Anthony Fauci’s Emails Reveal The Pressure That Fell On One Man

rmstock · June 02, 2021, 12:53:29 PM

Anthony Fauci waits to testify on Capitol Hill in June 2020
Pool / Getty Images
Anthony Fauci's Emails Reveal The Pressure That Fell On One Man
Thousands of pages of communications obtained by BuzzFeed News show how
Fauci tried to keep Americans calm and develop an effective strategy
despite conflicts with the Trump administration.
Natalie Bettendorf Jason Leopold
BuzzFeed Contributor BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on June 1, 2021, at 1:59 p.m. ET
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nataliebettendorf/fauci-emails-covid-response

"The woman's email arrived in Anthony Fauci's inbox on Feb. 28, 2020,
with a one-word subject line: "URGENT."

The coronavirus crisis was still in its early stages, and Fauci, the US
government's top infectious disease scientist, was already under
tremendous pressure, both because of the health threat facing the
country and the political climate fostered by the Trump administration.

"I understand Vice President Pence has ordered you to not inform the
public about Coronavirus without approval. This is quite terrifying,
especially since Trump has already shown his desire to spread false or
incomplete information about this public health crisis," the woman
wrote.

She had tracked down Fauci's email, which is not easily accessible on
government websites, because she had a pressing question: "I'm planning
to fly domestically TOMORROW [REDACTED]. Is it safe??"

Of course, Fauci had urgent matters of his own to attend to, but he
replied to the stranger anyway the next day. "There is much
misinformation," he wrote back. "I actually have not been muzzled at
all by the Vice President. And BTW, it is safe to fly domestically
[REDACTED]."

More than 3,200 pages of emails* obtained through a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed News — covering the period
from January to June 2020 — provide a rare glimpse into how Fauci
approached his job during the biggest health crisis of the last
century, showing him dealing directly with the public, health
officials, reporters, and even celebrities. (The Washington Post also
received more than 800 pages of emails and published a story about them
on Monday.)
* https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561/leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails.pdf
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The emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal him sparring over an
antiviral drug with Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama administration
health adviser, fielding questions about vaccines, and receiving an
update from Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's plans for a coronavirus
"information hub." Zuckerberg also asked whether the social media
company could provide resources to accelerate vaccine testing. And
Fauci even responded to an offer from actor Morgan Fairchild to use her
Twitter account on his behalf.

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

"It would be great if you could tweet to your many Twitter followers,"
he responded to Fairchild. "The American public should not be
frightened, but should be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this
country by measures including social distancing, teleworking, temporary
closure of schools, etc."

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

The emails show Fauci received a flurry of correspondence about the
theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan. One such email sent
to Fauci on April 16, 2020 by Francis Collins, the director of the
National Institute of Health, under the subject line "conspiracy gains
momentum" contained a link to a news story highlighting a Fox News
report that said the allegation had merit. Fauci's response to Collins
is entirely blacked out.

The records also lay bare Fauci's ambivalence toward his newfound
celebrity status but also his embrace of a documentary crew who would
tell his story. Additionally, the emails hint at the personal toll this
past year has taken on him. In one email sent on Feb. 18, weeks before
COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, he wrote that he had only been
able to see his wife for 45 minutes in the previous 10 days.

Fauci, who has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases since 1984, declined to comment for this story.

Some of the emails were reviewed by the Trump White House before being
turned over to BuzzFeed News. They represent just a portion of what was
requested, and they are filled with redactions, making them an
incomplete record of the time period and Fauci's correspondence.
Additional tranches are expected to be released in the coming months.

However, the emails do give a sense of the type of communicator Fauci
is: courteous, low-key, and empathetic. He politely interacts with the
office assistants who help him with his correspondence, and he sweats
over the proper way to let people down.

When a White House fellow and physician emails Fauci and offers to team
up to write an opinion piece on the coronavirus and "unite the nation,"
the NIAID director asks a colleague, "How do we nicely say no to this
person?"

And when health professionals write him with harsh criticism of Trump's
handling of the pandemic, he doesn't take the bait. Instead, he replies
with a "thank you."

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

His tone is a mix of friendly and formal, employing phrases like "let
us discuss," "many thanks," and — in rare displays of displeasure — a
delicate "yikes!" He signs off as "Tony."

Even though he tends to sidestep controversy, Fauci does defend his
decisions and push back.

In March 2020, Fauci and a few other colleagues received an email from
Gregg Gonsalves, a prominent Yale School of Public Health
epidemiologist, urging the NIAID director and his team to act promptly
on the virus. The subject line was "We Are Desperate for Advice."

"For those I know, I don't doubt your commitment to public service,"
Gonsalves wrote. "But time is running out. We need vocally, unequivocal
leadership now, that offers real guidance to communities about what to
do, what might happen next."

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

Fauci clearly resented any implication that his health team's response
was being shaped by the political values of the Trump administration,
and he responded curtly three hours later.

"Gregg: I am surprised you included me in your note," he wrote. "I
genuflect to no one but science and always, always speak my mind when
it comes to public health. I have consistently corrected misstatements
by others and will continue to do so."

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

Fauci, 80, has tackled the world's most difficult health crises and
infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika, earning respect
in his field and the trust of many Americans. As the COVID-19 crisis
deepened, his inbox filled with queries from people seeking guidance,
solace, or morsels of medical advice.

On March 4, under the subject line "A humble request for your wisdom,"
a woman wrote to Fauci and asked whether a person inoculated against
pneumonia would be protected against COVID-19.

One hour later, at 9:45 p.m. on a Wednesday, Fauci replied that
complications from COVID-19 are "heavily skewed" toward people who are
older or have underlying conditions. He went into a lengthy explanation:

"Most of the pneumonias are pure viral pneumonia and so this
vaccination will not help that," he wrote. "However, on the chance that
you have a pure viral pneumonia that gets secondarily complicated by a
bacterial pneumonia (pneumococcal) the vaccine would be beneficial.

"If you are 65 years of age or older, you should get pneumonvax23
anyway regardless of the risk of coronavirus infection. Thanks, Tony."

Five minutes later, the woman wrote back, "Oh my god. ... I honestly
never expected you to reply and I thank you from the bottom of my heart
for being so generous!"

Some writers emailed mainly to vent. Among them: a Florida infectious
disease specialist who was upset that some Americans were not taking
proper precautions.

"I am putting my life on the line so folks can go pump iron, drink
beer, have a burger and get a tan," Doug Brust emailed Fauci on March
18.

"The band is playing on. Again," Brust wrote, a reference to one of the
most famous books of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, which
exposed the hapless efforts of the government and the public medical
establishment to address the health crisis.

Obtained by BuzzFeed News via FOIA

And reporters, of course, reached out with questions for the doctor
considered the country's foremost expert. One email exchange, however,
shows how even Fauci couldn't see all that was coming.

Just a day after the first reported COVID-19 death in the United
States, the managing editor of ABC News' medical unit emailed Fauci and
asked him if he agreed with what a source at the Department of Homeland
Security told him: that epidemiology models showed that 98 million
people could be infected with COVID-19 and deaths from the virus could
reach 500,000.

"That seems exceptionally high," Fauci responded.

His guidance was not always welcomed by his own bosses at the White
House. He faced a wide range of harassment, including angry tweets from
Trump that questioned his expertise.

Those conflicts also get referenced in the emails. In April, a top
Chinese health official emailed Fauci about vaccines. As part of that
thread, the official expressed concern about him "being attacked by
some people."

"Thank you for your kind note. All is well despite some crazy people in
this world," Fauci replied.

Even as he gained enemies and roused critics, many of the emails also
reflect his growing stature around the world.

"Dear — highly respected — Dr. Fauci," a doctor from Austria writes in
bolded text. "Why do I try to childishly support a respected expert and
personally highly honored Gentleman like you — Dr. Fauxi? Because for
me — it is heartbreaking and unbelievably disturbing, what was and is
going on of the last 4 months in the USA."

He goes on to lay out a strategy for nations to cope with the
devastating effects of the pandemic.

"Not a crazy note. Please respond on my behalf," Fauci writes to a
staff member.

On May 5, 2020, Mary Harris, an NIAID employee, wrote: "I am grateful
to say my Director is Dr. Anthony Fauci and share with my family,
friends, and church that if you said it, it's gospel."

Along the way, the scientist was becoming a celebrity. Just a couple of
months into the pandemic, T-shirts, bobbleheads, socks, and even prayer
candles with his face plastered on them were being sold. Fauci's emails
show he was clearly uncomfortable with the attention.

"Click on the 'Cuomo Crush' and 'Fauci Fever' link below. It will blow
your mind. Our society is really totally nuts," Fauci wrote in an April
8, 2020, email he forwarded to undisclosed recipients after he received
a Google alert about news stories mentioning his name.

The previous month, a colleague had emailed Fauci a Washington Post
article headlined "Fauci Socks, Fauci Doughnuts, Fauci Fan Art: The
Coronavirus Experts Attract a Cult Following." The top of the article
tells the story of a Rochester, New York, shop that had sold out of
donuts with Fauci's face on them.

"Truly surrealistic," Fauci wrote. "Hopefully this all stops soon."
Later, he added: "It is not at all pleasant, that is for sure."

But it didn't stop, and, at times, Fauci actually couldn't help but get
a kick out of it, including when Brad Pitt played him on Saturday Night
Live.

"One reviewer of the SNL show said that Pitt looked 'exactly like me.'
That statement made my year, " Fauci wrote to a colleague.

The emails also reveal behind-the-scenes negotiations over a
documentary about Fauci's work. He first sent a note to his team about
the project on April 12, a month after the World Health Organization
had declared the coronavirus a pandemic.

"Let us discuss this tomorrow before we do anything. No one has any
'exclusives' on anything about me," he wrote to his team.

Still, there is little in his correspondence that strays from the
central issues: the pandemic and how best to save lives. His exchanges
with Ezekiel Emanuel, the former Obama health adviser, reflect the high
stakes.

Emanuel, an oncologist, bioethicist, and vice provost of the University
of Pennsylvania, sent Fauci an email on Feb. 25, 2020, asking for an
updated assessment of the virus and noting that he was having a "hard
time seeing this as serious as everyone else."

"Am I blind? Yes very transmissible but low mortality like flu in many
ways - the elderly, those with comorbidities, and total impact is
likely to be less than flu," Emanuel wrote.

Later, in April, Emanuel sent Fauci an email saying he was "perplexed"
by his "seeming strong endorsement" of the antiviral drug remdesivir to
treat COVID-19.

"Was it just a bit forced?" Emanuel asked. "My reading was the data was
weak and in normal times for normal disease it is not enough to
approve. And very unlikely to really impact COVID-19 disease
pattern--regardless of supply issues."

Fauci countered: "I did not 'strongly' endorse it. I specifically said
it was not a knockout drug and was only a baby step in the direction of
developing more and better drugs. I said that it was important because
it proved in a well-powered, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical
trial that one can suppress the virus enough to see a clinical effect,
as modest as the effect was. I do not think I forced anything."

The next day, Emanuel sent another email, apologizing for
misinterpreting Fauci's comments about the drug and inviting him over
for dinner "on the porch."

"You are a national — international — treasure. And we are depending on
your sanity and smarts." ●

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Clarissa-Jan Lim · Dec. 22, 2020

rmstock · June 02, 2021, 01:18:21 PM

Peter Daszak
Researcher Tied to Wuhan Lab Thanked Dr. Fauci for Dismissing Lab-Leak Theory
Published: 2021-06-02 14:51:05+00:00, Modified: 2021-06-02 14:51:05+00:00
by CHARLIE SPIERING | 2 Jun 2021 | 41
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/02/researcher-tied-to-wuhan-lab-thanked-dr-fauci-for-dismissing-lab-leak-theory/

"The man responsible for steering U.S. government funding to the Wuhan
Institution of Virology thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for publicly
dismissing the theory coronavirus may have leaked from the lab.

Peter Daszak (pictured), the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, sent
Fauci an email on April 18th, thanking him for steering the public
toward the natural bat-to-human theory for coronavirus origin.

"I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and
collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific
evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human
spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,"
Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.

Less than 12 months later Daszak would be in Wuhan personally leading a
World Health Organization (W.H.O.) team charged with investigating the
theory of an accidental laboratory leak being behind COVID-19's
origination, as Breitbart News reported.

He told CBS's Lesley Stahl soon after there was "no evidence" to back
the theory that a leak led to the virus.

"For an accidental leak that then led to COVID to happen, the virus
that causes COVID would need to be in the lab. They never had any
evidence of a virus-like COVID in the lab," Daszak advised.

Peter Daszak of the World Health Organization team waves goodbye to
journalists as he arrives at the VIP terminal of the airport to leave
at the end of the WHO mission in Wuhan in central China's Hubei
province on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

The email from Daszak to Fauci was obtained by Buzzfeed through a FOIA
request and released publicly on Wednesday.

The EcoHealth Alliance funneled $3.4 million in grants to the Wuhan lab
in China between 2014-2019.

"From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your
trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus's
origins," Daszak wrote.

The government redacted an entire paragraph of Daskaz's email to Fauci.

https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1399948241580462080

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561/leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails.pdf
For the Daszak email see page 1150 in above pdf

Fauci dismissed the lab leak theory again at a press briefing on April
17.

"A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the
sequences in bats as they evolve. The mutations that it took to get to
the point where it is now are totally consistent with a jump of a
species from an animal to a human," he said in response to a reporter's
question.

At the time, then-President Donald Trump said the government was
investigating the lab-leak theory, admitting it was plausible.

"We're looking at it," Trump told reporters during an April coronavirus
briefing at the White House. "A lot of people are looking at it – it
seems to make sense."

READ MORE STORIES ABOUT:
Asia, Health, Politics, Anthony Fauci, coronavirus, Donald Trump,
EcoHealth Alliance, Joe Biden, Peter Daszak, Wuhan, Wuhan Institution
of Virology

rmstock · June 04, 2021, 03:16:11 AM

On March 11 2020, the very day that the W.H.O. and Trump announced a pandemic,
a smart ass by the name of Adam Gaertner emails Fauci the recipy of SARS-CoV-2
in case `someone' needs more of the virus to be created :

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561-leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails#document/p2286

https://twitter.com/drsmichakat/status/1400350935814115330

Time goes on and on, with every week a new update from our nations CDC,
the RIVM. On 23 October 2020 I make a comment, how it can be that there
are so many cases, when at the same time every person is confined to
the limits of his own house/flat. This gets me banned for 25 days,
instantly, as i referred to Bio Terrorism :

here are the comments to my remark :

rmstock · June 04, 2021, 05:15:54 AM

Posted by1 day ago
Fauci is being sacrificed? Who is this adam gaertner?
Out of the entire 3234 pages of emails, the only one (that i can find) that actually discusses the actual lab protocols for viral infection assay is written by Adam Gaertner addressed to Fauci.
p.2286
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/nr5swn/fauci_is_being_sacrificed_who_is_this_adam/

From the comments :

rmstock · June 04, 2021, 09:47:22 AM

"Somethings are happening. I think Dems and Biden are trying to help
the CCP by sacrificing Fauci as the source of the virus, when in fact,
it's the WIV that designed it/leaked it/failed to contain it/killed
millions.
Note: RaTG13 never existed until the outbreak began. Why would the WIV
not publish a sequence of a virus that has a human cross over
potential? Don't they want a paper in nature/cell/science? Unless they
wanted to keep it for their own bioweapon research, then you have to
keep it quiet."

1. WIV = Wuhan Institute of Virology
2. This is RaTG13 :

A closed road near a mine where the bat virus called RaTG13 was found.
PHOTO: KOKI KATAOKA/THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/REUTERS
The Wuhan Lab Leak Question: A Disused Chinese Mine Takes Center Stage
It isn't the predominant hypothesis for Covid's origins, yet prominent scientists are calling for a deeper probe and clearer answers from Beijing
By Jeremy Page, Betsy McKay and Drew Hinshaw
May 24, 2021 11:48 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125

https://archive.is/DKJfF

Here the same discussion unfolded when the W.H.O. decided to name the virus SARS-CoV-2 :

Ognir Podcast 5th April 2020 - The #Covid1984 Scam
« on: April 05, 2020, 04:33:20 PM »
http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=26346.0

In there Zhen Peng intervened on [Wednesday, February 12, 2020 7:47 AM]
straight into the biorxiv.org website.

"I think it is HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE to rename 2019-nCoV as SARS-CoV-2.
The disease, which was recently named by the Chinese health officials
as Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP), is very different from SARS in
multiple ways, and the virus 2019-nCoV itself is also more distant to
SARS-CoV than to its known closest relative which is a bat coronavius
Bat CoV RaTG13. "

The Nature article wich the Reddit author refers to, mentioning RaTG13
was however only Received: 11 April 2020 Revised: 30 April 2020
Accepted: 6 May 2020 and Published online: 12 June 2020 :

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0.pdf

rmstock · June 05, 2021, 05:02:03 AM

ANALYSIS HEALTH
Origins of COVID-19: Who Opened Pandora's Box at Wuhan – People or Nature?
Even those who aren't persuaded that lab escape is the more likely origin of the virus may be concerned about the present state of regulations governing gain-of-function research.

Security personnel stand outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, February 3, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Thomas Peter

HEALTH / THE SCIENCES / WORLD / 10/MAY/2021
Nicholas Wade
https://thewire.in/health/origins-of-covid-19-wuhan-china-coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than
a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the
origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of
governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation,
which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts,
which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the
evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the
complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the
government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the
molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as
painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for
now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread
through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2,
but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two
main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from
wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a
lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case
if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I'll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then
ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It's
important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either
theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far
lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those
clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that
direction, I'm going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled
skein of disaster.

A Tale of Two Theories

After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese
authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market – a
place selling wild animals for meat – in Wuhan. This reminded experts
of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to
civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A
similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012.
This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus's genome showed it belonged a viral family
known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also
belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a
natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal
host, to people. The wet market connection, the only other point of
similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese
researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet
market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in
support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading
world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the
SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two
reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the
natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific
groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as
they should have been.

"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting
that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," a group of virologists
and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really
far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists
"overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,"
they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with
Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers' assertion, the idea that the virus
might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It
surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark
of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish
between what they know and what they don't know. By this criterion, the
signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they
were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were
true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organised and
drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New
York. Dr. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology. 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."

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance. Photo: Twitter

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame
for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public's attention,
they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they
routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in
nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead
of nature they could predict and prevent natural "spillovers," the
cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had
indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback
could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect
virologists everywhere, not just in China. "It would shatter the
scientific edifice top to bottom," an MIT Technology Review editor,
Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.
https://twitter.com/antonioregalado/status/1254916969712803840
A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public
attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a
scientific article) published on March 17, 2020, in the journal Nature
Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G.
Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. "Our analyses clearly show
that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully
manipulated virus," the five virologists declared in the second
paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense
defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral
genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods,
called "no-see-um" or "seamless" approaches, leave no defining marks.
Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage,
the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another.
If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by
serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr.
Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something
they could not know.

The discussion part their letter begins, "It is improbable that
SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related
SARS-CoV-like coronavirus". But wait, didn't the lead say the virus had
clearly not been manipulated? The authors' degree of certainty seemed
to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has
been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing
manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its
target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from
that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit.
Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not
manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it's because it's so strained.
The authors' basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to
make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First
they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2
receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it.
They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the
right string of amino acid units that compose it). But since the SARS2
spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper
says, therefore it can't have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins
to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing
in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With
serial passage, each time the virus's progeny are transferred to new
cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one
emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural
selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper's
speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation
has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of
the other two methods.

The authors' second argument against manipulation is even more
contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary
material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA's close chemical cousin. But
RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on
coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome
to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering
genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted
back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the
scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus "would
probably" have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group
writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it
was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive.
DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it's obviously possible that
SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that's it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group
in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not
manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two
inconclusive speculations, convinced the world's press that SARS2 could
not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen
letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who
constantly check each other's work. So why didn't other virologists
point out that the Andersen group's argument was full of absurdly large
holes? Perhaps because in today's universities speech can be very
costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any
virologist who challenges the community's declared view risks having
his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow
virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific
statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream
press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab
escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied
for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to
understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers
all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks,
and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question
scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen
assertions went largely unchallenged.

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Also read: World No Closer To Answer On COVID Origins Despite WHO Probe
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Doubts about natural emergence

Natural emergence was the media's preferred theory until around
February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission
to China. The commission's composition and access were heavily
controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the
ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their
visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite
the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping
for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer
the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left
copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of
SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak, and
the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2
pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers
had failed to find either the original bat population, or the
intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any
serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of
Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019.
Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to
begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a
year.

And as long as that remains the case, it's logical to pay serious
attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Colorised transmission electron micrograph showing particles of the
MERS coronavirus that emerged in 2012. Image: NIAID/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a
pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a
virus's genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential
pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making
the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the
ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists
asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how
the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesised from its published
DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as
gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular
interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical
surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal
it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the
gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike
protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these
turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In
particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to
occur in a bat virus's spike proteins before it could infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China's leading
expert on bat viruses, Dr. Shi Zheng-li or "Bat Lady", mounted frequent
expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and
collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Shi Zhengli. Photo: Chinese state media GCTN

Dr. Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus
researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on
enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to "examine
the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of
circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses]." In pursuit of this aim, in
November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the
SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus
(known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the
cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture
of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome
contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus
were to have been cooked up in Dr. Shi's lab, then its direct prototype
would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of
which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

"If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory," said Simon
Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but
argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing
future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, "may deem
similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains
too risky to pursue." Given various restrictions being placed on
gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at
"a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for
and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of
creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving
forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by
these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant
further investigation versus the inherent risks involved."

That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can
say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2
epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus
was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.

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Also read: How China Is Trying To Control the COVID-19 Origins Narrative
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Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Dr. Baric had developed, and taught Dr. Shi, a general method for
engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific
targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanised mice. These
laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are
genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called
ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and
resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering
coronaviruses to attack human cells.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part
of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals
that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify
exactly what she planned to do with the money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the
EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are
extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. "CoV" stands
for coronavirus and "S protein" refers to the virus's spike protein.

"Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models
of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally
using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and
virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from
different species and humanised mice."

"We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in
vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor
binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S
protein sequences predict spillover potential."

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to
create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for
human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins
possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging
from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into
the backbone of a number of viral genomes ("reverse genetics" and
"infectious clone technology"), creating a series of chimeric viruses.
These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack
human cell cultures ("in vitro") and humanised mice ("in vivo"). And
this information would help predict the likelihood of "spillover," the
jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of
coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The
approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have
created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus
backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Dr. Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in
her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was
certainly on the right track to have done so. "It is clear that the
Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel
chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human
cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice," says Richard H. Ebright, a
molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on
biosafety.

"It is also clear," Dr. Ebright said, "that, depending on the constant
genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced
SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2." "Genomic context"
refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the
spike protein.

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by
now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific
project being funded there by the NIAID.

Even if the grant required the work plan described above, how can we be
sure that the plan was in fact carried out? For that we can rely on the
word of Dr. Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months
that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by
China-bashers.

On December 9, 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 humanised mice.

"And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this,
over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS," Dr.
Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. "Some of them get into
human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in
humanised mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals
and you can't vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a
clear and present danger...

"Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can't
vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals – so what do we do?

"Daszak: Well I think ... coronaviruses – you can manipulate them in the
lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with
coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can
build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do
this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the
lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You've
got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you
are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use
pandemic SARS, but let's insert some of these other things and get a
better vaccine." The insertions he referred to perhaps included an
element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly
increases viral infectivity for human cells.

In disjointed style, Dr. Daszak is referring to the fact that once you
have generated a novel coronavirus that can attack human cells, you can
take the spike protein and make it the basis for a vaccine.

One can only imagine Dr. Daszak's reaction when he heard of the
outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known
better than anyone the Wuhan Institute's goal of making bat
coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the
institute's defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful
information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations
campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn't possibly have
been caused by one of the institute's souped-up viruses. "The idea that
this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It's simply not
true," he declared in an April 2020 interview.

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Also read: Controversy and Confusion Over The Hindu's Report of
Bengaluru Scientists' Bat Study
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The safety arrangements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

A woman stands outside Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese
and Western Medicine, Wuhan, Hubei province, January 29, 2021. Photo:
Reuters/Thomas Peter

Dr. Daszak was possibly unaware of, or perhaps he knew all too well,
the long history of viruses escaping from even the best-run
laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in
England in the 1960s and 1970s, causing 80 cases and three deaths.
Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since.
Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape
artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less
than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in
Beijing.

One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no
vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Dr. Daszak
mentioned in his December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan
researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the
coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have
been as defenseless against the SARS2 virus, if it were generated in
their lab, as their Beijing colleagues were against SARS1.

A second reason for the severe danger of novel coronaviruses has to do
with the required levels of lab safety. There are four degrees of
safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive
and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a new BSL4 lab, but its state of
readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who
visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018. "The new lab has a serious
shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed
to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," the inspectors
wrote in a cable of January 19, 2018.

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL4
lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don't like working in BSL4
conditions. You have to wear a space suit, do operations in closed
cabinets and accept that everything will take twice as long. So the
rules assigning each kind of virus to a given safety level were laxer
than some might think was prudent.

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere
required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted
in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in
BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety
precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up
liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a
gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent
more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab
workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if
unvaccinated.

Much of Dr. Shi's work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was
performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications
and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science
magazine that "The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted
in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories."

"It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a
biosafety standard – biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a
standard US dentist's office – that would pose an unacceptably high
risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having
the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2," says Dr. Ebright.

"It also is clear," he adds, "that this work never should have been
funded and never should have been performed."

This is a view he holds regardless of whether or not the SARS2 virus
ever saw the inside of a lab.

Concern about safety conditions at the Wuhan lab was not, it seems,
misplaced. According to a fact sheet issued by the State Department on
January 15,2021, " The U.S. government has reason to believe that
several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before
the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent
with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."

David Asher, a fellow of the Hudson Institute and former consultant to
the State Department, provided more detail about the incident at a
seminar. Knowledge of the incident came from a mix of public
information and "some high end information collected by our
intelligence community," he said. Three people working at a BSL3 lab at
the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe
symptoms that required hospitalisation. This was "the first known
cluster that we're aware of, of victims of what we believe to be
COVID-19." Influenza could not completely be ruled out but seemed
unlikely in the circumstances, he said.

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Also read: Wuhan Scientist Rules Out Theories That Novel Coronavirus
Originated in Lab
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Comparing the rival scenarios of SARS2 origin

The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could
have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case,
however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of
evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in
Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there.
For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain
salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained
by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and
lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have
some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for
those who may care to follow the argument.

1. The place of origin

Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2
virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of
southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living
around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the
virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn't what
happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs,
infect the horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus affinis), which ranges across
southern China. The bats' range is 50 kilometres, so it's unlikely that
any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the COVID-19
pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei
province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You
would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with
an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people.
All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a
busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of
Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying
this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without
infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the
person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.

It's a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out
naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make
its first appearance there.

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a
no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China's leading center of coronavirus
research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically
engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so
under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the
unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape
would be no surprise.

2. Natural history and evolution

The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger
problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don't just make one time
jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein,
adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species,
most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation – a
change in one of its RNA units – causes a different amino acid unit to
be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein
better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts
to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent
contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this
intermediate host to people.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive
changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a
dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there
were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild
pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much
better adapted to humans, and with a further four the epidemic took off.

But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in
SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all,
at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well
adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad
Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well
adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly
well adapted. "By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019,
it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar
to late epidemic SARS-CoV," they wrote.

Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are
remarkably uniform. Dr. Baric writes that "early strains identified in
Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the
virus may have been introduced from a single source."

A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so
with the massive variation and selection which is evolution's hallmark
way of doing business.

The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage
through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been
identified in nature.

Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a
yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties.
Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of lab
leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from
the start because it was grown in humanised mice or in lab cultures of
human cells, just as described in Dr. Daszak's grant proposal. Its
genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is
uniformity.

Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus
infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and
that they have identified it – a humanised mouse from the Wuhan
Institute of Virology.

3. The furin cleavage site

The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus's anatomy but one
that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle
of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of
where the virus came from.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first,
called S1, recognises the virus's target, a protein called angiotensin
converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining
the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to
the cell, to fuse with the cell's membrane. After the virus's outer
membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome
is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and
forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been
cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin
cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly
the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver.
It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a
protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut
any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This
is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine,
or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the
alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2's furin
cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage
site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses,
only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have
their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site
evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2
junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation
and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA
(or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a
protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm
the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something
useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein
gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to
civets, and then to humans.

Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2's furin cleavage site to be
generated, even though it can't completely be ruled out. The site's
four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place
in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by
copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by
chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino
acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids
like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired
all together through a quite different process known as recombination.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that
occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their
progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the
other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other
beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any
genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they
cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known
SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs,
possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site
from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related
beta-coronaviruses evidently don't need a furin cleavage site to infect
bat cells, so there's no great likelihood that any in fact possesses
one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents' next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage
site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in
the human population for months or years until at some point it
acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have
been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital
surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving
virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report
on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province,
home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and "no
evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months
preceding the outbreak in December was observed."

So it's hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin
cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2
may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no
problem at all. "Since 1992 the virology community has known that the
one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage
site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory," writes Dr. Steven Quay,
a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. "At least
eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a
virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including
[by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology."

A model of the spike protein of the novel coronavirus. Photo:
NIAID/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

4. A question of codons

There's another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path
for a natural emergence origin even further.

As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the
genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of
a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA
can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are
called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more
than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be
specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for
instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA,
CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds
of unit in RNA.

Here's where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different
codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the
codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus's least popular codon
for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in
the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.

Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its
cousin viruses don't, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the
string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its
cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called
RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at
the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The
CCT codes for proline, the two CGG's for two arginines, and the GC is
the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is
that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5% of SARS2's arginine
codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any
other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine
codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the
features of SARS2's furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a
recombination event at a site on the virus's genome where
recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence
with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus
repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly
expand the virus's infectivity.

"Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely – viruses are
specialists at unusual events," is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a
virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a
conspiracy theory. "Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in
these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein
and these codons appear unusual exactly because we've not sampled
enough."

Dr. Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results
that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold
numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural
selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too
far. For instance any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be
explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the
numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site
to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of
which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with
several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The
human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted
to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus's genome would
synthesise the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to
use CGG codons to do so.

"When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with
its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the
origin of the virus," said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and
former president of CalTech. "These features make a powerful challenge
to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2," he said.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Also read: Will We Really Find Out Where the Novel Coronavirus Came
From?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A third scenario of origin

There's a variation on the natural emergence scenario that's worth
considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to
humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS
did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes
that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes
the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because
the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central
China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though
it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Dr. Robertson's
thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any
intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December
2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not
changed since it first appeared in humans – it didn't need to because
it could already attack human cells efficiently.

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats
to people in a single leap and hasn't changed much since, it should
still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn't.

"Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are
therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection," write
a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.

Still, Dr. Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of
the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners
clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia
with COVID-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated
from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known
relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and
strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature
of 8 similar viruses that Dr. Shi reports she collected at the same
time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the
ancestry of SARS2. But all that is a story for another time. The point
here is that bat viruses can infect people directly, though only in
special conditions.

So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into
particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus
researchers do. Dr. Shi says she and her group collected more than
1,300 bat samples during some 8 visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012
and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan
caves.

Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and
back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin
to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers
could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while
working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The
virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not
one cooked up by gain of function.

The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence
and lab escape scenarios. It's a possibility that can't be dismissed.
But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have
only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can't be fully confident
that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no
better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2
gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is
determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the
bat-preferred codons.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Also read: Why the New Coronavirus Spreads so Effectively, Explained
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Where we are so far

Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be
ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no
definitive conclusion can be reached.

That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction
than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me
that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about
SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural
emergence.

It's documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses
infect human cells and humanised mice. This is exactly the kind of
experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The
researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and
they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2
laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all
of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan
institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected
for a virus grown in humanised mice. It possessed an unusual
enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other
known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double
arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more
evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab
records documenting SARS2's creation?

Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The
plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected
parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But
none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has
yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of
SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has
presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities
that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of
the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host
to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence
from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength
in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why
a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is
no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site,
which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the
site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence
theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.

The records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly hold much
relevant information. But Chinese authorities seem unlikely to release
them given the substantial chance that they incriminate the regime in
the creation of the pandemic. Absent the efforts of some courageous
Chinese whistle-blower, we may already have at hand just about all of
the relevant information we are likely to get for a while.

So it's worth trying to assess responsibility for the pandemic, at
least in a provisional way, because the paramount goal remains to
prevent another one. Even those who aren't persuaded that lab escape is
the more likely origin of the SARS2 virus may see reason for concern
about the present state of regulation governing gain-of-function
research. There are two obvious levels of responsibility: the first,
for allowing virologists to perform gain-of-function experiments,
offering minimal gain and vast risk; the second, if indeed SARS2 was
generated in a lab, for allowing the virus to escape and unleash a
world-wide pandemic. Here are the players who seem most likely to
deserve blame.

1. Chinese virologists

First and foremost, Chinese virologists are to blame for performing
gain-of-function experiments in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions
which were far too lax to contain a virus of unexpected infectiousness
like SARS2. If the virus did indeed escape from their lab, they deserve
the world's censure for a foreseeable accident that has already caused
the deaths of 3 million people.

True, Dr. Shi was trained by French virologists, worked closely with
American virologists and was following international rules for the
containment of coronaviruses. But she could and should have made her
own assessment of the risks she was running. She and her colleagues
bear the responsibility for their actions.

I have been using the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a shorthand for
all virological activities in Wuhan. It's possible that SARS2 was
generated in some other Wuhan lab, perhaps in an attempt to make a
vaccine that worked against all coronaviruses. But until the role of
other Chinese virologists is clarified, Dr. Shi is the public face of
Chinese work on coronaviruses, and provisionally she and her colleagues
will stand first in line for opprobrium.

2. Chinese authorities

China's central authorities did not generate SARS2 but they sure did
their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and China's
responsibility for it. They suppressed all records at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology and closed down its virus databases. They
released a trickle of information, much of which may have been outright
false or designed to misdirect and mislead. They did their best to
manipulate the WHO's inquiry into the virus's origins, and led the
commission's members on a fruitless run-around. So far they have proved
far more interested in deflecting blame than in taking the steps
necessary to prevent a second pandemic.

Members of the WHO team tasked with investigating the origins of
COVID-19 don PPE during a visit to the Hubei Animal Epidemic Disease
Prevention and Control Center, Wuhan, February 2, 2021. Photo:
Reuters/Thomas Peter

3. The worldwide community of virologists

Virologists around the world are a loose-knit professional community.
They write articles in the same journals. They attend the same
conferences. They have common interests in seeking funds from
governments and in not being overburdened with safety regulations.

Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function
research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding
obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with
gain-of-function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium
imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014 and it
was raised in 2017.

The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far
been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses
could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to
allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2.
Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world
have been playing with fire.

Their behavior has long alarmed other biologists. In 2014 scientists
calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on
creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of
creating a SARS2-like virus. "Accident risks with newly created
'potential pandemic pathogens' raise grave new concerns," they wrote.
"Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of
dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses
substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a
setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible
to control."

When molecular biologists discovered a technique for moving genes from
one organism to another, they held a public conference at Asilomar in
1975 to discuss the possible risks. Despite much internal opposition,
they drew up a list of stringent safety measures that could be relaxed
in future – and duly were – when the possible hazards had been better
assessed.

When the CRISPR technique for editing genes was invented, biologists
convened a joint report by the US, UK and Chinese national academies of
science to urge restraint on making heritable changes to the human
genome. Biologists who invented gene drives have also been open about
the dangers of their work and have sought to involve the public.

You might think the SARS2 pandemic would spur virologists to
re-evaluate the benefits of gain-of-function research, even to engage
the public in their deliberations. But no. Many virologists deride lab
escape as a conspiracy theory and others say nothing. They have
barricaded themselves behind a Chinese wall of silence which so far is
working well to allay, or at least postpone, journalists' curiosity and
the public's wrath. Professions that cannot regulate themselves deserve
to get regulated by others, and this would seem to be the future that
virologists are choosing for themselves.

4. The US role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology

From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance had a grant
from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),
part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function
research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether
or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable
policy to farm out high-risk research to unsafe foreign labs using
minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape
from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible
position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of
more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of
its own citizens.

The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for
the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a
moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. Why didn't the two
agencies therefore halt the Federal funding as apparently required to
do so by law? Because someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium.

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function
research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS
viruses. But then a footnote on p. 2 of the moratorium document states
that "An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head
of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently
necessary to protect the public health or national security."

This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony
Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both,
would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to
Dr. Shi's gain-of-function research.

"Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this
loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –
preposterously asserting the exempted research was 'urgently necessary
to protect public health or national security' – thereby nullifying the
Pause," Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent
Science News.

When the moratorium was ended in 2017 it didn't just vanish but was
replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens
Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to
report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to
fund.

According to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci "have declined
to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby
nullifying the P3CO Framework."

In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the
ensuing reporting system, "have systematically thwarted efforts by the
White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists
to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern."

Possibly the two officials had to take into account matters not evident
in the public record, such as issues of national security. Perhaps
funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed to have ties
with Chinese military virologists, provided a window into Chinese
biowarfare research. But whatever other considerations may have been
involved, the bottom line is that 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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Also read: Not Helping: WHO Is Confused About Whether SARS-CoV-2
'Leaked From a Lab'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

In conclusion

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn't
this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people
who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by
the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and
Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the
gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for
years.

Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue.
Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees
of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the
boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant
will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good
behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the
distribution system. And if you thought that Dr. Andersen and Dr.
Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity
after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the
second and second names on this list of recipients of an $82 million
grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases in August 2020.

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese
authorities: neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Dr.
Shi's coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of
Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the
Chinese government says "If this research was so dangerous, why did you
fund it, and on our territory too?" To which the US side might reply,
"Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have
this discussion in public?"

Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under
President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration
in handling the COVID-19 epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably,
may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the
apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in
Wuhan.

To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream
media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has
yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape
scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run
brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible
origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a
serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing
gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus's origin, would be
worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by
the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such research would bear
investigation. What accounts for the media's apparent lack of curiosity?

The virologists' omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike
political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources'
motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of
scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won't help,
these journalists are at a loss.

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward
the left of the political spectrum. 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. This is not to argue that editors
should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should
have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their
homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are
giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more
months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of
supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the
international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false
and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic
breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab
cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could
eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said
can't be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

Acknowledgements

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2
virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In
a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the
SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had
been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a
roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus's origins. Deigin
packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have
doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some
intelligence agency must have authored it. But the essay is written
with greater lightness and humor than I suspect are ever found in CIA
or KGB reports, and I see no reason to doubt that Dr. Deigin is its
very capable sole author.

In Deigin's wake have followed several other skeptics of the
virologists' orthodoxy. Nikolai Petrovsky calculated how tightly the
SARS2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptors of various species and found to
his surprise that it seemed optimised for the human receptor, leading
him to infer the virus might have been generated in a laboratory. Alina
Chan published a paper showing that SARS2 from its first appearance was
very well adapted to human cells.

One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the
virologists' absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who
has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research.
Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. "Even though strong
opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or
ruled out with currently available facts," he wrote. Kudos too to
Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021, that the "most likely"
cause of the epidemic was "from a laboratory," because he doubted that
a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without
taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.

Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and
bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus's origin,
showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are
clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute
of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the
perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe.

In June 2020 Milton Leitenberg published an early survey of the
evidence favoring lab escape from gain-of-function research at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Many others have contributed significant pieces of the puzzle. "Truth
is the daughter," said Francis Bacon, "not of authority but time." The
efforts of people such as those named above are what makes it so.

This article was originally published by the author on Medium and has
been republished here with permission. Read the original here.

Nicholas Wade is a science writer and has worked on the staff of
Nature, Science and, for many years, on the New York Times."

The Info Underground

Anthony Fauci’s Emails Reveal The Pressure That Fell On One Man

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