18 ms·

Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

87 points by digital55 3y ago

bagels 3y ago
https://archive.li/7XtTs https://archive.li/7XtTs
- pmarreck 3y ago
  It's giving me an endless reCaptcha loop on Firefox
  - istjohn 3y ago
    The owner of archive.is does that to people running PiHole.
    - jvdvegt 3y ago
      I'm not using PiHole but I also get the endless recaptcha loop. I am using Firefox though. Is Privacy Badger the culprit, or uBlock Origin?
- thedigitalone 3y ago
  Here's one that isn't an endless CAPTCHA loop. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XbLza https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XbLza
pocketsand 3y ago
It's a bummer to be a scientist whose work is stymied by these concerns. Nevertheless, pumping the brakes here is sensible. I get the sense that researchers feel a certain injustice that geopolitics is affecting scientific decisions by their funding bodies. Funding should be decided on the scientific merit of their proposals. In a vacuum, that makes sense. Seen more widely, though, the decisions of the NIH and similar funding bodies are shot through with political considerations. For example, it would be hard for a physician scientist to attend a conference in the last few years where considerable resources were not devoted to equity issues. My point here is that we already contextualize what work we fund by political decisions, for better or worse. In this circumstances, we continue to do so, but we in particular pause funding on research that may, in some form, be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the disruption of lives of billions. That's a sensible choice.
- avar 3y ago
  There's the completely reasonable compromise of continuing to conduct this research at an isolated Antarctic station, at a quarantined oil platform etc. Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    This is what I don't get, why is this all happenning in cities? Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them. Why the hell are we putting biological virology institutes in the middle of the major population centers instead of the middle of nowhere? Like there's plenty of unused land in the west, hell WY has like 2 dozen people living there, it seems that would be safe.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      They already kind of do this (look up Michael Army Airfield near Tooele, UT where they store(d) VX nerve gas and destroyed it over a multi-year period). How are you going to persuade civilian scientists to move there? If one of them gets sick, how are you going to keep them from going to the hospital? Are they physically confined if they have a fever? (the base was in fact locked down several years back because an accounting error made it look like VX gas was missing). What if they get a normal flu, are they under arrest? Not many will agree to those conditions, so research would be greatly slowed.
      - kridsdale3 3y ago
        The scientists of the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos, basically the same as Nowhereland WY. If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.
    - 3y ago
dehrmann 3y ago
Rather than modifying viruses and seeing what happens in the hope that that will inform us for the next pandemic, it seems smarter to start making more vaccines with different techniques where mistakes are lower-stakes and the benefit is more clear.
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  What exactly do you think gain of function research is for? In order to determine how viruses behave in a safe and reasonable manner, gain of function is one of the ways we do so. For example, modifying a virus that normally only infects humans to infect an animal, so we can examine how it works in a lab and in turn design better vaccines or treatments. Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    > so we can examine how it works in a lab and in turn design better vaccines or treatments This is where I see a gap. How does it actually inform vaccine design? Are there not enough wild viruses to play with?
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      Do you believe you can cure brain cancer by looking at skin cancer?
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Not of the variety we need to study
    - jksk61 3y ago
      If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Sun Tzu. How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).
purpleblue 3y ago
I'm glad that things are slowing down here. Virology research is one of those things no one ever thought about, but the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world should be a wake up call that the researchers were outpacing the regulations. The entire industry around the world has to be heavily regulated at this point to prevent this from happening again.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  > the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world Wait, is this canon now? If so, how is China going to not garner the hatred of the entire world?
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    I haven't read much in the last year that didn't consider it extremely likely. The lab was receiving funding from other nations including the US, so I don't think hatred specifically and only for China is rational, but being rational is so cliche. What is 100% accepted and documented is that the lab in question had a history of repeated leaks and failures to follow protocol. When a Chinese nuke plant doesn't follow protocols other nations use, that is one thing, but given global ramifications, it seems like even otherwise adversarial nations could agree on a set of safeguards for such labs and enforce them. That is assuming the aluminium fedora crowd are wrong and it wasn't like that scene in goonies where they hand Chunk a picture frame they want broken knowing he isn't very coordinated.
    - wredue 3y ago
      Sorry, where is this documented that this lab is known for leaks? To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate. You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.
ilamont 3y ago
Long before Covid there was pushback against these projects, particularly near population centers. Boston University built its National Emerging Infectious Diseases center right in the middle of the city, which was approved by local regulators (https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved) but strongly criticized by neighbors when they learned that Ebola and Marburg were studied there. Covid research at the center has not followed bureaucratic protocols, either: But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports. Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID. https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-researchers-testing-of-lab-made-version-of-covid-virus-draws-government-scrutiny/ https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-resear...
- cbsmith 3y ago
  NIMBYism isn't exactly a good measure of whether something should or shouldn't be done.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - improv 3y ago
    NIMBYism != People being concerned about their neighbors possessing weapons of mass destruction/super viruses capable of killing them and millions/billions of other people.
    - cbsmith 3y ago
      No, but it does equal a people being concerned about the effects of making a change while completely ignoring the effects of NOT making a change.
fabian2k 3y ago
One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a true pandemic. Those were scarier than SARS-CoV2 by lethality, but were manageable by the usual epidemiological tools. Now we've also seen how a virus can spread that is far more contagious, and how we are unable to stop such a virus. What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. It didn't have any special features like influenza to increase its potential there. It simply had the numbers, enormous amounts of hosts to evolve in. So potentially any virus that is able to spread as far initially could be able to evolve in a similar manner. I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic.
- xracy 3y ago
  > I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic. Help me out, I don't see the thread of logic from your previous points...
  - fabian2k 3y ago
    Certain gain of function experiments, e.g. modifying an animal virus to be able to infect humans could create viruses that might behave very similar to SARS-CoV2 if leaked. We now know more about the potential consequences of such a leak, we have a full-blown pandemic as a benchmark. If those experiments have a chance to repeat a similar pandemic, I don't think any of them are worth that risk.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Unfortunately, that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility. Because animal virii making the jump to humans is the risk factor the international epidemiology community tries to protect against, for the very reasons you've highlighted: the harm when it occurs and the frequency with which it occurs (rare, but often enough to create a once-a-century firestorm, at least). Spanish Flu was likely an animal-jump, baed on research done on corpses retrieved from the arctic circle. H1N1 was an animal jump. HIV was a multi-virus infection followed by an animal jump. If COVID was human-made and not an animal-jump, that's still three deadly natural pandemics that we want this research to be able to prevent in the future.
xracy 3y ago
I get that there are a lot of arm-chair experts who think this was a lab-leak. But we're making many large jumps here from: Was this created in a lab? Was this leaked from a lab? Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs? Full NIMBY. The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mongering here. How many people in the comments of this article really describe the processes used at each of these labs to prevent the viruses from getting out? How many can say how effective those practices are? We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
- tmaly 3y ago
  I have not kept up with this topic. What does the evidence point to? Has any new evidence surfaced in the past year?
  - xracy 3y ago
    I have certainly not heard of any new evidence that would change my view that it was not caused by a lab-leak yet. My impression is that the market animal to human jump was still the prevailing theory.
  - toomim 3y ago
    There has been little or no new physical evidence. We have seen new evidence of coverup, though, where scientists privately said there was high likelihood of lab leak in slack messages before publicly signing publications claiming there was no likelihood of lab leak. The leaked slack messages are damning.
    - wredue 3y ago
      That’s a complete mischaracterization of that situation. The conversation DID ask if it was a leak. Then they studied the evidence and only after studying the evidence did they publicly sign that it was probably of natural origin.
JoshTko 3y ago
Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.
- jsisto 3y ago
  If it clearly outweighs the risks can you provide a study showing this? I can't seem to find any.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Here's [1] a reasonable one. That list should be considered far from comprehensive, as it's extremely safe to assume that many events end up buried, especially given all of the grey-tier legality bio research happening in far off shores, researching who knows what. But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more. It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
  - yCombLinks 3y ago
    I can always rely on someone to here to make a useless comment demanding a study, thinking they have a point
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  Gain of function research is the kind of experiment that could develop a disease that kills billions. It isn't a game we should be playing lightly if at all. The argument is that eventually biology could make the same mutation. The thing is, it is extremely unlikely that Ebola becomes air born naturally, for example. But that is the kind of thing that gain of function seeks to develop, you know, just in case.
Ajay-p 3y ago
Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  [flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
  - cempaka 3y ago
    Are you under the impression that a large number of people who refused the COVID shots didn't also already believe that the virus came from a lab?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Are you under the impression that a large number of people who refused the COVID shots didn't also already believe that the virus came from a lab? At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the world was never shut down for small pox. It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next. So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.
ypeterholmes 3y ago
That's what happens when you release an endemic virus that kills millions of people.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  I mean, are we supposed to feel bad for a handful of scientists and not the millions of people who died and the billions whose lives were disrupted? Seriously?
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    I think of the poor Wuhan Lab that lost it's US funding finally. What a dark day for Science, right?
earthboundkid 3y ago
I mean, good? They did cause a global pandemic costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives, so maybe they should just chill TF out for a while?
- tootie 3y ago
  Everyone in this thread seems awfully convinced. There is as of yet no proof that's the case. Nor that GoF created the strain. Both are just conjecture. Seems pretty foolish to end valuable research to appease people who fear things they don't understand.
  - rurp 3y ago
    We don't know if the virus came from a market either, so why would that be the default position? Especially since that position requires accepting a hell of a coincidence that the virus just happened to emerge near a lab working on gain of function research for that type of virus. China's lack of openness to investigating this should also skew us against giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than the opposite. Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries. Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.
    - cbsmith 3y ago
      It's not a court case. There's not a burden of proof. What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action. I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million people die each year in car accidents. Conclusion: best to let those million people die each year.
      - baja_blast 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kspacewalk2 3y ago
>Scientists doing “gain-of-function” research said that heightened fears of lab leaks are stalling studies that could thwart or initiate >the next pandemic virus.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
molticrystal 3y ago
When we can do this work in a satellite with robots, and ensure that in case of launch failure or de-orbitting the samples are incinerated, then we can discuss doing this research. Otherwise we are just playing with fire and doing our best to ensure somebody doesn't bring something smoldering to the outside.
sterlind 3y ago
Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn't require GoF research to spill over into humans, and was a purely natural spillover, actively collecting novel viruses and processing them in a low-BSL lab is a recipe for disaster. BSL-4 is reserved for pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. This policy effectively translates to treating novel viruses as safe until proven otherwise, which is reckless.
- dhdudbd 3y ago
  >96% similar what does this mean
  - epgui 3y ago
    Not very much.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence. so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
    - uiberto 3y ago
      Sophisticated evolutionary models are needed to accurately estimated expected mean and variance in genetic distances. For example, rare events of large effect (e.g. recombination) also introduces variation beyond within-strain mutation.
m463 3y ago
I think the answer will be to do this covertly, maybe to an unsuspecting population. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_81 https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_81
salawat 3y ago
If you want to do this research: Get in line. Include building a completely hermetically sealed underground facility. Sign away the ability to interact with the world at large for the duration of the experiment. All samples and potentially contaminated equipment is to be incinerated/vitrified upon conclusion of the experiment. If you think you are good enough to play God with manufacturing new pandemic pathogens, okay. Fine. I sure hope you're really willing to sacrifice it all for your work. Because otherwise, the answer should be no by default.
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20231017170928/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/covid-lab-leak-research.html http://web.archive.org/web/20231017170928/https://www.nytime...
wdr1 3y ago
Or, you know, "Lab Leak of Coronavirus casts chill over virology research". I know it's not definitive it was a lab leak, but many US agencies including, notably, the Department of Energy, say it's likely it was. And when you change the headline to reflect that, it sure does change the message.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  The National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found: > The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019. And that: > As of August 2021, we still have not observed genetic signatures in SARS-CoV-2 that would be diagnostic of genetic engineering, according to the IC’s understanding of the virus. Similarly, we have not identified any existing coronavirus strains that could have plausibly served as a backbone if SARS-CoV-2 had been genetically engineered. Also: > The WIV previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV. And: > Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan. It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway. And as far as spillover from collected samples in the lab goes: > They also see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass... A prior declassified report found: > Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-... No idea why DOE continues to think it was a lab leak, other than we can't definitively prove it wasn't and since ChinaBad(tm) we have to assume it was.
cameldrv 3y ago
The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous. In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic. In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other. EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely. Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  > We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1595121080800538624 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...
eternityforest 3y ago
Why are we so focused on understanding the biology of viruses, while making almost no effort to block them physically or install any more filters in public?
vfclists 3y ago
See how paid actors and shills quickly jump in push the "it was not a lab leak" concerning a virus that was deliberately engineered with the additional benefit of creating profit from patented cures. Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2.article-info https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2.... then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216 Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance passing on NIH funding to WIV - with receipts - https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001 https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001 We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-anti-lab-leak-scientists-private-messages-conflict-with-their-congressional-testimony-1378773/ https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-an... Isn't that the same Kristian Andersen who received a huge load of money from Tony Fauci after backtracking on the lableak/artificial origins theory? https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scientists-received-grant-for-changing-opinion-on-pandemic-origins-contrary-to-claims/ https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scien... Now here are some researchers who maintain that the new variants did not evolve naturally. https://zenodo.org/records/8361577 https://zenodo.org/records/8361577

87 points by digital55 3y ago

bagels 3y ago

https://archive.li/7XtTs https://archive.li/7XtTs

pmarreck 3y ago
It's giving me an endless reCaptcha loop on Firefox
- istjohn 3y ago
  The owner of archive.is does that to people running PiHole.
  - jvdvegt 3y ago
    I'm not using PiHole but I also get the endless recaptcha loop. I am using Firefox though. Is Privacy Badger the culprit, or uBlock Origin?
thedigitalone 3y ago
Here's one that isn't an endless CAPTCHA loop. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XbLza https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XbLza

pocketsand 3y ago

It's a bummer to be a scientist whose work is stymied by these concerns. Nevertheless, pumping the brakes here is sensible. I get the sense that researchers feel a certain injustice that geopolitics is affecting scientific decisions by their funding bodies. Funding should be decided on the scientific merit of their proposals. In a vacuum, that makes sense. Seen more widely, though, the decisions of the NIH and similar funding bodies are shot through with political considerations. For example, it would be hard for a physician scientist to attend a conference in the last few years where considerable resources were not devoted to equity issues. My point here is that we already contextualize what work we fund by political decisions, for better or worse. In this circumstances, we continue to do so, but we in particular pause funding on research that may, in some form, be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the disruption of lives of billions. That's a sensible choice.

avar 3y ago
There's the completely reasonable compromise of continuing to conduct this research at an isolated Antarctic station, at a quarantined oil platform etc. Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.
- gustavus 3y ago
  This is what I don't get, why is this all happenning in cities? Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them. Why the hell are we putting biological virology institutes in the middle of the major population centers instead of the middle of nowhere? Like there's plenty of unused land in the west, hell WY has like 2 dozen people living there, it seems that would be safe.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    They already kind of do this (look up Michael Army Airfield near Tooele, UT where they store(d) VX nerve gas and destroyed it over a multi-year period). How are you going to persuade civilian scientists to move there? If one of them gets sick, how are you going to keep them from going to the hospital? Are they physically confined if they have a fever? (the base was in fact locked down several years back because an accounting error made it look like VX gas was missing). What if they get a normal flu, are they under arrest? Not many will agree to those conditions, so research would be greatly slowed.
    - kridsdale3 3y ago
      The scientists of the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos, basically the same as Nowhereland WY. If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.
  - 3y ago

dehrmann 3y ago

Rather than modifying viruses and seeing what happens in the hope that that will inform us for the next pandemic, it seems smarter to start making more vaccines with different techniques where mistakes are lower-stakes and the benefit is more clear.

fzeroracer 3y ago
What exactly do you think gain of function research is for? In order to determine how viruses behave in a safe and reasonable manner, gain of function is one of the ways we do so. For example, modifying a virus that normally only infects humans to infect an animal, so we can examine how it works in a lab and in turn design better vaccines or treatments. Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > so we can examine how it works in a lab and in turn design better vaccines or treatments This is where I see a gap. How does it actually inform vaccine design? Are there not enough wild viruses to play with?
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    Do you believe you can cure brain cancer by looking at skin cancer?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Not of the variety we need to study
  - jksk61 3y ago
    If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Sun Tzu. How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).

purpleblue 3y ago

I'm glad that things are slowing down here. Virology research is one of those things no one ever thought about, but the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world should be a wake up call that the researchers were outpacing the regulations. The entire industry around the world has to be heavily regulated at this point to prevent this from happening again.

pmarreck 3y ago
> the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world Wait, is this canon now? If so, how is China going to not garner the hatred of the entire world?
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  I haven't read much in the last year that didn't consider it extremely likely. The lab was receiving funding from other nations including the US, so I don't think hatred specifically and only for China is rational, but being rational is so cliche. What is 100% accepted and documented is that the lab in question had a history of repeated leaks and failures to follow protocol. When a Chinese nuke plant doesn't follow protocols other nations use, that is one thing, but given global ramifications, it seems like even otherwise adversarial nations could agree on a set of safeguards for such labs and enforce them. That is assuming the aluminium fedora crowd are wrong and it wasn't like that scene in goonies where they hand Chunk a picture frame they want broken knowing he isn't very coordinated.
  - wredue 3y ago
    Sorry, where is this documented that this lab is known for leaks? To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate. You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.

ilamont 3y ago

Long before Covid there was pushback against these projects, particularly near population centers. Boston University built its National Emerging Infectious Diseases center right in the middle of the city, which was approved by local regulators (https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved) but strongly criticized by neighbors when they learned that Ebola and Marburg were studied there. Covid research at the center has not followed bureaucratic protocols, either: But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports. Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID. https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-researchers-testing-of-lab-made-version-of-covid-virus-draws-government-scrutiny/ https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-resear...

cbsmith 3y ago
NIMBYism isn't exactly a good measure of whether something should or shouldn't be done.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- improv 3y ago
  NIMBYism != People being concerned about their neighbors possessing weapons of mass destruction/super viruses capable of killing them and millions/billions of other people.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    No, but it does equal a people being concerned about the effects of making a change while completely ignoring the effects of NOT making a change.

fabian2k 3y ago

One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a true pandemic. Those were scarier than SARS-CoV2 by lethality, but were manageable by the usual epidemiological tools. Now we've also seen how a virus can spread that is far more contagious, and how we are unable to stop such a virus. What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. It didn't have any special features like influenza to increase its potential there. It simply had the numbers, enormous amounts of hosts to evolve in. So potentially any virus that is able to spread as far initially could be able to evolve in a similar manner. I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic.

xracy 3y ago
> I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic. Help me out, I don't see the thread of logic from your previous points...
- fabian2k 3y ago
  Certain gain of function experiments, e.g. modifying an animal virus to be able to infect humans could create viruses that might behave very similar to SARS-CoV2 if leaked. We now know more about the potential consequences of such a leak, we have a full-blown pandemic as a benchmark. If those experiments have a chance to repeat a similar pandemic, I don't think any of them are worth that risk.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Unfortunately, that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility. Because animal virii making the jump to humans is the risk factor the international epidemiology community tries to protect against, for the very reasons you've highlighted: the harm when it occurs and the frequency with which it occurs (rare, but often enough to create a once-a-century firestorm, at least). Spanish Flu was likely an animal-jump, baed on research done on corpses retrieved from the arctic circle. H1N1 was an animal jump. HIV was a multi-virus infection followed by an animal jump. If COVID was human-made and not an animal-jump, that's still three deadly natural pandemics that we want this research to be able to prevent in the future.

xracy 3y ago

I get that there are a lot of arm-chair experts who think this was a lab-leak. But we're making many large jumps here from: Was this created in a lab? Was this leaked from a lab? Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs? Full NIMBY. The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mongering here. How many people in the comments of this article really describe the processes used at each of these labs to prevent the viruses from getting out? How many can say how effective those practices are? We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.

tmaly 3y ago
I have not kept up with this topic. What does the evidence point to? Has any new evidence surfaced in the past year?
- xracy 3y ago
  I have certainly not heard of any new evidence that would change my view that it was not caused by a lab-leak yet. My impression is that the market animal to human jump was still the prevailing theory.
- toomim 3y ago
  There has been little or no new physical evidence. We have seen new evidence of coverup, though, where scientists privately said there was high likelihood of lab leak in slack messages before publicly signing publications claiming there was no likelihood of lab leak. The leaked slack messages are damning.
  - wredue 3y ago
    That’s a complete mischaracterization of that situation. The conversation DID ask if it was a leak. Then they studied the evidence and only after studying the evidence did they publicly sign that it was probably of natural origin.

JoshTko 3y ago

Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.

jsisto 3y ago
If it clearly outweighs the risks can you provide a study showing this? I can't seem to find any.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Here's [1] a reasonable one. That list should be considered far from comprehensive, as it's extremely safe to assume that many events end up buried, especially given all of the grey-tier legality bio research happening in far off shores, researching who knows what. But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more. It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
- yCombLinks 3y ago
  I can always rely on someone to here to make a useless comment demanding a study, thinking they have a point
tastyfreeze 3y ago
Gain of function research is the kind of experiment that could develop a disease that kills billions. It isn't a game we should be playing lightly if at all. The argument is that eventually biology could make the same mutation. The thing is, it is extremely unlikely that Ebola becomes air born naturally, for example. But that is the kind of thing that gain of function seeks to develop, you know, just in case.

Ajay-p 3y ago

Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.

mdgrech23 3y ago
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
- cempaka 3y ago
  Are you under the impression that a large number of people who refused the COVID shots didn't also already believe that the virus came from a lab?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Are you under the impression that a large number of people who refused the COVID shots didn't also already believe that the virus came from a lab? At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the world was never shut down for small pox. It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next. So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.

ypeterholmes 3y ago

That's what happens when you release an endemic virus that kills millions of people.

earthboundkid 3y ago
I mean, are we supposed to feel bad for a handful of scientists and not the millions of people who died and the billions whose lives were disrupted? Seriously?
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I think of the poor Wuhan Lab that lost it's US funding finally. What a dark day for Science, right?

earthboundkid 3y ago

I mean, good? They did cause a global pandemic costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives, so maybe they should just chill TF out for a while?

tootie 3y ago
Everyone in this thread seems awfully convinced. There is as of yet no proof that's the case. Nor that GoF created the strain. Both are just conjecture. Seems pretty foolish to end valuable research to appease people who fear things they don't understand.
- rurp 3y ago
  We don't know if the virus came from a market either, so why would that be the default position? Especially since that position requires accepting a hell of a coincidence that the virus just happened to emerge near a lab working on gain of function research for that type of virus. China's lack of openness to investigating this should also skew us against giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than the opposite. Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries. Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    It's not a court case. There's not a burden of proof. What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action. I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million people die each year in car accidents. Conclusion: best to let those million people die each year.
    - baja_blast 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kspacewalk2 3y ago

>Scientists doing “gain-of-function” research said that heightened fears of lab leaks are stalling studies that could thwart or initiate >the next pandemic virus.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

molticrystal 3y ago

When we can do this work in a satellite with robots, and ensure that in case of launch failure or de-orbitting the samples are incinerated, then we can discuss doing this research. Otherwise we are just playing with fire and doing our best to ensure somebody doesn't bring something smoldering to the outside.

sterlind 3y ago

Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn't require GoF research to spill over into humans, and was a purely natural spillover, actively collecting novel viruses and processing them in a low-BSL lab is a recipe for disaster. BSL-4 is reserved for pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. This policy effectively translates to treating novel viruses as safe until proven otherwise, which is reckless.

dhdudbd 3y ago
>96% similar what does this mean
- epgui 3y ago
  Not very much.
- sterlind 3y ago
  the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence. so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
  - uiberto 3y ago
    Sophisticated evolutionary models are needed to accurately estimated expected mean and variance in genetic distances. For example, rare events of large effect (e.g. recombination) also introduces variation beyond within-strain mutation.

m463 3y ago

I think the answer will be to do this covertly, maybe to an unsuspecting population. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_81 https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_81

salawat 3y ago

If you want to do this research: Get in line. Include building a completely hermetically sealed underground facility. Sign away the ability to interact with the world at large for the duration of the experiment. All samples and potentially contaminated equipment is to be incinerated/vitrified upon conclusion of the experiment. If you think you are good enough to play God with manufacturing new pandemic pathogens, okay. Fine. I sure hope you're really willing to sacrifice it all for your work. Because otherwise, the answer should be no by default.

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20231017170928/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/covid-lab-leak-research.html http://web.archive.org/web/20231017170928/https://www.nytime...

wdr1 3y ago

Or, you know, "Lab Leak of Coronavirus casts chill over virology research". I know it's not definitive it was a lab leak, but many US agencies including, notably, the Department of Energy, say it's likely it was. And when you change the headline to reflect that, it sure does change the message.

lamontcg 3y ago
The National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found: > The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019. And that: > As of August 2021, we still have not observed genetic signatures in SARS-CoV-2 that would be diagnostic of genetic engineering, according to the IC’s understanding of the virus. Similarly, we have not identified any existing coronavirus strains that could have plausibly served as a backbone if SARS-CoV-2 had been genetically engineered. Also: > The WIV previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV. And: > Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan. It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway. And as far as spillover from collected samples in the lab goes: > They also see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass... A prior declassified report found: > Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-... No idea why DOE continues to think it was a lab leak, other than we can't definitively prove it wasn't and since ChinaBad(tm) we have to assume it was.

cameldrv 3y ago

The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous. In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic. In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other. EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely. Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
> We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1595121080800538624 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...

eternityforest 3y ago

Why are we so focused on understanding the biology of viruses, while making almost no effort to block them physically or install any more filters in public?

vfclists 3y ago

See how paid actors and shills quickly jump in push the "it was not a lab leak" concerning a virus that was deliberately engineered with the additional benefit of creating profit from patented cures. Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2.article-info https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2.... then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216 Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance passing on NIH funding to WIV - with receipts - https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001 https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001 We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-anti-lab-leak-scientists-private-messages-conflict-with-their-congressional-testimony-1378773/ https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-an... Isn't that the same Kristian Andersen who received a huge load of money from Tony Fauci after backtracking on the lableak/artificial origins theory? https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scientists-received-grant-for-changing-opinion-on-pandemic-origins-contrary-to-claims/ https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scien... Now here are some researchers who maintain that the new variants did not evolve naturally. https://zenodo.org/records/8361577 https://zenodo.org/records/8361577