Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation

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And how do we know its an accident.? You could easily bribe / blackmail someone to "accidentally" do something. Tell someone with limited morals that all his problems go away if he lightly brushes the beaker on on the table so that It falls and hits the floor. Oh no the windows in the lab are open. I guess that means that global pandemic. Yeah I've simplified the whole situation, but still. Wasn't there a movie that came out where the exact same. thing happened an Asian lab accidentally leaked the COVID virus? What a coincidence.
 
DCAllAfrican said:
Just here for the comments but hopefully the truth comes out eventually. (Whatever that truth is)

But I've said from the jump that the, "Wet Market" origin story had me questioning things.

But yea, "Wait and see."
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The same guy who organized a group of 27 scientists to put out a statement at the beginning of the pandemic claiming it had natural origins and that any other hypothesis was misinformation is the same guy that was funneling money to the lab where it potentially leaked from. So yea..

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.
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If it indeed was created in a lab and it got out, there's no way, for humanity's sake, should you cover something like that up. I'm sure the Chinese government is covering their tracks, or flat out blocking any sort of real investigation.

Could it have been something as small as a equipment breakdown in some capacity, that then a single, or multiple people were exposed to, and there wasn't a flag somewhere along the line? Plausible for sure. Maybe something as simple as a respirator filtering failure, or was it something far more nefarious? I'm sure there's wild theories.

Either way, we as a advanced society should figure it out, and make sure it doesn't happen again. Was covid created in a gain of function type of way? Some could argue that science like this is necessary, and others might say it's far too dangerous to be messing with these bugs.

Can super computers help us in creating these things in a virtual world to then find a way to kill these advanced diseases? Is that something that is even really possible right now, or is that a dream for the future?
 
But conspiracy-minded conservatives weren’t the only ones looking askance at Daszak. Ebright likened Daszak’s model of research—bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent—to “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.” Moreover, Ebright believed that Daszak’s research had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing pandemics through its global collaborations.

It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.

Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the “Statement” Ralph!!,” he wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”

Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”

Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other signers had either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: “We declare no competing interests.”

Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: “If zoonosis was the origin, it was a validation…of his life work…. But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.” It could mire the field indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.
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In the early days of the growing coronavirus outbreak that would soon become a pandemic, an elite group of international scientists gathered on a conference call to discuss a shocking possibility: The virus looked like it might have been engineered in a laboratory.

“I remember it very well,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert at the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview with me on Wednesday. “We decided on the call the situation really needed to be looked into carefully.”

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a reporter who has spent a decade revealing hundreds of serious safety breaches at U.S. biological research labs, it has always seemed obvious to investigate whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a major coronavirus research center, possibly played a role given that the initial outbreak happened in the same city.

Yet for more than a year, those who publicly raised such questions were too often deemed a crackpot conspiracy theorist or a simpleton who just didn’t understand science.

It has only been in recent weeks that a growing list of high-profile scientists, intelligence officials and politicians – including President Joe Biden – have publicly acknowledged the plausibility of a lab accident and pushed for rigorous investigation.

Perhaps that’s because the early concerns among key scientists – like the conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 – were kept private until now. That call likely would have remained secret if not for documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

A secret, high-stakes conference call
That teleconference was urgent enough it was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon.

Just two days earlier, the World Health Organization had raised the alert level on the novel coronavirus, declaring the growing outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. At the time, most Americans were still going about life as usual, blissfully unaware of what was to come, even though federal health officials had recently identified a man who had traveled from Wuhan to Washington state as the first case in this country.

Precious little was known back then about the virus, which was assumed to have emerged in the usual way by an infected animal, or a series of animals, infecting a person. The suggestion that it might have hallmarks of genetic engineering had enormous implications, if that turned out to be true.

The group of scientists invited to the call had agreed in advance that the information they discussed would be kept in total confidence and not shared until they had agreed on next steps, emails at the time show. They were among thousands of pages of Fauci’s emails on a wide range of topics that BuzzFeed News posted online recently after obtaining them through the federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab.

“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Andersen said in an email to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020. Andersen added that he and University of Sydney virologist and evolutionary biologist Edward Holmes, plus a handful of other top scientists with whom Fauci was on a first-name basis, “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
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www.usatoday.com

'I remember it very well': Dr. Fauci describes a secret 2020 meeting to talk about COVID origins

A 2020 call appears to have played a key role in shaping views of scientists who contributed to shutting down talk of whether a lab leak caused COVID.
www.usatoday.com
 
flyknitjb said:
If it is a lab leak, the world must hold the Chinese regime accountable. This is far worse than what anyone has ever done. Accountability means full removal from power.
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A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
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In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
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But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
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www.vanityfair.com

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
www.vanityfair.com www.vanityfair.com
 
Competing theories about the coronavirus' origin have recently thrust this gain-of-function debate into the spotlight, since a prominent lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was conducting that kind of research on coronaviruses. What's more, the US has funded grants that supported that lab — which might have given State Department officials an incentive not to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a lab leak, according to a recent Vanity Fair investigation.
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For years, the US government gave grants to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funded gain-of-function research — including studies at the Wuhan institute.
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But at the start of the pandemic, scientists quickly shut down the notion that the WIV could be to blame. A February 2020 statement published by 27 scientists in the journal The Lancet said the scientific community had overwhelmingly concluded that the virus originated in wildlife.

"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," the statement read.

However, the organizer of that statement was the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak.
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In May 2014, EcoHealth received a roughly $3.7 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of which went toward gain-of-function experiments. By 2018, EcoHealth was receiving up to $15 million per year in grant money from federal agencies, according to Vanity Fair.

In one instance, EcoHealth Alliance helped fund research that created a new infectious pathogen using the molecular structure of the SARS virus. The aim of the study, according to the researchers, was to warn of the potential risk of a SARS-related virus re-emerging from bats.

One of the paper's authors was a prominent WIV virologist, Shi Zhengli. NIAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are cited as financial supporters of the research.
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www.businessinsider.com

US officials may have avoided the coronavirus lab-leak theory to avoid associations with controversial gain-of-function research

The US has funded labs that alter coronaviruses for research. That may have led officials to avoid investigating whether the virus leaked from a lab.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
 
Wow what do you say.......

I would appreciate if i got access to post in the covid thread again considering i was banned for posting something (From one f China's main newspapers BTW) similar.
 
Early in the
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pandemic, Scientific American profiled Shi Zhengli, known in China as the “bat woman.” Shi trapped hundreds of bats in nets at the mouths of caves in southern China, sampled their saliva and their blood, swabbed their anuses, and gathered up their fecal pellets. Several times, she visited and sampled bats in a mine in Mojiang, in southern China, where, in 2012, six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Shi’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
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As Shi explained to Scientific American, late in December 2019, she heard from the director of the Wuhan Institute that there was an outbreak of a new disease in the city. Medical samples taken from hospital patients arrived at her lab for analysis. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
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If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen. The Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”
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Shi made some WeChat posts early in 2020. “The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits,” she wrote. “I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory.” She advised those who believed rumors, and gave credence to unreliable scientific papers, to “shut their stinking mouths.”
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