After 18 Months of Speculation, It’s Time for Answers on the Lab Leak Theory
By: Kyle Lamb
Tags: Covid, Lab Leak, Anthony Fauci, Gain Of Function, Coronavirus

After 18 Months of Speculation, It’s Time for Answers on the Lab Leak Theory Kyle Lamb Jun 21·49 min read

Since the beginning of the pandemic, questions have been persistent as to the real origins of COVID-19, but concrete answers have been virtually nonexistent. Skepticism of natural origins has been doused with fierce resistance before it ever reaches the tarmac for liftoff.

The official stance — that COVID-19 originated in bats, jumped species, wound up in a wet market in Wuhan, and infected an unknown patient zero — has never actually been substantiated after nearly 18 months of regurgitation.

It begs the question…why? As much as some in the media and public health want to paint any skeptic as a half-baked conspiracy theorist, they haven’t been able to prove a natural origin or disprove an unnatural one.

To be clear, despite a limitless number of anecdotes and enormous amount of circumstantial evidence, there is no ‘smoking gun’ that COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan. There is even less evidence of the notion that a possible lab escape was intentional, meant to bring worldwide destruction. But the fact there is so much evidence that research was being done in Wuhan on coronaviruses begs questions and demands answers.

Individually, these anecdotes cited that support a lab leak could easily be shrugged off as merely coincidental. But these are not isolated examples. That they are many, and collectively, you see holistically a larger pattern that makes it abundantly and undeniably clear that “gain of function” research — or enhancement of bat-origin coronaviruses meant to increase transmissibility in a lab — has been ongoing and persistent before and leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19.

What precisely is gain of function, anyhow? That’s really the crux of the story. We’ll get to that, and the events that follow gain of function, in a moment. But first, let’s meet a few of the key players you will keep hearing about to help provide background to the persistent drumbeats.

ANTHONY FAUCI, M.D.

Of course, by now, everyone knows Fauci. The 80-year old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has never met a media opportunity he didn’t like. Fauci revels in his newfound popularity and through a series of discoveries through Freedom of Information Act requests performed on his emails, we’ve learned he also has Google Alerts set on his own name.

From The Daily Wire:

Revealed in journalist-obtained emails, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a Google alert for his full name and passed along an article about his sex appeal. Fauci pulled a classic humble brag via email in April 2020 when he complained to someone about a write-up talking about the Internet’s “sexualization” of the bureaucrat, titled, “‘Cuomo Crush and ‘Fauci Fever’ — Sexualization of These Men Is a Real Thing on the Internet.”

Oddly, the appeal to authority granted to Fauci-ism is not consistent with the common pleas heard over the past year such as the infamous refrain, “follow the science.” Often, anyone speaking out against the accepted narrative is shouted down if they are not an epidemiologist.

But remarkably, Fauci himself is not an epidemiologist. Nor is he a virologist. Despite this being the most popular criticism of other prominent figures such as oft-tarnished former White House Coronavirus Task Force Advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, Fauci is actually an immunologist by trade. Not to discredit or downplay his achievements or knowledge, but he has not actually practiced medicine in many years.

No, indeed, Fauci is a bureaucrat. He’s been nothing more than an unelected politician for many decades, who has moonlighted as a quasi-celebrity that enjoys his COVID-created fame. It’s important to note, by the way, the NIAID is one of 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH). So any and all directives that from from NIH, apply to NIAID.

ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE INC

The ‘about’ section of the EcoHealth Alliance website describes the organization as being in existence over 45 years as a “global environmental health nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease.” Indeed, it maintains 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status as a charitable organization.

We’ll see much involvement of EcoHealth Alliance in this story, as well as its principal players. For instance: the Daily Mail reported the Pentagon gave $39 million to the organization between 2013 and 2020. EcoHealth also funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab suspect of having leaked COVID-19.

The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells. A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA. But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government — from 2017 to 2020 — and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013. Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

The $3.7 million grant cancelled by Trump came from the NIH. The NIH said at the time the grant, meant to study how coronaviruses in bats transferred to humans, did not “align with…agency priorities.”

However, in August, 2020, the NIH awarded a $7.5 million grant to the organization despite the uproar.

The suggestion that EcoHealth’s work no longer fit NIH priorities appears to be at a minimum ironic, given that at the time its award was canceled, the group was in an evaluation process for the grant announced Thursday. Research teams and institutes that wanted to be considered for part of a new network — called the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases or CREID — had to apply in the spring of 2019. EcoHealth was chosen as one of 11 institutions or research teams to be funded for work to determine how and where viruses and other new pathogens emerge from nature to begin infecting people. EcoHealth’s portion of the five-year, $82 million award will focus on Southeast Asia and the emergence of coronaviruses; filoviruses, the family responsible for Ebola; and paramyxoviruses, a family of viruses that includes measles and mumps. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, said the new network will help the world prepare for future Covid-19 like events. “The CREID network will enable early warnings of emerging diseases wherever they occur, which will be critical to rapid responses,” Fauci said in a statement.

Concerningly, a 2011 tweet by EcoHealth surfaced recently where they rhetorically asked if China ran a better form of democracy than the kind found in the western world.

This is irrelevant to the tangible evidence of a lab leak, of course, but it is certainly an odd circumstance pointing to deep involvement with Communist China.

Random note: Google also funded EcoHealth Alliance. But it’s not clear that’s directly relevant to this particular story. It’s just one of many odd sidebars we find along the way.

DR. PETER DASZAK

EcoHealth’s president is Dr. Peter Daszak. Daszak is a British zoologist who also sits on the National Research Council’s Advisory Committee to the U.S. Global Change Research program. Ironically, or perhaps not, the NRC was one of two organizations tasked with reforming funding procedures to gain of function research after the 2014 pause. But more on that momentarily.

The ties between Daszak, EcoHealth, and China are not merely speculative or distant. They’re direct and he himself has been forthcoming about the relationship.

Appearing at a September 2018 roundtable hosted by the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN), Daszak is seen on a video that surfaced earlier this year boasting over his ties to China. He was asked about whether the involvement of the Chinese in U.S. business, academic, and scientific research affairs was worrisome.

“I think the rhetoric of the politics doesn’t reflect the science that I see. Our organization has been working in China, in collaboration with Chinese scientists and the government of China for over 15 years, supported by federal funding from the U.S. and federal funding from China, and it’s true global cooperation. We work on emerging diseases ever since the SARS virus emerged in China. It’s been a key issue for public health.”

Here, Daszak not only mentions his collaboration with Chinese scientists and government, but reiterates the involvement of the U.S. government in funding his organization and research. Keep that in mind.

His work in coronavirus research runs deep; probably too deep to be a trustworthy, nonpartisan source on the virus origin. We’ll see later that’s one of the reasons these questions persist. He’s been more of a roadblock to truth than an open highway.

WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY

A core component of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. This lab is a BSL-4 clearance, which means it’s permitted to handle the world’s most dangerous pathogens. It’s also the only one in China permitted to do so.

The biosafety lab is reported to be just 32 kilometers (~20 miles) from the Hunan Seafood market — which is the wet market said to be the genesis of the disease migration to humans. The official story is that no bats were ever kept at the lab, which has been echoed by the World Health Organization investigators, but a recent report from Sky News Australia has a video purporting to show live bats being kept in cages at the BSL itself.

The footage aired by Sky News was said to be from a Chinese promotional video released in 2017, which coincided with the opening of WIV.

It is unquestioned this lab has been known to have performed coronavirus research. That in itself is not particularly concerning. In fact, China is home to well over 100 bat species, and they carry over 400 known coronaviruses. So it goes without saying that research is important in that field, especially after the 2003 SARS epidemic.

It’s the enhancement of pathogens where the problems arise. The Wuhan National Biosafety Lab is reported to be a breeding ground of that type of research.

DR. SHI ZHENGLI, AKA, “BAT WOMAN”

The most well important person at WIV when it comes to coronavirus research is famed virologist Dr. Shi Zhengli, also fondly referred to as “bat woman.” Dr. Zhengli’s work at the center focuses on coronaviruses of bat origin. Her research was profiled in a March 2020 article published by the Scientific American.

Here, she details early concerns she had as to whether the virus could have escaped her lab.

On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patients’ samples. In the following weeks — the most intense and the most stressful time of her life — China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the team found that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses. Shi instructed her group to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another facility to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.” By January 7 the Wuhan team had determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered — a conclusion based on results from analyses using polymerase chain reaction, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan. Their results appeared in a paper published online on February 3 in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

Not surprisingly, you see the reference to Daszak. It won’t be the last we hear of him.

But despite the ‘golly gee, we were worried it could have come from here but relieved to find out that it didn’t,’ kind of harmless admission, more reasons to be skeptical have since surfaced. In May, a U.S. intelligence report released by the State Department noted three researchers working at WIV fell ill and were hospitalized in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. The official position by China and WHO is that the first patient with known symptoms was treated on Dec. 8, 2019.

Although the link to the lab performing research on coronaviruses is undeniable, it’s unknown to what extent they were carrying out this work. Speculation on motives of the Chinese ranges from a possible honest mistake trying to research coronaviruses for development of vaccines to a more sinister possibility — performing biowarfare research for a possible weapon to be released intentionally at some point later down the line.

RALPH S. BARIC, PhD

A professor in the Department of Epidemiology and also the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ralph Baric is another figure seen in almost every angle of links to Wuhan. Baric can be traced to involvement in gain of function research as early as 2013.

It was on Sep. 2013, UNC announced a $10 million grant from NIH “to study the pathogenic activity of viruses,” which is believed to include his now infamous gain of function studies.

“This new research promises to identify novel genes and genetic functions that promote virus pathogenesis in the host, leading to new targets for antiviral development and vaccine design,” Baric said. “Our group will focus on genes that contribute to highly pathogenic coronavirus infections, using SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV as a model.”

In December of 2014, he was a featured speaker at a symposium in Washington, D.C. to discuss the risk and benefits of gain of function research. In fact, after the Federal pause of funding in 2014, he was still apparently authorized to continue his own research contrary to the funding stoppage. But it’s not clear as to how or why because he specifically had said the opposite.

Baric told NPR on Nov. 7, 2014, that “it took me 10 seconds to realize that most (of the research projects) were going to be affected.”

“The NIH has asked me to stop those experiments,” says Baric, “and so we have stopped those experiments.”

This statement becomes especially more alarming when you see the events that follow.

In the interview, he denied trying to change the way SARS or MERS are transmitted. But at the same time, his answers were confusing and contradictory.

Still, his group has recently been tweaking the genes of the MERS virus. So is he making it more dangerous? “If you’re a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to,” says Baric. Scientists study viruses in mice, so they can test vaccines and drugs. MERS doesn’t make mice ill. Baric wants to alter the MERS virus so that it can make mice as sick as it makes people.

GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH: WHAT IS IT?

Before we can go further, we must establish what exactly “gain of function” research really is. In short, it’s the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). This makes them more transmissible and/or more dangerous for purpose of studying possible impact on humans.

Here is a brief background provided on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website:

Certain gain-of-function studies with the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) have raised biosafety and biosecurity concerns, including the potential dual use risks associated with the misuse of the information or products resulting from such research. On October 16, 2014, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced the launch of the U.S. Government (USG) gain-of-function (GOF) deliberative process to re-evaluate the potential risks and benefits associated with certain GOF experiments. During this process the USG paused the release of federal funding for GOF studies anticipated to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets of influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses. The NSABB served as the official federal advisory body on the GOF issue and was tasked with providing recommendations to the USG on a conceptual approach for evaluating proposed GOF research. The NSABB finalized its recommendations on May 24, 2016. The U.S. Government considered the NSABB’s findings and recommendations during the development of policy on gain-of-function research. In January 2017, the U.S. Government released policy guidance for the review and oversight of research anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs.

As mentioned in the aforementioned background, in 2014, the practice was paused by the Federal government in order to further study the procedure for funding the research safely.

The dangers of gain of function came to the forefront both in the United States and globally in 2011 after a pair of researchers announced they had modified and enhanced the H5N1 avian influenza virus into a genetically altered strain that spread among ferrets. The study created immediate an immediate stir.

OCT. 17, 2014 — U.S. GOVERNMENT ISSUING A PAUSE TO ASSESS THE RISK AND BENEFITS OF LIFE SCIENCES GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

S ummary: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Department of Health and Human Services today announced that the U.S. Government is launching a deliberative process to assess the potential risks and benefits associated with a subset of life sciences research known as “gain-of-function” studies.

The White House Office of Science and Technology announced the pause, turning over recommendations to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to further study the issue and “begin the process of developing recommendations.”

Source: White House press release

Following this decision, the NIH codified the pause on funding of gain of function in NOT-OD-15–011 that same day.

The purpose of this Guide Notice is to notify applicants that in accordance with the October 17 White House announcement, the National Institutes of Health is instituting a funding pause on the provision of new funding for certain gain-of-function research projects, Federal-wide, so that a deliberative process can be undertaken to assess the potential benefits and risks associated with these types of studies.

An additional statement was provided by Director of NIH, Francis Collins.

After the pause, the government began the process of vetting gain of function. Although several projects were halted, not all of them were stopped. The research by Baric fell through the cracks somehow, although he stated publicly that his too had been halted.

In research that predated the pause, Baric continued to collaborate with the bat woman — Zhengli.

NOV. 9, 2015 — “A SARS-LIKE CLUSTER OF CIRCULATING BAT CORONAVIRUSES SHOWS POTENTIAL FOR HUMAN EMERGENCE” PUBLISHED BY RALPH BARIC, ZHENGLI-LI SHI, ET ALL

Baric, Zhengli, and others co-authored a study that published findings from work with the “spike protein,” commonly found in coronaviruses, in a genetically modified strand of SARS-CoV that was adapted to mice.

Abstract: The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

Source: NIH / PubMed, Nov. 9, 2015

Immediately, the study was criticized. Concerns over the then-paused gain of function research resurfaced with questions of how this study was endorsed in the first place. Remember Baric himself had told NPR in 2014 that he was asked to pause his research.

Less than a week after going online, on Nov. 15, 2015, Nature Magazine penned a scathing OP/ED titled, “Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate Over Risky Research.”

The argument is essentially a rerun of the debate over whether to allow lab research that increases the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens — what is known as ‘gain-of-function’ research. In October 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of such research on the viruses that cause SARS, influenza and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a virus that sporadically jumps from camels to people). The latest study was already under way before the US moratorium began, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency, says Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a co-author of the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, he says. But Wain-Hobson disapproves of the study because, he says, it provides little benefit, and reveals little about the risk that the wild SHC014 virus in bats poses to humans. Other experiments in the study show that the virus in wild bats would need to evolve to pose any threat to humans — a change that may never happen, although it cannot be ruled out. Baric and his team reconstructed the wild virus from its genome sequence and found that it grew poorly in human cell cultures and caused no significant disease in mice. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Both Ebright and Wain-Hobson are long-standing critics of gain-of-function research.

Although in general the funding on gain of research was still officially paused (apparently only for most), Daszak brazenly discussed it and his other coronavirus-related work in a February 2016 workshop in New York.

FEB. 23, 2016 — DASZAK DESCRIBES WORK DONE WITH THE “SPIKE PROTEIN” OF CORONAVIRUSES AT A FORUM ON THE ‘HISTORY & FUTURE OF PANDEMICS’

The forum, hosted by Sonia Shah at the New York Academy of Medicine, was aired on C-SPAN. Daszak spoke at length about the importance of identifying possible coronaviruses in nature that could make a leap to humans.

At the 1:15:38 mark of the video, which can be seen online, Daszak says:

“Some of these viruses will be killers and some of them won’t. How do we work that out from a viral sequence? It is not straightforward. So first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gotten to people from animals. We have narrowed it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative to the known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS — we found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them — some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein — the protein that attaches to cells — then we, well I didn’t do this work but my colleagues in China did the work, and then you create pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses; see if they bind to human cells. Each step of this, you move closer and closer to could the virus become pathogenic in people. You narrow down the field. You reduce the cost and end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”

Here, Daszak specifically mentions gain of function through the insertion of the spike protein. More notably, he says his Chinese colleagues were doing the work. That is an inference to gain of function research being done most likely at the lab in Wuhan and by the group run by Dr. Zhengli.

In an unrelated, yet sort of odd, twist, that forum panel was shared with Amy Maxmen, a PhD and reporter for Nature.

Earlier this month, a screenshot of Maxmen and Daszak on the dais together surfaced on Twitter. Maxmen, responding to a press inquiry from investigative journalist Katherine Eban, quickly fired back the screenshot was doctored. She claimed she had never met Daszak.

After Maxmen was bombarded with references to the symposium, where she can be seen on the previously mentioned C-SPAN video, and also a tweet on Feb. 23, 2016 where she proclaims excitement meeting Daszak and the panel, she acknowledges her ‘error’ and claims she simply forgot meeting him.

Although there is no linkage of Maxmen to the gain of function or COVID-19 story, it’s another in a long line of obfuscation and lies by public health officials.

Daszak, meanwhile, has continued to spill the beans on gain of function like a gossip columnist.

Making an appearance May 19, 2020 on Ep. 615 of the “This Week in Virology” podcast, Daszak tells host Vincent Racaniello how they had been enhancing a virus by inserting the spike protein, helping to prepare vaccine development.

“You can manipulate (coronaviruses) in the lab pretty easily. The spike protein drives a lot of what happens with coronaviruses — zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein — and we worked with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this — insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”

This is important. He is once again saying explicitly they’re taking the spike protein and inserting it into the backbone of a lesser virus. The spike protein is the cause by which COVID-19 has been so transmissible and so deadly. This is not proof they caused COVID-19, but this is admission they had certainly been engineering these viruses in labs.

JAN. 9, 2017 — WHITE HOUSE LIFTS PAUSE ON FUNDING OF GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH BY AUTHORIZING “POTENTIAL PANDEMIC PATHOGEN CARE AND OVERSIGHT” (P3CO) PROCEDURE

After the NSABB released their final report in May 2016, the White House evaluated the report and elected to permit the restart of funding of enhancing potential pandemic pathogens, or gain of function, but under the guidelines that each project must come with a benefit analysis that the rewards outweigh potential risks.

The White House said in the statement:

In particular, the recommended policy guidance implements the NSABB’s call for a pre-funding review mechanism for certain research proposals. Toward that end, the policy guidance recommends that Federal departments and agencies establish appropriate review processes if they plan to fund studies anticipated to create, transport, or use enhanced PPP. In their reviews, Departments and agencies are asked to establish that such projects satisfy eight specified principles, to assess the projects’ risks and benefits, and to develop risk mitigation plans that are commensurate with the projects’ risks. They are also requested to report the outcome of any such reviews to the OSTP Director, along with the associated risk-benefit analyses and risk mitigation plans. Projects that have been paused under the existing moratorium will now be reviewed utilizing a process consistent with the recommended policy guidance. Any projects that are determined suitable to proceed will do so with appropriate risk mitigation measures in place.

The full text of the new regulations can be found here.

DEC. 19, 2017 — NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH FOLLOWS WHITE HOUSE GUIDANCE, RESUMES FUNDING FOR GAIN OF FUNCTION THROUGH P3CO FRAMEWORK

Over 11 months after the White House issued new guidance, NIH followed suit announcing the resumption of funding through the P3CO process. the Director of NIH, Francis Collins, issued this statement:

We have a responsibility to ensure that research with infectious agents is conducted responsibly, and that we consider the potential biosafety and biosecurity risks associated with such research. I am confident that the thoughtful review process laid out by the HHS P3CO Framework will help to facilitate the safe, secure, and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health.

The new procedure was codified by NIH with NOT-OD-17–071. In the background section of the notice, the text states:

On October 17, 2014, the U.S. Government announced that it would be instituting a funding pause on gain-of-function research projects that could be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the resulting virus has enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility (via the respiratory route) in mammals. During the funding pause, the U.S. Government undertook a deliberative process to assess the potential benefits and risks associated with these types of studies. Completion of the deliberative process resulted in the Department of Health and Human Services issuing the HHS P3CO Framework on December 19, 2017. The HHS P3CO Framework is responsive to and in accordance with the “Recommended Policy Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight” issued on January 9, 2017 and supersedes the previous “Framework for Guiding U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Funding Decisions about Research Proposals with the Potential for Generating Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Viruses that are Transmissible among Mammals by Respiratory Droplets.” The HHS P3CO Framework is intended to guide agency funding decisions on proposed research that is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). A PPP is any pathogen that satisfies both of the following: It is likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations; and It is likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans. An enhanced PPP is defined as a PPP resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.

The bolded portion is key. Any agency funding decisions on proposed research that reasonably anticipates to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs, must use the P3CO process. It is a PPP if the pathogen is likely highly transmissible and likely of wide and uncontrollable spread, and it’s likely virulent and to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality. Enhancing a PPP is anything that would increase transmissibility and/or virulence of said pathogen — such as inserting a spike protein, which is the mechanism by which COVID-19 and other coronaviruses are so dangerous.

Simply, if any research meets this criteria, it is supposed to pass through P3CO process.

DEC. 12, 2019 — UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL RECEIVES MATERIAL TRANSFER AGREEMENT FROM NIAID AND MODERNA FOR “mRNA CORONAVIRUS VACCINE CANDIDATES DEVELOPED AND JOINTLY-OWNED BY NIAID AND MODERNA”

It’s unknown where the documents came from, but a purported leak of Moderna transfer agreements made with the NIAID — Fauci’s organization — show a series of transfers made from NIAID and Moderna to recipients for the purpose of vetting and researching mRNA vaccine candidates. This in itself isn’t surprising, as Moderna has been targeting mRNA technology as a primary platform for commercial distribution.

However, one particular agreement stood out.

On. Dec. 12, 2019, this specific transfer agreement made to UNC-Chapel Hill was signed for by…Ralph Baric. The document specifies beginning on p. 105 the provider(s), NIAID and ModernaTX, Inc, “agree to transfer to Recipient’s Investigator the following Research Material: mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna.”

Again, in a vacuum, this isn’t necessarily a big deal. Moderna had been performing mRNA research in collaboration with NIAID on many fronts, and one would assume a coronavirus vaccine was in demand due to the SARS epidemic in 2003. Still, given the questions surrounding gain of function research, the timing on this is extraordinary.

The agreement goes on to say the research material may not be used in human subjects. Although the type of research model is redacted as proprietary info, also redacted in the exhibit attached, one can reasonably guess this is likely “human mice lung” research, as Daszak has alluded to previously and references can be found in emails to and from Fauci. Baric signed off on the recipient page of this document on Dec. 12, with UNC’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) signing off four days later.

Then, a few weeks later…

DEC. 31, 2019 — “NOVEL CORONAVIRUS EMERGES IN CHINA”

In a press release issued in early January, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) country office in China was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. A preliminary determination of a new coronavirus was identified in a hospitalized patient with pneumonia.

The reported link to a wholesale fish and live animal market in Wuhan could indicate an exposure link to animals. According to media reports, the concerned market was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection. No specific measures for travellers are recommended. In case of symptoms suggestive of respiratory illness either during or after travel, travellers are encouraged to seek medical attention and share their travel history with their health-care provider. WHO advises against any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the current information available on this event.

Of course, this is not the full story. Even then, we didn’t know who was patient zero, nor did the wet market theory ever get fully vetted, clearly, as questions still persist.

But in addition to the intelligence report of three lab workers getting sick in November, we have ample evidence the virus could have been spreading sooner than the December outbreak timeline suggests.

In June 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) said traces of the new coronavirus were detected in that country as early as Dec. 18, 2019 in samples from Milan and Turin.

In their study, ISS scientists examined 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between last October and February. Samples from October and November came back negative, showing that the virus had not yet arrived, ISS water quality expert Giuseppina La Rosa said. Waste water from Bologna began showing traces of the virus in January.

Furthermore, health officials in France said a patient was known to have the new coronavirus in Paris on Dec. 27, 2019. Importantly, the patient said he didn’t know where he caught the virus as he had not travelled abroad.

In the United States, there is credible evidence showing the virus was here at least in December, if not earlier. From a report by the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal, published Nov. 30, 2020:

Methods

To determine if SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies were present in sera prior to the first identified case in the United States on 19 January 2020, residual archived samples from 7389 routine blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from 13 December 2019 to 17 January 2020 from donors resident in 9 states (California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin) were tested at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for anti–SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Specimens reactive by pan-immunoglobulin (pan-Ig) enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the full spike protein were tested by IgG and IgM ELISAs, microneutralization test, Ortho total Ig S1 ELISA, and receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity assay. Results

Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states.

If the virus was beginning to show signs of community spread in December in places such as France, Italy, and the United States, it assuredly was already being spread in China in November or earlier. And that is precisely what intelligence officials have said. In addition to three lab workers falling ill, they were warning a contagious of unknown origin was sweeping through the Wuhan area.

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.

One can only speculate as to the reason(s) why China has attempted to delay, obfuscate, and hide the true nature of the COVID-19 outbreak since the very beginning. Sadly, however, they had help suppressing the truth.

JAN. 27, 2020 — CHINA AGREES TO WHO SENDING AN “INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF LEADING SCIENTISTS” TO BETTER “UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT” AND RESPONSE OF THE OUTBREAK AND CONTAINMENT MEASURES

The team was assembled initially to have frank conversations beginning in February 2020, when the WHO deployed representatives for the “WHO-China Joint Mission” to rapidly inform national and international planning on next steps in the response to the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19.

From the mission, the 40-page final report was issued Feb. 28, 2020. It included a variety of findings — some now known to be inaccurate — ranging form origins, to early mitigation by China, to transmission dynamics. More concerning was the international team, which took part in the February mission, that was reassembled in November 2020 to study the “origins” of the virus.

The investigation aims to find out how and when SARS-CoV-2 first infected people. Strong evidence suggests that the coronavirus originated in bats, but its journey to people remains a mystery. Scientists say the team is highly qualified, but its task will be challenging. “This is an excellent team with a lot of experience,” says Martin Beer, a virologist at the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Greifswald, Germany. The group will be working with researchers in China and professionals from several other international agencies, and will start the search in Wuhan — the Chinese city where the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was first identified — and expand across China and beyond.

But when we see the membership roster in full, a familiar name pops out: one with an exceptional conflict of interest — Peter Daszak.

From the WHO “Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” page, we find members of the international team:

It’s remarkable that Daszak did not or would not have disclosed his ties to China and specifically, research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in studying coronaviruses. We cannot expect an honest, or at least entirely fair, accounting of the true origins of the virus with someone with such a financial and vested interest in the outcome. Yet, here we are.

JAN. 31, 2021 — FAUCI RECEIVES AN EMAIL THAT SETS OFF A CHAIN OF FRANTIC AND POTENTIALLY ALARMING COMMUNICATIONS REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF COVID-19

It started with a simple link to a story, no text, just a reference to an article in Science Magazine forwarded to Fauci by NIH Chief of Staff Greg Folkers. That story, “Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak’s origins,” authored by Jon Cohen, is mostly rejecting of the lab leak theory.

Naturally, Daszak was Johnny-on-the-spot to deflect and downplay any theory against natural origin.

Concerns about the institute predate this outbreak. Nature ran a story in 2017 about it building a new biosafety level 4 lab and included molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, Piscataway, expressing concerns about accidental infections, which he noted repeatedly happened with lab workers handling SARS in Beijing. Ebright, who has a long history of raising red flags about studies with dangerous pathogens, also in 2015 criticized an experiment in which modifications were made to a SARS-like virus circulating in Chinese bats to see whether it had the potential to cause disease in humans. Earlier this week, Ebright questioned the accuracy of Bedford’s calculation that there are at least 25 years of evolutionary distance between RaTG13 — the virus held in the Wuhan virology institute — and 2019-nCoV, arguing that the mutation rate may have been different as it passed through different hosts before humans. Ebright tells ScienceInsider that the 2019-nCoV data are “consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident.” Shi did not reply to emails from Science, but her longtime collaborator, disease ecologist Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, dismissed Ebright’s conjecture. “Every time there’s an emerging disease, a new virus, the same story comes out: This is a spillover or the release of an agent or a bioengineered virus,” Daszak says. “It’s just a shame. It seems humans can’t resist controversy and these myths, yet it’s staring us right in the face. There’s this incredible diversity of viruses in wildlife and we’ve just scratched the surface. Within that diversity, there will be some that can infect people and within that group will be some that cause illness.”

However, it did include a quote from Scripps researcher, Kristian Andersen, saying they couldn’t be sure.

“Until you consistently isolate the virus out of a single species, it’s really, really difficult to try and determine what the natural host is,” Anderson added.

Behind the scenes, Andersen was more doubting. After receiving a link to the article at 8:43 PM, Fauci had forwarded the email along to Andersen. Within two hours, at 10:32 PM, Andersen expressed his concerns as to the natural origin theory (on p. 3187 of the Buzzfeed email release).

“On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look

really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered. We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent wit h expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”

Earlier that very same day, before telling Fauci the virus appeared to be possibly engineered, Andersen responded to a tweet by Senator Tom Cotton expressing doubts about whether the virus could have escaped a lab in Wuhan. He snapped back at the suggestion, saying the analyses are “completely flawed and wrong. They can safely be ignored.”

Shortly after the BuzzFeed emails were released, Andersen deleted over 5,000 of his past tweets before imploding his own account. Now if you attempt to point to Andersen’s twitter, the account does not exist.

Questioned before he deleted the account, Andersen tried saying his old tweets “auto-delete.” Yet the screenshots captured by several researchers, Twitter users, etc., were still being found right up to the end of May 2021 when the emails surfaced. Yet another bizarre claim in a long list of them we have seen the past year to explain away suspect behavior.

In addition to Andersen, Fauci forwarded the email to John Mascola, Director of the Vaccine Research Center at NIH, Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome Trust, a British NPO and research organization, and HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Robert Kadlec.

In the early hours of Feb. 1, Fauci sent a panicked message (p. 3221, BuzzFeed emails) to Hugh Auchincloss, the NIAID Principal Deputy Director telling him to keep his phone on and read the paper attached to the email so they could discuss. The attachment is titled “Baric, Shi et al — Nature medicine — SARS Gain of function.pdf,” which is the Nov. 9, 2015 paper mentioned earlier.

Fauci quickly followed up a minute later sending Auchincloss the Science article from the day before. Then at 8:19 AM, Fauci forwarded the 2015 Nature article to NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak marked “IMPORTANT” with the text, “Here it is.”

At 10:34 AM that morning, Farrar sent a group email to 12 others including Fauci, German virologist Christian Drosten, who was later appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, Andersen, and Collins. The email advised there would be a conference call forthcoming and, “(I)nformation and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.”

A little over an hour after the Farrar conference call invitation, at 11:47 AM, Auchincloss responded to the Fauci email asking him to read the attached paper.

“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH. Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work bas gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

This is critical to understand. Remember after the pause, all resumed gain of function research was to be approved by the P3CO framework. Baric himself said initially he shut down his research by order of NIH, yet somehow, quietly, the study resumed with approval by NIH before the P3CO process was put in place in 2017. Further, they were concerned about “distant ties to this work abroad.” They were fully aware of the connections to labwork in China.

Fauci replied to Auchincloss with “OK. Stay tuned.” At 1:13 PM, Farrar sent an email about an upcoming 2 PM call saying, “Kristen and Eddi have shared this and will talk through it on the call. Thank you. Hope it will help frame the discussions.”

At 2:56 PM, Farrar sent an email to Fauci, Collins, and two others, asking if they could shut down the call and then redial in, advising it would be just a 5–10 minute break.

After Fauci responded six minutes later with a quick “yes,” Farrar rejoined the call, sending an email saying, “I have rejoined so a line is open if any help to rejoin.”

Then at 3:50 PM, Collins appears to reference WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an email to Farrar with Fauci CC’d.

“Hi Jeremy, I can make myself available at any time 24/7 for the call with Tedros. Just let me know. Thanks for your leadership on this critical and sensitive issue. Francis.”

At 3:59, Farrar sent out an email to the group that was part of the call.

“There is clearly so much to understand in this. This call was very helpful to hear some of our current understanding and the many gaps in our knowledge.(redacted portion) I hope that is a reasonable approach, please send any thoughts or suggestions.”

A minute later, Farrar followed up to the previous email from Collins sent at 3:50.

“We are altogether as you know! Conversations with you and Tony, and Patrick and others — always great working with you both.”

An early morning Feb. 2 email from Ron Fouchier was almost entirely redacted, thanking Farrar for participation. Farrar responded later (p. 3128) to Andrew Rambaut with the other participants on CC, with a heavily redacted email adding, “this is a very complex issue.” He closed, “I suggest we don’t get into further scientific discussion here, but wait for that group to be established.”

At 5:27 AM on Feb. 2, Collins sent an email to Farrar, with Fauci and Tabak copied, saying he was available “for a call to Tedros.”

“Let me know if I can help get through his thicket of protectors,” Collins added.

Later, at 7:13 AM, Colins then emailed Farrar with Fauci and Tabak copied, saying “Really appreciate us thinking through the options…,” with a single line redacted after that.

Then, at 11:28, Farrar responded to Collins and Fauci with Tabak copied.

The link references a Feb. 1, 2020 story that appeared on ZeroHedge by Tyler Durden. The article published public discussions on Twitter from Trevor Bedford, Eric Feigl-Ding, and several other sources as to whether there were HIV-like insertions inserted into the virus genome sequences.

One day later, on Feb. 3, 2020, ZeroHedge was banned from Twitter

Meanwhile, on the same day ZeroHedge was banned, and one day after Collins, Fauci, and Farrar were attempting to get in touch with the Director-General of the World Health Organization, the official WHO twitter account tweeted about “rumours & misinformation.”

Another interesting email to Fauci came a day later. On Feb. 4, 2020, Farrar forwarded a message to he and Collins from an Edward Holmes, with the subject “Prevalence of infection and stage of the epidemic in Wuhan.”

Holmes, a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, sent a draft of a paper he wrote to Farrar stating it’s “fundamental science and completely neutral as written,” adding it was also “excellent basic science, which is a service in itself.”

Also in the email, Holmes noted that he did not mention other anomalies “as this will make us look like loons.”

Farrar asked for the draft to be treated in confidence. Collins responded that it was very thoughtful analysis, with the rest of his reply being redacted. Then, a response from Farrar was entirely redacted.

It’s not clear as to which draft Holmes was working on, as he was included in a few publications shortly thereafter. However, on Feb. 17, 2020, Holmes, Andersen, and W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist from Columbia University, were already pushing back on the idea that the virus came from a lab.

Despite days earlier Andersen saying the virus did not appear natural, and Holmes saying the anomalies would make them look like “loons,” they were confident the evidence pointed to natural evolution.

“The SARS-CoV-2 spike appears to be the result of selection on human or human-like ACE2 permitting another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of genetic engineering,” the researchers wrote.

FEB. 19, 2020 — DASZAK, FARRAR, DROSTEN AND 24 OTHER PUBLIC HEALTH PROFESSIONALS PUBLISH LANCET PAPER ASKING FOR A SIGNED PETITION ASKING FOR PUBLIC SUPPORT AGAINST “CONSPIRACY THEORIES SUGGESTING THAT COVID-19 DOES NOT HAVE A NATURAL ORIGIN.”

The paper, published online Feb. 19, 2020 and included in correspondence in Vol. 395, Issue 10226, E42-E43, March 7, 2020, goes on to declare no competing interests by the authors. Daszak clearly wasn’t being truthful on that front. Like the World Health Organization international team inclusion, he had several conflicts of interest.

We are public health scientists who have closely followed the emergence of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and are deeply concerned about its impact on global health and wellbeing. We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable. We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 as have so many other emerging pathogens.11, 12 This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine13 and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.14 We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus. We invite others to join us in supporting the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of Wuhan and across China. Stand with our colleagues on the frontline! We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.

This was a clear push to downplay the narrative of the virus originating in a lab.

It’s important to note that on Feb. 6, 2020, Fauci received an email from Folkers advising him of an opportunity to be a part of another paper from Daszak, with the subject title of the email, “ASF — Morens+Daszak+Taubeneberger paper.”

Although the email Folkers is quoting is redacted, he adds,

“So the question to you — do you want to be part of this? ie be a

coauthor? I would vote no — it would look weird to add you as a coauthor now. Plus,

plate too full. …..”

This appears to be an invitation to participate in and a reference of an article later published by Daszak, David M Morens, and Jeffery K Taubenberger in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 2, 2020. The paper itself, titled, “Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus,” isn’t terribly controversial but it also isn’t informative, either.

If anything, the paper reads like a subtle push against the narratives of being engineered or modified in a lab and a defense of Daszak’s own research into bat-originated coronaviruses occurring in nature.

Of course, scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar: RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets. We have recently seen many such emerging zoonoses, including the 2003 bat-coronavirus–derived SARS (an earlier severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a closely related coronavirus), which came terrifyingly close to causing a deadly global pandemic that was prevented only by swift global public health actions and luck.1 Now, 17 years later, we stand at a similar precipice. How did we get to this point, and what happens next? We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats.1–3 We have created a global, human-dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses, especially genetically error-prone RNA viruses, whose high mutation rates have, for millions of years, provided opportunities to switch to new hosts in new ecosystems. It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by 1%. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1% in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses. We have actually been watching such dramas play out in slow motion for more than a millennium in the case of pandemic influenza, which begins with viruses of wild waterfowl that host-switch to humans and then cause human-to-human transmission. A bird virus thereby becomes a human virus. Coronavirus emergence takes a different trajectory, but the principles are similar: SARS, the Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), and Covid-19 all apparently have their origins in enzootic bat viruses. The parallels between the two SARS viruses are striking, including emergence from bats to infect animals sold in live-animal markets, allowing direct viral access to crowds of humans, which exponentially increases opportunities for host-switching. Such live markets have also led to avian epizootics with fatal human “spillover” cases caused by nonpandemic, poultry-adapted influenza viruses such as H5N1 and H7N9. One human cultural practice in one populous country has thus recently led to two coronavirus near-pandemics and thousands of severe and fatal international cases of “bird flu.”

To be fair to Daszak, there was one line included in the paper that may have been a bit Freudian.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly had it right decades ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

MARCH 17, 2020 — ANDERSEN, LIPKIN, HOLMES, ANDREW RAMBAUT AND ROBERT F. GARRY PUBLISH “THE PROXIMAL ORIGIN OF SARS-COV-2”

In a public reversal of what was communicated the previous month in confidential emails, Andersen, Holmes, Rambaut, and others that had been communicating with Fauci came out with a definitive pushback against the lab leak possibility. The paper, published in Nature Medicine, suggested evidence supported natural evolution.

While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation. Theories of SARS-CoV-2 origins

It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.

The remarkable part of the email communications is it’s never clear there was a change in their stance on the virus looking engineered. It would make sense why you would keep communications confidential for something embarrassing — or worse — but you would think they would be entirely eager to share great news with one another if they believed the theory was baseless. A breakthrough definitively pushing back on a lab leak possibility would be something scientists should be eager to share with one another. Instead, emails were sparse, dodgy, ambiguous, and vaguely self-congratulatory in the weeks that followed.

After weeks of no communication found in email correspondence, on March 6, 2020, Andersen thanked Fauci, Collins, and Farrar on their leadership and advised the forthcoming paper was accepted by Nature pending final edits.

By April, Fauci was pushing Andersen and Holmes’ papers to the media.

MAY 11, 2021 — ANTHONY FAUCI TO SENATOR RAND PAUL IN SENATE HEARING TESTIMONY, “DR. BARIC IS NOT DOING GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH AND IF IT IS, IT’S ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES AND IS BEING CONDUCTED IN NORTH CAROLINA.”

In a May 11 senate hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rand Paul had another of his many verbal confrontations with Fauci, this time regarding the origins of the virus. Fauci became agitated and defensive over the line of questioning.

When asked by Paul if Fauci still supports NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan, he counters:

“Senator Paul with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Picking up on Fauci’s attempt at a technicality, Paul quickly interrupts…

“Do they fund Dr. Baric?”

“We do not fund gain…”

“Do you fund Dr. Baric’s gain of function research?” Paul pins Fauci down further.

“Dr. Baric is not doing gain of function research and if it is, it’s according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina.”

Paul asks, “you don’t think inserting a bat virus spike protein that he got from the Wuhan Institute that he got from the SARS virus is gain of function?

“You must be in the minority because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge working group saying that it is gain of function.”

“Well, it is not. And if you look at the grant and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain of function, despite the fact that people tweet that and write about it.”

“So do you still support sending money to the Wuhan Virology Institute,” Paul asks.

“We do not send money now to the Wuhan Virology Institute.”

“Do you support sending money? We did under your tutelage. We were sending it through EcoHealth, it was sub-agency and a sub-grant. Do you support that the money from NIH that was going to the Wuhan Institute?”

“Let me explain to you why that was done. The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected.”

“Or perhaps it would be irresponsible to send it to the Chinese government, who we may not be able to trust with this knowledge and with these incredibly dangerous viruses. Government scientists like yourself who favor gain of function research…”

“I don’t favor gain of function research in China. You’re saying things that are not correct.”

“Government defenders of gain of function, such as yourself, say that COVID-19 mutations were random and not designed by man. But interestingly, the technique that Dr. Baric developed forces mutation through serial passage by cell culture that the mutations appear to be natural. In fact, Dr. Baric named the technique the ‘no-see-m’ technique because the mutations appear naturally. Nicholson Baker of New York Magazine said nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature.

“Government authorities in the U.S., including yourself, unequivocally deny that COVID-19 could have escaped a lab. But even Dr. Shi in Wuhan wasn’t so sure. According to Nicholson Baker, Dr. Shi wondered could this new virus have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records frantically and found no matches.

‘That really took a load off my mind,’ she said. ‘I had not slept for days.’

“The director of the gain of function research in Wuhan couldn’t sleep because she was terrified it might be in her lab. Dr. Baric, an advocate of gain of function research, admits the main problem that the Institute of Virology has is the outbreak occurred in close proximity. What are the odds? Baric responded, could you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer is in this case, probably not.

“Will you, in front of this group, categorically say COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?”

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done and I’m fully in favor of any investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

“But you do support it in the U.S. We have 11 labs doing it and you have allowed it here. We have a committee to do it here, but the committee has granted every exemption. You’re fooling with mother nature here. You’re allowing super-viruses to be created with a 15 percent mortality. It’s very dangerous and it was a huge mistake to share this with China and it’s a huge mistake to continue to allow this in the United States. We should be very careful to investigate where this virus came from.”

“I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology no matter how…”

“You’re parsing words. There was research done with Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. They have collaborated on gain of function research where they enhanced the SARS virus to infect human airway cells and they did it by merging a new spike protein on it. That is gain of function. That was joint research by Wuhan Institute and by Dr. Baric. You can’t deny it.”

Fauci finishes by saying they did not fund gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It’s obvious in this exchange that Fauci got backed into a corner. He started off saying they have never funded gain of function research and by the end, he winds up making the distinction they’ve never funded gain of function in Wuhan. But he’s clearly arguing only a technicality as the evidence shows that gain of function research was being conducted, it was funded, and they certainly were aware it was being done in Wuhan.

Furthermore, he started off by saying they haven’t sent money to Wuhan and then he changed to we don’t now send money to Wuhan. This exchange, with his emails and previous knowledge as a backdrop, show Fauci had every reason in the world to be concerned. He knew there was gain of function research being done. He knew there were links to the lab in Wuhan. He knew Baric, Daszak, Shi, and others were involved. As Fauci has done so often, he’s denying and deflecting.

MAY 2, 2021 — ORGIN OF COVID — FOLLOWING THE CLUES

“Did people or nature open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?”

As we pour through pages and pages of evidence, which only scratch the surface of what may have really happened to cause the COVID-19 global pandemic, we have only a fraction of the information necessary to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Still, it is obvious there is a mountain of circumstantial and tangible evidence to conclude a lab leak is a very real possibility. Whether it was purposeful or accidental in nature is less pressing by the information available, but the alarm bells are ringing and it’s time to put forth a thorough and honest accounting.

Nicholas Wade probably best summed the scientific evidence on May 2, 2021 with his Medium piece raising the issue. Although the scientific explanation is compelling, his opined conclusion is equally fascinating.

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 2nd and 3rd 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 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 funding 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.

The reckoning needs to begin. If a small number of scientists, researchers, and public health officials directly or indirectly led to a global pandemic with their reckless disregard for safety, we need these answers. And we need to know why, then, they were allowed to cover their tracks if that is indeed what happened. From Google to Twitter, to the New York Times to the rest of corporate media, to the CDC to WHO, to NIH and everyone in between, if there is an untold story, it is because it was censored and many people were dismissed as deranged conspiracy loons along the way.

It’s time to investigate this once and for all.