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Jun 16, 2022

After 2 years,

@WHO

, US intelligence & more top experts+virologists acknowledge that a lab #OriginOfCovid is plausible and deserving of an investigation. Yet, the attacks by scientists & pundits on those who called for an objective investigation of a lab origin has gotten worse.

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My reaction today when I hear another scientist privately saying "of course the pandemic virus came from a lab".

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It's like... who cares how much of their budget was spent on brie parties. Can we please get their research documents and communications concerning furin cleavage site insertion into unidentified SARS-like viruses?

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Is there any way for this audit to extend to all US gov funding agencies that received research proposals involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology or EcoHealth? There should be a systematic, comprehensive investigation of these proposals (rejected or funded) & research reports.

The National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance Did Not Effectively Monitor Awards and...

It's a bit ridiculous for EcoHealth and NIH to be worrying about who owes who $100K when an accident during research partially funded through their program might've cost the globe trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

oig.hhs.gov

Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's...

We could've skipped the entire pangolin side saga and 2 years of casting a lab #OriginOfCovid as a conspiracy theory.

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Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research

A funder could've asked EcoHealth in Jan 2020: "Hey, did you put furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses?" And they could've said: "Yea, we gave our Wuhan collaborators that idea in early 2018."

theintercept.com

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

Granted the president of EcoHealth has a tough time keeping their stories straight but they would still have documents & emails telling them some of what was done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab they were funding & collaborating with.

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Oct 23, 2021

A series of conspiracy theories, according to Peter Daszak, becoming plausible hypotheses to be investigated... June 2020, on TWiV, 1:07:00 mark Daszak says "there is no evidence that it escaped from a lab.. this is a classic conspiracy theory" youtube.com/watch?v=Et3CHc

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NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years Late

If one was worried they might've accidentally funded the research that caused the pandemic, wouldn't they call up the middleman (EcoHealth) to find out more? What's the point of convening virologists & gain-of-function advocates who don't know what's happening in the Wuhan lab?

In early 2020, why didn't US funders call up EcoHealth Alliance for their 2018-2019 research progress reports when they suspected the novel coronavirus might've come from the subcontracted Wuhan lab?

theintercept.com

The unusual timing of a bat coronavirus grant report suggests that an earlier version may have been revised.

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Who could have predicted that 3 years after a world-changing pandemic started there would still be no credible investigation of its origin? #OriginOfCovid

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Opinion | Let’s leave the covid origin mystery to scientists

Jan 25

Do we have channels for accurate information to spread around the world in real-time? Can we trust scientists and politicians to focus on the facts and not on selling a narrative that will elicit their desired reaction from the public?

I don't think anyone serious thinks zombies are going to happen, but it does make you wonder what you're supposed to do when you turn on the news and there's a new pathogen wreaking havoc somewhere on the other side of the globe.

I think reality favors underplaying novel emerging pathogens (unless you're writing a grant application for research funding). Trying to calm the public into thinking it's NBD and to carry on as usual. Is the assumption that future pandemics will not have a high mortality rate?

*SPOILER warning* There's got to be some effective intermediate response between "just get your flu shot" (how a large number of scientific leaders reacted to Covid-19) and "bomb the entire city" (plot of

@TheLastofUsHBO

) when experts hear of a novel pathogen.

Most of us are still recovering from this pandemic. I'm not sure what normal people are supposed to do if a similar or worse pathogen emerges in the next 10 years - whether due to increased risky pathogen research or invasion of natural habitats.

We're stuck contemplating whether the next pandemic will come from the supposed millions of spillovers of viruses from animals to people vs growing numbers of scientists engaging in pathogen research with unpredictable outcomes in not necessarily the appropriate biosafety level.

It's stressful to watch

@TheLastofUsHBO

after spending the last 3 years trying to understand the #OriginOfCovid I don't think the world has gotten better at detecting and responding to novel outbreaks. The pandemic has heralded an era of increased virus hunting and manipulation.

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Some assert that the origin of Covid “is a scientific question best left to scientists.” Perhaps we should also leave oversight of banking solely to bankers? Or the investigation of an airline crash solely to the airline and the aircraft manufacturer? 1/

washingtonpost.com

Spillover or lab leak? The answer matters, but a new House subcommittee should leave this mystery to the experts.

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Ultimately, I believe that the #OriginOfCovid will be found and that success can hopefully be attributed to scientists, intelligence personnel, journalists, sleuths, and the leaders who finally launch a proper investigation of both natural and lab hypotheses.

Although some Western virologists hold the belief that they know everything that was happening in Wuhan labs in the years and months preceding the 2019 outbreak, I think it's better if the intelligence community also plays a large role in an #OriginOfCovid investigation.

The #OriginOfCovid cannot be left to scientists alone, although scientists should be brought in to co-lead and advise the investigation. Scientists alone do not have the power to subpoena communications and documents that can shed light on whether research led to the pandemic.

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If the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about natural outbreaks. It just means a lot of people (especially decision-makers) are going to have to acknowledge the real risks that come with scientific breakthroughs in pathogen research.

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This is not to underplay the threat of natural outbreaks but these virus hunters certainly did not think bat coronavirus spillover into people would occur in Wuhan, which they used as a negative control in their studies (ie they assumed 0 detectable spillover in Wuhan).

September 2019. Wuhan Institute of Virology and the EcoHealth Alliance publish a study: "The low seroprevalence observed in this study suggests that bat coronavirus spillover is a rare event."

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Human-animal interactions and bat coronavirus spillover potential among rural residents in Southern...

Human interaction with animals has been implicated as a primary risk factor for several high impact zoonoses, including many bat-origin viral diseases. However the animal-to-human spillover events...

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POTUS on #OriginOfCovid, August 2021: "The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them... Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics."

whitehouse.gov

Statement by President Joe Biden on the Investigation into the Origins of COVID-⁠19 | The White...

This week, I received the report on the 90-day sprint I asked our intelligence community to conduct into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am

U.S. should expand rules for risky virus research to more pathogens, panel says

science.org

U.S. should expand rules for risky virus research to more pathogens, panel says

Draft report from biosecurity panel examining “gain-of-function” research policy gets mixed response from outside experts

Jan 22

It's going to tell you that if you collect 10,000s of pathogen samples from animals and people across 8 countries, you may find a SARS-like virus with a FCS. And it is understood that if you work with such viruses at low biosafety levels like BSL2, they can escape from the lab.

Maybe someone can collect 10,000s of pathogen samples from animals and people across 8 countries like the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab did and one day find a SARS-like virus with a FCS. This is not going to tell you how the pandemic virus appeared in Wuhan.

In that sense, it is very unlikely that searching around in bat caves is going to tell us whether the pandemic virus emerged in Wuhan due to the wildlife trade or research activities. What we need to know is what happened in Wuhan in the months leading up to the outbreak.

Scientists have been hunting novel SARS-like viruses since the 2003 SARS outbreak and none of these published SARS-like viruses have such a FCS. It's possible this lab collected so many 100s of SARS-like viruses they finally found one with an FCS or something similar to an FCS.

The only way we are going to understand if this research pipeline led to the pandemic virus is if we get access to research records from the lab in Wuhan or possibly communications between that group and their collaborators overseas, including in the US.

One interpretation is that, at that time in early 2018, they had already found such rare SARS-like viruses and determined that they bore cleavage sites or features approaching functional cleavage sites that could be optimized and inserted into SARS-like viruses in the lab.

These scientists wrote in early 2018 that they were systematically looking for rare SARS-like viruses with FCSs, and they would optimize/insert these FCSs into "low risk" SARS-like viruses to see how this could impact the virus' ability to infect and grow in human cells.

The lab #OriginOfCovid hypothesis does not require that no natural spillovers of SARS-like viruses occur or that 0 SARS-like viruses have furin cleavage sites in nature. It asks why a rare SARS-like virus + FCS emerged where scientists proposed putting FCSs in SARS-like viruses.

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It sounds absurd but what happens if a virus that kills half the people it infects is enhanced in a lab so that it spreads through the air and this escapes or is released into the city that lab is based in? What happens when 1 in 2 people around the world die?

If we don't want to deal with the reality that a small but growing number of scientists around the world are engaging in some fairly risky pathogen experiments that have the potential to cause pandemics, then those of us who can should probably start investing in bunkers.

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The stakes of not investigating a lab #OriginOfCovid are extremely high. It can be measured in millions of deaths & trillions in economic damage. A future lab release of a deadly pathogen, accidental or not, can devastate our medical workforce and even civilization as we know it.

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There is no evidence in the past 3 years that would make a lab #OriginOfCovid implausible. Would WHO, US IC+gov, Lancet Commission, and numerous reputable virologists all be asking whether this virus came from a lab if there wasn't sufficient evidence?

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Jun 16, 2022

After 2 years, @WHO, US intelligence & more top experts+virologists acknowledge that a lab #OriginOfCovid is plausible and deserving of an investigation. Yet, the attacks by scientists & pundits on those who called for an objective investigation of a lab origin has gotten worse.

Show this thread

Jan 21

As early as February 2020, scientists, both in and outside of China, were publicly and privately worrying about a lab leak origin of the pandemic. 3 years later, the WHO, the Lancet Commission, US intelligence and government all agree a lab #OriginOfCovid must be investigated.

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