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FTR#1193 The Oswald Institute of Virology, Part 12: Covid-19 and The American Deep State, Part 4

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FTR #1193 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Embody­ing the “Deep State” ide­o­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity being per­pet­u­at­ed from the “extrem­ist” Trump admin­is­tra­tion to the “respectable” Biden admin­is­tra­tion, nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor Jake Sul­li­van now sees the “Lab Leak The­o­ry” of Covid’s ori­gins as “cred­i­ble” as nat­ur­al ori­gins.

Sul­li­van is a nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and has no sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials in rel­e­vant dis­ci­plines.

Sul­li­van has intoned: ” . . . . Nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Jake Sul­li­van warned Bei­jing of poten­tial con­se­quences last month, telling Fox News that Chi­na will face ‘iso­la­tion in the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty’ if it does not coop­er­ate with probes mov­ing for­ward. . . .”

Iso­lat­ing Chi­na is the biggest strate­gic goal of this “op,” as we have not­ed repeat­ed­ly since Feb­ru­ary of 2020.

Note that jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing the issue are not per­mit­ting dis­cus­sion of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the virus’s delib­er­ate cre­ation and dis­sem­i­na­tion as part of a U.S. covert oper­a­tion, the 800-pound goril­la in the room we have dis­cussed for many hours.

As famed jour­nal­ist Edward R. Mur­row observed decades ago: “A nation of sheep will beget a gov­ern­ment of wolves.”

But­tress­ing Mur­row’s obser­va­tion, 52% of Amer­i­cans in a recent poll believed the “Lab Leak The­o­ry,” large­ly because of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s renewed focus on that pos­si­bil­i­ty.

” . . . . U.S. adults were almost twice as like­ly to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in Chi­na than human con­tact with an infect­ed ani­mal, which many sci­en­tists believe is the most like­ly sce­nario. . . . [Har­vard Pro­fes­sor Robert] Blendon said Democ­rats like­ly became more recep­tive to the idea after Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s recent order that intel­li­gence agen­cies inves­ti­gate the virus’ ori­gin and com­ments from Antho­ny Fau­ci, the White House chief med­ical offi­cer, that it’s worth dig­ging into. . . .”

Antho­ny Fau­ci’s expres­sion of doubt about the nat­ur­al ori­gin the­o­ry of the virus is said to have influ­enced the increase in pub­lic accept­abil­i­ty of the “Lab-Leak The­o­ry.” 

Fau­ci him­self set forth the “lab leak” sce­nario in his 2012 endorse­ment of a mora­to­ri­um on gain-of-func­tion manip­u­la­tions, set­ting the intel­lec­tu­al stage for the “gam­ing” of just such a sce­nario. 

In FTR#1187, we not­ed that Fau­ci’s NIH NIAID was among the insti­tu­tions that presided over Eco­Health Alliance’s fund­ing of exper­i­men­ta­tion on bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy.

A Chi­nese spokesper­son has hint­ed at the ori­gins of the virus being found in U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ries. 

Again, the Amer­i­can and world wide press has failed to address the 800-pound goril­la in the room. 

By the same token and as part of that fail­ure, the clo­sure of USAMRIID at Ft. Det­rick on the eve of the pan­dem­ic (ear­ly August of 2019.)

“. . . . ‘What secrets are hid­den in the sus­pi­cion-shroud­ed Fort Det­rick and the over 200 US bio-labs all over the world?’ Zhao asked reprov­ing­ly when com­ment­ing after Biden announced the intel­li­gence review. In Chi­na, offi­cials have point­ed to the US fail­ure to pub­li­cize infor­ma­tion about or accept an inves­ti­ga­tion of its own biode­fense program—something that the gov­ern­ment spokesper­son cit­ed as an exam­ple of ‘hav­ing a guilty con­science.’ . . .”

Sup­ple­ment­ing the pre­vi­ous item, we recap an item from pre­vi­ous pro­grams:

  1. The U.S. would not be accept­able to such a propo­si­tion, if the Chi­nese demand­ed access to Ft. Det­rick (part of which was shut down by the CDC in ear­ly August of 2019 on the eve of the pan­dem­ic). A com­menter also not­ed the Rocky Moun­tain lab in his analy­sis, which we not­ed was one of the areas where Willy Burgdor­fer appears to have worked on the devel­op­ment of Lyme Dis­ease. ” . . . . If a dis­ease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chi­nese blamed the Pen­ta­gon and demand­ed access to the data, ‘what would we say?’ [Dr. Ger­ald] Keusch asked. ‘Would we throw out the red car­pet, ‘Come on over to Fort Det­rick and the Rocky Moun­tain Lab?’ We’d have done exact­ly what the Chi­nese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’’ . . . .”

Repris­ing a por­tion of an arti­cle used in FTR#1191, we note Danielle Ander­son­’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing been vio­lent­ly exco­ri­at­ed for expos­ing false infor­ma­tion post­ed about the pan­dem­ic online.

The “last–and only” for­eign researcher at the WIV, Ms. Ander­son has shared the vit­ri­ol that many virol­o­gists have expe­ri­enced  in the wake of the pan­dem­ic.

Are we see­ing a man­i­fes­ta­tion of what might be called “anti-virol­o­gist” McCarthy­ism, not unlike the “Who Lost Chi­na” cru­sade in the 1950’s?

Are virol­o­gists being intim­i­dat­ed into supporting–or at least not refuting–the “Lab Leak The­o­ry?”

Bear in mind that Don­ald Trump’s attor­ney and polit­i­cal men­tor was the late Roy Cohn, who was Sen­a­tor Joe McCarthy’s top hatch­et man.

In addi­tion, we note that intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty has been damp­ened by the finan­cial gain that derives from gov­ern­ment fund­ing.

“. . . . One of the many pre­scient obser­va­tions in Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s 1961 farewell speech warn­ing about the dan­gers of the ‘mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex’ was that ‘a gov­ern­ment con­tract becomes vir­tu­al­ly a sub­sti­tute for intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. . . The prospect of dom­i­na­tion of the nation’s schol­ars by fed­er­al employ­ment, project allo­ca­tions, and the pow­er of mon­ey is ever present and is grave­ly to be regard­ed.’ . . . .”

We won­der if this, paired with the intim­i­da­tion of virol­o­gists by the right-wing, is a fac­tor dri­ving accep­tance of “The Lab-Leak The­o­ry?”

Next, we once again reprise a study released by US Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences at the request of the Depart­ment of Defense about the threats of syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy con­clud­ed that the tech­niques to tweak and weaponize virus­es from known cat­a­logs of viral sequences is very fea­si­ble and rel­a­tive­ly easy to do.

Note that the Pen­ta­gon has fund­ed research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es in Chi­na and at the “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy,” through var­i­ous vehi­cles, includ­ing and espe­cial­ly (in com­bi­na­tion with USAID) the Eco­Health Alliance .

That research has led to the pub­li­ca­tion of research papers includ­ing some fea­tur­ing the genomes of bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es.

Once those papers are pub­lished, the virus­es can be “print­ed out” at will, either as direct copies or as mutat­ed virus­es.

Key points of dis­cus­sion:

  1. ” . . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body. . . .”
  2. ” . . . . In the report, the sci­en­tists describe how syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, which gives researchers pre­ci­sion tools to manip­u­late liv­ing organ­isms, ‘enhances and expands’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate bioweapons. . . .”
  3. ” . . . . Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sized. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said Impe­ri­ale. ‘It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
  4. ” . . . . Oth­er fair­ly sim­ple pro­ce­dures can be used to tweak the genes of dan­ger­ous bac­te­ria and make them resis­tant to antibi­otics, so that peo­ple infect­ed with them would be untreat­able. . . .”

Recap­ping dis­cus­sion from pro­grams in ear­ly Feb­ru­ary of 2020, we note Event 201, one of whose key par­tic­i­pants was for­mer Deputy Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Avril Haines.

Ms. Haines is now Biden’s Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence and is pre­sid­ing over Delaware Joe’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the pan­demic’s ori­gins.

It is strain­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty to see this con­cate­na­tion as “coin­ci­dence.”

” . . . . a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness exer­cise Octo­ber 18, 2019, in New York called ‘Event 201.‘46 The sim­u­la­tion pre­dict­ed a glob­al death toll of 65 mil­lion peo­ple with­in a span of 18 months.47 As report­ed by Forbes Decem­ber 12, 2019:48 ‘The experts ran through a care­ful­ly designed, detailed sim­u­la­tion of a new (fic­tion­al) viral ill­ness called CAPS or coro­n­avirus acute pul­monary syn­drome. This was mod­eled after pre­vi­ous epi­demics like SARS and MERS.’ . . . .”

A chill­ing arti­cle may fore­cast the poten­tial deploy­ment of even dead­lier pan­demics, as oper­a­tional dis­guise for bio­log­i­cal war­fare and geno­cide.

Note that the sub-head­ing in the con­clu­sion refer­ring to the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis is fol­lowed by no men­tion of the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis, per se.

Why not? We feel there may be a chill­ing sub­text to this.

Is this a between-the-lines ref­er­ence to impend­ing bio­log­i­cal war­fare devel­op­ment and the deploy­ment of anoth­er pan­dem­ic?

Note that the Army sci­en­tist quot­ed in the con­clu­sion offers an obser­va­tion that is very close to a Don­ald Rums­feld quote reit­er­at­ed by Peter Daszak in an arti­cle we ref­er­ence in FTR#1170.

  1. From the Defense One arti­cle: ” . . . . ‘We don’t want to just treat what’s in front of us now,’  [Dr. Dim­i­tra] Stratis-Cul­lum said. ‘I think we real­ly need to be resilient. From an Army per­spec­tive. We need to be agile, we need to adapt to the threat that we don’t know that’s com­ing.’ . . .”
  2. From the arti­cle from Inde­pen­dent Sci­ence News: ” . . . . ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ (This Rums­feld quote is in fact from a news con­fer­ence) . . . . In the sub­se­quent online dis­cus­sion, Daszak empha­sized the par­al­lels between his own cru­sade and Rumsfeld’s, since, accord­ing to Daszak, the ‘poten­tial for unknown attacks’ is ‘the same for virus­es’. . . .”

Some­thing to keep in mind–with Avril Haines in charge of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty under Biden–the lat­est sal­vo in the anti-Chi­na pro­pa­gan­da bar­rage should be eval­u­at­ed against the dis­clo­sure that CIA dis­guis­es cyber­weapon­ry as being Chi­nese in ori­gin and nature.

” . . . . The Biden admin­is­tra­tion for the first time on Mon­day accused the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment of breach­ing Microsoft email sys­tems used by many of the world’s largest com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary con­trac­tors, as the Unit­ed States ral­lied a broad group of allies to con­demn Bei­jing for cyber­at­tacks around the world. . . .”

Note in that con­text, that we have learned that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Chi­nese, among oth­er nation­al­i­ties.

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion and now Chi­na’s alleged hacks.

With the CIA’s dis­turb­ing track record of dis­tor­tions and out right lies, such as the “Paint­ing of Oswald Red” dis­cussed in–among oth­er pro­grams–FTR #‘s 925 and 926, as well as our series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio, the ease with which the Agency can now dis­guise its cyber­at­tacks as being of a dif­fer­ent nation­al ori­gin, com­bined with the preva­lence of online espi­onage might be said to leave us all in “Oswald World!”

” . . . . These tools could make it more dif­fi­cult for anti-virus com­pa­nies and foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors to attribute hacks to the CIA. Could this call the source of pre­vi­ous hacks into ques­tion? It appears that yes, this might be used to dis­guise the CIA’s own hacks to appear as if they were Russ­ian, Chi­nese, or from spe­cif­ic oth­er coun­tries. . . .”

1a.  Embody­ing the “Deep State” ide­o­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity being per­pet­u­at­ed from the “extrem­ist” Trump admin­is­tra­tion to the “respectable” Biden admin­is­tra­tion, nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor Jake Sul­li­van now sees the “Lab Leak The­o­ry” of Covid’s ori­gins as “cred­i­ble” as nat­ur­al ori­gins.

Sul­li­van is a nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and has no sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials in rel­e­vant dis­ci­plines.

Sul­li­van has intoned: ” . . . . Nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Jake Sul­li­van warned Bei­jing of poten­tial con­se­quences last month, telling Fox News that Chi­na will face ‘iso­la­tion in the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty’ if it does not coop­er­ate with probes mov­ing for­ward. . . .”

Iso­lat­ing Chi­na is the biggest strate­gic goal of this “op,” as we have not­ed repeat­ed­ly since Feb­ru­ary of 2020.

Note that jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing the issue are not per­mit­ting dis­cus­sion of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the virus’s delib­er­ate cre­ation and dis­sem­i­na­tion as part of a U.S. covert oper­a­tion, the 800-pound goril­la in the room we have dis­cussed for many hours.

“Senior Biden Offi­cials Find­ing that Covid-19 Lab Leak The­o­ry as Cred­i­ble as Nat­ur­al Ori­gins Expla­na­tion” by Natasha Bertrand, Pamela Brown, Katie Bo Williams and Zachary Cohen; [CNN New­source]; KTVZ.com; 7/16/2021.

Senior Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials over­see­ing an intel­li­gence review into the ori­gins of the coro­n­avirus now believe the the­o­ry that the virus acci­den­tal­ly escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as cred­i­ble as the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it emerged nat­u­ral­ly in the wild — a dra­mat­ic shift from a year ago, when Democ­rats pub­licly down­played the so-called lab leak the­o­ry.

Still, more than halfway into Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty remains firm­ly divid­ed over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped nat­u­ral­ly from ani­mals to humans in the wild, mul­ti­ple sources famil­iar with the probe told CNN.

Lit­tle new evi­dence has emerged to move the nee­dle in one direc­tion or anoth­er, these peo­ple said. But the fact that the lab leak the­o­ry is being seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered by top Biden offi­cials is note­wor­thy and comes amid a grow­ing open­ness to the idea even though most sci­en­tists who study coro­n­avirus­es and who have inves­ti­gat­ed the ori­gins of the pan­dem­ic say the evi­dence strong­ly sup­ports a nat­ur­al ori­gin.

Cur­rent intel­li­gence rein­forces the belief that the virus most like­ly orig­i­nat­ed nat­u­ral­ly, from ani­mal-human con­tact and was not delib­er­ate­ly engi­neered, the sources said. But that does not pre­clude the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the virus was the result of an acci­den­tal leak from the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, where coro­n­avirus research was being con­duct­ed on bats — although many sci­en­tists famil­iar with the research say such a leak is unlike­ly. . . .

. . . . As more US offi­cials have come to see the lab leak the­o­ry as cred­i­ble, their tone toward Bei­jing has also become firmer. Days after Biden announced the renewed probe, White House press sec­re­tary Jen Psa­ki told reporters that the admin­is­tra­tion had been pres­sur­ing Chi­nese offi­cials through diplo­mat­ic chan­nels to allow inter­na­tion­al inves­ti­ga­tors full access to the data Chi­na col­lect­ed in the ear­ly days of the out­break. . . .

. . . . As the review has pro­gressed, how­ev­er, the White House has begun mak­ing pub­lic threats as well.

Nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Jake Sul­li­van warned Bei­jing of poten­tial con­se­quences last month, telling Fox News that Chi­na will face “iso­la­tion in the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty” if it does not coop­er­ate with probes mov­ing for­ward. He told CNN’s State of the Union that same day that “if it turns out that Chi­na refus­es to live up to its inter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions, we will have to con­sid­er our respons­es at that point.”

A source famil­iar with the ongo­ing review said that sev­er­al top admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials, includ­ing Sul­li­van, view the acci­den­tal lab leak the­o­ry as equal­ly plau­si­ble to the nat­ur­al ori­gins the­o­ry. Intel­li­gence agen­cies that were skep­ti­cal of the lab leak the­o­ry a year ago, like the CIA, also now view it as a cred­i­ble line of inquiry, this per­son said.

“There has been a shift in their point of view,” this per­son added. . . .

1b. As famed jour­nal­ist Edward R. Mur­row observed decades ago: “A nation of sheep will beget a gov­ern­ment of wolves.”

But­tress­ing Mur­row’s obser­va­tion, 52% of Amer­i­cans in a recent poll believed the “Lab Leak The­o­ry,” large­ly because of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s renewed focus on that pos­si­bil­i­ty.

” . . . . U.S. adults were almost twice as like­ly to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in Chi­na than human con­tact with an infect­ed ani­mal, which many sci­en­tists believe is the most like­ly sce­nario. . . . [Har­vard Pro­fes­sor Robert] Blendon said Democ­rats like­ly became more recep­tive to the idea after Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s recent order that intel­li­gence agen­cies inves­ti­gate the virus’ ori­gin and com­ments from Antho­ny Fau­ci, the White House chief med­ical offi­cer, that it’s worth dig­ging into. . . .”

“POLITI­CO-Har­vard Poll: Most Amer­i­cans Believe Covid Leaked from Lab” by Alice Miran­da Oll­stein; politico.com; 7/09/2021.

Most Amer­i­cans now believe that the coro­n­avirus leaked from a lab­o­ra­to­ry in Chi­na, accord­ing to a new POLITI­CO-Har­vard poll that found a dra­mat­ic shift in pub­lic per­cep­tion of Covid-19’s ori­gins over the last year.

U.S. adults were almost twice as like­ly to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in Chi­na than human con­tact with an infect­ed ani­mal, which many sci­en­tists believe is the most like­ly sce­nario. The pol­l’s find­ings show what was once a fringe belief held main­ly among some on the polit­i­cal right has become accept­ed by most Repub­li­cans, as well as most Democ­rats, amid height­ened scruti­ny of the lab leak the­o­ry. . . .

. . . . [Har­vard Pro­fes­sor Robert] Blendon said Democ­rats like­ly became more recep­tive to the idea after Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s recent order that intel­li­gence agen­cies inves­ti­gate the virus’ ori­gin and com­ments from Antho­ny Fau­ci, the White House chief med­ical offi­cer, that it’s worth dig­ging into. Fau­ci and oth­er sci­en­tists have cau­tioned the answer may nev­er be known defin­i­tive­ly.

“That the pres­i­dent thought there was enough evi­dence to ask intel­li­gence agen­cies to put togeth­er a report sends a sig­nal to Democ­rats that there might be some­thing there,” Blendon said.

1c. A Chi­nese spokesper­son has hint­ed at the ori­gins of the virus being found in U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ries. 

Again, the Amer­i­can and world wide press has failed to address the 800-pound goril­la in the room. 

By the same token and as part of that fail­ure, the clo­sure of USAMRIID at Ft. Det­rick on the eve of the pan­dem­ic (ear­ly August of 2019.)

“. . . . ‘What secrets are hid­den in the sus­pi­cion-shroud­ed Fort Det­rick and the over 200 US bio-labs all over the world?’ Zhao asked reprov­ing­ly when com­ment­ing after Biden announced the intel­li­gence review. In Chi­na, offi­cials have point­ed to the US fail­ure to pub­li­cize infor­ma­tion about or accept an inves­ti­ga­tion of its own biode­fense program—something that the gov­ern­ment spokesper­son cit­ed as an exam­ple of ‘hav­ing a guilty con­science.’ . . .”

“After the lab-leak the­o­ry, US-Chi­nese rela­tions head down­hill” by Yanzhong Huang; Bul­letin of Atom­ic Sci­en­tists; July 16, 2021.

. . . . The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy now sits at the fore­front of the US-Chi­na row on the ori­gins of a once-in-a-cen­tu­ry pan­dem­ic. From For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, to Chi­nese gov­ern­ment spokesper­son Zhao Lijian, and on to oth­ers, com­bat­ive per­son­al­i­ties with stark polit­i­cal agen­das have helped draw both coun­tries into a down­ward spi­ral of tit-for-tat accu­sa­tions about who is to blame.

A call for a sci­ence-based inves­ti­ga­tion into the ori­gins of the crises has large­ly been over­shad­owed by a geopo­lit­i­cal fight that threat­ens not only efforts to under­stand how the pan­dem­ic began, but also inter­na­tion­al efforts to coop­er­ate on biose­cu­ri­ty, pub­lic health, and more. . . .

. . . . “What secrets are hid­den in the sus­pi­cion-shroud­ed Fort Det­rick and the over 200 US bio-labs all over the world?” Zhao asked reprov­ing­ly when com­ment­ing after Biden announced the intel­li­gence review. In Chi­na, offi­cials have point­ed to the US fail­ure to pub­li­cize infor­ma­tion about or accept an inves­ti­ga­tion of its own biode­fense program—something that the gov­ern­ment spokesper­son cit­ed as an exam­ple of “hav­ing a guilty con­science.” . . .

1d. Sup­ple­ment­ing the pre­vi­ous item, we recap an item from pre­vi­ous pro­grams:

  1. The U.S. would not be accept­able to such a propo­si­tion, if the Chi­nese demand­ed access to Ft. Det­rick (part of which was shut down by the CDC in ear­ly August of 2019 on the eve of the pan­dem­ic). A com­menter also not­ed the Rocky Moun­tain lab in his analy­sis, which we not­ed was one of the areas where Willy Burgdor­fer appears to have worked on the devel­op­ment of Lyme Dis­ease. ” . . . . If a dis­ease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chi­nese blamed the Pen­ta­gon and demand­ed access to the data, ‘what would we say?’ [Dr. Ger­ald] Keusch asked. ‘Would we throw out the red car­pet, ‘Come on over to Fort Det­rick and the Rocky Moun­tain Lab?’ We’d have done exact­ly what the Chi­nese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’’ . . . .”

“To the Bat Cave: In Search of Covid’s Ori­gins, Sci­en­tists Reignite Polar­iz­ing Debate on Wuhan ‘Lab Leak’” by Arthur Allen; KHN; 05/19/2021

. . . . Scal­ing the Wall of Secre­cy

U.S.-China ten­sions will make it very dif­fi­cult to con­clude any such study, sci­en­tists on both sides of the issue sug­gest. With their anti-Chi­na rhetoric, Trump and his aides “could not have made it more dif­fi­cult to get coop­er­a­tion,” said Dr. Ger­ald Keusch, asso­ciate direc­tor of the Nation­al Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases Lab­o­ra­to­ry Insti­tute at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. If a dis­ease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chi­nese blamed the Pen­ta­gon and demand­ed access to the data, “what would we say?” Keusch asked. “Would we throw out the red car­pet, ‘Come on over to Fort Det­rick and the Rocky Moun­tain Lab?’ We’d have done exact­ly what the Chi­nese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’”

1e. Repris­ing a por­tion of an arti­cle used in FTR#1191, we note Danielle Ander­son­’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing been vio­lent­ly exco­ri­at­ed for expos­ing false infor­ma­tion post­ed about the pan­dem­ic online.

The “last–and only” for­eign researcher at the WIV, Ms. Ander­son has shared the vit­ri­ol that many virol­o­gists have expe­ri­enced  in the wake of the pan­dem­ic.

Are we see­ing a man­i­fes­ta­tion of what might be called “anti-virol­o­gist” McCarthy­ism, not unlike the “Who Lost Chi­na” cru­sade in the 1950’s?

Are virol­o­gists being intim­i­dat­ed into supporting–or at least not refuting–the “Lab Leak The­o­ry?”

Bear in mind that Don­ald Trump’s attor­ney and polit­i­cal men­tor was the late Roy Cohn, who was Sen­a­tor Joe McCarthy’s top hatch­et man.

“The Last–And Only–Foreign Sci­en­tist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out” by Michell Fay Cortez; Bloomberg; 06/27/2021

. . . . . Despite this, Ander­son does think an inves­ti­ga­tion is need­ed to nail down the virus’s ori­gin once and for all. She’s dumb­found­ed by the por­tray­al of the lab by some media out­side Chi­na, and the tox­ic attacks on sci­en­tists that have ensued.

One of a dozen experts appoint­ed to an inter­na­tion­al task­force in Novem­ber to study the ori­gins of the virus, Ander­son hasn’t sought pub­lic atten­tion, espe­cial­ly since being tar­get­ed by U.S. extrem­ists in ear­ly 2020 after she exposed false infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic post­ed online. The vit­ri­ol that ensued prompt­ed her to file a police report. The threats of vio­lence many coro­n­avirus sci­en­tists have expe­ri­enced over the past 18 months have made them hes­i­tant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be mis­con­strued.

1f. In addi­tion, we note that intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty has been damp­ened by the finan­cial gain that derives from gov­ern­ment fund­ing.

“. . . . One of the many pre­scient obser­va­tions in Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s 1961 farewell speech warn­ing about the dan­gers of the ‘mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex’ was that ‘a gov­ern­ment con­tract becomes vir­tu­al­ly a sub­sti­tute for intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. . . The prospect of dom­i­na­tion of the nation’s schol­ars by fed­er­al employ­ment, project allo­ca­tions, and the pow­er of mon­ey is ever present and is grave­ly to be regard­ed.’ . . . .”

We won­der if this, paired with the intim­i­da­tion of virol­o­gists by the right-wing, is a fac­tor dri­ving accep­tance of “The Lab-Leak The­o­ry?”

Into the Night­mare: My Search for the Killers of John F. Kennedy and Offi­cer J.D. Tip­pit by Joseph McBride; High­tow­er Press [SC]; Copy­right 2013 by Joseph McBride; ISBN 978–1939795250; p. 188.

. . . . One of the many pre­scient obser­va­tions in Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s 1961 farewell speech warn­ing about the dan­gers of the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” was that “a gov­ern­ment con­tract becomes vir­tu­al­ly a sub­sti­tute for intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. . . The prospect of dom­i­na­tion of the nation’s schol­ars by fed­er­al employ­ment, project allo­ca­tions, and the pow­er of mon­ey is ever present and is grave­ly to be regard­ed.” . . . .

1g. Antho­ny Fau­ci’s expres­sion of doubt about the nat­ur­al ori­gin the­o­ry of the virus is said to have influ­enced the increase in pub­lic accept­abil­i­ty of the “Lab-Leak The­o­ry.” 

Fau­ci him­self set forth the “lab leak” sce­nario in his 2012 endorse­ment of a mora­to­ri­um on gain-of-func­tion manip­u­la­tions, set­ting the intel­lec­tu­al stage for the “gam­ing” of just such a sce­nario. 

“To the Bat Cave: In Search of Covid’s Ori­gins, Sci­en­tists Reignite Polar­iz­ing Debate on Wuhan ‘Lab Leak’” by Arthur Allen; KHN; 05/19/2021

. . . . In 2012, Dr. Antho­ny Fau­ci, who leads NIH’s Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases, came out in sup­port of a mora­to­ri­um on such research, pos­ing a hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nario involv­ing a poor­ly trained sci­en­tist in a poor­ly reg­u­lat­ed lab: “In an unlike­ly but con­ceiv­able turn of events, what if that sci­en­tist becomes infect­ed with the virus, which leads to an out­break and ulti­mate­ly trig­gers a pan­dem­ic?” Fau­ci wrote.

In 2017, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment lift­ed its pause on such exper­i­ments but has since required some be approved by a fed­er­al board. . . .

1h. In FTR#1187, we not­ed that Fau­ci’s NIH NIAID was among the insti­tu­tions that presided over Eco­Health Alliance’s fund­ing of exper­i­men­ta­tion on bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy.

“REVEALED: Three Wuhan lab researchers were hos­pi­tal­ized in Novem­ber 2019 and Dr Fau­ci now says he’s ‘not con­vinced’ COVID devel­oped nat­u­ral­ly and calls for a full inves­ti­ga­tion into ‘what went on in Chi­na’” by Megan Sheets and Geoff Ear­le [Deputy U.S. Polit­i­cal Edi­tor aboard Air Force One (!); Dai­ly Mail [UK]; 5/23/2021.

. . . . In 2014, NIH approved a grant to Eco­Health Alliance des­ig­nat­ed for research into ‘Under­stand­ing the Risk of Bat Coro­n­avirus Emer­gence.’ The project involved col­lab­o­rat­ing with researchers at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy to study coro­n­avirus­es in bats and the risk of poten­tial trans­fer to humans. . . .

1i. A study released by US Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences at the request of the Depart­ment of Defense about the threats of syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy con­clud­ed that the tech­niques to tweak and weaponize virus­es from known cat­a­logs of viral sequences is very fea­si­ble and rel­a­tive­ly easy to do.

Note that the Pen­ta­gon has fund­ed research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es in Chi­na and at the “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy,” through var­i­ous vehi­cles, includ­ing and espe­cial­ly (in com­bi­na­tion with USAID) the Eco­Health Alliance .

That research has led to the pub­li­ca­tion of research papers includ­ing some fea­tur­ing the genomes of bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es.

Once those papers are pub­lished, the virus­es can be “print­ed out” at will, either as direct copies or as mutat­ed virus­es.

Key points of dis­cus­sion:

  1. ” . . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body. . . .”
  2. ” . . . . In the report, the sci­en­tists describe how syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, which gives researchers pre­ci­sion tools to manip­u­late liv­ing organ­isms, ‘enhances and expands’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate bioweapons. . . .”
  3. ” . . . . Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sized. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said Impe­ri­ale. ‘It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
  4. ” . . . . Oth­er fair­ly sim­ple pro­ce­dures can be used to tweak the genes of dan­ger­ous bac­te­ria and make them resis­tant to antibi­otics, so that peo­ple infect­ed with them would be untreat­able. . . .”

“Syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy rais­es risk of new bioweapons, US report warns” by Ian Sam­ple; The Guardian; 06/19/2018

2a. NB: The infor­ma­tion in this post, excerpt­ed from Forbes mag­a­zine is accu­rate. This does not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sti­tute an endorse­ment of any oth­er of Mer­co­la’s posi­tions on the pan­dem­ic.

Recap­ping dis­cus­sion from pro­grams in ear­ly Feb­ru­ary of 2020, we note Event 201, one of whose key par­tic­i­pants was for­mer Deputy Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Avril Haines.

Ms. Haines is now Biden’s Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence and is pre­sid­ing over Delaware Joe’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the pan­demic’s ori­gins.

” . . . . a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness exer­cise Octo­ber 18, 2019, in New York called ‘Event 201.‘46 The sim­u­la­tion pre­dict­ed a glob­al death toll of 65 mil­lion peo­ple with­in a span of 18 months.47 As report­ed by Forbes Decem­ber 12, 2019:48 ‘The experts ran through a care­ful­ly designed, detailed sim­u­la­tion of a new (fic­tion­al) viral ill­ness called CAPS or coro­n­avirus acute pul­monary syn­drome. This was mod­eled after pre­vi­ous epi­demics like SARS and MERS.’ . . . .”

“Nov­el Coronavirus–The Lat­est Pan­dem­ic Scare” by Dr. Joseph Mer­co­la; Mer­co­la; 2/4/2020.

  •  

2b. One of the fac­tors allow­ing the seeds of evil to grow has been the gov­ern­ment financ­ing of much of U.S. polit­i­cal life. 

Intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty has been damp­ened by finan­cial gain.

Cou­pled with intim­i­da­tion of virol­o­gists by the right-wing, we won­der if this “pas de deux” is help­ing to dri­ve pub­lic per­cep­tion toward the “Lab-Leak The­o­ry”?

Into the Night­mare: My Search for the Killers of John F. Kennedy and Offi­cer J.D. Tip­pit by Joseph McBride; High­tow­er Press [SC]; Copy­right 2013 by Joseph McBride; ISBN 978–1939795250; p. 188.

. . . . One of the many pre­scient obser­va­tions in Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s 1961 farewell speech warn­ing about the dan­gers of the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” was that “a gov­ern­ment con­tract becomes vir­tu­al­ly a sub­sti­tute for intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. . . The prospect of dom­i­na­tion of the nation’s schol­ars by fed­er­al employ­ment, project allo­ca­tions, and the pow­er of mon­ey is ever present and is grave­ly to be regard­ed.” . . . .

3. Peter Daszak voiced the (self-ful­fill­ing?) opinion/prophecy that Covid-19 is indeed “Dis­ease X.”

The cog­ni­tive tem­plate for Covid-19 was par­tial­ly set by Peter Daszak, who has wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed the sup­po­si­tion that “Dis­ease X” would over­take the world.

It is our view that the efforts of Daszak, the Event 201 play­ers and oth­ers could be com­pared to the pro­pa­gan­diz­ing that ele­ments of the WACCFL and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, as well as ele­ments of the U.S. far right did in the run-up to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

That pro­pa­gan­diz­ing was a key ele­ment in the “Paint­ing of Oswald Red.”

“We Knew Dis­ease X Was Com­ing. It’s Here Now.” by Peter Daszak; The New York Times; 02/27/2020

In ear­ly 2018, dur­ing a meet­ing at the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion in Gene­va, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blue­print) coined the term “Dis­ease X”: We were refer­ring to the next pan­dem­ic, which would be caused by an unknown, nov­el pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human pop­u­la­tion. As the world stands today on the edge of the pan­dem­ic precipice, it’s worth tak­ing a moment to con­sid­er whether Covid-19 is the dis­ease our group was warn­ing about.

Dis­ease X, we said back then, would like­ly result from a virus orig­i­nat­ing in ani­mals and would emerge some­where on the plan­et where eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment dri­ves peo­ple and wildlife togeth­er. Dis­ease X would prob­a­bly be con­fused with oth­er dis­eases ear­ly in the out­break and would spread quick­ly and silent­ly; exploit­ing net­works of human trav­el and trade, it would reach mul­ti­ple coun­tries and thwart con­tain­ment. Dis­ease X would have a mor­tal­i­ty rate high­er than a sea­son­al flu but would spread as eas­i­ly as the flu. It would shake finan­cial mar­kets even before it achieved pan­dem­ic sta­tus.

In a nut­shell, Covid-19 is Dis­ease X. . . .

3a. Event 201–which began on the same day as the Mil­i­tary World Games in Wuhan–helped to set the PR tem­plate for Covid-19.

Avril Haines (see below) was a key par­tic­i­pant in the event.

“Event 201 Play­ers: Avril Haines;” centerforhealthsecurity.org

Avril Haines is a Senior Research Schol­ar at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty; a Senior Fel­low at the Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty Applied Physics Lab­o­ra­to­ry; a mem­ber of the Nation­al Com­mis­sion on Mil­i­tary, Nation­al, and Pub­lic Ser­vice; and a prin­ci­pal at Wes­t­Ex­ec Advi­sors.

Dur­ing the last admin­is­tra­tion, Dr. Haines served as Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent and Prin­ci­pal Deputy Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor. She also served as the Deputy Direc­tor of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and Legal Advis­er to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

Dr. Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go and a law degree from George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Law Cen­ter. She serves on a num­ber of boards and advi­so­ry groups, includ­ing the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Bio Advi­so­ry Group, the Board of Trustees for the Voda­fone Foun­da­tion, and the Refugees Inter­na­tion­al Advi­so­ry Coun­cil.

3b. A key par­tic­i­pant in Even 201, for­mer Deputy CIA Direc­tor Avril Haines is Biden’s direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence.

“Intel­li­gence Chief Picks a For­mer Bush Aide to Lead Brief­in­gs for Biden” by Julian E. Barnes and Adam Gold­man;” The New York Times; 1/30/2021; p. A17 [West­ern Print Edi­tion].

 The new direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence [Avril Haines] has been reshap­ing the office, installing a new offi­cial to lead Pres­i­dent Biden’s dai­ly brief­in­gs by tap­ping a vet­er­an of the last Bush admin­is­tra­tion, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials. . . .

4. A chill­ing arti­cle may fore­cast the poten­tial deploy­ment of even dead­lier pan­demics, as oper­a­tional dis­guise for bio­log­i­cal war­fare and geno­cide.

Note that the sub-head­ing in the con­clu­sion refer­ring to the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis is fol­lowed by no men­tion of the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis, per se.

Why not? We feel there may be a chill­ing sub­text to this.

Is this a between-the-lines ref­er­ence to impend­ing bio­log­i­cal war­fare devel­op­ment and the deploy­ment of anoth­er pan­dem­ic?

Note that the Army sci­en­tist quot­ed in the con­clu­sion offers an obser­va­tion that is very close to a Don­ald Rums­feld quote reit­er­at­ed by Peter Daszak in an arti­cle we ref­er­ence in FTR#1170.

  1. From the Defense One arti­cle: ” . . . . ‘We don’t want to just treat what’s in front of us now,’  [Dr. Dim­i­tra] Stratis-Cul­lum said. ‘I think we real­ly need to be resilient. From an Army per­spec­tive. We need to be agile, we need to adapt to the threat that we don’t know that’s com­ing.’ . . .”
  2. From the arti­cle from Inde­pen­dent Sci­ence News: ” . . . . ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ (This Rums­feld quote is in fact from a news con­fer­ence) . . . . In the sub­se­quent online dis­cus­sion, Daszak empha­sized the par­al­lels between his own cru­sade and Rumsfeld’s, since, accord­ing to Daszak, the ‘poten­tial for unknown attacks’ is ‘the same for virus­es’. . . .”

“‘This May Not Be The Big One’: Army Sci­en­tists Warn of Dead­lier Pan­demics to Come” by Tara Copp; Defense One; 6/21/2021.

The ser­vice is clos­ing in on a “pan-coro­n­avirus” vac­cine and on syn­thet­ic anti­bod­ies that could pro­tect a pop­u­la­tion before spread. But that may not be enough.
June 21, 2021

The U.S. Army sci­en­tists who have spent the last year find­ing vac­cines and ther­a­peu­tics to stop COVID-19 cau­tioned that the nation remains vul­ner­a­ble to a viral pandemic—one that could be even dead­lier than the cur­rent one. 

Since the ear­li­est days of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the emerg­ing infec­tious dis­eases branch at the Wal­ter Reed Army Insti­tute of Research has worked to devel­op a vac­cine that would help patients fend off not only the orig­i­nal virus strain but also new vari­ants. 

In ini­tial tests on mon­keys, hors­es, ham­sters, and sharks, Wal­ter Reed’s spike fer­ritin nanopar­ti­cle, or SpFN, vac­cine has shown effec­tive­ness against not only the cur­rent SARS-CoV­‑2 vari­ants, but also against the com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent SARS-CoV­‑1 out­break that occurred in 2003, the head of Wal­ter Reed’s infec­tious dis­eases branch said at the Defense One 2021 Tech Sum­mit Mon­day. 

“If we try to chase the virus­es after they emerge, we’re always going to be behind,” said Dr. Kayvon Mod­jar­rad, direc­tor of Wal­ter Reed’s infec­tious dis­eases branch. “So the approach that we took with our vac­cine, the nanopar­ti­cle approach, in which we can place parts of dif­fer­ent coro­n­avirus­es on to the same vac­cine to edu­cate the immune sys­tem about dif­fer­ent coro­n­avirus­es all at the same time.”

Wal­ter Reed’s vac­cine is now in the ear­ly stages of human tri­als. 

“And we see the same thing over and over again: a very potent immune response and a very broad immune response,” Mod­jar­rad said. “So if we show even a frac­tion of what we’re see­ing in our ani­mal stud­ies in humans, then we’ll have a very good con­fi­dence that this is going to be a very good option as a next-gen­er­a­tion vac­cine.” 

Dr. Dim­i­tra Stratis-Cul­lum, direc­tor of the Army’s trans­for­ma­tion­al syn­thet­ic-biol­o­gy for mil­i­tary envi­ron­ments pro­gram at the U.S. Army Com­bat Capa­bil­i­ties Devel­op­ment Com­mand, Army Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, was tasked ear­ly on to assist the Hous­ton Methodist Research Insti­tute devel­op blood plas­ma as a COVID-19 ther­a­peu­tic. She’s now work­ing on devel­op­ing a large dataset, a library of COVID strains that would help the lab then cre­ate and dis­trib­ute syn­thet­ic anti­bod­ies to pre­emp­tive­ly pre­vent a spread. 
Relat­ed arti­cles

If the Lab-Leak The­o­ry Is Right, What’s Next?

Cre­at­ing a pan-coro­n­avirus vaccine—or syn­the­siz­ing anti­bod­ies slight­ly ahead of a known out­break still isn’t enough, the sci­en­tists cau­tioned. 

“We don’t want to just treat what’s in front of us now,”  Stratis-Cul­lum said. “I think we real­ly need to be resilient. From an Army per­spec­tive. We need to be agile, we need to adapt to the threat that we don’t know that’s com­ing.” 

The like­li­hood this gen­er­a­tion will see anoth­er pan­dem­ic dur­ing its life­time “is high,” Mod­jar­rad said. “We have seen the accel­er­a­tion of these pathogens and the epi­demics that they pre­cip­i­tate. And it may not be a coro­n­avirus, this may not be the big one. There may be some­thing that’s more trans­mis­si­ble and more dead­ly ahead of us.”   

“We have to think more broad­ly, not just about COVID-19, not just about coro­n­avirus, but all emerg­ing infec­tious threats com­ing into the future,” he said.

5. Some­thing to keep in mind–with Avril Haines in charge of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty under Biden, the lat­est sal­vo in the anti-Chi­na pro­pa­gan­da bar­rage should be eval­u­at­ed against the dis­clo­sure that CIA dis­guis­es cyber­weapon­ry as being Chi­nese in ori­gin and nature.

” . . . . The Biden admin­is­tra­tion for the first time on Mon­day accused the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment of breach­ing Microsoft email sys­tems used by many of the world’s largest com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary con­trac­tors, as the Unit­ed States ral­lied a broad group of allies to con­demn Bei­jing for cyber­at­tacks around the world. . . .”

“U.S. and Key Allies Accuse Chi­na In String of Glob­al Cyber­at­tacks” by Zolan Kan­no-Youngs and David E. Sanger; The New York Times; 7/20/2021; pp. A1-A9 [West­ern Print Edi­tion.]

The Biden admin­is­tra­tion for the first time on Mon­day accused the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment of breach­ing Microsoft email sys­tems used by many of the world’s largest com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary con­trac­tors, as the Unit­ed States ral­lied a broad group of allies to con­demn Bei­jing for cyber­at­tacks around the world. . . .

6. As we have not­ed in many pre­vi­ous broad­casts and posts, cyber attacks are eas­i­ly dis­guised.

Per­pe­trat­ing a “cyber false flag” oper­a­tion is dis­turbing­ly easy to do. In a world where the ver­i­fi­ably false and phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble “con­trolled demolition”/Truther non­sense has gained trac­tion, cyber false flag ops are all the more threat­en­ing and sin­is­ter.

Note that we have learned that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Chi­nese, among oth­er nation­al­i­ties.

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about alleged Chi­nese hacks or “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion.

“Wik­iLeaks Vault 7 Part 3 Reveals CIA Tool Might Mask Hacks as Russ­ian, Chi­nese, Ara­bic” by Stephanie Dube Dwil­son; Heavy; 4/3/2017.

This morn­ing, Wik­iLeaks released part 3 of its Vault 7 series, called Mar­ble. Mar­ble reveals CIA source code files along with decoy lan­guages that might dis­guise virus­es, tro­jans, and hack­ing attacks. These tools could make it more dif­fi­cult for anti-virus com­pa­nies and foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors to attribute hacks to the CIA. Could this call the source of pre­vi­ous hacks into ques­tion? It appears that yes, this might be used to dis­guise the CIA’s own hacks to appear as if they were Russ­ian, Chi­nese, or from spe­cif­ic oth­er coun­tries. These tools were in use in 2016, Wik­iLeaks report­ed.

 It’s not known exact­ly how this Mar­ble tool was actu­al­ly used. How­ev­er, accord­ing to Wik­iLeaks, the tool could make it more dif­fi­cult for inves­ti­ga­tors and anti-virus com­pa­nies to attribute virus­es and oth­er hack­ing tools to the CIA. Test exam­ples weren’t just in Eng­lish, but also Russ­ian, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Ara­bic, and Far­si. This might allow a mal­ware cre­ator to not only look like they were speak­ing in Russ­ian or Chi­nese, rather than in Eng­lish, but to also look like they tried to hide that they were not speak­ing Eng­lish, accord­ing to Wik­iLeaks. This might also hide fake error mes­sages or be used for oth­er pur­pos­es. . . .

 

 

Discussion

One comment for “FTR#1193 The Oswald Institute of Virology, Part 12: Covid-19 and The American Deep State, Part 4”

  1. How close did we come to a new COVID lab leak night­mare sce­nario? That’s just one of the many ques­tions raised by a sto­ry about rather dis­turb­ing study just car­ried out by virol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Boston.

    The study involved tak­ing the spike pro­tein from the Omi­cron vari­ant and splic­ing it into the back­bone of the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2 strain. This new chimeric strain was then test­ed on mice as well as human cell tis­sue cul­tures like lung tis­sue. 0 mice were killed by Omi­cron while 80% of the mice died from the chimeric strain. It’s the kind of find­ing that sure sounds like they con­duct­ed a “gain-of-func­tion” exper­i­ment on the Omi­cron strain. But as we’re going to see, it’s not quite that clear cut and that ambi­gu­i­ty gets at one of the big sto­ries here: the def­i­n­i­tion of “gain-of-func­tion” is sur­pris­ing­ly neb­u­lous. Exper­i­ments involv­ing the cre­ation of chimeric virus­es with great path­o­genic­i­ty can appar­ent­ly avoid the “gain-of-func­tion” (GoF) label as long as the researchers weren’t expect­ing the exper­i­ment to prod­uct enhanced path­o­genic­i­ty.

    We’re also learn­ing that, while the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases (NIAID) fund­ed this exper­i­ment, the NIAID is claim­ing that it was­n’t ful­ly informed about the nature of these exper­i­ments in the grant pro­pos­al. Things would have gone dif­fer­ent had the agency been prop­er­ly informed, we are assured. It’s the kind of expla­na­tion that rais­es obvi­ous ques­tions about what oth­er non-approved exper­i­ments of this nature might be tak­ing place under the purview of NIAID fund­ing.

    But there’s anoth­er com­pli­ca­tion here in terms of defin­ing this as a GoF exper­i­ment: While the chimeric virus had an 80% kill rate, that’s less than the 100% kill rate found by the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2 strain that was also test­ed on these mice. Also, it turns out these mice are specif­i­cal­ly select­ed for the exper­i­ment for their sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to expe­ri­enc­ing severe COVID. So while the 100% and 80% kill rates are cer­tain­ly alarm­ing to hear, what’s real­ly more remark­able is the 0% Omi­cron kill rate. It’s an indi­ca­tion of how much less severe the Omi­cron strain real­ly is com­pared to the orig­i­nal strain. At least when it comes to mice bred to die from COVID. It’s also anoth­er indi­ca­tion that COVID real­ly might be head­ing down the path of becom­ing anoth­er com­mon cold coro­n­avirus.

    And then there’s anoth­er very inter­est­ing aspect tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to this sto­ry: As we’re going to see in the two arti­cle excerpts below — one from the Dai­ly Mail and one from STAT News — both arti­cle refer to stud­ies done over the past year exam­in­ing the genet­ics of the viral strains found in the ear­li­est patients in Wuhan and from virus­es found at wet mar­kets in Wuhan. And both arti­cle specif­i­cal­ly refer a study pub­lished back in Feb­ru­ary 2022 — pre-pub­lished with­out peer review — that makes a remark­able claim: there were two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic jumps from ani­mals-to-human in Wuhan at two sep­a­rate wet mar­kets. The first jump hap­pened on Novem­ber 19, 2019, and the sec­ond jump at a dif­fer­ent mar­ket in ear­ly Decem­ber. So why are they arriv­ing at this two-jump con­clu­sion? Because that’s how they can best make sense of the genet­ic diver­si­ty of these ear­ly strains.

    There’s anoth­er very inter­est­ing aspect to that study pub­lished in Feb mak­ing the ‘two jumps’ claim: that study includes a num­ber of the same authors behind the paper pub­lished back in March of 2020 — “The prox­i­mal ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2” — that assert­ed that the virus jumped from humans to ani­mals and could­n’t pos­si­ble have come from a lab. Recall how the authors of that paper were Kris­t­ian G. Ander­sen, Andrew Ram­baut, W. Ian Lip­kin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Gar­ry. All but Lip­kin are co-authors on this Feb 2022 paper assert­ing two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic events. So it appears that the same team of virol­o­gist that was try­ing to put a lid on any dis­cus­sion of a lab leak back in ear­ly months of the pan­dem­ic is now behind the ‘two jumps’ the­o­ry. A the­o­ry that has appar­ent­ly just been kind of accept­ed as the ‘best guess’ for the ori­gin of the virus at this point. Keep in mind that their find­ings of genet­i­cal­ly diverse ear­ly strains should make the the­o­ries about infect­ed mil­i­tary ath­letes at the Wuhan Mil­i­tary World Games in Octo­ber of 2019 a much more intrigu­ing the­o­ry.

    That’s all part of the con­text of this trou­bling sto­ry com­ing out of Boston Uni­ver­si­ty: at the same time we’re learn­ing that “gain-of-func­tion” exper­i­ments on COVID were appar­ent­ly being con­duct­ed with NIAID fund­ing, but not NIAID approval, we’re also find­ing that the same team that was dis­miss­ing any pos­si­bil­i­ty of a lab leak has now put out a ‘two zoonot­ic jumps’ the­o­ry that’s just kind of being accept­ed as the best guess for the ori­gins of the virus, pre­clud­ing any real inves­ti­ga­tions of either lab leaks or ear­li­er strains cir­cu­lat­ed out­side of Chi­na.

    Ok, first, here’s a Dai­ly­Mail piece on the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty study and all the alarm it raised. Not just lay­man alarm but expert alarm too. Because it sure looks like they car­ried out COVID GoF exper­i­ments while claim­ing they did­n’t actu­al­ly do that:

    The Dai­ly Mail

    EXCLUSIVE: ‘This is play­ing with fire — it could spark a lab-gen­er­at­ed pan­dem­ic’: Experts slam Boston lab where sci­en­tists have cre­at­ed a new dead­ly Covid strain with an 80% kill rate

    * Researchers added Omi­cron’s spike pro­tein to the orig­i­nal Wuhan Covid strain
    * Omi­cron’s spike is high­ly mutat­ed which made it the most infec­tious vari­ant ever
    * Eight in 10 mice infect­ed with the lab-cre­at­ed strain died at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty lab

    By Caitlin Tilley, Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com and Mansur Sha­heen Deputy Health Edi­tor For Dailymail.Com

    Pub­lished: 11:02 EDT, 17 Octo­ber 2022 | Updat­ed: 05:00 EDT, 18 Octo­ber 2022

    Boston Uni­ver­si­ty sci­en­tists were today con­demned for ‘play­ing with fire’ after it emerged they had cre­at­ed a lethal new Covid strain in a lab­o­ra­to­ry.

    DailyMail.com revealed the team had made a hybrid virus — com­bin­ing Omi­cron and the orig­i­nal Wuhan strain — that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study.

    The rev­e­la­tion expos­es how dan­ger­ous virus manip­u­la­tion research con­tin­ues to go on even in the US, despite fears sim­i­lar prac­tices may have start­ed the pan­dem­ic.

    Pro­fes­sor Shmuel Shapi­ra, a lead­ing sci­en­tist in the Israeli Gov­ern­ment, said: ‘This should be total­ly for­bid­den, it’s play­ing with fire.’

    Gain of func­tion research — when virus­es are pur­pose­ful­ly manip­u­lat­ed to be more infec­tious or dead­ly — is thought to be at the cen­ter of Covid’s ori­gin.

    A Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry locat­ed just miles from the first clus­ter of cas­es car­ried out sim­i­lar research on bat coro­n­avirus­es.

    But the prac­tice has been large­ly restrict­ed in the US since 2017.

    ...

    In the new research, which has not been peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Boston and Flori­da extract­ed Omi­cron’s spike pro­tein — the unique struc­ture that binds to and invades human cells.

    It has always been present in the virus but has become more evolved over time. Omi­cron has dozens of muta­tions on its spike pro­tein that made it so infec­tious.

    Researchers attached Omi­cron’s spike to the orig­i­nal wild­type strain that first emerged in Wuhan at the start of the pan­dem­ic.

    The researchers looked at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain com­pared to the orig­i­nal Omi­cron vari­ant.

    When a sim­i­lar group of rodents were exposed to the stan­dard Omi­cron strain, how­ev­er, they all sur­vived and only expe­ri­enced ‘mild’ symp­toms.

    Writ­ing in the paper, they said: ‘In...mice, while Omi­cron caus­es mild, non-fatal infec­tion, the Omi­cron S‑carrying virus inflicts severe dis­ease with a mor­tal­i­ty rate of 80 per­cent.’

    The researchers said it sig­naled that while the spike pro­tein is respon­si­ble for infec­tiv­i­ty, changes to oth­er parts of its struc­ture deter­mine its dead­li­ness.

    Dr Ebright told DailyMail.com: ‘The research is a clear exam­ple of gain of func­tion research of con­cern and enhanced poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogen (ePPP) research.

    ‘It is espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing that this new US-gov­ern­ment ePPP research — like the pre­vi­ous US-gov­ern­ment ePPP research on chimeric SARS-relat­ed coro­n­avirus­es at Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy that may have caused the pan­dem­ic — appears not to have under­gone the pri­or risk-ben­e­fit review man­dat­ed under US-gov­ern­ment poli­cies.

    ‘If we are to avoid a next lab-gen­er­at­ed pan­dem­ic, it is imper­a­tive that over­sight of ePPP research be strength­ened.

    ‘It is imper­a­tive that the exist­ing polices man­dat­ing pri­or risk-ben­e­fit assess­ment of ePPP research be fol­lowed, and it is imper­a­tive that offi­cials at US-gov­ern­ment agen­cies who repeat­ed­ly have placed the pub­lic at risk by repeat­ed­ly vio­lat­ing the exist­ing poli­cies be held account­able.’

    Prof David Liv­er­more, a pro­fes­sor of micro­bi­ol­o­gy at the UK’s Uni­ver­si­ty of East Anglia told DailyMail.com: ‘giv­en the strong like­li­hood that the Covid pan­dem­ic orig­i­nat­ed from the escape of a lab-manip­u­lat­ed coro­n­avirus in Wuhan, these exper­i­ments seem pro­found­ly unwise.’

    Gain of func­tion research was large­ly restrict­ed in the US until 2017, when the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health began to allow it to take place using gov­ern­ment funds.

    Pre­vi­ous­ly it had been halt­ed from 2014 to 2017 over con­cerns that it could lead to the inad­ver­tent cre­ation of a pan­dem­ic.

    The research involves tin­ker­ing with virus­es to make them more lethal or infec­tious — with the hopes of get­ting ahead of a future out­break.

    The Uni­ver­si­ty of Boston refut­ed that the exper­i­ments are gain of func­tion, adding that the research was reviewed and approved by the Insti­tu­tion­al Biosafe­ty Com­mit­tee (IBC) and the Boston Pub­lic Health Com­mis­sion.

    A spokesper­son said: ‘This research mir­rors and rein­forces the find­ings of oth­er, sim­i­lar research per­formed by oth­er orga­ni­za­tions.

    ‘Ulti­mate­ly, this research will pro­vide a pub­lic ben­e­fit by lead­ing to bet­ter, tar­get­ed ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tions to help fight against future pan­demics.’

    While Covid is offi­cial­ly believed to have been trans­mit­ted from an ani­mal to a human — like­ly from a bat — in a Wuhan wet mar­ket, some spec­u­late oth­er­wise.

    The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV) was per­form­ing gain of func­tion research on sim­i­lar strains before the virus emerged in the city.

    Some believe that the pathogen being devel­oped in the lab infect­ed employ­ees, and escaped into the world as a result.

    The Boston sci­en­tists were per­form­ing sim­i­lar research, and looked at dif­fer­ent strains’ effect on human lung cells that were grown in the lab.

    Covid latch­es onto human cells with its spike pro­tein, and instructs healthy cells to pro­duce copies of itself.

    Sci­en­tists mea­sured how many copies each vari­ant caused the health cells to pro­duce.

    They found the hybrid strain pro­duced five times more viral par­ti­cles than the orig­i­nal Omi­cron.

    The sci­en­tists admit the hybrid virus is unlike­ly to be as dead­ly in humans as it was in mice.

    This is because the spe­cif­ic breed of lab mice used are very sus­cep­ti­ble to severe Covid dis­ease. Mice and humans also have very dif­fer­ent immune respons­es to the virus.

    The lab, at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty’s Nation­al Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases Lab­o­ra­to­ries, is one of 13 biosafe­ty lev­el 4 labs in the US.

    These are labs that are autho­rized to han­dle the most dan­ger­ous pathogens. There are also facil­i­ties in Texas, Atlanta and Man­hat­tan, Kansas.

    Exper­i­ments at these labs often involve tin­ker­ing with ani­mal virus­es to advance treat­ments and vac­cines that could be used in a future out­break.

    Work on the live virus that caus­es Covid must be car­ried out at a BSL‑3 or BSL‑4 lab.

    ...

    There have long been spec­u­la­tion about the true ori­gins of the virus that took over the world in ear­ly 2020.

    Offi­cial­ly, it is believed that the virus was trans­mit­ted from a bat or sim­i­lar ani­mal to a human in Wuhan, before spread­ing among peo­ple.

    Some believe that the virus could be man-made — with expla­na­tions rang­ing from the acci­den­tal to the nefar­i­ous.

    The ‘lab leak’ Covid the­o­ry alleges that the virus was cre­at­ed via gain of func­tion research being under­tak­en at the WIV.

    It is feared that the virus being devel­oped man­aged to infect an employ­ee and then escape into the real world from there.

    The the­o­ry for Covid was ini­tial­ly dis­missed as con­spir­a­cy at the start of the pan­dem­ic in favor of a nat­ur­al emer­gence.

    But the hypoth­e­sis gained momen­tum fol­low­ing a series of rev­e­la­tions and cov­er-ups.

    Cru­cial infor­ma­tion about the ear­li­est infect­ed patients was wiped from the Wuhan lab’s data­base in late 2019 and one of its staff van­ished after com­ing down with a mys­te­ri­ous flu-like ill­ness.

    Fierce debate about the ori­gins of the Covid pan­dem­ic was reignit­ed after two stud­ies claimed to trace the out­break back to a noto­ri­ous ani­mal slaugh­ter mar­ket in Wuhan.

    One shows for the first time how the ear­li­est human cas­es were clus­tered with­in a small radius around the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in win­ter 2019.

    More pre­cise analy­sis of swabs tak­en from floors, cages and coun­ters track the virus back to stalls in the south­west­ern cor­ner of the mar­ket, where ani­mals that can har­bor Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time.

    A sec­ond study claims to have pin­point­ed the exact date the first ani­mal-to-human infec­tion occurred — Novem­ber 18, 2019 — after car­ry­ing out genet­ic analy­sis on hun­dreds of sam­ples from the first human car­ri­ers.

    They also say they have found evi­dence anoth­er first gen­er­a­tion strain was spread­ing at the wet mar­ket — which, if true, would place both orig­i­nal lin­eages with­in its walls.

    Until recent­ly, the only Covid cas­es linked to the mar­ket were Lin­eage B, which was thought to have evolved after Lin­eage A.

    Pro­po­nents of the acci­den­tal lab leak hypoth­e­sis used this as proof the virus only arrived at the mar­ket after evolv­ing else­where in Wuhan.

    ————

    “EXCLUSIVE: ‘This is play­ing with fire — it could spark a lab-gen­er­at­ed pan­dem­ic’: Experts slam Boston lab where sci­en­tists have cre­at­ed a new dead­ly Covid strain with an 80% kill rate” By Caitlin Tilley and Mansur Sha­heen; The Dai­ly Mail; 10/17/2022

    “Researchers attached Omi­cron’s spike to the orig­i­nal wild­type strain that first emerged in Wuhan at the start of the pan­dem­ic.”

    Talk about a love-child from hell: the Omi­cron spike pro­tein was spliced into the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2. And com­pared to Omi­cron, it behaved like a virus from hell. Omi­cron killed non of the mice while this chimera had an 80% fatal­i­ty rate. It was an exper­i­ment that had the stat­ed aim of study­ing the Omi­cron vari­ant, it appears to have result­ed in a far more lethal Omi­cron vari­ant. And yet some­how the cre­ation of this chimera was­n’t deemed a ‘gain-of-func­tion’ exper­i­ment or enhanced poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogen (ePPP) research by the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty team. That’s one part of what makes this research con­tro­ver­sial. As we’re going to see, there’s enough wig­gle room in how these kinds of exper­i­ments are defined that the dif­fer­ence between get­ting the ‘gain-of-func­tion’ des­ig­na­tion or not comes down to whether or not researchers could ‘rea­son­ably expect’ the mod­i­fied virus­es they’re plan­ning on mak­ing to have enhance path­o­genic­i­ty. Some­thing the researchers at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty are say­ing they did­n’t expect...even though it looks like that’s what hap­pened and was a very plau­si­ble out­come:

    ...
    The researchers looked at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain com­pared to the orig­i­nal Omi­cron vari­ant.

    When a sim­i­lar group of rodents were exposed to the stan­dard Omi­cron strain, how­ev­er, they all sur­vived and only expe­ri­enced ‘mild’ symp­toms.

    Writ­ing in the paper, they said: ‘In...mice, while Omi­cron caus­es mild, non-fatal infec­tion, the Omi­cron S‑carrying virus inflicts severe dis­ease with a mor­tal­i­ty rate of 80 per­cent.’

    The researchers said it sig­naled that while the spike pro­tein is respon­si­ble for infec­tiv­i­ty, changes to oth­er parts of its struc­ture deter­mine its dead­li­ness.

    Dr Ebright told DailyMail.com: ‘The research is a clear exam­ple of gain of func­tion research of con­cern and enhanced poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogen (ePPP) research.

    ‘It is espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing that this new US-gov­ern­ment ePPP research — like the pre­vi­ous US-gov­ern­ment ePPP research on chimeric SARS-relat­ed coro­n­avirus­es at Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy that may have caused the pan­dem­ic — appears not to have under­gone the pri­or risk-ben­e­fit review man­dat­ed under US-gov­ern­ment poli­cies.

    ‘If we are to avoid a next lab-gen­er­at­ed pan­dem­ic, it is imper­a­tive that over­sight of ePPP research be strength­ened.

    ...

    The Uni­ver­si­ty of Boston refut­ed that the exper­i­ments are gain of func­tion, adding that the research was reviewed and approved by the Insti­tu­tion­al Biosafe­ty Com­mit­tee (IBC) and the Boston Pub­lic Health Com­mis­sion.

    A spokesper­son said: ‘This research mir­rors and rein­forces the find­ings of oth­er, sim­i­lar research per­formed by oth­er orga­ni­za­tions.

    ‘Ulti­mate­ly, this research will pro­vide a pub­lic ben­e­fit by lead­ing to bet­ter, tar­get­ed ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tions to help fight against future pan­demics.’
    ...

    Dead mice weren’t the only met­ric of this new chimeric strain’s enhance path­o­genic­i­ty. They found the chimera pro­duced 5 fold more viral par­ti­cles at 48 hours after infec­tion than the Omi­cron strain. Now, what isn’t stat­ed in this arti­cle, but the nis that the results, it’s worth not­ing that the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2 and chimeric strains both appeared to dra­mat­ic reduce their viral loads after 96 hours, which the researchers attrib­uted to the “cyto­path­ic effect” (the effects of the virus on the cell). The Omi­cron strain did­n’t induce this cyto­path­ic effect (hence all the mice sur­viv­ing), but also kept up a high­er viral load after 96 hours. So the orig­i­nal and chimeric strains which are high­ly lethal to the mice pro­duced a huge ini­tial surge of the virus to the point of warp­ing the cells where they could­n’t even prod­uct more virus. Non-lethal Omi­cron kept the viral load at a lev­el low enough not to kill the cel­lu­lar host. You can see why Omi­cron won the evo­lu­tion­ary race. And poten­tial­ly a very good sign that COVID is head­ing the way of the com­mon cold:

    ...
    While Covid is offi­cial­ly believed to have been trans­mit­ted from an ani­mal to a human — like­ly from a bat — in a Wuhan wet mar­ket, some spec­u­late oth­er­wise.

    The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV) was per­form­ing gain of func­tion research on sim­i­lar strains before the virus emerged in the city.

    Some believe that the pathogen being devel­oped in the lab infect­ed employ­ees, and escaped into the world as a result.

    The Boston sci­en­tists were per­form­ing sim­i­lar research, and looked at dif­fer­ent strains’ effect on human lung cells that were grown in the lab.

    Covid latch­es onto human cells with its spike pro­tein, and instructs healthy cells to pro­duce copies of itself.

    Sci­en­tists mea­sured how many copies each vari­ant caused the health cells to pro­duce.

    They found the hybrid strain pro­duced five times more viral par­ti­cles than the orig­i­nal Omi­cron.
    ...

    So are mice just super vul­ner­a­ble to the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2? No, just these spe­cif­ic strains of mice that are par­tic­u­lar­ly sus­cep­ti­ble for severe COVID. It’s a reflec­tion of how rel­a­tive­ly mild Omi­cron real­ly is com­pared to the orig­i­nal. Even the mice bred to die from COVID all sur­vived Omi­cron. And there’s some­thing about the muta­tions on Omi­cron that aren’t found on the spike-pro­tein that are play­ing a role in that dif­fer­ent behav­ior. Omi­cron ‘escapes the immune sys­tem’ more effec­tive­ly which pre­sum­ably helps avoid the cytokine storms that char­ac­ter­ize severe COVID, but as these exper­i­ments demon­strate, Omi­cron also just has a low­er viral load in the human cells test­ed com­pared to the ear­li­er ver­sion. We learned all sorts of inter­est­ing things about Omi­cron in this exper­i­ment. That’s not in doubt. What’s in doubt is whether or not it was worth the risk. A risk the high prob­a­bil­i­ty of lab-ori­gins for SARS-CoV­‑2 should under­score:

    ...
    The sci­en­tists admit the hybrid virus is unlike­ly to be as dead­ly in humans as it was in mice.

    This is because the spe­cif­ic breed of lab mice used are very sus­cep­ti­ble to severe Covid dis­ease. Mice and humans also have very dif­fer­ent immune respons­es to the virus.
    ...

    And then the Dai­ly Mail arti­cle gets to this inter­est­ing obser­va­tion about the state of the research into the ori­gins of the virus: The arti­cle refers to the find­ings of stud­ies into the orgins and notes a study that pur­port­ed­ly pin­point­ed the first ani­mal-to-human infec­tion tak­ing place in Wuhan on Novem­ber 19, 2019. Yes, the first ani­mal-to-human infec­tion accord­ing to this group. Because they con­clud­ed there was not one, but two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic events, at two dif­fer­ent Wuhan wet mar­kets in Novem­ber and Decem­ber of 2019. That’s how this group of researchers made sense of the data they col­lect­ed based on the genet­ic sam­ples of teh virus col­lect­ed from the ear­li­est patients. And as we’re going to see, the fol­low­ing arti­cle below also cites this same study as an exam­ple of evi­dence against the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis. So this dou­ble-zoonot­ic event hypoth­e­sis appears to be the cur­rent lead­ing hypoth­e­sis for a nat­ur­al ani­mal-to-human event:

    ...
    Some believe that the virus could be man-made — with expla­na­tions rang­ing from the acci­den­tal to the nefar­i­ous.

    The ‘lab leak’ Covid the­o­ry alleges that the virus was cre­at­ed via gain of func­tion research being under­tak­en at the WIV.

    It is feared that the virus being devel­oped man­aged to infect an employ­ee and then escape into the real world from there.

    The the­o­ry for Covid was ini­tial­ly dis­missed as con­spir­a­cy at the start of the pan­dem­ic in favor of a nat­ur­al emer­gence.

    But the hypoth­e­sis gained momen­tum fol­low­ing a series of rev­e­la­tions and cov­er-ups.

    Cru­cial infor­ma­tion about the ear­li­est infect­ed patients was wiped from the Wuhan lab’s data­base in late 2019 and one of its staff van­ished after com­ing down with a mys­te­ri­ous flu-like ill­ness.

    Fierce debate about the ori­gins of the Covid pan­dem­ic was reignit­ed after two stud­ies claimed to trace the out­break back to a noto­ri­ous ani­mal slaugh­ter mar­ket in Wuhan.

    One shows for the first time how the ear­li­est human cas­es were clus­tered with­in a small radius around the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in win­ter 2019.

    More pre­cise analy­sis of swabs tak­en from floors, cages and coun­ters track the virus back to stalls in the south­west­ern cor­ner of the mar­ket, where ani­mals that can har­bor Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time.

    A sec­ond study claims to have pin­point­ed the exact date the first ani­mal-to-human infec­tion occurred — Novem­ber 18, 2019 — after car­ry­ing out genet­ic analy­sis on hun­dreds of sam­ples from the first human car­ri­ers.

    They also say they have found evi­dence anoth­er first gen­er­a­tion strain was spread­ing at the wet mar­ket — which, if true, would place both orig­i­nal lin­eages with­in its walls.

    Until recent­ly, the only Covid cas­es linked to the mar­ket were Lin­eage B, which was thought to have evolved after Lin­eage A.

    Pro­po­nents of the acci­den­tal lab leak hypoth­e­sis used this as proof the virus only arrived at the mar­ket after evolv­ing else­where in Wuhan.
    ...

    Next, here’s a STAT News arti­cle on the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty study that gives us a bet­ter sense of what kind of over­sight there was for this project. The uni­ver­si­ty is insist­ing that they had an appro­pri­ate review. But the NIAID, which fund­ed the project, is assert­ing that they were nev­er informed about the nature of this work. In oth­er words, it may not have been as easy for this team to insist this was­n’t “gain-of-func­tion” work had the NIAID actu­al­ly known what they were plan­ning and con­duct­ed its own review of the work before it got start­ed. But then again, maybe they would have got­ten approval. We don’t real­ly know. What we do know is that the researchers and the uni­ver­si­ty are insist­ing that this was­n’t “gain-of-func­tion” research because they did­n’t have any rea­son­able expec­ta­tion that they were increas­ing the path­o­genic­i­ty of the virus. And that gets at one of the big aspects of this sto­ry: the line between “gain-of-func­tion” and “not gain-of-func­tion” appears to be whether or not the researchers can have a “rea­son­able expec­ta­tion” that their work was going to enhance the pathogenci­ty of virus. And as this sto­ry demon­strates, that’s a pret­ty big loop­hole:

    STAT News

    Boston Uni­ver­si­ty researchers’ test­ing of lab-made ver­sion of Covid virus draws gov­ern­ment scruti­ny

    Helen Bran­swell
    Oct. 17, 2022

    Research at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty that involved test­ing a lab-made hybrid ver­sion of the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus is gar­ner­ing heat­ed head­lines alleg­ing the sci­en­tists involved could have unleashed a new pathogen.

    There is no evi­dence the work, per­formed under biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el 3 pre­cau­tions in BU’s Nation­al Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases Lab­o­ra­to­ries, was con­duct­ed improp­er­ly or unsafe­ly. In fact, it was approved by an inter­nal biosafe­ty review com­mit­tee and Boston’s Pub­lic Health Com­mis­sion, the uni­ver­si­ty said Mon­day night.

    But it has become appar­ent that the research team did not clear the work with the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases, which was one of the fun­ders of the project. The agency indi­cat­ed it is going to be look­ing for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.

    Emi­ly Erbeld­ing, direc­tor of NIAID’s divi­sion of micro­bi­ol­o­gy and infec­tious dis­eases, said the BU team’s orig­i­nal grant appli­ca­tions did not spec­i­fy that the sci­en­tists want­ed to do this pre­cise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing exper­i­ments that might involve enhanc­ing a pathogen of pan­dem­ic poten­tial in the progress reports it pro­vid­ed to NIAID.

    “I think we’re going to have con­ver­sa­tions over upcom­ing days,” Erbeld­ing told STAT in an inter­view.

    Asked if the research team should have informed NIAID of its inten­tion to do the work, Erbeld­ing said: “We wish that they would have, yes.”

    ...

    The email, from Rachel Lapal Cav­al­lario, asso­ciate vice pres­i­dent for pub­lic rela­tions and social media, said that the work was not, as claimed, gain of func­tion research, a term that refers to manip­u­la­tion of pathogens to make them more dan­ger­ous. “In fact, this research made the virus [repli­ca­tion] less dan­ger­ous,” the email stat­ed, adding that oth­er research groups have con­duct­ed sim­i­lar work.

    In the paper Saeed and col­leagues report­ed on research they con­duct­ed that involved cre­at­ing a hybrid or chimeric virus — in which the spike pro­tein of an Omi­cron ver­sion of SARS‑2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the orig­i­nal ver­sion that emerged from Chi­na in 2020. Omi­cron virus­es first emerged in late 2021 and have since splin­tered into mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent sub­vari­ants.

    The goal of the research was to deter­mine if the muta­tions in the Omi­cron spike pro­tein were respon­si­ble for this variant’s increased abil­i­ty to evade the immu­ni­ty to SARS‑2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s low­er rate of sever­i­ty.

    The test­ing actu­al­ly showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omi­cron itself, killing 80% of the mice infect­ed. Impor­tant­ly, the orig­i­nal Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was test­ed in.

    The con­clu­sion of the study is that muta­tions in the spike pro­tein of the Omi­cron vari­ant are respon­si­ble for the strain’s abil­i­ty to evade immu­ni­ty peo­ple have built up via vac­ci­na­tion, infec­tions, or both, but they are not respon­si­ble for the appar­ent decrease in sever­i­ty of the Omi­cron virus­es.

    “Con­sis­tent with stud­ies pub­lished by oth­ers, this work shows that it is not the spike pro­tein that dri­ves Omi­cron path­o­genic­i­ty, but instead oth­er viral pro­teins. Deter­mi­na­tion of those pro­teins will lead to bet­ter diag­nos­tics and dis­ease man­age­ment strate­gies,” Saeed said in a com­ment cir­cu­lat­ed by the uni­ver­si­ty.

    Research that has the poten­tial to make pathogens more dan­ger­ous has been a hot-but­ton issue for years. About a decade ago, a high-pro­file debate over whether it was safe to pub­lish con­tro­ver­sial stud­ies done on a dan­ger­ous bird flu virus, H5N1, led to a re-writ­ing of the rules around this type of work. Anoth­er review of the pol­i­cy is cur­rent­ly under­way, led by the Nation­al Sci­ence Advi­so­ry Board for Biose­cu­ri­ty.

    The con­tro­ver­sy around research on pathogens of pan­dem­ic poten­tial has gained ground since the start of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, which some sci­en­tists and oth­ers believe may have been an acci­den­tal or delib­er­ate result of research on bat coro­n­avirus­es at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy in the Chi­nese city where the pan­dem­ic is believed to have begun. (There is a lot of evi­dence that points to the virus spread­ing from a wet mar­ket in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But prov­ing some­thing didn’t hap­pen three years after the fact is a chal­lenge that may be impos­si­ble to meet.)

    Under NIAID’s pol­i­cy, pro­pos­als to do fed­er­al­ly fund­ed research that could pro­duce so-called enhanced pathogens of pan­dem­ic poten­tial should be referred to a com­mit­tee that would assess the risks and ben­e­fits of the work. The pol­i­cy is known as P3CO frame­work.

    Erbeld­ing said NIAID would prob­a­bly have con­vened such a com­mit­tee in this case, had it known that Saeed’s team planned to devel­op a chimeric virus.

    “What we would have want­ed to do is to talk about exact­ly what they want­ed to do in advance, and if it met what the P3CO frame­work defines as enhanced pathogen of pan­dem­ic poten­tial, ePPP, we could have put a pack­age for­ward for review by the com­mit­tee that’s con­vened by HHS, the office of the assis­tant sec­re­tary for pre­pared­ness and response. That’s what the frame­work lays out and that’s what we would have done,” she said.

    Erbeld­ing not­ed, how­ev­er, that some of the media cov­er­age of the study over-esti­mates the risk the work may have posed. “That 80% kill rate, that head­line doesn’t tell the whole sto­ry,” she said. “Because Wuhan” — the orig­i­nal strain — “killed all the mice.”

    ...

    Virol­o­gist Angela Ras­mussen, who was not involved in the research, had some sym­pa­thy for the BU sci­en­tists, say­ing there is ambi­gu­i­ty in the rules as they are cur­rent­ly writ­ten.

    “Because so much of the def­i­n­i­tion of ePPP per­tains to ‘rea­son­able antic­i­pa­tion’ of results in humans (and ani­mal mod­els are not always good prox­ies of this), it’s very dif­fi­cult for researchers to say ‘Oh yes, this is ePPP,” Ras­mussen wrote in response to ques­tions from STAT.

    “I’d per­son­al­ly reach out for clar­i­fi­ca­tion from NIAID when in doubt, but it’s often not obvi­ous when addi­tion­al guid­ance is war­rant­ed. And because it’s not very trans­par­ent, it’s hard to look at oth­er deci­sions NIAID has made for exam­ples,” she said.

    “I’m very tired of peo­ple sug­gest­ing that virol­o­gists and NIAID are reck­less or don’t care about biosafe­ty,” said Ras­mussen, a coro­n­avirus expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saskatchewan’s Vac­cine and Infec­tious Dis­ease Orga­ni­za­tion. “The prob­lem isn’t that. The prob­lem is that the guide­lines and expec­ta­tions aren’t clear for many exper­i­ments and the process isn’t trans­par­ent.”

    ———-

    “Boston Uni­ver­si­ty researchers’ test­ing of lab-made ver­sion of Covid virus draws gov­ern­ment scruti­ny” by Helen Bran­swell; STAT News; 10/17/2022

    “The email, from Rachel Lapal Cav­al­lario, asso­ciate vice pres­i­dent for pub­lic rela­tions and social media, said that the work was not, as claimed, gain of func­tion research, a term that refers to manip­u­la­tion of pathogens to make them more dan­ger­ous. “In fact, this research made the virus [repli­ca­tion] less dan­ger­ous,” the email stat­ed, adding that oth­er research groups have con­duct­ed sim­i­lar work.”

    Not only was the research not gain-of-func­tion, but it actu­al­ly made the viral less dan­ger­ous. That’s the spin from the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pub­lic rela­tions depart­ment. It not clear what exact­ly they’re refer­ring to in claim­ing that the work made the virus less dan­ger­ous, but that’s the remark­able claim we’re hear­ing. Maybe they’re refer­ring to mak­ing the orig­i­nal SARS-CoV­‑2 strain less lethal? That ambi­gu­i­ty in whether or not some­thing can be defined as gain-of-func­tion or “ePPP” is a big part of the sto­ry here. In this case, they’re com­bin­ing the more lethal ances­tral strain with the less lethal Omi­cron strain. So is that new chimera a weak­er ver­sion of the ances­tral strain (not GoF) or a stronger ver­sion of the Omi­cron strain (GoF)? A lot of this seems to come down word games:

    ...
    In the paper Saeed and col­leagues report­ed on research they con­duct­ed that involved cre­at­ing a hybrid or chimeric virus — in which the spike pro­tein of an Omi­cron ver­sion of SARS‑2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the orig­i­nal ver­sion that emerged from Chi­na in 2020. Omi­cron virus­es first emerged in late 2021 and have since splin­tered into mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent sub­vari­ants.

    The goal of the research was to deter­mine if the muta­tions in the Omi­cron spike pro­tein were respon­si­ble for this variant’s increased abil­i­ty to evade the immu­ni­ty to SARS‑2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s low­er rate of sever­i­ty.

    The test­ing actu­al­ly showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omi­cron itself, killing 80% of the mice infect­ed. Impor­tant­ly, the orig­i­nal Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was test­ed in.

    The con­clu­sion of the study is that muta­tions in the spike pro­tein of the Omi­cron vari­ant are respon­si­ble for the strain’s abil­i­ty to evade immu­ni­ty peo­ple have built up via vac­ci­na­tion, infec­tions, or both, but they are not respon­si­ble for the appar­ent decrease in sever­i­ty of the Omi­cron virus­es.

    “Con­sis­tent with stud­ies pub­lished by oth­ers, this work shows that it is not the spike pro­tein that dri­ves Omi­cron path­o­genic­i­ty, but instead oth­er viral pro­teins. Deter­mi­na­tion of those pro­teins will lead to bet­ter diag­nos­tics and dis­ease man­age­ment strate­gies,” Saeed said in a com­ment cir­cu­lat­ed by the uni­ver­si­ty.

    ...

    Virol­o­gist Angela Ras­mussen, who was not involved in the research, had some sym­pa­thy for the BU sci­en­tists, say­ing there is ambi­gu­i­ty in the rules as they are cur­rent­ly writ­ten.

    “Because so much of the def­i­n­i­tion of ePPP per­tains to ‘rea­son­able antic­i­pa­tion’ of results in humans (and ani­mal mod­els are not always good prox­ies of this), it’s very dif­fi­cult for researchers to say ‘Oh yes, this is ePPP,” Ras­mussen wrote in response to ques­tions from STAT.

    “I’d per­son­al­ly reach out for clar­i­fi­ca­tion from NIAID when in doubt, but it’s often not obvi­ous when addi­tion­al guid­ance is war­rant­ed. And because it’s not very trans­par­ent, it’s hard to look at oth­er deci­sions NIAID has made for exam­ples,” she said.

    “I’m very tired of peo­ple sug­gest­ing that virol­o­gists and NIAID are reck­less or don’t care about biosafe­ty,” said Ras­mussen, a coro­n­avirus expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saskatchewan’s Vac­cine and Infec­tious Dis­ease Orga­ni­za­tion. “The prob­lem isn’t that. The prob­lem is that the guide­lines and expec­ta­tions aren’t clear for many exper­i­ments and the process isn’t trans­par­ent.”
    ...

    At the same time, the NIAID, which fund­ed the work, is defend­ing itself with the asser­tion that it had no idea these kinds of chimeric virus­es were being cre­at­ed as part of this project. It’s the kind of sto­ry that rais­es obvi­ous ques­tions about how many oth­er unde­clared projects of this nature might be oper­at­ing with NIAID financ­ing:

    ...
    There is no evi­dence the work, per­formed under biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el 3 pre­cau­tions in BU’s Nation­al Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases Lab­o­ra­to­ries, was con­duct­ed improp­er­ly or unsafe­ly. In fact, it was approved by an inter­nal biosafe­ty review com­mit­tee and Boston’s Pub­lic Health Com­mis­sion, the uni­ver­si­ty said Mon­day night.

    But it has become appar­ent that the research team did not clear the work with the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases, which was one of the fun­ders of the project. The agency indi­cat­ed it is going to be look­ing for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.

    Emi­ly Erbeld­ing, direc­tor of NIAID’s divi­sion of micro­bi­ol­o­gy and infec­tious dis­eases, said the BU team’s orig­i­nal grant appli­ca­tions did not spec­i­fy that the sci­en­tists want­ed to do this pre­cise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing exper­i­ments that might involve enhanc­ing a pathogen of pan­dem­ic poten­tial in the progress reports it pro­vid­ed to NIAID.

    “I think we’re going to have con­ver­sa­tions over upcom­ing days,” Erbeld­ing told STAT in an inter­view.

    Asked if the research team should have informed NIAID of its inten­tion to do the work, Erbeld­ing said: “We wish that they would have, yes.”

    ...

    Under NIAID’s pol­i­cy, pro­pos­als to do fed­er­al­ly fund­ed research that could pro­duce so-called enhanced pathogens of pan­dem­ic poten­tial should be referred to a com­mit­tee that would assess the risks and ben­e­fits of the work. The pol­i­cy is known as P3CO frame­work.

    Erbeld­ing said NIAID would prob­a­bly have con­vened such a com­mit­tee in this case, had it known that Saeed’s team planned to devel­op a chimeric virus.

    “What we would have want­ed to do is to talk about exact­ly what they want­ed to do in advance, and if it met what the P3CO frame­work defines as enhanced pathogen of pan­dem­ic poten­tial, ePPP, we could have put a pack­age for­ward for review by the com­mit­tee that’s con­vened by HHS, the office of the assis­tant sec­re­tary for pre­pared­ness and response. That’s what the frame­work lays out and that’s what we would have done,” she said.

    Erbeld­ing not­ed, how­ev­er, that some of the media cov­er­age of the study over-esti­mates the risk the work may have posed. “That 80% kill rate, that head­line doesn’t tell the whole sto­ry,” she said. “Because Wuhan” — the orig­i­nal strain — “killed all the mice.”
    ...

    Final­ly, we once again find a link to that study that con­clud­ed that not one but two zoonot­ic events took place at two sep­a­rate Wuhan wet mar­kets in Novem­ber and Decem­ber of 2019, and the sug­ges­tion that this study rep­re­sents “a lot of evi­dence” that the virus emerged from those wet mar­kets. As we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing arti­cle, two of those stud­ies were put out by an inter­na­tion­al team that includes a num­ber of the same authors behind the paper pub­lished back in March of 2020 — “The prox­i­mal ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2” — that assert­ed that the virus jumped from humans to ani­mals and could­n’t pos­si­ble have come from a lab. Recall how the authors of that paper were Kris­t­ian G. Ander­sen, Andrew Ram­baut, W. Ian Lip­kin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Gar­ry. All but Lip­kin are co-authors on this Feb 2022 paper assert­ing two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic events. So the “two zoonot­ic events” sce­nario is being pushed by the same “it could­n’t pos­si­bly have come from a lab” net­work of virol­o­gists:

    ...
    The con­tro­ver­sy around research on pathogens of pan­dem­ic poten­tial has gained ground since the start of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, which some sci­en­tists and oth­ers believe may have been an acci­den­tal or delib­er­ate result of research on bat coro­n­avirus­es at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy in the Chi­nese city where the pan­dem­ic is believed to have begun. (There is a lot of evi­dence that points to the virus spread­ing from a wet mar­ket in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But prov­ing some­thing didn’t hap­pen three years after the fact is a chal­lenge that may be impos­si­ble to meet.)
    ...

    Ok, so now let’s take a look at that Feb 2022 arti­cle in Sci­ence describ­ing three stud­ies that came out over the last year explor­ing the genet­ics of the ear­li­est viral sam­ples obtained at the Wuhan wet mar­kets. Two of those stud­ies were put out by the inter­na­tion­al team that includes Ander­son, Ram­bout, Holmes, and Gar­ry. The oth­er study was put out by a large­ly Chi­nese team. And, sur­prise, they arrive at com­plete­ly oppo­site con­clu­sions. The inter­na­tion­al team exam­ined the viral sequences found at mul­ti­ple Wuhan wet mar­kets and con­clud­ed that two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic events took place in Novem­ber and Decem­ber of 2019. That’s how they explained the rel­a­tive­ly dif­fer­ent viral sequences found dur­ing this peri­od when the virus had alleged­ly just jumped to humans. It jumped twice. It’s the kind of find­ing that makes all the claims about the virus already being present in mil­i­tary ath­letes dur­ing the Mil­i­tary World Games in Wuhan in Octo­ber of 2019 all the more intrigu­ing. Exist­ing strains qui­et­ly cir­cu­lat­ing the world would be anoth­er obvi­ous pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for the mul­ti­ple strains found at those wet mar­kets.

    The Chi­nese team arrived at a very dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion: the virus sam­ples found at the wet mar­kets did­n’t orig­i­nate with the ani­mals. It orig­i­nat­ed with the humans. And pos­si­ble orig­i­nat­ed from out­side the coun­try. These are the stud­ies that are today being referred to in news reports as the research com­mu­ni­ty’s best guess at the ori­gins of the virus:

    Sci­ence

    Do three new stud­ies add up to proof of COVID-19’s ori­gin in a Wuhan ani­mal mar­ket?

    Preprints unlike­ly to end debate over how SARS-CoV­‑2 began the pan­dem­ic, but some sci­en­tists say lab-leak hypoth­e­sis has tak­en a “blow”

    By Jon Cohen
    28 Feb 2022 6:45 PM

    Update, 26 July, 5 p.m.: Two of the three preprints cov­ered below, one look­ing at ear­ly lin­eages of SARS-CoV­‑2 in Wuhan, Chi­na, and anoth­er doing a geospa­tial analy­sis of the ear­li­est COVID-19 cas­es in Chi­na, were pub­lished by Sci­ence.

    Three new stud­ies offer one indis­putable con­clu­sion about the ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2: Despite the pas­sage of 2 years and the Chi­nese government’s lack of trans­paren­cy, data that can shed light on the pandemic’s great­est mys­tery still exist. And although these new analy­ses don’t all reach the same con­clu­sion for how COVID-19 was sparked, each under­cuts the the­o­ry that the virus some­how escaped from the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, long a focus of sus­pi­cions.

    The stud­ies exam­ine dif­fer­ent aspects of the viral spread at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in Wuhan, Chi­na, the city where the first cas­es were detect­ed. Two inter­na­tion­al efforts build the case that SARS-CoV­‑2 jumped to peo­ple from infect­ed animals—a zoonot­ic leap—at the mar­ket, like­ly twice, at the end of 2019. A third, large­ly Chi­nese effort details ear­ly signs of the coro­n­avirus in envi­ron­men­tal and ani­mal sam­ples from the mar­ket but sug­gests the virus was import­ed there, per­haps from out­side the country—a con­clu­sion the Uni­ver­si­ty of Arizona’s Michael Worobey, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist who is a cor­re­spond­ing author of the two inter­na­tion­al stud­ies, calls “a huge dis­con­nect.”

    The stud­ies were post­ed as preprints and are not peer reviewed, but sci­en­tists, biose­cu­ri­ty experts, jour­nal­ists, and oth­ers are already intense­ly exam­in­ing their details. “I have been brought clos­er to the zoono­sis side with these preprints,” says Flo Débarre, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at the French nation­al research agency, CNRS, who has fol­lowed the ori­gin debate close­ly and not thrown her lot with either the nat­ur­al-ori­gin or the lab-leak camp. Evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist William Han­age of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty agrees these stud­ies “will be tak­en as a blow” to the lab-leak hypoth­e­sis. “They sub­stan­tial­ly move the nee­dle on the ori­gins in the direc­tion of the mar­ket,” Han­age says.

    Skep­tics of the nat­ur­al ori­gin the­o­ry main­tain the mar­ket clus­ter could mere­ly be a super­spread­er event touched off when a per­son infect­ed with a lab-escaped coro­n­avirus vis­it­ed it. But Worobey thinks fur­ther data could make that con­tention even less ten­able. A more trans­par­ent analy­sis of the market’s genet­ic sam­pling data, in par­tic­u­lar, might iden­ti­fy exact­ly which species of ani­mals sold there car­ried the virus.

    In one study, Worobey and col­leagues describe two sub­tly dif­fer­ent lin­eages of SARS-CoV­‑2 that were found in peo­ple at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in late 2019, which they take as a sign that the virus jumped twice from ani­mals to humans there. Their oth­er study offers a geospa­tial analy­sis of the ear­li­est human cas­es that pin­points the mar­ket as the “epi­cen­ter” of SARS-CoV‑2’s emer­gence, show­ing both lin­eages infect­ed peo­ple who had links to the mar­ket or lived near it. It also con­nects the spe­cif­ic stalls at the mar­ket where live ani­mals were sold to envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples known to have test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. “Togeth­er, these analy­ses pro­vide dis­pos­i­tive evi­dence for the emer­gence of SARS-CoV­‑2 via the live wildlife trade and iden­ti­fy the Hua­nan mar­ket as the unam­bigu­ous epi­cen­ter of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic,” they con­clude.

    Worobey and col­leagues had hoped to release their preprints in the next week but sped up their plans, choos­ing a preprint serv­er that posts with­out any delays, when the Chi­nese study was post­ed on 25 Feb­ru­ary on the Research Square site. Led by George Gao of the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and co-authored by 37 oth­er sci­en­tists (one is from Cana­da), that research—which builds on data ear­li­er leaked to the media but nev­er offi­cial­ly published—offers the most detailed descrip­tion yet of the envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples the Chi­nese Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion obtained at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket between 1 Jan­u­ary and 2 March 2020.

    In the new preprint, Gao and col­leagues ana­lyzed 1380 sam­ples from 188 ani­mals in the mar­ket and the envi­ron­ment, includ­ing sew­er wells, the ground, feath­er remov­ing machines, and “con­tain­ers.” They found SARS-CoV­‑2 in 73 sam­ples. But because all were from the envi­ron­ment, not the ani­mals them­selves, they assert that humans intro­duced the virus to the mar­ket. The authors call the mar­ket an “ampli­fi­er,” not the source, of SARS-CoV­‑2.

    Hew­ing close­ly to gov­ern­ment asser­tions on COVID-19’s ori­gin, the preprint by Gao and col­leagues notes stud­ies that have report­ed evi­dence of SARS-CoV­‑2 in oth­er coun­tries before it sur­faced in Wuhan, mak­ing no men­tion of cri­tiques that attribute that evi­dence to con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. It also floats a wide­ly dis­put­ed the­o­ry that frozen food import­ed to Chi­na might have been the orig­i­nal source. (Authors of the paper, includ­ing Gao, did not respond to requests to dis­cuss the work.)

    The coro­n­avirus lin­eage analy­sis from Worobey and col­leagues refines an argu­ment posit­ed by virol­o­gist Robert Gar­ry last year. In data on the ear­ly human cas­es, Gar­ry had iden­ti­fied two dif­fer­ent forms of SARS-CoV­‑2, dif­fer­ing by just two muta­tions, which he argued sur­faced at dif­fer­ent Wuhan mar­kets in Decem­ber 2019. The new work, which includes Gar­ry as a co-author and cites evi­dence from the Gao study, reshapes that sce­nario sig­nif­i­cant­ly. It con­cludes that both lin­eages, dubbed A and B, orig­i­nat­ed at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket and soon spread in near­by neigh­bor­hoods. B like­ly jumped from ani­mals to humans in late Novem­ber 2019, lead­ing to the first detect­ed case on 10 Decem­ber, and lin­eage A a few weeks lat­er, the group con­cludes. Either way, the team argues the almost simul­ta­ne­ous emer­gence of two lin­eages chal­lenges the lab-ori­gin the­sis, as it would require two dif­fer­ent virus­es leak­ing at rough­ly the same time. (Gao and col­leagues also found both SARS-CoV­‑2 lin­eages in their envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples.)

    The sec­ond preprint from the inter­na­tion­al team builds on a June 2021 Chi­nese-led study that spent 2 years doc­u­ment­ing a tick fever dis­ease in mam­mals for sale at a spe­cif­ic stall in the mar­ket. The new study pin­points for the first time where species sus­cep­ti­ble to SARS-CoV‑2—including rac­coon dogs, hedge­hogs, bad­gers, red fox­es, and bam­boo rats—were sold and maps those sites to the pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples, includ­ing in one “con­tain­er” the authors believe was a cage. “To any­one who real­ly grasps what is in all of those three papers, I think it’s very hard to dis­miss that this is a very, very, very strong case that this pan­dem­ic start­ed at that mar­ket,” Worobey says.

    Oth­ers say they are not defin­i­tive. “They are inter­est­ing stud­ies, but I don’t think they close the case on what hap­pened with the ori­gins of the virus,” says Jesse Bloom, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at the Fred Hutchin­son Can­cer Research Cen­ter who has crit­i­cized col­leagues for too blithe­ly dis­miss­ing the lab-ori­gin hypoth­e­sis. “I’m espe­cial­ly skep­ti­cal of the con­clu­sion that there must have been two zoonot­ic jumps.”

    He notes that in about 10% of human trans­mis­sions of SARS-CoV­‑2, the virus acquires two muta­tions, which means a sec­ond lin­eage could have emerged after the infec­tion of the first human rather than two zoonot­ic jumps. Worobey, Gar­ry, and col­leagues did a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion that chal­lenges Bloom’s asser­tion. They mod­eled what would have hap­pened if there was an intro­duc­tion of a sin­gle lin­eage and com­pared that with the virus­es sequenced from Wuhan cas­es through 23 Jan­u­ary 2020. By match­ing the sequence data from the actu­al epi­dem­ic, they found there was only a 3.6% chance that a sin­gle lin­eage mutat­ed into a sec­ond one.

    The envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples from the Wuhan mar­ket that test­ed pos­i­tive for SARS-CoV­‑2 might resolve the stale­mate over the virus’ ori­gin if they can reveal a spe­cif­ic ani­mal source of the virus. “If you find a pos­i­tive sam­ple with, say, lots of rac­coon dog DNA, you’ve got a hit,” on the like­ly source of SARS-CoV­‑2, says evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist David Robert­son of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow, who co-authored the epi­cen­ter paper.

    ...

    ———-

    “Do three new stud­ies add up to proof of COVID-19’s ori­gin in a Wuhan ani­mal mar­ket?” By Jon Cohen; Sci­ence; 02/28/2022

    “The stud­ies exam­ine dif­fer­ent aspects of the viral spread at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in Wuhan, Chi­na, the city where the first cas­es were detect­ed. Two inter­na­tion­al efforts build the case that SARS-CoV­‑2 jumped to peo­ple from infect­ed animals—a zoonot­ic leap—at the mar­ket, like­ly twice, at the end of 2019. A third, large­ly Chi­nese effort details ear­ly signs of the coro­n­avirus in envi­ron­men­tal and ani­mal sam­ples from the mar­ket but sug­gests the virus was import­ed there, per­haps from out­side the coun­try—a con­clu­sion the Uni­ver­si­ty of Arizona’s Michael Worobey, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist who is a cor­re­spond­ing author of the two inter­na­tion­al stud­ies, calls “a huge dis­con­nect.””

    As this Sci­ence arti­cle from back in Feb­ru­ary describes, there have been mul­ti­ple stud­ies over the past year with intrigu­ing find­ings regard­ing the ori­gins of the virus. Two of those stud­ies were put out by an inter­na­tion­al team that includes a num­ber of the same authors behind the paper pub­lished back in March of 2020 — “The prox­i­mal ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2” — that assert­ed that the virus jumped from humans to ani­mals and could­n’t pos­si­ble have come from a lab. Recall how the authors of that paper were Kris­t­ian G. Ander­sen, Andrew Ram­baut, W. Ian Lip­kin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Gar­ry. All but Lip­kin are co-authors on this Feb 2022 paper assert­ing two sep­a­rate zoonot­ic events. So the “two zoonot­ic events” sce­nario is being pushed by the same “it could­n’t pos­si­bly have come from a lab” net­work of virol­o­gists. And note how, as back in March 2020, the ‘defin­i­tive’ con­clu­sions this group arrives at aren’t seen as so defin­i­tive by oth­er experts:

    ...
    In one study, Worobey and col­leagues describe two sub­tly dif­fer­ent lin­eages of SARS-CoV­‑2 that were found in peo­ple at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in late 2019, which they take as a sign that the virus jumped twice from ani­mals to humans there. Their oth­er study offers a geospa­tial analy­sis of the ear­li­est human cas­es that pin­points the mar­ket as the “epi­cen­ter” of SARS-CoV‑2’s emer­gence, show­ing both lin­eages infect­ed peo­ple who had links to the mar­ket or lived near it. It also con­nects the spe­cif­ic stalls at the mar­ket where live ani­mals were sold to envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples known to have test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. “Togeth­er, these analy­ses pro­vide dis­pos­i­tive evi­dence for the emer­gence of SARS-CoV­‑2 via the live wildlife trade and iden­ti­fy the Hua­nan mar­ket as the unam­bigu­ous epi­cen­ter of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic,” they con­clude.

    ...

    The coro­n­avirus lin­eage analy­sis from Worobey and col­leagues refines an argu­ment posit­ed by virol­o­gist Robert Gar­ry last year. In data on the ear­ly human cas­es, Gar­ry had iden­ti­fied two dif­fer­ent forms of SARS-CoV­‑2, dif­fer­ing by just two muta­tions, which he argued sur­faced at dif­fer­ent Wuhan mar­kets in Decem­ber 2019. The new work, which includes Gar­ry as a co-author and cites evi­dence from the Gao study, reshapes that sce­nario sig­nif­i­cant­ly. It con­cludes that both lin­eages, dubbed A and B, orig­i­nat­ed at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket and soon spread in near­by neigh­bor­hoods. B like­ly jumped from ani­mals to humans in late Novem­ber 2019, lead­ing to the first detect­ed case on 10 Decem­ber, and lin­eage A a few weeks lat­er, the group con­cludes. Either way, the team argues the almost simul­ta­ne­ous emer­gence of two lin­eages chal­lenges the lab-ori­gin the­sis, as it would require two dif­fer­ent virus­es leak­ing at rough­ly the same time. (Gao and col­leagues also found both SARS-CoV­‑2 lin­eages in their envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples.)

    ...

    Oth­ers say they are not defin­i­tive. “They are inter­est­ing stud­ies, but I don’t think they close the case on what hap­pened with the ori­gins of the virus,” says Jesse Bloom, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at the Fred Hutchin­son Can­cer Research Cen­ter who has crit­i­cized col­leagues for too blithe­ly dis­miss­ing the lab-ori­gin hypoth­e­sis. “I’m espe­cial­ly skep­ti­cal of the con­clu­sion that there must have been two zoonot­ic jumps.”

    He notes that in about 10% of human trans­mis­sions of SARS-CoV­‑2, the virus acquires two muta­tions, which means a sec­ond lin­eage could have emerged after the infec­tion of the first human rather than two zoonot­ic jumps. Worobey, Gar­ry, and col­leagues did a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion that chal­lenges Bloom’s asser­tion. They mod­eled what would have hap­pened if there was an intro­duc­tion of a sin­gle lin­eage and com­pared that with the virus­es sequenced from Wuhan cas­es through 23 Jan­u­ary 2020. By match­ing the sequence data from the actu­al epi­dem­ic, they found there was only a 3.6% chance that a sin­gle lin­eage mutat­ed into a sec­ond one.
    ...

    Then there’s the oth­er paper put out over the past year exam­in­ing the genet­ics of the ear­li­est viral sam­ples found around the Wuhan wet mar­ket. That paper, con­duct­ed by a most­ly Chi­nese team, arrived at the con­clu­sion that there were no zoonot­ic events and the virus may have even been intro­duced from out­side the coun­try:

    ...
    Worobey and col­leagues had hoped to release their preprints in the next week but sped up their plans, choos­ing a preprint serv­er that posts with­out any delays, when the Chi­nese study was post­ed on 25 Feb­ru­ary on the Research Square site. Led by George Gao of the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and co-authored by 37 oth­er sci­en­tists (one is from Cana­da), that research—which builds on data ear­li­er leaked to the media but nev­er offi­cial­ly published—offers the most detailed descrip­tion yet of the envi­ron­men­tal sam­ples the Chi­nese Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion obtained at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket between 1 Jan­u­ary and 2 March 2020.

    In the new preprint, Gao and col­leagues ana­lyzed 1380 sam­ples from 188 ani­mals in the mar­ket and the envi­ron­ment, includ­ing sew­er wells, the ground, feath­er remov­ing machines, and “con­tain­ers.” They found SARS-CoV­‑2 in 73 sam­ples. But because all were from the envi­ron­ment, not the ani­mals them­selves, they assert that humans intro­duced the virus to the mar­ket. The authors call the mar­ket an “ampli­fi­er,” not the source, of SARS-CoV­‑2.
    ...

    As we can see, these two research teams arrived at two very dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions. Nor­mal­ly, that would call for a redou­bling of efforts to get to the bot­tom of the sit­u­a­tion. This obvi­ous­ly isn’t a nor­mal sit­u­a­tion. So we’ll see if the efforts to inves­ti­gate the ori­gins of the virus are sus­tained. But at some point it seems like­ly that the world is just going to accept what­ev­er the lat­est con­clu­sions is put for­ward by the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. And as of now, it appears that the ‘two zoonot­ic jump’ the­o­ry — a the­o­ry that sure looks like a high­ly moti­vat­ed con­clu­sions put for­ward by the orig­i­nal group of virol­o­gists who did­n’t want the world to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a lab leak at all — has man­aged to cap­ture that ‘best guess’ sta­tus in the eyes of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty. Which, of course, is also the kind of con­clu­sion that should reduce lab leak con­cerns and make it a lot eas­i­er for labs every­one to car­ry out ‘not actu­al­ly GoF’ exper­i­ments in the future.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 20, 2022, 4:47 pm

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