Thanks Srutayus Ji. I have read the article in detail, quite sobering. There is a four hour long podcast on the role of SynBio attacks - deliberate or accidental by Rob Reid and Sam Harris which is quite fascinating.
I think this article is so important that I have taken the liberty of summarizing it for BRF readers, details and links are all in the original. Mods may wish to move or delete it if not in the spirit of the thread. I believe it is a fresh review and much needed, esp when you consider the role of the US government and the much adored Dr. Fauci.
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A week ago an article was published by Nicholas Wade, a science writer from the NYT who has worked on Nature and Science journals in the past. He argues that the origins of the virus causing havoc in the world for over a year are still shrouded in mystery. This is because right from the beginning every effort was made by China and its sponsored scientists around the world to suppress any thought that this may have been made in a lab, the alternate hypothesis that it is naturally occurring and somehow jumped from bats to humans through the ‘wet markets’ of Wuhan is far more palatable and acceptable.
Wade puts forward a painstaking argument from both sides and lets the reader conclude what they will, although the evidence he puts forward strongly argues for a lab origin. It is a very, very long article but makes a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.
For TLDR types, I will summarize it here (spoiler alert). The entire story reads like a Robert Ludlum novel complete with twists and turns, heroes and villains and collusion at the highest levels of American and Chinese bureaucracy.
It appears that the Ecohealth alliance, an American non-profit organization headed by Dr. Peter Daszak was given a grant by the NIH to the tune of millions of dollars to fund research in the Wuhan lab conducted by Shi Zheng-Li (the ‘Bat Lady’). She had set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. The lab she worked in was a BSL2 and not BSL4 capable which should be the case.
On 9 December 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.
The NIH had funded this research from 2014 to 2019. It incredible that the American government would sponsor research in a lab in China to create something so monstrous. And yet it happened. Peter Daszak was the contractor for the grant and he subcontracted it to Shi. They all knew that this woman was working on ‘gain in function’ methodology to make the virus even more deadly and to be able to infect humans. There was actually a moratorium on this kind of research under the US law but there was a footnote clause (an escape clause) that allowed it ‘in national interest’. This required the head of the NIAD, Anthony Fauci and his counterpart in the NIH, Francis Collins to sign off on it. Which they did, as per Wade, but have not acknowledged it publicly.
And so it was.
In February 2020, just one week after the WHO so reluctantly announced that indeed the world was facing a new pandemic originating in China, a letter was published in the Lancet refuting all possibility of a lab origin for the virus identified in the pandemic. This letter was signed by 27 prominent virologists and stated categorically that it was a naturally occurring virus, even though they presented no evidence to support this, simply asserting their authority on the world, expecting everyone to believe them because they were the ‘experts in the field’.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak himself, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”
A month later, another group of ‘eminent’ virologists published another opinion piece in Nature, supporting the ‘naturally occurring virus’ theory. Again, no evidence was offered, just conjecture and hypotheses that have subsequently been debunked by other experts.
The National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions. The prudence of this decision can be questioned, whether or not SARS2 and the death of 3 million people was the result of it.
Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump Administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of National Intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored.
Wade argues that this happens because the mainstream media in the US (and possibly the world) has shifted to the left of the political spectrum.
In conclusion, he puts the blame squarely on the following four agencies:
1. Chinese virologists who have been performing gain of function studies in highly dangerous viruses in an attempt to make them even more lethal to humans
2. Chinese authorities, who may not have created the virus but did their utmost to suppress and conceal the nature of the tragedy and their ultimate responsibility for it.
3. International Virologists who found the lure of creating even more dangerous viruses and playing with possibilities too tempting and lobbied the US government to fund such research and lift any moratoriums on limits placed on it.
4. The US role in funding the Wuhan laboratory when it knew that it was only a BSL2 lab and was pursuing gain of function studies on such dangerous viruses.
