The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins

[Max Peck]

That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn the indifference and incompetence of the ccp in allowing this thing to spread but we need to be able to realistically condemn them not whip out the depraved James Bond supervillain claims.

China quarantined entire cities and locked people forcibly in their homes.

The US couldn't even get people to wear masks occasionally.

Indifference and incompetence indeed.

IIRC, the local authorities in the Wuhan region actively suppressed information about the outbreak and this delayed the effort to contain it until it had already spread beyond China. The massive city-wide quarantines came later, after the national government stepped in.

[Max Peck]

More information regard the virus's origin has emerged.

Genetic data links SARS-CoV-2 to raccoon dogs in China market, scientists say

Newly obtained genetic data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) links the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to animals—specifically raccoon dogs—at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the earliest COVID-19 cases centered, a group of independent scientists told the World Health Organization this week.

The genetic data came from environmental swabs collected at the market by China CDC in January of 2020. The existence of these swabs was previously known, as was the fact that they were positive for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. But in late January of this year, scientists at China CDC uploaded—and then later removed—additional genetic data from these swabs to a public genetic database called GISAID, the WHO said. That additional data, which had not been previously disclosed, indicates that the SARS-CoV-2-positive swabs also contained genetic material from humans and animals, particularly large amounts of genetic material that closely matches that of raccoon dogs.

Raccoon dogs—foxlike animals whose faces closely resemble those of raccoons—are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and were known to be sold at the market.

Such close commingling of genetic material from the virus and a susceptible animal at the epicenter of the outbreak provides additional—though still inconclusive—evidence in support of a natural spillover hypothesis instead of the main competing hypothesis of a laboratory biosafety breach, i.e., a "lab leak." Previous genetic studies had identified two genetic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 in people early in the pandemic, suggesting two separate cross-species jumps into humans.

And, of course, the Chinese government's reluctance to play nicely with others factors in to this.

According to media reports, the data was taken off of GISAID after the international scientists analyzing the data reached out to China CDC to collaborate.

"The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community. This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier," Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said Friday.

Throughout the investigations into SARS-CoV-2 origins, China has pushed a dubious hypothesis that the virus originated outside its borders entirely, suggesting at one point that it was carried into the Huanan market via imported frozen foods. It has strongly pushed back on suggestions of a possible lab leak and had previously denied the existence of any wild animals in Huanan that could have acted as intermediate hosts.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed Van Kerkhove's frustration, emphasizing that the agency has again pushed China for transparency.

"These data could have—and should have—been shared three years ago," Tedros said Friday. "We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results. Understanding how the pandemic began remains both a moral and scientific imperative."

[Isgrimnur]

I didn't know raccoon dogs could perform gain-of-function research.

[Unagi]

I didn't know raccoon dogs could perform gain-of-function research.

I think they just sponsored it.

[LordMortis]

I didn't know raccoon dogs could perform gain-of-function research.

Doctor Tony Tony Chooper is not a Racoon Dog!!!!

[Max Peck]

Pandas in Wuhan market? China’s COVID genetic study is out—it has problems

Chinese scientists have published their long-awaited genetic analysis of the samples and swabs they collected in early 2020 from the Huanan Seafood Market, the initial epicenter of the pandemic.

In the study, published Wednesday in Nature, the authors acknowledge for the first time that wildlife susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection—including raccoon dogs—were present in the market amid the plethora of genetic traces from SARS-CoV-2 and humans. But, the overall analysis is flawed, indicating the presence of animals that were almost certainly not at the market, including giant pandas, chimpanzees, and Atlantic grey seals. The authors continued to downplay the potential that a virus spillover from wildlife to humans in the crowded market was the spark that ignited the pandemic. Instead, they repeatedly put forward, without evidence, hypotheses favored by Chinese officials, namely that the virus was carried into the market via humans or frozen foods, and the bustling venue became an amplifier site for infection.

Still, the publication of the data is momentous—and a long time coming. Though the samples were collected from January 1 to March 30 of 2020, a draft of the study and some of the data were only first released in a preprint two years later, in February 2022. The preprint reported that SARS-CoV-2 was abundant amid human genetic material from the samples, indicating that the virus was prevalent among people at the market before it was shuttered on the morning of January 1. The authors, led by scientists at China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), noted that they had also tested some animals in the market—mostly rabbits, stray cats, and snakes—but all were negative for SARS-CoV-2.

[Smoove_B]

It's been a while since this thread had a bump, but today's news is absolutely bonkers:

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.

The group attempted to have Nature and its staff put under surveillance and investigated by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Japanese and Australian intelligence agencies. They met Cabinet minister Michael Gove and later asked him to arrange phone taps and electronic surveillance. One member of the group led intrusive investigations into the intimate personal life and background circumstances of senior Nature staff the group suspected of “extreme Sinophile views”.

...

The campaign was led by former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Sir Richard Dearlove in conjunction with retired history academic Gwythian (Gwyn) Prins, and lobbyist John Constable of the privately funded climate change denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation. The scientific member of the group, oncologist professor Gus Dalgleish, was a prominent member of UKIP who had stood as the party’s parliamentary candidate in a south London constituency then campaigned for “Leave Means Leave”. All were avid supporters of Brexit.

...

After the failure of their Covid campaign, the group moved instead to coordinate attacks on climate change prevention activities, which they also blamed on a Chinese-run “Green Blob”.

Springer Nature told Byline Times and Computer Weekly that the publishing group did not wish to comment in this report.

At the request of Springer Nature, Computer Weekly agreed to exclude from this article the names of the staff members and editors who were targeted by the “hunters”.

Computer Weekly’s investigation has established that the slurs the Hunters circulated and published in the press, alleging that Nature and its staff were Chinese agents, were false and baseless.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Meanwhile, scurrilous unperson Matt Taibbi provides an interesting footnote on this topic:

Footnote: I, Faucius
About being late to the party, and other issues raised by readers about today's "Anthony Fauci, Warmup Dictator" piece

The piece published earlier today, “Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator,” prompted a few hot texts and comments that deserve responses. A common theme is that I need to own being late to the topic.

It’s true. Fauci, Covid, and treatment of people like fired podcaster Alison Morrow and censored Drs. Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty are on my conscience. Intimidated by the science, I decided early to sidestep pandemic stories, and as a result blew off people who could have used support. Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger were the ones who knew to look up Jay’s name in the Twitter Files. Their focus on Covid turned out to be key in spotting the worst mischief in those documents, because so many pandemic-related removals were based on narrative rather than factual transgressions. Suppression of posts supposedly encouraging “vaccine hesitancy” created the template for true political censorship. This was the moment when platforms and government agencies learned to punish based not on what was written, but the state of mind of the writer, a next-level dystopian technique.

I had to start over to get through jargon-laden texts like the Slack chats of the “Proximal Origin” authors. Going back through pandemic chronology was embarrassing — I can’t believe how much I missed in real time — but also drove home how much olé journalism went on among people who supposedly covered the story every day. There was close to zero meaningful pushback in the early months to public messaging on a slew of issues like natural immunity, age-specific risk, and especially the monstrous infection mortality rate error that sent the country into a panic from which it still hasn’t really recovered:



So, yes, there was an awful lot that anyone paying even minimal attention should have known then, but many official deceptions are also only becoming clear now. An example is this past week’s Public/Racket story about Fauci’s “big tour” promoting zoonotic origin to the CIA, State Department, and White House.

Even though emails show Fauci was intimately involved with crafting the “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper, and one source told us this week that Fauci might even have brought one of the paper’s authors with him in those official briefings, he pretended not to know their names in an April 17, 2020 press conference touting their findings. “I don’t have the authors right now,” he said, when he insisted “highly qualified evolutionary virologists” determined the data on Covid was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”



We didn’t find out until late July of this year that the “Proximal Origin” authors were exchanging thoughts like “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” and “we also can’t fully rule out engineering” up until April 16th of that year, i.e. the day before that April 17 press conference above. That adds a brand new extreme-cringe factor to a video you’ve probably seen before.

It’s one thing to have an “evolving” take on mask efficacy, and another to tell a lie or two to scare people into getting a shot. Bullying bad research into existence and pretending in perfect TV deadpan not to know the names of the researchers, all while hyping a bogus paper you helped create, is corruption on a different scale. Add algorithmic suppression of Covid policy critics we now know was going on by then, and you have a story that looks uglier every time you glance in the rearview mirror. So yes, a lot of this is old news, but there are also new dimensions to the Covid debacle popping up every day that need examining, as no one’s come close to finding the bottom of this thing.

[stessier]

I don't understand what part of that is supposed to be interesting. It's just the same conspiracy stuff all over again.

[LordMortis]

I don't have the patience to wade through Taibbi's dreck any more. He shot his credibility as a lien on my time some time ago (first when he started writing anti Ukraine propaganda before the Russian invasion and finally when he became a paid political mouthpiece for Shitter's "public square" vision), so I'll trust stessier's assessment.

[Unagi]

I don't have the patience to wade through Taibbi's dreck any more. He shot his credibility as a lien on my time some time ago (first when he started writing anti Ukraine propaganda before the Russian invasion and finally when he became a paid political mouthpiece for Shitter's "public square" vision), so I'll trust stessier's assessment.

And I'm totally in agreement with the assessment you just gave - so I'm going to trust your trusting of stessier's assessment as well.

[Exodor]

Matt Taibbi

Yeah, I stopped reading right there.

[Anonymous Bosch]

I don't understand what part of that is supposed to be interesting. It's just the same conspiracy stuff all over again.

Alas, people often confuse skeptics with conspiracy aficionados because it's easier to spurn intelligent analysis with terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument, or evaluate the evidence and contemplate the reasoning provided to support its conclusion.

[Pyperkub]

It's been a while since this thread had a bump, but today's news is absolutely bonkers:

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.

The group attempted to have Nature and its staff put under surveillance and investigated by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Japanese and Australian intelligence agencies. They met Cabinet minister Michael Gove and later asked him to arrange phone taps and electronic surveillance. One member of the group led intrusive investigations into the intimate personal life and background circumstances of senior Nature staff the group suspected of “extreme Sinophile views”.

...

The campaign was led by former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Sir Richard Dearlove in conjunction with retired history academic Gwythian (Gwyn) Prins, and lobbyist John Constable of the privately funded climate change denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation. The scientific member of the group, oncologist professor Gus Dalgleish, was a prominent member of UKIP who had stood as the party’s parliamentary candidate in a south London constituency then campaigned for “Leave Means Leave”. All were avid supporters of Brexit.

...

After the failure of their Covid campaign, the group moved instead to coordinate attacks on climate change prevention activities, which they also blamed on a Chinese-run “Green Blob”.

Springer Nature told Byline Times and Computer Weekly that the publishing group did not wish to comment in this report.

At the request of Springer Nature, Computer Weekly agreed to exclude from this article the names of the staff members and editors who were targeted by the “hunters”.

Computer Weekly’s investigation has established that the slurs the Hunters circulated and published in the press, alleging that Nature and its staff were Chinese agents, were false and baseless.

This is totally bonkers, even if not unexpected, but the implications for what these types of people are and will continue to do are terrifying.

[Smoove_B]

Alas, people often confuse skeptics with conspiracy aficionados because it's easier to spurn intelligent analysis with terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument, or evaluate the evidence and contemplate the reasoning provided to support its conclusion.

It's a bit hard to take him seriously as he's pointing out the problems with performative journalism while...engaging in performative journalism (for Elon Musk). He's in the same vein as Nate Silver. Someone that had expertise and experience (legitimate, not being sarcastic) in a specific field, but is now an expert in public health, zoonotic illnesses, research laboratories and of course science journalism.

[GreenGoo]

Alas, people often confuse skeptics with conspiracy aficionados because it's easier to spurn intelligent analysis with terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument, or evaluate the evidence and contemplate the reasoning provided to support its conclusion.

I wrote out a longish post addressing this, but then I realized I didn't want to get into a debate about it.

We've rebutted these types of articles repeatedly for 3 years. I think we're done doing it.

Yes, I spurn and dismiss him. Super easy.

Alas indeed.

[LawBeefaroni]

The campaign was led by former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Sir Richard Dearlove...

Ah yes, Sir Dick Dearlove, former head of SIS.

[GreenGoo]

Ah yes, Sir Dick Dearlove, former head of SIS.

I recently had to explain to my daughter why the detective in the anime we were watching was named "dick gumshoe".

[Carpet_pissr]

LOL!

Played by Mr. Bean in the upcoming motion picture.

Or Ron Jeremy depending on which way they go with it.

[stessier]

I don't understand what part of that is supposed to be interesting. It's just the same conspiracy stuff all over again.

Alas, people often confuse skeptics with conspiracy aficionados because it's easier to spurn intelligent analysis with terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument, or evaluate the evidence and contemplate the reasoning provided to support its conclusion.

"I am not a conspiracist, I just parrot their talking points" is not intelligent analysis.

[RunningMn9]

I would just like to say that I trust all of you to dismiss what I don’t need to waste time on. I appreciate it.

[malchior]

Alas, people often confuse skeptics with conspiracy aficionados because it's easier to spurn intelligent analysis with terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument, or evaluate the evidence and contemplate the reasoning provided to support its conclusion.

It's a bit hard to take him seriously as he's pointing out the problems with performative journalism while...engaging in performative journalism (for Elon Musk). He's in the same vein as Nate Silver. Someone that had expertise and experience (legitimate, not being sarcastic) in a specific field, but is now an expert in public health, zoonotic illnesses, research laboratories and of course science journalism.

Yikes. Talk about burning down your reputation. The evidence? Some comments in a grant application. Did it happen? Who knows?! Was any of this research actually dangerous? Experts say no but why listen to them - they're all in the conpiracy!? Nate - a "data guy" has completely fallen into a self-sealing conspiracy theory clique.

[Smoove_B]

Nate Silver really is the gift that keeps on giving.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Jim Geraghty, writing in the National Review, shares some further details on how prominent U.S. virologists planned to evade oversight as to what kind of gain-of-function experiments were being conducted on coronaviruses found in bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, along with some sobering perspective on the profound consequences of the pandemic…

Why China Was Never Held Accountable for the Covid-19 Lab Leak

Ignoring China’s Covid Role . . . to Our Detriment
We now know that prominent U.S. virologists did not want DARPA and the U.S. government to know what kind of gain-of-function experiments were being done on coronaviruses found in bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. James Meigs, writing over at Commentary:

The December breakthrough came when the medical watchdog group U.S. Right to Know unearthed an early draft of a 2018 grant proposal for a “Project DEFUSE.” The proposal outlines a joint project between [Ralph] Baric’s UNC lab and a team headed by WIV senior scientist Zhengli Shi, the famous “Bat Lady” of the Wuhan lab. The proposal was drafted under the supervision of Peter Daszak — whose EcoHealth Alliance would funnel the hoped-for grant money to the researchers — and was addressed to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the end, DARPA declined to fund the project. But many experts suspect the Wuhan lab conducted research along these lines using other funding sources.

Some of the most telling passages in the newly released documents show how EcoHealth’s Daszak and UNC researcher Baric planned to evade this oversight. . . .

Daszak’s and Baric’s deceptiveness about how and where their research would take place is all the more stunning when you consider how dangerous their proposal was. The project called for combining various bat-borne coronaviruses, modifying them by adding a “furin-cleavage site” that might help the virus bind to human cells, and then testing the supercharged virus on mice bred to have human-like cells in their lungs. When SARS-CoV-2 surged out of Wuhan in early 2020, it featured this exact type of furin-cleavage site, something never before seen in this family of viruses. This was the genetic quirk that alarmed many virologists who thought the virus looked “engineered.”

So, while DARPA didn’t fund the DEFUSE project, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Wuhan scientists followed this general roadmap (perhaps without the Americans’ knowledge). . . .

I said what I had to say in that cover piece back in 2022, that the natural-origin theory requires us to believe a series of coincidences so unlikely that it becomes effectively impossible:

In the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.

In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being extremely difficult to find in bats.

This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.

And, at least in the venue of American public opinion, those of us who thought a lab leak was a more likely cause of the pandemic won the argument. Back in 2023, a Quinnipiac University poll showed that 64 percent of Americans believed the pandemic started from a lab leak, compared to 22 percent who believed it had a natural origin. And the Economist/YouGov poll showed similar numbers: Sixty-six percent believed in the lab-leak theory, and 16 percent believed in the natural-origin theory.

Though we won the argument in the realm of public opinion . . . nothing happened. There are still few real consequences for the Chinese government, certainly no consequences commensurate for unleashing a plague that killed about 7 million people officially and anywhere from 18 million to 32 million if you count all the suspiciously high excess deaths in places such as China and Russia, among others. President Biden assures us that U.S. and Chinese relations are in a “thaw.”

Stories don’t get any bigger than the origin of a virus that caused a global pandemic, effectively shut down the world for a year, and changed the lives of every human being on the planet. We’re still dealing with the learning loss; we’re still living with the consequences of missed cancer diagnoses; we’re dealing with an explosion of skepticism about the value of all kinds of vaccines — thanks a lot, mandate advocates; and we’re dealing with an estimated financial cost of $14 trillion. (For perspective, all U.S. federal government spending in fiscal year 2023 was $6.1 trillion.)

And yet, when we wake up every morning, most of us choose to think about other topics — and hey, there are a lot of other important priorities in this world. But sometimes it feels like vast swaths of American society chose to forget about the pandemic at the first opportunity and chose to not keep asking how and why the pandemic started, because they and some of our leaders didn’t like the probable answers. Holding the Chinese government accountable for setting off the pandemic would just be too difficult. There’s still $575 billion in trade between the two countries. Mustn’t upset the applecart.

To quote the late wise philosopher Dennis Green, “They are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook.”

[GreenGoo]

[
And yet, when we wake up every morning, most of us choose to think about other topics — and hey, there are a lot of other important priorities in this world. But sometimes it feels like vast swaths of American society chose to forget about the pandemic at the first opportunity and chose to not keep asking how and why the pandemic started, because they and some of our leaders didn’t like the probable answers.

If Americans should spend any time at all thinking about the pandemic, they should be thinking about how to deal with a public health issue of that magnitude when it happens again.

Why the virus exists is probably the least important aspect they should waste time thinking about.

However, if they do want to understand the situation better, there are plenty of articles out there that cover it in more detail than a speculative article in the National Review.

[Victoria Raverna]

It is important if they want to be able to blame someone else (other country) for the pandemic and the public health issue that was the result of that pandemic.

[GreenGoo]

It is important if they want to be able to blame someone else (other country) for the pandemic and the public health issue that was the result of that pandemic.

Well it originated in China and they failed to contain it. If you need to blame someone, have at it.

[Zaxxon]

It is important if they want to be able to blame someone else

The American way!

[El Guapo]

It is important if they want to be able to blame someone else (other country) for the pandemic and the public health issue that was the result of that pandemic.

Well it originated in China and they failed to contain it. If you need to blame someone, have at it.

Whether the pandemic originated as a lab leak does have significant non-xenophobic policy implications. Like presumably it would matter to how we approach the regulation of disease research labs.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Additional commentary on the new documents from the former science editor of the New York Times, Nicholas Wade:

Where Did Covid Come From?

New documents bolster the theory that it not only escaped from a laboratory but was developed in one.


ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN KOZLOWSKI

In the four years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unleashed on the world, data have steadily accumulated supporting the hypothesis that it emerged from a laboratory. The latest information, released last month, makes a formidable case that the virus is the product of laboratory synthesis, not of nature.

This startling fact will probably take some time to sink into the national consciousness, given the mainstream media’s sustained inability to report the issue objectively. Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis. Science journalists are too beholden to their sources to suspect that virologists would lie to them about the extent of their profession’s responsibility for a catastrophic pandemic.

Here are some salient facts that haven’t been clearly reported to readers of the mainstream press:

In March 2018 a team of American and Chinese virologists applied to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, seeking a $14 million grant to manipulate viruses related to SARS-CoV-1, the bat virus that caused a minor epidemic in 2002. Their goal was to identify bat viruses in Asia with the highest potential for jumping to people and to immunize bats so they wouldn’t infect soldiers in the region.

The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site.

In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process.

Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team.

The new documents, which are background planning papers and drafts for the DEFUSE proposal, call for assembling SARS-like viruses from six sections of DNA, and include a cost estimate for purchase of the BsmBI restriction enzyme—exactly as the three authors had inferred. This clearly strengthens, perhaps conclusively, their contention that the virus is synthetic. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, says it raises “to the level of a smoking gun” the genetic evidence that the virus was manufactured.

Other strong indicators of the virus’s laboratory birth include the furin cleavage site, possessed by none of the other more than 1,500 members of its viral family with which in nature it might swap genetic material. The codons—“words” used by the genetic code to specify the units of proteins—that define the cleavage site are those preferred by humans, not coronaviruses, pointing to their likely origin in a lab kit. And whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol.

The authors of the proposal were a team led by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Although Mr. Baric is the leading expert on the technology, Mr. Daszak intended for much or most of the work to be done in Ms. Shi’s laboratory, despite giving a different impression to Darpa. He writes in the recently discovered documents that “I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan.”

Ms. Shi did most of her work with SARS-type viruses in the minimal-containment condition known as BSL2, whereas Mr. Baric, who regarded the viruses as seriously dangerous, worked in a more secure lab known as BSL3. Mr. Daszak noted that the lower-security labs would save money: “The BSL-2 nature of work on SARSr-CoVs makes our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” Mr. Baric replied to this comment that the viruses might be grown under BSL2 safety conditions in China, but “US researchers will likely freak out.”

Mr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance last year asserted that the DEFUSE project was never implemented: “The proposal was not funded and the work was never done, therefore it cannot have played a role in the origin of COVID-19.” But science is a competitive business. After Darpa turned down the DEFUSE proposal in February 2019, the researchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government funding and gone ahead by themselves. Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin. (Mr. Daszak, Mr. Baric and Ms. Shi didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. Chinese officials have demanded that the U.S. “stop defaming China” by raising the possibility of a lab leak.)

One piece is missing from the puzzle—the identity of the parent viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 was derived. The Chinese authorities have rigorously suppressed all information about the viruses being kept in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the documentary and scientific evidence already assembled seems sufficient to understand the genesis of the pandemic that killed millions.

[stessier]

[Anonymous Bosch]

Bona fide evidentiary documents released -- slowly and reluctantly -- from federal agencies via Freedom of Information Act requests do not "A New Study…" make.

[LordMortis]

I'll wait for others to assess the documents in question before worrying about the evidence this time. Who knows, this time it may be meaningful and I'm too ignorant to know. On the author:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wade

A Troublesome Inheritance

In 2014, Wade released A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in which he argued that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional" and that genes may have influenced a variety of behaviours that underpin differing forms of human society.[26][page needed] The book has been widely denounced by scientists, including many of those upon whose work the book was based.[27][5][6][7]

On 8 August 2014, The New York Times Book Review published an open letter signed by 139 faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology[5][6] which read:[27]

Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures.

After publication, the letter was signed by four more faculty members.[7] In response to the letter, Wade said these scientists had misunderstood his intent.[5][6]

The book was further criticised in a series of five reviews by Agustín Fuentes, Jonathan M. Marks, Jennifer Raff, Charles C. Roseman and Laura R. Stein, which were published together in the scientific journal Human Biology.[28] Marks, for instance, described the book as "entirely derivative, an argument made from selective citations, misrepresentations, and speculative pseudoscience."[29] Biologist H. Allen Orr called the book "lively and generally serviceable", but said it was "not [...] without error", stating that Wade had overstated the evidence for recent natural selection in the human genome.[30]

[Unagi]

Yeah, that's not the best author synopsis.

Big red flag with "including many of those upon whose work the book was based", which speaks of manipulation of facts to support his narrative.

I'm with LM here, and I'll wait for a body of scientists, all generally respected, to come to a consensus on it.


Frankly, even then - I'm not sure what I should do with the information of a lab leak, if it's ultimately true.

[Anonymous Bosch]

I'll wait for others to assess the documents in question before worrying about the evidence this time. Who knows, this time it may be meaningful and I'm too ignorant to know. On the author:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wade

A Troublesome Inheritance

In 2014, Wade released A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in which he argued that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional" and that genes may have influenced a variety of behaviours that underpin differing forms of human society.[26][page needed] The book has been widely denounced by scientists, including many of those upon whose work the book was based.[27][5][6][7]

On 8 August 2014, The New York Times Book Review published an open letter signed by 139 faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology[5][6] which read:[27]

Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures.

After publication, the letter was signed by four more faculty members.[7] In response to the letter, Wade said these scientists had misunderstood his intent.[5][6]

The book was further criticised in a series of five reviews by Agustín Fuentes, Jonathan M. Marks, Jennifer Raff, Charles C. Roseman and Laura R. Stein, which were published together in the scientific journal Human Biology.[28] Marks, for instance, described the book as "entirely derivative, an argument made from selective citations, misrepresentations, and speculative pseudoscience."[29] Biologist H. Allen Orr called the book "lively and generally serviceable", but said it was "not [...] without error", stating that Wade had overstated the evidence for recent natural selection in the human genome.[30]

So what? Perhaps the author is a puppy-kicking nun-puncher, but attacking a person's character instead of the merits of their argument serves only as a distraction to draw attention away from the underlying issue he was addressing.

[Victoria Raverna]

I don't think it was attacking his character but just being a bit scepticm about his speculation based on his previous claim/speculation.

It is not about if he was a puppy kicking or nun punching. It is about he was known to be wrong.

[LordMortis]

So what? Perhaps the author is a puppy-kicking nun-puncher, but attacking a person's character instead of the merits of their argument serves only as a distraction to draw attention away from the underlying issue he was addressing.

I'm not attacking him on his character. I'm "attacking" trusting that he's being objective with his findings on documents not shown, that I'm not likely to understand anyway based on the idea that a large body experts he's cited in the past denounce his findings. So I'll wait for others more knowledgeable than I to make an assessment and put more trust in them. If anything, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by waiting for others, rather than dismissing him like I've dismissed others passing their beliefs as definitive findings.

I don't see the merits of his argument. I don't see the documents and rather doubt I'd understand them if I did.

[Anonymous Bosch]

I don't think it was attacking his character but just being a bit scepticm about his speculation based on his previous claim/speculation.

It is not about if he was a puppy kicking or nun punching. It is about he was known to be wrong.

Every human on the face of the earth has been known to be wrong, so based upon LM's cited Wikipedia quotation, what exactly is dubious in Wade's particular assessment of the documents released via FOIA request from the Interior Department? Or the assessment of the former editor of Popular Mechanics, who's likely every bit as fallible?

[Anonymous Bosch]

I don't see the documents and rather doubt I'd understand them if I did.

The relevant documents are all available right here, FWIW.

[GreenGoo]

Whether the pandemic originated as a lab leak does have significant non-xenophobic policy implications. Like presumably it would matter to how we approach the regulation of disease research labs.

You'll note the article was talking about the average American. If the average american is interested in regulatory policy re: disease research labs, then yes, it would be good for them to pay attention. I feel like those particular americans are already paying attention though.