Evidence has been available all along that Covid-19 was modified in a Chinese lab; MSM constantly tried to discredit that theory

If you're like most Americans, you get your news from the Mainstream Media.  The MSM, in turn, prints or broadcasts only "news" that makes China look good and Republicans look bad.

Thus when a virus that clearly came from China burst onto the world, the MSM first demanded that it was "raaaacist!" to call it "the China virus."  Instead it must be called something that would totally hide the origin.

Next, when the Chinese government claimed the virus had come from people eating meat from an open-air "wet market" in Wuhan, the MSM uncritically published those claims.  Can't fault that, because people were looking for information, and that was at least superficially plausible  The Chinese even named the likely animal host as either bats or pangolins. 

It took weeks before the MSM grudgingly admitted that Wuhan was the site of two virus labs--one just four blocks from the "wet market" and a second--the only level-4 lab in China--about seven miles away.

Shortly afterward, people who understood technical papers on virus experiments and knew how to search the Net found a published 2015 paper from researchers at this level-4 lab, proudly describing their success in splicing genes into a coronavirus to alter its functionality.  This led a few highly knowledgeable people to raise the obvious question:  Had the Chinese lab modified a virus that normally wouldn't have infected humans to make it do that, and make it lethal?

This prompted the MSM to screamingly denounce this very plausible theory.  The media went into full propaganda mode, denouncing anyone who raised this idea as a "conspiracy theorist," "xenophobic."  "Unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by the Trump administration."  They claimed the "rumor" was "unsubstantiated," and "discredited by all scientists."

You probably saw about a thousand stories like the eight samples below--all claiming the same thing.  I mean, how could anyone possibly think the friendly, human-rights-pushing Chinese government would have made a lethal virus in a lab, right?

Well, turns out that as more info has emerged, it's starting to dawn on more Americans that the real "unsubstantiated theory" was the one relentlessly being pushed by the Media, that the virus came from the wet market.

Normally the Media would simply redouble its bleats, secure in the knowledge that not one American out of ten-thousand had the background to understand the hard science that shows the virus was lab-created.  But for now we're seeing something...odd:  The media is taking down some of their "debunked theory" stories (counting on the fact that most Americans have never heard of the Wayback Machine that saves deleted stories).  And they're "stealth-editing" others to make 'em look less like Chinese propagandists.

This behavior is unprecedented:  The Media have never done these things before, counting on the fact that if they're caught in a lie (propaganda), Americans won't remember for long, so there's no reason to  take down or stealth-edit old lies.

Why show the rubes they're even slightly worried about their flacking for China, eh?

In any case, the post below--my edit of a much longer, excellent piece by Nicholas Wade--walks you thru why the "natural mutation/wet-market" theory is so clearly wrong, and shows why virus experts are virtually certain it was lab-created.  It's necessarily long because there are so many holes in the "natural mutation/wet-market" cover story.

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Adapted from an excellent article by Nicholas Wade in "Medium," May 2, 2021
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

The Covid-19 pandemic has essentially destroyed the U.S. economy.  It has killed lots of Americans--though almost surely far less than the officially-reported figure.  So you'd think we'd want to know where the damn thing came from.

But due to the political agendas of governments, scientists and the Mainstream Media, no serious investigation has been made into the origin.  All three groups have repeatedly lied about the origin of the virus and have tried to block serious investigation into that origin.

The virus that allowed the Democrats to shut down the U.S. economy is officially known as SARS-CoV-2, usually called Covid-19 by the media.  Many scientists also refer to it as SARS2.  It first appeared in Wuhan, China, where it killed over 40,000 people in a single province before escaping to infect the rest of the world.

There are two main theories about the origin of the virus:  The official party line, asserted by the Chinese government and parroted by the U.S. media and government, is that the virus is a totally natural mutation of a coronavirus common in bats.  Most viruses infect only a single species, but the Narrative is that the alleged totally natural mutation enabled the virus to infect humans.

The other theory is that the bat virus--originally unable to infect humans--was genetically altered in a Chinese government lab in Wuhan to infect humans.  As you'll see below, several genetic indicators make this theory overwhelmingly more likely than natural mutation.

Most evidence suggests that the now-deadly virus first infected Wuhan residents in November of 2019.  The Chinese government claimed the source was a so-called "wet market" — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan.  This was plausible because in the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 a bat virus had spread to civets-- an animal sold in wet markets--and then jumped from civets to humans.  A decade later a similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS. This time the intermediate host animal was camels.

Genetic analysis of the new virus showed it was a member of a family known as beta-coronaviruses, as are the SARS1 and MERS viruses.  Because SARS1 and MERS had made the jump from bats to humans by natural mutation, it seemed plausible that Covid-19 had done the same.  It was also plausible that people could have been infected by eating virus-infected bats from the "wet market."

But Chinese researchers soon found hundreds of Wuhan residents infected with the virus who hadn't been to the wet market or eaten bats.  If true, it proved that the virus could be transmitted from person to person.  But oddly, a month after the Chinese learned this, the World Health Organization was telling the world that there was "NO evidence of human-to-human transmission."

Because Wuhan is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology--a leading center for research on coronaviruses and home to a top researcher known as "the bat woman"--some western scientists raised the possibility that the lab had been experimenting with the new virus and it had escaped.

It requires no leap of logic to realize that the communist Chinese government would have every motive to debunk that theory--which is what they've been doing from the beginning.

Soon western media began running an avalanche of stories debunking the "created in a lab" theory in favor of the natural-mutation explanation.  Some of these stories were prompted by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

On February 19, 2020--a mere 3 weeks after the first confirmed case of the virus in the U.S, and well before any western researchers had had time to analyze the genetic code of the new virus--a group of scientists wrote a piece published in the Lancet: “We stand together to strongly condemn **conspiracy theories** suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”  The group went on to claim that "Scientists overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”  But the group had no evidence at all to back this claim:  Not a bit of genetic research on the new virus had been done in the west at that point.  The piece was little more than pro-Chinese propaganda, but it had the intended effect of shaping media opinion.

One of the most common ways to discredit a theory is to get the media to brand it a "conspiracy theory."

The people who signed the Lancet letter were issuing sweeping statements claiming things they had no way of knowing were true or false.

Later it was found that the Lancet letter was drafted--and the signers organized--by one Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.  It turned out Daszak’s organization had funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

If Covid-19 virus had indeed escaped from research Daszak had funded, he would be seen by many Americans as culpable. This acute conflict of interest was never disclosed to the Lancet’s readers.  In fact the letter concluded with the totally false statement, “We declare no competing interests.”

If one was interested in evidence of deliberate lying, deliberately adding the line "We declare no competing interests" would be a huge clue.  That statement itself was a huge, intentional lie.

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in assigning blame for the pandemic to any source other than China.  For 20 years, with virtually no public knowledge, they had been routinely creating deadly viruses, arguing that by getting ahead of nature they could prevent “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people.  If the public were to learn that Covid-19 had escaped from such a laboratory experiment, public outrage would almost certainly put an end to such dangerous research.

A month later the Lancet letter was followed by a second letter which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes.  It was an opinion piece (not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute.  They declared “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."  

But once again, this group was speculating.  While some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes show tell-tale signs of manipulation, newer methods leave no identifiable marks.  Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were claiming as undisputed fact something they actually didn't know.


Science is supposedly a community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities, speech that goes against the government's Narrative can be very costly. It can destroy careers. Any virologist who challenges the Narrative risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant-awarding agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters had no scientific basis but were amazingly effective. Articles now began repeatedly appearing in the mainstream media stating as fact that experts had determined that the lethal virus couldn't have been created or modified in a lab. The authors of these articles relied on the Daszak and Andersen letters, without understanding the huge flaws in their arguments.

Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialists are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions.  Yet every media outlet accepted the assertions in the Daszak and Andersen letters without printing a critical word.


Doubts about natural emergence 

The Mainstream Media had totally embraced the theory--pushed by the Chinese government--that the virus acquired the ability to infect and kill humans by means of a "natural mutation."  But the Chinese government realized that lots of actual science was starting to find holes in that theory, so finally, in February of this year, the World Health Organization and the Chinese government announced the formation of a commission to investigate the theory that the virus was created in the Wuhan lab.

Not surprisingly, the members of the commission were carefully selected by the Chinese government.  One of those members was Dr. Peter Daszak, who had claimed long before the planned investigation visit that the virus couldn't possibly have been created in the Wuhan lab but instead was the result of a natural mutation.  But keep in mind that Daszak had funded the lab's research, so had a powerful motive to debunk the "created in the lab" theory.

The Mainstream Media crowed that the "inspection" proved that the virus wasn't lab-created.  But the members of the team weren't allowed to examine any records, which had been sealed by the Chinese government.  Instead they accepted as truth whatever that government told them.

Once again, mission accomplished.  

Both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of that epidemic’s outbreak, and the animal host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the outbreak of Covid-19, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population or the intermediate species to which the new virus might have jumped en-route to humans.  Not a shred of evidence had been found to support the theory that the virus was the result of a natural mutation.  Actually several mutations, as we'll see.

That left as the only serious alternative explanation that Covid-19 was modified in a lab.

Western defenders of the communist Chinese government scream that this is simply un-possible, bleating that no government could possibly want to create a virus capable of causing widespread death.

To evaluate this defense you need to know about "gain-of-function" research.  Hopefully that sounds vaguely familiar to some readers.

"Gain-of-function" research is a bland term carefully chosen to mask its true meaning.  It means altering the genetic code of a virus to make it do new things.  Among these "functions" could be altering a virus to infect a new species, then making it more lethal to those it infected.

With coronaviruses there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and determine how tightly the virus can bind to target cells of the host species.  The spike proteins effectively determine what species the virus can infect.

Virologists increased their focus on bat coronaviruses after those turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics.  Specifically, researchers wanted to find out what changes had to occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins to enable it to infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Dr. Shi Zheng-li (a.k.a.“bat lady”) made frequent trips to bat-infested caves in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.  She then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, a coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, focusing on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].”  

In November of 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV).  They then tested this new, created virus on lab cultures of cells found in the human airway and found that it would successfully infect those cells.

We know this unequivocally, because in 2015 the team published a paper--in a peer-reviewed journal-- describing their achievement.  In their 2015 paper Drs. Baric and Shi acknowledged the obvious risks of creating lethal viruses in the lab, but argued the benefits outweighed the risks.


Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Dr. Baric had developed--and taught Dr. Shi--a method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and "humanized mice." These mice are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that covers the surface of the cells that line human airways.

You might well wonder how we know this.  Because her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)--a branch of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose director is...wait for it...Tony Fauci.

Hmmm.  And the grant proposals she submitted to obtain funds for her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the grant money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, who happens to have been...wait for it... Dr. Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance.  Here are some quotes from the grant applications for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. (“CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.):

Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.

We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.

What that means is that Dr. Shi proposed to modify coronaviruses so they would infect human cells.  Her plan was to take genes that produced the crucial spike proteins and insert these genes one at a time into the genetic code of the original (non-human-infective) virus.  She proposed to then test each candidate virus to see how well it could bind to human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”).  The result would predict whether a particular virus could infect humans.

This is the smoking gun.  It's why in testifying before congress, Fauci falsely denied that the government agency he heads had any role in funding this research--despite that information being published on the cover of Dr. Shi's 2015 paper itself.  

Again, the stated purpose of the research proposed in the grant application was to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein to infect human cells.  Of course we can't know for certain that Dr. Shi did what she proposed in the grant application because...wait for it...her records have been sealed by the Chinese government.

Gosh, that's...interesting, eh?  But don't be concerned, citizen.  There's probably a totally innocent explanation.

So the theory that Covid-19 was created in a Chinese lab isn't just speculation but is based on a detailed proposal from the principal researcher, as confirmed by the public records of grants awarded by Fauci's NIAID.

But even though the grant was to do the research described in the grant application, how can we be sure that the research was actually done?  For that we have the word of Dr. Daszak--the same person who aggressively debunked the theory that the virus was created in the Wuhan lab, claiming that's an absurd conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

On 9 December 2019, before the virus was known in the U.S, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute had been modifying the spike protein, creating coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.

   Daszak: "And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related viruses, very close to SARS.  Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models **and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals.  And you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger…."

Keep in mind that Daszak is the same guy who drafted the Lancet letter claiming "Scientists overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and that it was NOT possible for Covid-19 to have been created in a lab.

One can only imagine Dr. Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later.  Since he was the contract manager for Dr. Shi's research, Daszak would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of modifying bat coronaviruses to make them infectious to humans.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, Daszak immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s viruses. In an April 2020 interview Daszak declared
“The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true.” 


Comparing the theories of the origin of Covid-19

The evidence above supports the theory that the Covid-19 virus could have been created in a lab.  Open records could shed a lot of light on that, but the Chinese have sealed the records.  So let's look at other evidence:

1) The place of origin.

Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the Covid-19 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province in southern China.  If the virus had mutated naturally, it would almost certainly have first infected people living in the Yunnan area.  But the pandemic actually broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of viruses to which Covid-19 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s highly unlikely that any made it to Wuhan.  Also, the first cases of Covid-19 in humans probably occurred in September of 2019, when temperatures in Hubei province (where Wuhan is) are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate animal host first?  If so, the infected animal (or person) carrying the now-human-infectious virus from Yunnan to Wuhan would have managed to make it to Wuhan without infecting anyone else en route.  Since there's no evidence that anyone outside Wuhan got sick before the large outbreak there, this seems most unlikely.

In other words it’s highly unlikely that a virus unique to bats in Yunnan would cause the virus to break into the human population 1,500 kilometers away in Wuhan.

By contrast, if the virus was created in a lab in Wuhan origin, the above problems are easily overcome.  And as the lab's own 2015 paper claims, researchers had been genetically modifying bat coronaviruses to attack human cells for four years before the outbreak.

2) Mutation: Natural or human-caused?

Mutation — a change in the virus's genetic code —causes a different amino acid to be inserted into a viral protein.  For example, a mutation could make the spike protein better at binding to the cells of a different species.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus underwent one mutation at a time before it became able to infect humans.  After it had gotten from bats into civets, researchers were able to identify six more mutations in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After 14 more mutations the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a final 4 mutations the SARS1 epidemic took off.  Thus 24 mutations in all.

Covid-19 differs considerably from the closest known bat coronavirus, yet no one has found any intermediate mutations between the two.  This lack of intermediate mutations gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

Proponents of the "natural mutation" theory claim Covid-19 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population to gain its human lethality, or that it jumped to an unidentified host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained.  By contrast, a lab-modified virus wouldn't leave any evidence of intermediate one-at-a-time mutations outside the lab because it was created in its current form, exactly as described in Dr. Daszak’s grant proposal. 

3) The furin cleavage site.

Furin is an enzyme that breaks proteins apart.  The furin cleavage site sits in the middle of the Covid-19 spike protein, and sheds light on where the virus originated.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called "angiotensin converting enzyme-2" (ACE2 for short) which covers the surface of cells lining human airways.  Once the virus has anchored itself to the target cell, the second sub-unit, S2, helps the virus fuse with the cell’s membrane, enabling the virus to inject its own genetic code into the target cell, forcing the target cell to make copies of the virus.

But none of this invasion can happen until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart.  That's what the furin enzyme does, and it will cleave any protein chain that has a target cutting site that fits it.
 
The virus doesn't carry its own furin enzyme but relies on the target cell to provide it.  This works because most human cells have furin on their surface.

What's significant about the furin cleavage site on Covid-19 is that of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only Covid-19 has this cleavage site.  All other coronaviruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

So how did Covid-19 acquire a unique furin cleavage site not found in any other coronavirus?  Those wanting to debunk the "created in a lab" theory have to claim virus got the cleavage site from a natural mutation.  The alternative is that it was inserted by researchers.

Let's consider the possibility of natural mutation first. Mutation is a random change in genetic code, and a single mutation usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being replaced by another. Many of these changes harm the virus, but if one happens to do something that makes the virus more successful, natural selection retains that mutation.

Mutation is how the SARS1 spike protein gradually got better at targeting civet cells instead of bat cells, then started targeting human cells.  But mutation is far less likely to have created the furin cleavage site in Covid-19 because the site requires four specific amino acids together, in the right order and in just the right place between S1 and S2.

Since natural mutation is random, and typically switches just one amino acid per mutation, the odds of the four required aminos appearing next to each other, in the right order, in the right spot, by random chance are virtually zero.  Again, no other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus has a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have acquired the unique cleavage site from some as-yet-unknown coronavirus. But bat coronaviruses don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, and indeed none has yet been found.

The proponents of "natural origin" also argue that Covid-19 could have acquired its furin cleavage site from humans. They claim a predecessor of Covid-19 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to cause a pandemic.

But if this happened there should be traces in hospital samples of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus.  As you've already guessed, none has so far been found. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, major hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses but have found no evidence of this hypothetical intermediate virus before the outbreak of the current version in December of 2019.

So again, the chances of Covid-19 acquiring its furin cleavage site through natural mutation are infinitesimally small.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment.  For a lab, inserting a furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that one way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction,” writes Dr. Steven Quay. “At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, have been published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

While it's unlikely that anyone will be able to prove the theory that Covid-19 was created in a Chinese lab, all available evidence leans strongly toward that conclusion--with the two most damning pieces being the 2015 paper by Dr. Shi describing her work modifying coronaviruses to make them better able to infect humans, and the grant funding by Fauci's NIAID of research to perfect that. The "created in a lab" theory explains all the known facts about Covid-19, whereas those supporting "natural mutation" must posit many missing pieces that should be discoverable but haven't been found.

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute were doing experiments that had the explicit goal of making coronaviruses that could infect human cells and humanized mice.  Moreover, the researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses they were modifying, and they were working under fairly lax safety rules.  Thus infection of a staff member would not be at all surprising.

Next, out of all of China, the victims of Covid-19 appeared first just blocks from the Wuhan institute. The virus also possessed a unique furin cleavage site not found in any other beta-coronavirus.

Finally, the Chinese government has sealed the records of the research lab, which strongly suggests those records contain a smoking gun.

Proponents of natural emergence have to explain why no genetic evidence has been found showing the virus making multiple incremental jumps as it migrated from infecting bats to killing humans--evidence that was quickly found with both the SARS1 and MERS viruses.  There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no plausible explanation for how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other beta-coronavirus possesses.  In short, the "natural mutation" theory must overcome many implausibilities.


The U.S. "moratorium" on gain-of-function research

From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The existence of this grant by the NIAID and NIH is particularly suspicious because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance the U.S. government had banned funding gain-of-function research. Why did the two agencies award the grant to fund research banned by the government?

Because someone deliberately inserted a loophole into the moratorium.

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research **is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.**”

It appears that either NIAID Director Fauci or NIH Director (Francis Collins) used this loophole to issue exemptions to projects that had specifically been barred from federal funding –preposterously asserting that the exempted research was "urgently necessary to protect public health or national security."

When the moratorium was effectively ended by the exception clause in 2017 it was replaced by a reporting system that required agencies to submit funding requests for any gain-of-function work they wished to fund to a review panel prior to funding.

According to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci “have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review.”

In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the ensuing reporting system, “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”

The bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions.

In Conclusion

If the theory that Covid-19 was created in a Chinese lab is so well supported, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason to discredit this theory.  Chinese officials, of course, but also Fauci and Collins, and virologists in the United States and Europe who have a huge vested interest in continuing to get government grants to fund gain-of-function experiments.

One might think that any plausible theory on the origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit serious investigation. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID despite an explicit moratorium on such funding would bear investigating. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?

One clear reason is the strong leftward bias of virtually all the mainstream media.  Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors had all the motive needed to contemptuously discredit the idea. They joined the virologists in dismissing the idea that the virus had been created in a Chinese as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

original by Nicholas Wade, April 30,2021

Wade acknowledgements

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2 virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus’s origins. Deigin packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some intelligence agency must have authored it. But the essay is written with greater lightness and humor than I suspect are ever found in CIA or KGB reports, and I see no reason to doubt that Dr. Deigin is its very capable sole author.

In Deigin’s wake have followed several other skeptics of the virologists’ orthodoxy. Nikolai Petrovsky calculated how tightly the SARS2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptors of various species and found to his surprise that it seemed optimized for the human receptor, leading him to infer the virus might have been generated in a laboratory. Alina Chan published a paper showing that SARS2 from its first appearance was very well adapted to human cells.

One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.

Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has shown how the hospitals receiving early Covid patients in Wuhan are clustered along the Wuhan #2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other.

In June 2020 Milton Leitenberg published an early survey of the evidence favoring lab escape from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Many others have contributed significant pieces of the puzzle.