Friday 21 January 2022

Covid-19, genetic engineering, and the Wuhan lab-leak theory

There are three key questions about the Covid-19 pandemic. 

1) Did Covid-19 arise by natural spread from another animal (zoonosis), or did it come from a lab-leak?

2) If it came from a lab-leak, was it from an unmodified virus that was being held in the lab, or had it been genetically modified?

3) Were there attempts by any scientists or governments to cover it up?

Sometimes in scientific controversies, there can be absolute proof that one theory is correct, and all others are wrong. Often this is not the case, and the best that can be achieved is a situation in which one pattern fits the known facts better than alternative patterns.


Four plausible paths that the virus could have taken from bats to people.

The Case that Covid-19 came from zoonosis


Most novel viruses that infect humans do occur by zoonosis. Usually, the species of origin and the route of cross-infection from an animal to humans can be demonstrated reasonably quickly, especially with modern virological techniques. 


Avian influenza. The most well-known strain, H5N1, was first isolated from a farmed goose in Guangdong Province, China in 1996.

Hendra virus is a bat-borne virus that is associated with a highly fatal infection in horses and humans. Dr Linfa Wang played a role in elucidating it.

Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) emerged by zoonosis from Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in primates such as chimpanzees in West Africa. 

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), sometimes known as SARS 1 or SARS-CoV-1, caused an epidemic in 2002-04. It was shown to have come from horseshoe bats, via Asian palm civets. The SARS virus was isolated in March 2003, its genome sequenced in April, and animal sources in markets identified in May.

Middle East respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus (MERS-CoV) emerged in 2012. It crossed to humans from dromedary camels, possibly after originating in bats.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) emerged in Wuhan in December 2019. A source at the Huanan seafood market was suspected. The authorities tested 457 samples from 188 animals spanning 18 species. They all proved negative for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. They tested 616 animals of ten species from the suppliers to the market and found no sign of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material.

Suspicion then fell on pangolins, but that theory was later abandoned.

After extensive investigations over the last two years, unlike all the examples above, no evidence of a plausible natural zoonotic source of SARS-CoV-2 has been discovered. 


The Case that Covid-19 came from a lab-leak



The closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in a copper mine in Mojiang in south-west China near the border with Laos. In April 2012, six miners who had been clearing bat droppings from a cave fell ill with a novel virus. The virus they were infected with was described as a SARS-like coronavirus. Samples were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) 1,800 km away.

The genome of the virus was sequenced and named BtCoV/4991

The WIV made at least seven expeditions to the mine to collect bat samples between 2012 and 2015, led by Dr Shi Zhengli.

After the first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in Wuhan in December 2019, Dr Shi published the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 genome in Nature. She named it RaTG13. 

Later a whistleblower worked out that there was a close match between BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13. The Nature article was subsequently amended. 'In 2020, we compared the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 with our unpublished bat coronavirus sequences and found that it shared a 96.2% identity with RaTG13.'

She later told Scientific American that she had frantically searched through her lab’s records to see if there was a possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus having leaked from the lab. Every laboratory-related incident was reviewed.  ‘That really took a load off my mind,’ said Dr Shi. ‘I had not slept a wink for days.’

(This illustrates that a lab-leak origin of Covid-19 was initially plausible to the scientist at the heart of the bat viral research. She later abused sceptics and told them to 'Shut your stinky mouth'.)

To summarise, an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in a copper mine, more than 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, led to patient samples being sent to Wuhan for analysis. A 2013 medical thesis concluded, after incorporating results shared by the WIV, that these miners had likely been infected by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats in the mine. An expedition by Wuhan virologists to seek the viral cause brought back hundreds of samples from bats. Their repeated visits to the mine turned up a bat-borne coronavirus in 2013, which was recognised to be a novel SARS-like coronavirus. The WIV team partly sequenced this new virus in 2017 and then fully sequenced it in 2018. When its sequence was found to closely match the sequence of the virus causing Covid-19, the Wuhan scientists published it under a new name and failed to cite their own paper detailing its discovery or to reveal that they had been studying the virus over the past few years or to mention that it had come from a mine where there had been a fatal outbreak of pneumonia.

A short history of laboratory leaks and gain-of-function studies by Professor Paul R. Goddard. 19th Feb 2022.

"SARS-CoV-2 arose in a city many miles away from an animal population that might have harboured a similar virus, at a time when the supposed original host was dormant (late autumn), near a laboratory known to be working on the viruses. It then spread from person to person at an alarming rate and was seen to be totally adapted to human beings, to the extent that it was unable to even infect the bat it was supposed to have arisen from.

As a person who has studied the history of pandemics and lab leaks, imagine my surprise when authorities, not only in China but also in the USA and UK, stated categorically that the virus was obviously zoonotic and we were conspiracy theorists if we proposed the opposite. I had to conclude that they were misguided or purposely lying."

Was the virus genetically engineered?


This story involves some key people, several from outside of China. 

Dr Shi Zhengli, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Dr Linfa Wang heads the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, and has worked in the CSIRO in Geelong, Australia. 
Prof Ralph Baric Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Dr Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. The organization has administered more than $100 million in U.S. federal grants to fund overseas laboratory experiments including many at WIV.
Prof Anthony Fauci,  Chief Medical Advisor to the US President.

There have been many collaborations between these people, often involving research that amount to genetic engineering of bat coronaviruses.


Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang and Peter Daszak

Eg: This 2015 paper was co-authored by Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric. 
A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. The summary includes: 'Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.'

Note: A 'chimeric' virus is a virus that contains genetic material derived from two or more distinct viruses. Wikipedia. In other words, the authors concede that they were genetically engineering coronaviruses.

'We do know one thing now beyond debate: speculative “gain-of-function” experiments on mutant bat viruses were taking place in Wuhan laboratories.'

There are many other examples documented in the two books: 



"In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?" Fauci wrote in the American Society for Microbiology in 2012, adding "Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?"

"Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks," Fauci continued. "It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky."

The Obama administration instituted a moratorium on 'gain-of-function' research in October 2014. The moratorium was lifted in December 2017 during the Trump administration. Ban on gain-of-function studies ends.

First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources. The three scientists were engaged in “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses when they fell ill. 14th June 2023


Ben Hu, one of three “patients zero,” and a researcher who led the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

The story of the first three people infected by Covid being lab workers is refuted here.



'That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious. Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis.'

Was there a cover-up?



The answer to this is an unambiguous 'YES'. Not only by the Chinese Government, but also, more shockingly, by western scientists and scientific journals.

Here are a few examples:

Whistleblowers.

Dr Li Wenliang was a young Chinese ophthalmologist who raised the alarm about the first cases of Covid-19. He was admonished by the police. He later died. 


Furin cleavage sites. 

Furin cleavage sites are important in two ways: 

a) They can be added by genetic engineers. They can also occur naturally.
b) They sometimes distinguish viruses that have the ability to cross from animals to humans. 

Zhengli Shi was one of the scientists who had been at the forefront of research into the importance of the furin cleavage site making MERS and SARS into human pathogens.

One such study, which featured as co-authors Zhengli Shi and Ralph Baric, was Two Mutations Were Critical for Bat-to-Human Transmission of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) Coronavirus, saying then that such cleavage sites ‘played critical roles in the bat-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV, either directly or through intermediate hosts’


On 3rd Feb 2020, Zhengli Shi published 'A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin' in Nature. The SARS-Cov-2 virus has the very rare CGG-CGG doublet furin cleavage site. The paper curiously ignored it. 

As Chan and Ridley remark: 'It is one of the strangest omissions in a scientific paper. The sarbecovirus specialists were clearly paying extremely close attention to this part of the genome, but the most remarkable feature of all escaped their attention. 

'It is as if you discover a unicorn and you compare it with other horses, describing in detail the hair and the hooves, but you don’t mention the horn.' 

Chan and Ridley say: 'Given that Dr Shi’s group had made chimeric SARS viruses and Dr Shi and co-authors had recently collaborated on a project studying parallel sites in MERS-like viruses, their silence on the unique furin cleavage site with critical implications when they published the first sarbecovirus genome is the dog that did not bark in the night-time.'

US officials meetings

On February 1, 2020, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated. Letter from two US Congressmen. 11th January 2022. It contains several heavily redacted emails.

Over the next few days, the group of officials shifted from accepting the possibility of a lab-leak, maybe involving genetic engineering, to a decision to try to quash the 'conspiracy theory'.

Newly released emails make more plausible the contention that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins presided over the suppression of the lab-leak theory for political reasons. Nicholas Wade. The City Journal. January 23, 2022

Lancet letter and conflict of interest.

On 7th March 2020, the Lancet published a letter which had been organised by Peter Daszak. It said the writers 'strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.' It also said 'We declare no competing interests'.

Peter Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, which had been a significant funder of the research at WIV. This conflict of interest was immediately spotted, but it took 15 months for the editor of the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, to persuade Dr Daszak to accept an amendment, which was published on 21st June 2021. Dr Horton was quizzed extensively about this in a UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting on 16th December 2021.

China's reaction to the request for an inquiry.

In April 2020, Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, called for an international inquiry into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Chinese ambassador threatened various punitive reactions, which came to pass.




The deletion of the viral genome database.

The genetic sequences for the viral samples for the first few months of the pandemic in Wuhan had been uploaded to the NIH Sequence Read Archive. In June 2020, they were removed by a Chinese researcher, and have not become available again. 

This interview with the authors of the book 'Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19' by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley expands on the points above.





Review: Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, Covid Ground Zero – Murong Xuecun.

It’s The Cover Up, Stupid. 11 July 2023. Three and a half years after the COVID pandemic began taking lives and destroying communities, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Congress will start hearings today to investigate how the epidemic kicked off. A group of highly conflicted virologists and U.S federal scientists have argued COVID started naturally—jumping from bats to humans—while others point to evidence of a lab accident in Wuhan, China. Neither side has a smoking gun, but the greatest proof against the virologists’ natural outbreak story is a constant stream of evidence pointing to a scientific cover up.

The secret messages behind the lab-leak cover-up. This is “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author.

The Wuhan Cover-Up: Scientists Lied as People Died.  The DisInformation Chronicle. 2nd Nov 2023.

Science Magazine’s Paper Advocating Market Origin for COVID Based on False Statistics. The DisInformation Chronicle. 12th February 2024. German paper here.

The scale of the consequences of this pandemic is massive.






The figures from The Economist model suggest a death toll more than twice that from the First World War (about 15 million).

Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research. Jonathan Latham, and Allison Wilson. 21st April 2022. A thorough and comprehensive discussion about the arguments around Covid-19's origin.


An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of Covid. 20th May 2022. 


9th June 2022. WHO report from the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) shifts ground from its previous position.


The World Health Organisation recommended in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is needed.


The lab-leak theory isn’t dead. Unherd. 30th August 2022

Review of 'Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus' by Nicholas Wade, City Journal, October 21, 2022. Wade criticizes the partiality of the author David Quammen, and then concisely summarizes the evidence that a genetically engineered virus was responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sir Jeremy Farrar’s damning indictment, sent to two leading scientists in the United States, shows that the head of the Wellcome Trust admitted to fears the new virus emerging in China might have been tied to research even as he coordinated an influential paper dismissing ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario.’

Newly released emails cast more doubt than ever on the official story of Covid-19 as a naturally occurring virus. Nicholas Wade, City Journal, December 4, 2022. (Extract below).

'This brings us to the over-riding puzzle of the email record. What exactly happened on February 1 to make Andersen and Holmes change their minds 180 degrees?' On 31st January Andersen tells Fauci that if you “look really closely at all the sequences” of SARS2 and related bat viruses, you can see “that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Hence, he wrote, he and his three colleagues, Holmes, Farzan, and Garry, “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” meaning it wasn’t made in nature.

This would be a stunning discovery, if true, and one that its authors doubtless intended to publish as soon as possible, even though it would trigger a political maelstrom. Andersen surely expected praise for this sensational insight and that Fauci would give helpful advice about presenting the discovery to the public.

But would the NIH leadership indeed have been overjoyed to see the mother of all public inquiries into the possibility of a link between its support of research at Wuhan and the outbreak of the pandemic? Quick action would be needed to avert any such disaster. Instead of appreciation, Andersen finds himself the very next day on a teleconference with Fauci, Collins, and senior British medical officials, being confronted by a bunch of European gain-of-function virologists baying for his blood. To Andersen’s dismay, it seems that Fauci is not so pleased. Collins, too, is seriously unhappy, fretting in an email the next day that “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

Evidently, Andersen has gotten the wrong answer. Right scientifically, maybe, but oh, so erroneous politically.

Being wrong was no trivial matter for Andersen’s group. Fauci, Collins, and Farrar between them control a huge chunk of the money available for virology research. What serious prospects could there be for Andersen’s future career if he should persist, despite heavy hints, in doing “great potential harm to science and international harmony?” As to the likelihood of NIH delight in his group’s landmark discovery that SARS-CoV2 bore the fingerprints of human design, the scales that day fell from his eyes.

“I see that road to Damascus conversion occurring during the February 1 teleconference,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has long criticized gain-of-function virology research, said in an interview. “They felt they had found something really important and their funding agency would be proud of it too, but on the teleconference they learned the opposite. They felt Fauci would really want to know, but it’s the last thing he wanted to know.”

Telling the truth had landed them in deep ordure. “They were so concerned they had damaged their fundability that the only way they could retrieve it was to suborn science on behalf of their paymaster,” Ebright avers.

The Proximal Origins paper was the recantation of the dangerous conclusion they had outlined in their January 31st email. Only when this palinode is safely in press does Andersen receive the praise he had at first expected, though for the opposite reason. “Nice job on the paper,” Fauci writes him on March 8. And what a pleasant surprise: on May 21, Andersen’s lab, with Garry as a subcontractor, was awarded a grant of almost $1.9 million from Fauci’s agency.

“Our analyses clearly show,” wrote the authors of Proximal Origins, “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” For the following two years, this aggressively stated conclusion in a high-visibility journal became accepted wisdom throughout the world. The new emails give no reason for confidence that its authors believed a word of it.'

A lengthy interview of Matt Ridley by Jordan Peterson. 'Viral: The Origin of Covid 19'

 

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation. 14 February 2023

FBI director says China lab leak probably caused COVID pandemic. SMH March 1, 2023.

EVOLUTION OF A THEORY

Unredacted NIH Emails Show Efforts to Rule Out Lab Origin of Covid The Intercept. 19th Jan 2023

Sergei Pond is a computational virologist at Temple University who is “agnostic” on the question of the virus’s origin. He described reading this new batch of emails as a “revelatory experience” and likened it to watching the TV show “Breaking Bad,” in which the main character, through a series of small, understandable decisions, ends up in a bad place. He sees in the emails a desire to downplay the deep concern about the possibility of a lab origin.

“It started out being a fairly careful discussion, with anomalies being aired out and people saying multiple times that there is simply not enough data to resolve this,” he said in a recent interview. “But at some point, I think there was such strong pressure that they went from ‘Let’s just wait to get more data’ to ‘Let’s publish something that has a very strong opinion favoring one explanation over another without acquiring any new data.’”

“The big question,” he said, “is why did this happen?”

Pond added that there was no data then, and there is no data now, that would definitively indicate that a lab origin like the one contemplated in “Proximal Origin” is not at least plausible.

Nicholas Wade on Lab Leak. March 29th, 2023. Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade appeared before the House Oversight Committee to testify on the origin of the Covid virus.


US scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. January 18, 2024 by Emily Kopp

For a long time, Dr. Richard Ebright, a prominent biologist who has been outspoken on the origins of Covid-19, has leaned toward believing a lab to be the most likely source of the pandemic, but left room open for a natural origin possibility. Following Kopp’s new report, the room for doubt is closed, he said. “There is no – zero – remaining room for reasonable doubt that EcoHealth and its associates caused the pandemic,” he said, referring to the new report as a “smoking gun.”

Emily Kopp interviewed here on Breaking Points, 25th January 2024. Start at 1:28:00


The Story of the Decade. By Nicolas Wade. City Journal. Jan 25th 2024

New documents strengthen—perhaps conclusively—the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins.

On the other hand....
These next three items from from the rationalist site Astral Codex Ten. They are long, and exhaustive.

Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate

Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.

His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.

One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker.

So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning everywhere, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges.

Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this Peter Miller agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. (See below)

Did Covid-19 come from nature or from a lab? Rootclaim says:


The case against the lab leak theory
Every reason why lab leak theories fail and a natural origin of covid is more likely.
Peter Miller. Microbial Instincts. Jan 17, 2023


First Rootclaim Debate on Covid Origins, part 1 -- opening arguments for a natural origin of Covid


First Rootclaim Debate on Covid Origins, part 2 -- opening arguments for lab leak


First Rootclaim Debate on Covid Origins, part 3 -- discussion and judges' questions

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate by Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten.

COVID origins debate: Response to Scott Alexander



___________________________________________________________________

The UK Sunday Times published an extensive review on the origin of Covid-19 on 10th June 2023. 

What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted. (May be behind a paywall, but copied below).

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.

Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.


The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.

However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

Covid-19 is widely believed to have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.

They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

Separate analysis shows the centre of the initial outbreak of Covid-19, which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the institute’s laboratory, rather than at the city’s “wet” wildlife market as had been thought.


Chinese medical workers in protective suits in early February 2020

The US investigators also revealed how they had been given evidence indicating the institute had been working on a vaccine before the pandemic. “I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the source said. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”

Foreign experts who have sought to identify the source of the pandemic have been blocked from investigating by the Chinese state.

A team led by British bat expert Alice Hughes, who was an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which oversees the Wuhan institute, had been working in the mines. Hughes said she was barred from speaking to the media about her research and was being watched by China’s security service. The restrictions forced her to leave China and move to Hong Kong.

The microbiologist Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, is a long-standing opponent of the type of high-risk work undertaken at Wuhan.

He reviewed some of the experiments and describes them as “by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses — or indeed on any viruses — known to have been undertaken at any time in any location”.


Railway workers disinfect the main station in Wuhan in March 2020Railway workers disinfect the main station in Wuhan in March 2020

Experiment that diced with death: inside the Wuhan lab
In November 2002, farmers and food workers in the Chinese province of Guangdong began to fall ill with severe respiratory symptoms. Medical staff soon followed suit. The Sars virus spread rapidly through 29 countries, infecting 8,000 people and killing 774. It was the first serious epidemic of the new century — and a wake-up call to scientists.

Sars was identified as a coronavirus, which until then had mostly caused mild symptoms, such as a common cold. If it could mutate like this, so could other viruses. A vaccine was needed.

The job of finding out how Sars had emerged was taken on by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its most famous scientist, 39-year-old Dr Shi Zhengli. She and her team zoned in on bats, which had been linked to other deadly viruses, such as rabies, nipah and marburg. She began searching for bat colonies in caves in southern China in 2004, earning her the nickname “Batwoman”. Faecal samples were sent back to Wuhan to be tested for viruses.

They began conducting experiments with Sars and other viruses. Shi was joined by a British bat expert, Dr Peter Daszak, who would become a close friend and collaborator. Born in Dukinfield, near Manchester, he obtained a degree in zoology at Bangor University and later moved to New York, where he took a management position in the Wildlife Trust, a non-profit organisation.

Its work protecting pets and endangered species did not attract substantial funding. But after the September 11 terror attacks and the Sars outbreak, the US began to see the importance of funding work combatting bioterrorism and pandemics. The trust began to focus on how viruses might cross from animals to people and spark a pandemic.

Shi’s team provided the fieldwork for the trust’s campaign and the laboratories to test and experiment on the viruses. In 2009, the trust was given $18 million over five years from a new programme, called Predict, to identify pandemic viruses. Shortly afterwards, the trust was rebranded as the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak assumed the role of president. The Chinese collaborators who helped put him on the map were also rewarded: $1 million of the Predict grant was redirected to the Wuhan institute.


Mice were “humanised” with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours.

The truly cutting-edge experiments were being done in the US by the veteran virologist Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He used a technique to fuse together different pathogens by mixing their genes. To test the effect of these lab-created mutant viruses on people, he created “humanised” mice by injecting them with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours. His ultimate aim was to create a universal vaccine against Sars-type viruses — an objective still not achieved.

Baric was aware this type of “gain of function” work, so-called because it can enhance virus potency, was controversial and could have a sinister application.

“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”

By 2012, campaigners and scientists were starting to wake up to the profound risks inherent in coronavirus work. Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, in Washington, called for research on live Sars coronaviruses to be stopped.

“About 30 labs now are working with live Sars virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high,” Klotz wrote in a co-authored article. “Would one in ten escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high.”


Shi Zhengli in 2017 with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Bioweapons warnings
In 2012, in a cave called Shitou in the remote mountains of Yunnan province, southern China, Shi’s team made a breakthrough. They recovered a virus that was the closest match to Sars of those found at the time. They labelled it WIV1, using the initials of the institute, and demonstrated through laboratory work that it was able to infect human cells.

But they were unable to grow sufficient quantities of a second Sars-like virus found in the cave, labelled SHC014, to do similar tests.

Shi needed Baric’s expertise. She contacted him in 2013 and he agreed to help. The Wuhan Institute provided Baric’s team with the genetic sequence for SHC014 so he could recreate the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides. The American scientists then inserted SHC014’s “spike gene” into a copy of the original Sars virus Baric had created in his lab and tested the new mutant on his humanised mice.

In May 2014, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded a $3.7 million publicly funded grant by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). More than $500,000 of it went to the Wuhan lab for equipment and a further $130,000 was spent chiefly on pay and benefits for Shi and her assistant.

Pressure was being exerted on the lab work, however. That year, Barack Obama announced a moratorium on all gain-of-function experiments that would be “reasonably anticipated” to increase a pathogen’s infectiousness or lethality. This included Sars-related work.

It could have been the end of the Wuhan-North Carolina collaboration, but a loophole allowed gain-of-function work to proceed if deemed urgent and safe. Baric made the argument to the NIH, which gave approval.

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.


A scientist at the Wuhan laboratory handling virus samples from a laboratory-grade deep freezer without face or eye cover

Safety fear at Wuhan labs
The Wuhan institute began stepping up its own lab work using Baric’s techniques. It created two new mutants by fusing viruses with the WIV1 pathogen it had found in the Shitou cave. These experiments were mentioned in Daszak’s progress report for the year to May 2016, which he submitted to the US government funders. The same report disclosed the institute planned to create an infectious version of the camel pathogen Mers by combining it with bat viruses. Mers had killed 35 per cent of people infected during a 2012 outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

This triggered alarm bells for the US government because it would have involved the type of gain-of-function experiments that were still barred. According to documents obtained by freedom of information campaigners, Daszak argued the Mers experiment was not gain of function because it was unlikely to make the virus more pathogenic. A compromise was reached whereby the scientists would stop work and report to US officials if they created a new mutant virus that grew ten times faster than the natural virus it was created from.

That same year, Daszak announced to a New York conference that Shi was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people”.

By 2017, according to a paper published by Shi, her scientists had sought to create eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses found in the Shitou cave. Two of the mutant viruses were found to infect human cells. Most of this work was carried out in the institute’s biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) laboratories, which took only light precautions that have been compared to those used in a dental surgery.

By contrast, the US guidelines require level 3 (BSL-3) precautions for similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.

The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post. They observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”.


Before Covid-19 the Wuhan institute investigated whether mutant viruses they had created had the potential to spark a pandemic.

Creating a mutant virus
Around the same time, the Wuhan institute took another perilous leap forward with its work on the Shitou viruses. It began what Professor Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.

The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked.

The Sars epidemic had proved how lethal these types of virus were, and Sars itself was ten times as deadly as Covid-19. But Sars had been brought under control by quarantining, because the people who were infected exhibited symptoms a day or so before they could pass it on.

The experiment’s results suggested the new lab-made virus would be more difficult to stop if it leaked into the population, according to Ebright. It appeared to be highly infectious early in the illness.

The researchers’ tests also showed vaccines and other treatments developed to combat Sars were not effective against the new virus. The results of the experiment were not shared with other scientists in any scientific journal or paper.

The experiment was part-funded by EcoHealth’s grant money, but the FOI documents show that, while the Wuhan institute’s experiments were described in Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, he did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.

There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.

Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement.


Firefighters disinfecting Wuhan airport in April 2020, after the coronavirus had gone global

US defence funds rejected
By March 2018, the Wuhan institute was keen to press ahead with more experiments. Daszak applied for more funding from the US. He made a pitch for $14 million over three years from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is responsible for emerging technology for use by the military.

The application, entitled Defuse — which names Daszak, Shi and Baric — proposed the Wuhan laboratory find large numbers of new Sars viruses and mix some of them with their two deadly strains from the Shitou cave — WIV1 and SHC014 — to see what would happen. Darpa declined to fund the research.

One specific experiment involved inserting a furin cleavage site, a tiny section of a virus’s genetic order that makes them more infectious, into the pathogens. Daszak and the Wuhan laboratory say they did not go ahead with the work. But when Covid-19 emerged the following year, it was notable for being the first Sars-like coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.

Last week, Daszak denied the EcoHealth-related experiments were dangerous. He said the NIH did not view the experiments as gain of function and that laboratory safety rules in China were followed at all times. The NIH said it “has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans”.


In 2012 six men who fell ill after an encounter with a large bat colony tested positive for antibodies to an unknown coronavirus. 

Finding Covid’s origins
While the US funders had been kept informed about the work on the cave viruses, investigators believe the Wuhan institute was running a shadow project that it kept secret, even from Daszak.

The root of this project goes back to an incident that allegedly drew the attention of the Chinese military to the work of scientists in Wuhan. In 2012, the Wuhan institute’s researchers investigated an abandoned copper mine with a large bat colony in the Mojiang region of south China. Six men clearing out bat guano there were struck down by a mystery illness that caused fever, coughs and pneumonia.

All the men required hospital treatment and three died. Tests on the men for various illnesses came back negative but they tested positive for antibodies to an unknown coronavirus.

It has been possible, however, to piece together what happened from a master’s thesis by a medic at the hospital that treated the men and a PhD paper by a student of the director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

The incident happened while the institute was working on EcoHealth’s Predict programme, which was aimed at finding this type of virus crossover between animals and humans. But the Wuhan institute withheld information about the mine deaths from EcoHealth and the US government. Shi’s team spent four years stripping the Mojiang mine, collecting 1,300 samples from the bats, and discovered 293 coronaviruses.

The work on the mine appears to have ended in May 2015. A year later, Shi published a scientific paper referring to the discovery at the site of a coronavirus that was from a lineage of Sars never seen before. She called it RaBtCoV/4991.

The paper did not mention the deaths of the miners or that the scientists had found in the mine eight other Sars coronaviruses from the same previously undiscovered family.

After the pandemic began, the 4991 virus took on ever-greater significance. It was identified as the closest known relative to Covid-19. It meant the nine viruses found in the mine were the only members of Covid-19’s lineage known to have existed prior to the pandemic. When the Wuhan institute was forced to admit the existence of 4991 — having listed a section of its genome sequence on an international database in 2016 — it changed the name to RaTG13, which meant it could not easily be linked to the mine.

In 2021, after sustained pressure, Shi published the genomic sequences of the eight other mine viruses, claiming they were more distant from Covid-19 than RaTG13. However, the sequences’ veracity has been called into question.

Dr Monali Rahalkar, a microbiologist at the Agharkar Research Institute in Pune, India, swiftly tweeted: “Looks like cheating . . . May be they changed [the sequences] so people drop the trips to Mojiang mine.”


Many parts of China were still enduring lockdowns by late last year
 
A shadow project
As the world emerged from lockdown, US State Department investigators were given access to secret intelligence on what had been happening in China in the months and years before Covid emerged.

More than a dozen investigators were given unparalleled access to “metadata, phone information and internet information” from intercepts collected by the US intelligence services.

The investigators’ report was published in early 2021. It made two assertions: that Wuhan scientists were conducting experiments on RaTG13 from the Moijang mine, and that covert military research, including laboratory animal experiments, was being done at the institute before the pandemic. But the published report was brief — just 700 words — and was stripped of all sourcing and detail because so much of it was confidential.

The Sunday Times has spoken to three members of the team. The intelligence they saw suggests the types of risky experiments undertaken on the Shitou cave Sars viruses were also conducted in secret on RaTG13 and the other Covid-19-like viruses from the mine.

“They were working with the nine different Covid variants,” one of the investigators said. They believe one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. “We are confident they were working on a closer unpublished variant — possibly collected in Mojiang,” the source added.

The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

The investigators also saw evidence that the institute was conducting “serial passaging” experiments on at least one of the mine viruses. This is a process in which lab animals are infected with viruses and monitored to see which strain is harmful to their health. The most damaging strain is selected for repeat experiments to encourage the pathogens to mutate into something more deadly.

The investigators spoke to a Wuhan institute insider who alleged serial passaging experiments were being carried out on RaTG13. “Humanised mice with the serial passaging is a toxic combination,” said a source. “It speeds up the natural mutation process. So instead of taking years to mutate, it can take weeks or months. It guarantees that you accelerate the natural process.”

Dr Steven Quay, a US scientist who advised the State Department on its investigation, believes the Wuhan institute’s secrecy about the mine virus never made sense. “There has never been an example of a bat virus directly infecting humans and killing,” he said. Sars was a bat virus that infected people via an intermediary animal. “If those miners died from a bat virus, that was the first time in the history of human science that that happened. And the Chinese didn’t publish it,” he added. The investigators think Daszak was kept in the dark about this part of the work.

Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”

This explains why from the beginning of the outbreak, he says, the pandemic virus was so remarkably well adapted to infect humans.


Chinese military staff were given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute long before Covid-19 emerged, according to a US Senate report

Working with the military
One of the reasons there is no published information on such work, according to all three investigators, is because the shadow project on the mine viruses at the Wuhan institute was being funded by the Chinese military.

The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.

The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.

The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.

Quest for a killer virus


A vaccine to shift power
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the Mers coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.

Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.

A report published in April, co-authored by Dr Robert Kadlec, who was responsible for the US’s vaccine development programme, concluded that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019 — just as the pandemic began. One of the US investigators said testimony from scientists connected to the Wuhan institute’s collaborators suggested Covid-19 vaccine work was going on at the laboratory before the outbreak.

In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.


Three scientists at the Wuhan lab fell ill with a mystery virus in November 

Did Covid leak in 2019?
The investigators also saw communications intercepts that allegedly show three Wuhan institute researchers working at its level 3 laboratory on coronavirus gain-of-function work had fallen sick with coronavirus symptoms in the second week of November 2019, when many experts believe the pandemic began. One of the researchers’ family members later died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

There was certainly much activity at the institute. It issued a patent on November 15 for a tourniquet to treat researchers who are “exposed accidentally, especially when wounds such as needle pricks and blade cuts occur”. A few days later, it sent out a procurement request for an incinerator to sanitise air being piped out of its laboratory complex.

On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.

A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid. At the time, the authorities were eager to play down the suggestion that the city’s Huanan seafood market was the source of the outbreak; the study was used to show that the initial hotspots in December and January were several miles away.

When the study was first published, the Wuhan institute was not marked on the map it provided. So a report by the US Senate did just that — and found the institute right next to the biggest hotspot in the month before the province was locked down on January 23. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.

Even before the West was told a mysterious virus was killing people in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities were beginning an information clampdown.

If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

In the first months of the pandemic, there was a strong desire among Chinese scientists to head off to the bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.

Dr Alice Hughes said: “Every CAS research institute was prioritised to go out and form these working groups to do more sampling.”

However, there was a no-go area: the Moijang mine. Seven of Hughes’s team headed to the mine in June 2020, including Camping Huang, the PhD student who had investigated the miners’ mystery illness soon after they died.

When they arrived, they were told the Moijang mine was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours.

Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. “We did provide documentation to show we were there legally,” said Hughes. “But there was just too much fear and so they didn’t release those samples.”

Shi has never revealed whether she returned to the Moijang mine or the surrounding area after the outbreak. She is still working at the Wuhan institute.

Hughes said she was barred from speaking to the media about the research and was being watched by China’s security service. She said: “I was told I was being monitored by the Yunnan Security Bureau for the work that we had done on bats, which isn’t something you want, especially as a foreigner in China.”

Eventually, there was a total clampdown on Covid origin work. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021 and new restrictions on foreign researchers made it difficult for Hughes to continue her work. She left China to take up a post at Hong Kong University earlier this year.

Most coronavirus experts in China, she said, were too fearful of the consequences to examine Covid’s origins. “They haven’t touched it because of the risks associated with working on it.

“China has moved to a state where they can say what they want to be the case — they can cherry-pick data that fits that narrative and prevent the collection of data that could prove inconvenient. I think that it is very dangerous.”

___________________________________________

Further data about the topic can be seen on my earlier blog: The Origin of Covid-19
on
Labels:

1 comment:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)