copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2023-04-05): First peer-reviewed analysis of the Chinese swabs confirms animal DNA was present in samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. [...] Researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) have published an eagerly awaited analysis1 of swabs collected at a wet market in Wuhan, China, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic — as well as the underlying data, which the international research community has been calling for since the beginning of the outbreak.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2024-02-20): These analyses add weight to original suspicions that the pandemic began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which many of the people who were infected earliest with SARS-CoV-2 had visited. The preprints contain genetic analyses of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from people infected in December 2019 and January 2020, as well as geolocation analyses connecting these samples to a section of the market where live animals were sold. Taken together, these different lines of evidence point towards the market as the source of the outbreak—much like animal markets were ground zero for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2002–2004—says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and an author on two of the reports. "This is extremely strong evidence," he says. [...] Over the past year, Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and an author on the papers with Andersen says that his thinking on the origins of COVID-19 has shifted. Back in May 2021, he led a letter published in Science in which he and other researchers pressed the scientific community to keep an open mind about whether the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory, a controversial hypothesis suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was either created in a lab, or was accidentally or intentionally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. "You want to take this kind of thing seriously," he explains.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2021-11-19): Now he’s published a new study in Science that suggests that the earliest diagnosed covid case was incorrectly understood—and that Wuhan’s Huanan wet market was almost certainly the site of a spillover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from animals to humans, rather than a lab leak. His intervention, and growing confidence in the natural spillover idea, is likely to re-ignite the debate around the hunt for the origins of covid. [...] Nevertheless, many scientists still lean heavily toward the theory that wet markets played a critical role in triggering covid-19. Even though all eyes are on Yunnan and other parts of Southeast Asia as the most likely places of the pandemic’s origins, Hanage says "it’s not batshit crazy" to suggest that Wuhan’s Hubei province could have been where SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally. Indeed, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have found SARS-like coronaviruses in bats in Hubei. Even though they haven’t systematically tested farmed animals for coronavirus infection across the province, in a little-known study conducted in the aftermath of SARS, they found that the seven civets they tested in a farm in the province in 2004 all were infected with relatives of SARS-CoV-1. Several research teams in China and in the US are trying to figure out where the animals got the virus, whether coronavirus infection among civets is more common than previously thought, and what impact that might have on our understanding of the origins of covid-19.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2023-10-02): Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), testified how science indicates COVID-19 infections were likely the result of an accidental lab leak in Wuhan. His conclusion is based on the biology of the virus itself and unusual actions in and around Wuhan in 2019, including gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). [...] Subcommittee Chairman Wenstrup: "In your expert opinion was the Wuhan Institute conducting gain-of-function research on a batch of coronaviruses?" [...] "Was it for personal financial gain? Was it to hide U.S. financial interest into the Wuhan Institute of Virology indirectly? Was it to suppress the revelation that there was perhaps gain-of-function research that had been prohibited in the United States? Or were they concerned that a conspiracy would develop that it was bioterrorism?
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2020-07-09): Evidence to date shows that SARS-CoV-2 is most closely related to known betacoronaviruses in bats; the role of an intermediate host in facilitating transmission in the earliest known human cases remains unclear.(56, 57) In addition to investigations on the possible intermediate host(s) of SARS-CoV-2, there are also a number of studies underway to better understand susceptibility of SARS-CoV-2 in different animal species. Current evidence suggests that humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 can infect other mammals, including dogs(58), cats(59), and farmed mink.(60) However, it remains unclear if these infected mammals pose a significant risk for transmission to humans. [...] Many unanswered questions about transmission of SARS-CoV-2 remain, and research seeking to answer those questions is ongoing and is encouraged. Current evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is primarily transmitted between people via respiratory droplets and contact routes – although aerosolization in medical settings where aerosol generating procedures are used is also another possible mode of transmission - and that transmission of COVID-19 is occurring from people who are pre-symptomatic or symptomatic to others in close contact (direct physical or face-to-face contact with a probable or confirmed case within one meter and for prolonged periods of time), when not wearing appropriate PPE. Transmission can also occur from people who are infected and remain asymptomatic, but the extent to which this occurs is not fully understood and requires further research as an urgent priority. The role and extent of airborne transmission outside of health care facilities, and in particular in close settings with poor ventilation, also requires further study.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2022-10-19): In January 2020, when I stumbled upon research carried out in the lab of Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—known as China’s ‘bat woman’ because her work in the past 18 years has focused on bat-borne coronaviruses—I didn’t realize I was stepping into a scientific minefield that would become a fierce battleground for numerous hot-button issues, ranging from biosafety concerns of virus research, transparency and accountability of international science, to geopolitical wrangling between China and the United States. [...] Wuhan Institute of Virology main entrance | Ureem2805 The article, for instance, included a sensational quote from David Baltimore—an expert on viruses that can cause cancer for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975—saying that a seemingly peculiar genetic feature of SARS-CoV-2, known as the furin cleavage site, was "the smoking gun" that makes "a powerful challenge" to the natural-origins theory. This, as Wade insinuated, is evidence that the virus was engineered in the Wuhan lab. Baltimore, however, was wrong. Many contagious pathogens—including some coronaviruses and influenza viruses—have naturally evolved this type of genetic feature because it gives them an evolutionary advantage by making them more infectious. The episode offers a good example of how journalism can go wrong—when journalists do not critically evaluate what’s said but pay more attention to who said it.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2023-11-08): You have always said that you approached the COVID-19 origin story with an open mind. I will have to admit that in February and March 2020, I dismissed the story that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. [...] Yeah, lots of lab accidents have happened, but we have to be really careful [with this]. Do laboratory accidents happen and infect people and kill people? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. Could the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through various scenarios have been the spark of this pandemic? Sure, it could have. [But] show me the evidence that a lab leak sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. What it comes down to is sorting through possibilities and probabilities and moving away from theory and moving toward evidence. Over time, evidence naturally accrues for all of these [infectious disease] origin stories. This isn’t my first origin story rodeo. I’ve covered several origin stories in the past and over time we see evidence that supports or doesn’t support different theories. What we’re witnessing over this three-year period of time is theories are starting to give way to evidence. [...] What about the evidence that there was a strain of a bat coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute that was genetically 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 virus?
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2024-06-18): Initial cases all appeared linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market at the time, though there has since been much speculation about the types of research taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Koblentz said he believes the available evidence points to a spillover event from an animal, though he added a "research-related accident can’t be ruled out at this time." [...] Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, testified he believes a "large preponderance of evidence indicates SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, entered humans through a research incident."
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2022-08-15): A recent report in Science confirmed that a natural spillover emergence from a seafood wholesale market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the August 12 episode of Public Health On Call, biosecurity and immunology expert Gigi Gronvall, PhD, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security and the author of "The Contested Origin of SARS-CoV-2", discussed the findings and their critical importance for finally putting many of the early theories to rest, as well as future implications for policy, biological research, and public health surveillance. [...] There has been a lot of evidence up to this point that the seafood market [in Wuhan] was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2, but these recent reports are the death knell for any alternative theories. The reason why people thought that it wasn’t the market was because the Wuhan Virology Institute—a laboratory where scientists study coronaviruses—is in the same city. People thought that it came from [that] lab.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2021-06-18): They couldn’t rule out an accidental leak of a natural virus from a lab that was studying it, but thanks in part to research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it was also known that coronaviruses that had the capacity to infect people, and that were related both to the one that caused the original severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2003, and to Sars-CoV-2, were circulating in Chinese bat populations. [...] But since RaTG13 was identified, others have been isolated from bats in China and south-east Asia that are also highly similar to Sars-CoV-2. A cluster of them, from the Chinese province of Yunnan, was described last week in the journal Cell. "The connection between RaTG13, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Sars-CoV-2 isn’t required any more," says Robertson. [...] This leaves the lab leak theory resting principally, for now, on unverified reports of three cases of respiratory illness among the WIV’s nearly 600 staff in November 2019, a winter month in Wuhan, and the fact that the institute took a database of viral genome sequences offline two months earlier – to protect it from hackers, they told WHO investigators.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2021-11-18): The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, has emerged as the most likely source of the COVID-19 outbreak, making a possible alternative explanation that the virus leaked from a research lab increasingly unlikely, according to a paper published in the journal Science by Michael Worobey, a virus evolution expert at the University of Arizona. [...] "The Dec. 8 case has been used by lab leak proponents to argue that the virus could not have emerged at the market since the earliest case had no exposure there," Worobey said. "Moreover, it has led them to claim that the pandemic started at the BSL4 facility of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, since that facility is near where this person lived and shopped. But it is clear that this patient got sick after the first cases had been reported from Huanan, so clearly the virus was circulating in the community at that point." [...] Worobey likened the combined evidence to a "flashing red arrow pointing to the Huanan market as by far the most likely site of origin, with a failure to put a stop to sales of illegal wildlife in markets like Huanan as the reason."
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2021-08-02): Washington, D.C. – House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican has released an addendum to his Origins of COVID-19 report released in September 2020. The addendum outlines evidence that points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as the source of the outbreak, and outlines some of the many steps researchers at the WIV along with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance took to cover up the research being done there. It also breaks down how scientific papers written by researchers at the WIV not only prove the WIV was doing dangerous genetic modification research on coronaviruses at unsafe biosafety levels, but also that WIV researchers had the ability to genetically modify coronaviruses as early as 2016 without leaving any trace of that modification.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2023-03-01): Its supporters point to the presence of a major biological research facility in the city. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been studying coronaviruses in bats for over a decade. [...] A classified US intelligence report - saying three researchers at the Wuhan laboratory were treated in hospital in November 2019, just before the virus began infecting humans in the city - began circulating in US media in 2021. [...] Prof Shi Zhengli - often referred to as "China's Batwoman" - a researcher at the Wuhan Institute, published a report in 2021 revealing that her team had identified eight coronavirus strains found on bats in the mine in China in 2015. The paper says that coronaviruses from pangolins pose more of an immediate threat to human health than the ones her team found in the mine.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2023-02-28): Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident. [...] In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019. [...] You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2024-09-20): The hunt for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has new leads. Researchers have identified half a dozen animal species that could have passed SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, to people, by reanalysing genomes collected from an animal market in Wuhan, China1. The study establishes the presence of animals and the virus at the market, although it does not confirm whether the animals themselves were infected with the virus. [...] The search for how the pandemic began has been hugely controversial. Most researchers say the virus originated in bats that infected people, most probably through an intermediate animal, as has happened with other pathogens that have emerged in humans. But a lack of strong evidence for an intermediate host has led some researchers to argue that the virus could have escaped — deliberately or accidentally — from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. [...] When researchers at the China CDC published their analysis in Nature last April, they reported samples that contained SARS-CoV-2 and came from wild animals in the market, most notably raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides), which are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and can spread the virus to other animals. But the team noted that there was no way to establish that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Even if they were infected, they could have caught the infection from a person who brought the virus to the market, which leaves open the possibility that the market was not the site of the pandemic’s emergence.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2022-03-03): Newly published evidence points to Wuhan seafood market as pandemic origin point [...] Scientists who weren't involved in the research papers have called the new data "very convincing" and a "blow" to the lab-leak theory — that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does research on coronaviruses. In reaction to the papers, they say the data tips the scales toward wildlife sold at the market. [...] You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2024-09-13): CHAN: So we know specifically that this Wuhan Institute of Virology had been funded and had been collaborating with a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. And the EcoHealth Alliance had gotten tens of millions of dollars from U.S. federal sources, not just the Defense Department, but also the NIH and the NIAID, which Dr. Anthony Fauci was a director of for more than 40 years. There was U.S. money flowing to China and specifically to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. [...] So this was a very well funded lab. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a premier virology lab in China. They were not short on funds. [...] So the U.S. intelligence community has confirmed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had military work being done there. They were using the space to do military research.
Claim: evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Steven W. Mosher, 2020-05-03)
Evidence (2021-09-09): Documents obtained by The Intercept contain new evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as "gain-of-function research of concern," intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose. [...] The experiment also raises questions about assertions from Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins that NIH-funded projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not involve gain-of-function research. In May, Fauci testified before Congress: "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." The documents do not establish whether Fauci was directly aware of the work. [...] In October 2014, the federal government put a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens that could be "reasonably anticipated" to lead to spread in humans, as outlined in a 2017 guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services. In December 2017, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with new guidelines for oversight of research using potential pandemic pathogens. The grantees reported that the humanized mouse experiment was done between June 2017 and May 2018. Gain-of-function research was thrust into the spotlight again in 2020, amid speculation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had conducted such research and that it was somehow linked to the pandemic.
Claim: “For every one person who dies: 19 more require hospitalization; 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives” (Franklin Veaux, 2020-07-13)
Evidence (2020-07-13): COVID-19 infections can have multiple outcomes besides death and complete recovery. Although the vast majority of patients survive the infection, a significant proportion continue to suffer from potentially lifelong health problems, such as heart and lung damage and neurological deficits. Hence it is important to take transmission control measures seriously to minimize our risk of infection. However, there is currently not enough information to calculate with certainty the risks of developing the different sequelae of infection.