By Jim Geraghty
Monday, September 27, 2021
Back in June
2020, the medical journal The Lancet formed
a commission to investigate and offer guidance on all aspects of the COVID-19
pandemic, including a pledge to create a task force focusing on “the nature,
origin, and prevention of zoonotic diseases.” The Lancet named
Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University, one of the world’s most celebrated
experts on international development and an adviser to the United Nations, as
chairman of the commission.
By November 2020, the commission had
formed the task force on COVID-19’s origins and selected Dr. Peter Daszak, the
president of EcoHealth Alliance, to chair it. You didn’t have to be a wide-eyed
conspiracy theorist to find a problem with a man who had extensive financial
ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology being the one in charge of
investigating whether a global pandemic started from an accident at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. Daszak is the favorite American COVID-19 expert of Chinese-state-run media. What’s more, in an interview with the state-run Global
Times in February 2021, Daszak echoed the supremely implausible claim of the
Chinese government that SARS-CoV-2 originated in another country and was somehow imported into Wuhan. Daszak stated that EcoHealth
Alliance was focusing its own investigation into the origins of COVID-19 by
examining similar viruses in Thailand, Japan, and Cambodia. After being the
only American whom the Chinese government would allow to visit Wuhan as part of
the World Health Organization team, Daszak said in a March interview with CBS
News’ Leslie Stahl that, “It wasn’t our task to find out if China had covered
up the origin issue.” Daszak said he took his Chinese colleagues at their word
that there was no reason to suspect a lab leak.
In June, Daszak recused himself from the
COVID-19 commission established by The Lancet — not over his
public embrace of China’s implausible blame-shifting theories but because of
complaints that he didn’t disclose past conflicts of interest in his
contributions to that journal.
The good news is that Sachs has realized
that the conflict of interest goes beyond Daszak, concluding that other members
of the task force had collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on
various projects. The bad news is that Sachs has disbanded the entire
commission investigating the origin of COVID-19, and instead the commission
will “continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022
but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns
including government oversight and transparency regarding risky laboratory
research,” according to
the Wall Street Journal.
The Lancet’s investigation has ceased; apparently it is just too hard to find
qualified scientific minds who don’t have some past tie to Daszak or EcoHealth.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization
is launching a
new investigation: “A new team of about 20 scientists —
including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and
animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature — is being
assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.” This
represents a modest win for the Biden administration, as “officials, including
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have pressed WHO director-general Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus publicly and privately to renew the inquiry, which is
likely to include at least one American.”
It is unclear how intensely the U.S.
government is still investigating the origins of a pandemic that has killed at
least 4.7 million people worldwide (some estimates put it much higher),
infected 232 million, briefly shut down the world, disrupted the education of
hundreds of millions of children, and set off a global economic slowdown.
Back on May 26, President Biden announced
that he had “asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to
collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive
conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days. As part of that report, I have
asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific
questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our
National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence
Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep
Congress fully apprised of its work.”
Three months later, the U.S. intelligence
community came back with a report that was useless, offering almost nothing new
to what was publicly known about the start of the pandemic. The publicly
released summary of its investigation is barely a page and a half, and offered
less information than most lengthy magazine pieces, offering the obvious and
unhelpful conclusion that “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are
plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and laboratory-associated
incident.”
Neither the intelligence community nor the
Biden administration ever shared any specific questions for China. We never
heard any details about any work by the National Labs. Whatever the
intelligence community did find out in those three months, the Biden administration
and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines have no interest in sharing
it with the American people or the world. No one in the administration has said
anything about the origins of COVID-19 since the intelligence community’s
report arrived.
One aspect of the ongoing debate that is
particularly frustrating is that nearly two years after the pandemic started,
some (possibly disingenuous) voices still insist that any evidence of a
zoonotic origin — that is, evidence that the virus jumped from a bat or other
animal — is ipso facto evidence that the pandemic could not be caused by a lab
leak. But the Wuhan Institute
of Virology kept live bats within its walls, a verified fact that Daszak initially denied. We know that in the
past, Chinese
researchers and EcoHealth Alliance researchers collected bats in the wild
without protective equipment. And we know visiting American researchers concluded that the Wuhan
Institute of Virology suffered from “a shortage of the highly trained
technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4
laboratory and lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and
guidelines.”
We also know that the Wuhan
Institute of Virology was conducting gain-of-function research on novel
coronaviruses found in bats —
that is, taking existing novel coronaviruses found in bats and figuring out
ways to make them more virulent and more contagious. And in a point that cannot
be emphasized enough, the pandemic began on the metaphorical doorstep of one of three
institutions in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel
coronaviruses in bats.
As Dr. Richard Ebright, a board of
governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and
a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, summarized it to Vanity
Fair, “It’s not a dozen cities. It’s three places.”
The independent investigative group
DRASTIC found a March 2018
grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposing an effort to “introduce appropriate
human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses; in other words, to take
existing bat viruses and make them more likely to infect human beings. The
proposal declared that “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral
testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse
work.” This is Shi Zhengli, nicknamed “Bat Woman,” who said in a
March 2020 interview with Scientific American that when she first heard of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, one
of her first questions was, “Could they have come from our lab?” She vehemently
denies that the WIV is the source of the virus.
Over at The Atlantic, Daniel
Engber and Adam Federman examined the EcoHealth proposal to DARPA; the headline
concludes that, “The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier,” which is a
painfully obfuscatory summary. (Engber and Federman may not have written the
headline.) Their piece
ends with a not-very-messy conclusion:
In May
2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed
discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy
theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major,
international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health
Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it
appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant
proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that
described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan
said.
The
pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important
information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month
delay, that describe
experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some
experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and
the U.S. government.
What’s fascinating is that we have a new
virus whose genetic code is most similar to those found in
samples taken from a mineshaft in southern China and taken to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology for additional study, a Chinese
government that lied at every step of the opening weeks of the pandemic, and a U.S. virus-research bureaucracy that has deliberately withheld,
covered up, lied, and obscured relevant information . . . and some people still
dismiss all of this as a “conspiracy theory.”
No comments:
Post a Comment