By Jim Geraghty
Monday, October
25, 2021
As we contemplate how the COVID-19
pandemic began, let’s add up all of the strange and unusual pieces of
information that, in the eyes of the lab leak skeptics, are complete coincidences.
·
In 2009, EcoHealth Alliance’s Alexsei
Chmura led expeditions to collect samples of viruses from bats in caves in
southern China. He did not wear a mask or other personal protective gear, telling
science writer David Quammen, “I guess it’s like not wearing a seat belt.”
·
A March 2018
grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed “introduc[ing] 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, “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology, will conduct viral testing on
all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work.”
·
The National Institute of Health revealed last
week that EcoHealth Alliance had
non-deliberately made viruses more virulent during their research work with the
Wuhan Institute of Virology. “The limited experiment described in the final
progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins
from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of
binding to the human ACE2 receptor on a mouse model,” Tabak wrote. (Before the
pandemic, Chinese research scientists had engineered a supply of mice with “humanized” lungs, to give a better sense of how
these viruses would affect human beings.) “All other aspects of the mice,
including the immune system, were unchanged,” the letter continues. “In this
limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat
coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.”
NIH emphasized that “as sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected
result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to
do.”
·
According to
Emily Kopp of Roll Call, “the
NIH’s letter states that EcoHealth violated a provision in its contract
requiring a report to government funders should one of the viruses in its
experiment produce “a one log increase in growth.” In other words, EcoHealth
was not supposed to enhance a virus’s ability to grow by a factor of 10 without
notifying NIH. EcoHealth, working with the Wuhan lab, created novel
coronaviruses that enhanced viral growth by 1,000-fold to 10,000-fold, orders
of magnitude greater than the limit that should have triggered further NIH
review, according to agency documents made public in recent weeks. The increase
in viral load, which is closely tied to transmissibility, also resulted in more
severe disease in mice in some cases.”
·
The Wuhan
Institute of Virology kept live bats within its walls, a verified fact that EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak
initially denied.
·
American officials who visited the Wuhan
Institute of Virology in 2017 reported to
the U.S. State Department that
the labs suffered from “a serious shortage of the highly trained technicians
and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory.”
·
Shi Zhengli, nicknamed “Bat Woman,” 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?” However, since
the pandemic began, she vehemently denied that the WIV was the source of the
virus.
·
In late autumn/early winter of 2019, as
the COVID-19 pandemic started, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of three
institutions in the world conducting gain-of-function-research on novel
coronaviruses found in bats.
·
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes
COVID-19, has not yet
been found naturally occurring in any other bat or animal in China – at least, according to Chinese authorities.
·
Researchers at University of California
San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues at the University of Arizona and
Illumina, Inc., attempted to
run simulations of natural spillover of viruses from animals. They concluded that depending upon certain variables, anywhere from 70
percent to 99.6 percent of the time, the virus would not spread quickly enough
from one person to the next and would go extinct. SARS-CoV-2 is exceptionally
contagious among human beings compared to the average bat or other animal virus
– almost genetically optimized for this purpose.
·
Similarly, research
published by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018 examined the villagers who lived closest to the
coronavirus-carrying bats in Yunnan Province and concluded that natural
“spillover” from bats directly to humans is “relatively rare” – just 2.7
perecnt of the villagers had antibodies indicating exposure to a bat virus.
So, in theory, the pandemic could have
started with some random Chinese person who doesn’t have any connection to the
Wuhan Institute of Virology having some spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat
or other animal…
….and that random Chinese person just
happened to catch the exceptionally rare naturally-occurring animal virus that
infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire…
…on the metaphorical doorstep of one of
the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel
coronaviruses found in bats…
…and that spectacularly contagious virus
also just happens to be nearly impossible to find in any other bats or animals
in China.
But that’s one hell of a series of
coincidences, isn’t it?
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