the origins of Covid-19, but it does show how some of these folks leading the charge of "it had to be natural" were at the very least being duplicitous in their communications.
What's not being reported even in this Intercept article is that Fauci and the Eco Health Alliance are heavily involved with each other. One week before Daszak et al released their ridiculous "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" Lancet article, as revealed in Fauci's emails (which supposedly revealed nothing), Fauci had a conference call with Daszak and other Eco Health folks, after discussing the fact that the lab leak hypothesis was gaining traction.
They have a big conference call, the Lancet article is posted a week later.
Here's all the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNxoVFZwMYw
I know "Bro, just watch this youtube video" is lame-ass evidence in general, but Dr. Martenson has been incredibly data-driven and level-headed throughout the pandemic, is a pro-masker, and his views have evolved over time with new data.
Peak Prosperity was not about prepping much at all until Covid, as far as I know. Dr. Martenson started pushing home gardening and stocking up when covid hit--in fact, he started saying such things in like February 2020--pretty prescient.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart...
Tangent, but if it takes this long to learn a fact like that, consider a critical audit of your regular news sources.
E.g. I want to know the different reasonable perspectives on issues/events without entertaining every kooky idea. In this case, I feel like I lumped what seems a plausible concern in with kooky ideas, and so missed the entire non-kooky narrative.
You'll get a lot more "noise", sure, but the signal you do get can be incredibly useful. You learn to place less trust on any individual thing you hear, and get a better bullshit detector as you go. It's well worthwhile, and you'll be surprisingly well informed all without some large entity telling you "what's really happening".
Don't get me wrong, but in online discussions, all too often telling the whole truth makes people ignore your message. That's probably also why dishonest politicians can get populist votes from many people. Whenever you include the material to dig your grave with, people just take that by the horns and stop looking at the rest of your argument even if that disclosure is the reason why you are a qualified expert that should be weighing into the discussion on a given topic.
I don't know the details about this Daszak guy, I only know what you wrote and the comments above yours. Perhaps this does not apply in this situation; that's not for me to say. But I can see why they might not have dug their own grave while trying to communicate a message with honest intentions. It is extremely easy to have subtly wrong wording or just bad luck and get people to ignore everything you said before or after "my lab worked on coronaviruses".
Anyway, this was in Lancet, a scientific publisher, not a mass medium, disclosures of interest are mandatory. I know that in today's age it looks like science papers are just mass media because they're so easy to consume and distribute, but they are not. They're supposed to be rigurous, otherwise people would lose trust in them. Which is exactly what happened in this pandemic: it's a worldwide lack of trust in science, scientists, leaders, governments.
Edit: the problem looks like partisan politics to me. Republicans have been agitating to pressure Daszak, and therefore Democrats are against it.
They also know that if it was their fault, the CCP did a good enough job of scrubbing the evidence that we'll never meet the standard of evidence that would satisfy many of those who choose to take the authority at their word. We're seeing this first-hand in this thread.
An example of this happening is on Wikipedia where one editor in particular seems to have declared it to be a “conspiracy theory” and scrubs every mention of it. The editor in question scrubs talk pages and their own talk page, thus effectively preventing any kind of consensus forming, which is out of the ordinary for Wikipedia. They have remarkable stamina, and thus can our out-wait other editors.
Wikipedia seems to be one example of a much bigger effort to suppress discussion of a potential lab leak.
>> Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email.
There seems to be zero data to support his spillover idea too. But now we have documentation of people wanting to do the exact experiments that could lead to this, and he's still sticking to his fantasy.
I dont think the point here is to definitively determine the origin of this virus, it's to point to the fact that unchecked scientists are wanting to do exactly the kind of experiments that could kill us all. IIRC an Ebola gene was successfully put in a flu virus years ago but contained - hemorrhagic influenza anyone?
This stuff needs to stop.
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.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
more info: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
* Event occurs
* Access to investigate is limited
* A deep independent investigation is blocked
*Internet is flooded with msging that unless there are hard facts uncovered by independent investigation some of the origin theories are def conspiracy theories
It would be nice if they could be left up in YouTube, but it’s either removing them right after the stream ends, or YouTube takes it down and blocks his account, which has happened multiple times in the last 18 months.
You can find all of them in his website after registration (e-mail and password): https://www.mccairndojo.com/
Some of the videos are still available in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2-l7Y87DC_3SBAKPk2M1Q
His surviving Twitter account: https://twitter.com/w_mccairn
EcoHealth just got defunded by the US Congress with bipartisan support: https://twitter.com/GReschenthaler/status/144122144752803020...
My spidey sense is certainly tingling, though of course no smoking guns. But the jigsaw pieces fit. Can’t get the funding in North Carolina? Let’s try Wuhan.
> We will conduct in vitro pseudovirus binding assays, using established techniques, and live virus binding assays (at WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] to prevent delays and unnecessary dissemination of viral cultures)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
- Gay vs straight: religious and political beliefs - Abortion: same reasons IMO - Left vs right: politics that self propagate and stay in power with division
What what some other examples that we can try to isolate the causes for and extrapolate to here.
My opinion on the reasons for this theory being a culture war is the government and its predominate scientists have pushed a “hero” or “patriot” perspective onto one class of its citizens that if you’re not devoting your energy towards increased vaccine engagement or government policies towards containment of this virus you are doing something wrong. Everyone else is a villain or bad guy or extremist conspiracy theorist.
If given the right resources, would it be feasible to synthesize a pandemic-inducing virus in a lab setting?
If so, a general question: why haven’t the villains of the world done so already?
To your last question, releasing such a thing would basically assure your (and your people's) own destruction in addition to your target's, as we've seen by how difficult it has been to control COVID. So you'd have to want everyone dead, and generally speaking the people who would be willing to actually do something like that don't have the resources and knowledge to make it happen.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2012/06/fouchier...
That’s more of a doomsday terrorist fantasy than viable bio weapons research.
That sentence should be written in bold.
https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699
"That organization - the US-based EcoHealth Alliance - was awarded grants strating 2014 to look into possible coronaviruses from bats.
EcoHealth received $3.7m from the NIH, $600,000 of which was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
So, in early 2018 they propose specific modifications to the virus, and in the end of 2019 such a modified virus emerges right near their lab...
Btw, in their first $666K (with Wuhan getting $160K) 2014 tranche of the $3.3M grant award, the "Are Human Subjects Involved" is already "Yes" with IRB review already pending - see p.13 here https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understandi...
I from the start (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23340283) was saying that one of main reasons of doing it in Wuhan was the human testing.
I can’t say if it’s a setup, but I’d be very sceptical of this proposals origins.
Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic...
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”
Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”
Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
And yes we do have reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
I value expert opinions but oversight is necessary.
Reading the introduction, it looks like it would have been incredibly useful data to have for the origins of COVID-19 since much of the work looks like it would have been surveillance for bat coronaviruses. I note that the second work program would be research on effectively vaccinating bats to prevent spread of coronaviruses. Australia did something similar by vaccinating horses against Hendra virus.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter in the end what evidence is put forth. People are going to believe the lab escape hypothesis because there are powerful interests intent on pushing that narrative. The arguments in favour of lab escape seem plausible, even if they conflict with the molecular evidence. Most people don't know enough about the arcanery of molecular biology to trust it over the hearsay of documents and politicians.
0. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)
Not the first time I've seen you say this. Would it be worthwhile to fetch articles when they're submitted, if only for your own sanity?
1. In 2018 EcoHealth Alliance(Peter Dazsak and team) apply to a grant to darpa for viral modification research and highlight a change in "furin cleavage site" at the same location as covid-19's change, this change has never been seen before in nature.
2. In the darpa proposal is listed "Wuhan institute of virology" as a team member, this was a year before the covid-19 outbreak in wuhan in 2019.
3. Rather damning for Peter Dazsak is he publicly denied any plausibility in the idea of a lab created source for covid-19, while behind the scenes at the same time telling his two students to distance themselves from this darpa proposal as the virus was rapidly spreading through cities in the world.
4. Even more unusual is that Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it until now.
"Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses."
And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
What you're saying is worth looking deeper into, but it's not enough to start making claims yet, imo. There are probably hundreds or thousands of proposals and papers floating around now that talk about different things one can do with genetic engineering. If something should arise that is related to the concepts in some of those papers you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that there's a causal connection. Not without more information, anyway.
"it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin" This doesn't tell me it's artificially created. The most this tells me is it's not well understood.
"The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect." It could be related. Or it could be unrelated and there maybe some other explanation. My point is, when you want to charge someone with a serious crime, which I think this falls under, you need to come with some pretty strong evidence that directly ties whoever is involved to the events of the crime. This evidence may very well exist and it's not been shared publicly.
"Leaked DARPA proposals adds weight to lab-engineered sars-cov-2 hypothesis"
...or something along those lines. The problem is that "points to" is a pretty strong direct relationship. But these docs aren't directly related apparently (since the research was rejected by DARPA). It just shows that labs were potentially interested in creating such viruses. But that does hint that such a scenario could have been possible.
They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.
Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.
Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.
As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
Some other sites' coverage of this highlighted some of the grant content a bit more prominently. I agree it's not quite a smoking gun, but the content of the grant that was discussed was eerily similar to what's been put together by investigating organizations. It's akin to if you were trying to solve a burglary and concluded "if this happened, the suspects would have done A, B, D, and H", and then later you found some emails sent back and forth by the suspects saying "hey how about we do A, B, D, and H?" It's not proof they actually did it but it's about as close as you can get to a smoking gun without it being a smoking gun.
The timing is also uncanny.
I don't want to miscommunicate the extent to which I think the grant proposal proves anything, as I don't think it does, but it blurs the moral difference so much that I start to find myself wondering why as a society we shouldn't react with some things as if it did. That is, I don't think it rises to some level where I would say it definitely proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone did anything, but I do think it compels some deep reflection about the scientific-media-authority-academic-funding complex.
While this doesn’t prove they made and leaked the virus, it doesn’t exonerate them either. A proper investigation is needed. When you say you rely on experts, you should definitely listen to them but unfortunately when people are defending their colleagues it’s much harder to do this. Further, many scientists would take any questioning of this persons ethics as castigation of the whole scientific establishment and become defensive. Even otherwise, it looks like the tide is changing among experts now, more and more are agreeing the lab leak is a viable hypothesis.
The lab leak hypothesis isn't a hypothesis that foul business went on.
Coincidence 1.) Wuhan is roughly 1800 KM away from the caves in Yunnan province where previous bat-borne coronaviruses jumped to humans harvesting bat guano in earlier SARS outbreaks. It is a massive metropolitan area, and far more cosmopolitan than many westerners believe. They don't eat bats in Wuhan, and bats were never present at wet markets. Possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans here, but unlikely based on priors and the realities of horseshoe bats being highly unlikely to come into contact with urbanized humans at a level to transmit a virus that isn't adapted to human lung receptors.
Coincidence 2.) Wuhan has 2 different facilities where bat-borne coronavirus research took place. There are only a few of these labs in the entire world, and none others in all of China.
Coincidence 3. ) Unlike both SARS-1 and MERS, where animal reservoirs for both were found within months, almost 2 years later, no animal reservoir has been identified for SARS-2. Unlike both MERS and SARS-1, SARS-2 has never been particularly infectious to other animal species. SARS-1 in its early stages was still highly transmissible between bats. SARS-2 never exhibited this characteristic.
Coincidence 4. ) The evidence that would have easily exonerated the labs was deliberately destroyed by the CCP early in the pandemic, with extensive blocking of access to any and all foreign investigators.
Coincidence 5.) The same city where this outbreak occurred was a known location, based on other grants to EcoHealth Alliance, of researching bat coronavirus experiments involving the use of "humanized mice". No, "humanized" isn't some novel, sci-fi or conspiracy theory idea. They are genetically modified mice which are routinely used in research. The variety used in the lab were engineered to have human ACE-2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. Sounds crazy, I know, but here's the grant summary (it was awarded) for the research, and notice the "humanized mice" at the very end of the text: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but every day that goes by where no zoonotic reservoir is identified (the CCP isn't looking at all, because they know the answer) increasingly points to this being a lab accident and a subsequent coverup by a paranoid authoritarian regime, along with a scientific community desperate to prevent virology from being impacted the way nuclear energy research was by Chernobyl.
We did not have the tools to do genetic manipulation as far s the physical techniques until recently...ie they were not around when I took biochem in 1990s.
HOWEVER, we still do not have enough concrete knowledge about this domain to reliably design anything on purpose including viruses organs ,etc.
Anybody that states otherwise is a danger to themselves and others. Blunt as I can put that.
Can someone enlighten me about the value of this theory? It just seems like another vector of anti-establishment distrust discourse with a more intelligent veneer; easy to profit off of (clicks, book sales, etc) and doesn't require a conclusion.
If it came from a lab - hell, even if it DIDN'T come from a lab, but could have - then we need to globally think about what sort of things we're doing and how safely we can do them.
If China caused this and then lied about it, there would absolutely be geopolitical will to organize and extract concessions.
Regarding what should be done: stop giving money to China for GoF research would be a great start...
Someone, in USA, asking for a grant in the past doesn't point to anything about origins of SARS-CoV-2.
"“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept."
The first page of the document listed collaborators from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Evidence is a method of confirmation. Motives, incentives and suspicious evasions can help us form hypotheses to evaluate. Dismissing a hypothesis as something unworthy of examination may fall under the 'suspicious evasion' subheading.
But we’ve known since the COVID outbreak that there was experiments making novel corona viruses infect humanized mice in Wuhan just before two of the WIV researchers got sick and a nearby military event also got sick. We’ve further known that COVID-19 has a DNA structure unlike natural viruses — matching a bat virus except for a single protein that appears to be from a pangolin virus.
It was always clear the preponderance of evidence pointed towards a lab leak — and that claims of a natural virus were special pleading by interested parties or a political stunt by media parties.
You were always irrational and acting based on propaganda to question a lab leak — it was the only reasonable and supported-by-evidence hypothesis the entire time.
Is the default to simply assert that, because it is biological, it naturally evolved? In the modern era we're in, I'm not convinced that is a sensible default.
The most sensible default is to say we don't know, and all reasonable possibilities are being explored. That is not the same as saying that its reasonable and responsible to downplay a completely reasonable theory; for all that's holy, the virus was first discovered in the same city as China's only L4 biohazard lab studying human pathogens, literally that evidence alone is enough to say the lab-leak theory is "reasonable". Not a smoking gun! But REASONABLE and not worthy of downplay.
That is to say, is there an actual person who is perfectly fine with all the terrible things the CCP plainly does, but finding out that they've been incompetently handling research will suddenly make them change their views?
The basis for GoF research (at least, the publicly-espoused thesis, bioweapons research being a likely secondary interest) is that such research can help us stop or reduce the impact of a pandemic. If the natural origin theory turns out to be the truth, then this adds lots of weight to the idea that we SHOULD be aggressively pursuing GoF research in order to fix the next naturally-occuring viral pandemic. However, if sars-cov-2 actually came from a lab leak, then we have evidence that such research is both far more risky than we thought and as well that natural pandemics are less likely than we think, so we should probably not do it at all.
Sure, maybe the CCP screwed up containment, and that mistake cost millions of lives. Every single major government around the planet has facilities like the one we're discussing. Every single one has made mistakes like the CCP possibly did. The CCP were just unlucky in that their mistake wasn't confined to one person or the welcome lobby.
Knowing it was engineered in a lab would put a bigger spotlight on facilities like these. Unfortunately, its most likely to only result in sanctions against China, but if the people in charge could summon an ounce of sense, it could also mean more of these facilities being shut down, their research suspended, and the live cultures of humanity-destroying plagues in their vaults destroyed.
Past that, I offer that headlines that will lead the public we have toward thoughtful, measured, conclusions (that reflect where we actually are) - this would seem to be our best goal.
Think of it being an requirement to join the United Nations.
Those countries that arn't in the UN, or don't want moderation; well let's say let the CIA do their dirty work, or outright tariff/humanitarian wars.
(I don't have a clue to the origin of this mutating virus, but letting any lab anywhere experiment on biologicals does not seem prudent.)
If dangerous research killed 15 million people we need to know.
the response during the initial critical phase could have been been different if it wasn't led by the people with obvious conflict of interests like Fauci and was looking more like coverup than an actual response.
The EcoHealth NIH grants for coronavirus/Wuhan included "Human Subjects", so who knows how much of the initial spread was the part of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875758 (July 2020)
2. I don't know about you but I have lost more than 1.5 years of my life to this. World around me has changed fundamentally in many ways. Just for closures sake I would like to know why this happened to me.
Even if you knew would anything change? I’m not advocating for ignorance, rather that it’s impossible to know conclusively without full cooperation and it’s in the interest of all parties to deflect
Yes. Closure. I know it's a vague human need, but it is a need at least I have. It will definitely be good for my mental health. And why do you want people to cease just because something is hard? All criminal cases are hard. Some are solved. Let's try to solve this one.
- Only with accountability can there be some deterrence. Especially if there were actors outside of China that were involved.
- The details of the post-mortem will give us valuable insights that we can't get by simply imagining up a worst case from our armchair. If a plane crashes, we want to figure out why it crashed and make specific improvements, rather than just assuming what happened and acting based on a loose and inaccurate mental model.
- If it did leak, there needs to be a cultural reckoning and introspection as to how this was allowed to be so taboo for so long.
- If it did leak, public knowledge of that may be what causes there to be sufficient political will to get regulatory safeguards implemented
Because they might require vastly different actions?
CcChina was going to do bioweapon research and there was nothing we or anyone else could do about it.
Quietly funding research in Wuhan was a way for the US IC to keep an eye on what China was doing.
Something from that lab escaped. It's not clear or particularly relevant to me whether what escaped was directly involved in the particular experiments we funded. In my mind if the US funded 50 experiments and China funded 50 other experiments of categorically the same type, and one of those 100 escaped, both are culpable regardless of whether it was on of our 50 or their 50.
Fauci and other officials can't just come out and say "This is part of a top secret weapons/intelligence program where we were using this funding to spy on China." And so they will lie in public. They will lie under oath. And there will be no consequence because the people (Congress/Presidents/etc) with the classified truth are all similarly culpable (they probably okayed/funded it).
But there are so many other questions:
- intentional release? If so why?
- any other viruses/bacteria under study(almost undoubtedly, "Yes")?
- if so, where and what is planned?
China makes plans(written plans) for everything. Even if the release was an accident, there were reasons for doing the studies. What were/are they?
-What other viruses and/or bacteria are undergoing similar study in China? Are there any bacteriological production facilities in place now (as are present yet in Russia IIRC)?
- Can we count on Russia's past actions, facilities and quite clear warnings to provide a sufficient counterweight to China's fiddling in the lab? Or should we return to full scale biological warfare research ourselves? We can undoubtedly outpace both given time but at this point I see a need for some reasonable planning or we're likely to worsen the situation.
We still haven't considered non-governmental entities that may have an interest in biological warfare, ranging from the MIT grad student with a gene lab in his basement to the environmental organization that believes reducing the world's human population is a necessity.