“I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science.
Jon Stewart, June 2021
Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic—which was more than likely caused by science.”
I guess it finally happened. The NIH decided to throw EcoHealth Alliance under the bus, because they “violated terms of [their] grant“:
In a letter, the NIH claims that the grant to EHA was initially approved because the work was not expected to lead to a more pathogenic virus, but that the researchers failed to report an increased disease in mice at least 10-fold, as required by the terms. In fact, their progress report was filed more than two years late, which is something the NIH is not normally very chill about.
While the debate over the origin of the novel coronavirus can now happen in polite society – and an increasing number of mainstream news outlets are writing articles about the possibility of a lab leak – it is important to recognize that, for months, some in the scientific community attempted to use their status and authority to suppress valid hypotheses. That is, there was a time that any insinuation that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from anything other than zoonotic spillover was considered anathema or a “conspiracy theory.” This position was not based on the scientific merits, but rather a concerted effort to evade scrutiny. Journalists cited articles that hurled conclusory findings and were blessed with the imprimatur of top-tier journals, including The Lancet and Nature Medicine. Even the World Health Organization collapsed to CCP pressure to discount the idea during its first investigation:
“The team in Wuhan appeared to have given in to Chinese pressure to dismiss the idea without a real investigation. Later, when the WHO-China team released a report that again dismissed that scenario, [Director General] Tedros pushed back, saying that…there had not been ‘timely and comprehensive data-sharing.’ “
But the involvement of a lab was never an outlandish idea. It is true that virtually all known pandemics to date have had a natural origin, and that everyone involved denied any culpability. But lab accidents do happen. For a pandemic to start in the city with a bat coronavirus research lab – as opposed to any other large population center – with a bat coronavirus whose closest known relatives were collected by that lab from caves over 1,000 miles away, is pretty suspicious. As Jon Stewart said: “Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?” he continued. “Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f—ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.”
In a briefing to Congress this month, Dr. Brix said that the story that a lab leak was implausible was never based on data:
As (finally) reported in Atlantic, EHA head Peter Daszak was essentially appointed lead investigator over himself, and was central to shaping the early narrative:
For years, scientists have been warning about the dangers of trying to create new viruses in an effort to stay one step ahead of naturally occurring pandemics. Others have claimed that the risks of spillovers is so great, that it is worth taking that chance. Dr. Anthony Fauci is known today as the public face of the US response to COVID-19, but he has been in public health for a very long time. In fact, he has been leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He wrote in 2012 in favor of gain-of-function research, claiming the benefits outweighed the risks, up to and including accidently starting a pandemic yourself:
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? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily. This is a valid concern.
Gain of function research was thrown into the spotlight in November 2015, when Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Ralph Baric at UNC published an article describing how they built a chimeric virus.
A few days later in the same journal, an article “Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research” quoted Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”
Just to make sure no one get the “wrong idea,” the editors saw fit to retroactively slap this label on the article:
Editors’ note, March 2020 We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
Then, an article in Motherboard had the title “Ethical Questions Arise After Scientists Brew Super Powerful ‘SARS 2.0’ Virus: Creating powerful new viruses has benefits and dangers.” Baric tried to justify his work by claiming that another SARS-like pandemic is inevitable, and that research on enhanced coronaviruses would open the way for new vaccines and treatments. One venue for these apologetics was an episode of This week in Virology, with the title: “It’s not SARS 2.0”
What annoys me the most personally are the scientists that publicly denounced lab origins as “crackpot theories” when they them themselves harbored suspicions privately only days previously. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Kristian Andersen said in an email to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020
But, ostensibly due to a conference call the next day, these doubts were quickly set aside: “Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan…for more than a year, those who publicly raised such questions were too often deemed a crackpot conspiracy theorist…”
[Later, however, Fauci claimed that it was absolutely not an overwhelming consensus view: “It was a very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus,”]
Some emails surrounding the call remain redacted. The teleconference was led by Farrar, an expert on infectious diseases, who admits that he saw the ‘huge coincidence’ of a novel coronavirus erupting in ‘a city with a superlab’ that was ‘home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses’…Yet, “three days after the conference call, Andersen emailed Daszak to discuss how to counter ‘crackpot theories’ suggesting ‘this virus being somehow engineered with intent’ when it was ‘demonstrably not the case’. ” Andersen went on to be the first author of the infamous “proximal origin” paper that came out the very next month and claimed without any real basis that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” In recent interviews, Andersen says he changed his mind due to evidence, and that he was even calling himself a crackpot for his initial suspicions.
The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are obviously a matter of huge public concern. Millions of people are dead, and the best way to prevent the next pandemic is to get to the truth about how COVID-19 came to be. While we don’t know the answer yet, the lab leak was never a crazy, fringe theory. Let’s not allow the people who tried to stifle open scientific debate on such a crucial issue not engage in revisionist history .
Right after the COVID-19 pandemic started, Dr. Shi said she had “not slept a wink for days” until she “checked her laboratory records” to reassure herself that her lab was not responsible. The obvious implication, before the new narrative was imposed, what that a lab leak was obviously a possibility.
of Photons, Protons, and Proteins 