Last year, as the China Virus was just beginning to spread across the US, I suggested in these pages that it might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s China’s top lab for researching and engineering dangerous pathogens, especially coronaviruses.
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Video taken just days before the start of the coronavirus pandemic shows a current World Health Organization (WHO) inspector discuss the testing of modified coronaviruses on human cells and humanized mice in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), just weeks before the first cases of COVID-19 were announced in the city of Wuhan itself.
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U.S. intelligence reports that suggest the Chinese People's Liberation Army was conducting secret animal research with highly contagious viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, without notifying the World Health Organization even after the pandemic began, raise new questions about the possible laboratory origins of COVID-19 that must be addressed.
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This morning, New York magazine unveiled “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” — Nicholson Baker’s lengthy and detailed exploration of the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus and ongoing coronavirus pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China. Baker goes even further, speculating that the reason this virus is similar to many previously discovered viruses but not quite the same is that it may have been altered through gain-of-
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MPS have demanded China come clean after a US official stunningly claimed the "most credible" origin of Covid-19 was a lab leak in Wuhan. Senior Tory MPs Tom Tugendhat and Tobias Ellwood have called on the Government to probe allegations made by Donald Trump's security advisor Matthew Pottinger.
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At first it was the stuff of conspiracy theorists. Most experts, and certainly the bulk of the public, believed that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started as a result of someone eating a bat in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. There were whispers that the virus had been manufactured in a laboratory in that city and that somehow the little spiky ball that has killed millions and brought the world’s economy to its knees escaped.
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What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.
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In this installment of the Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame, we add fellow anthrax alumnus David R. Franz, now an adviser to EcoHealth Alliance, the coronavirus-hunting funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that we covered in our profile of Peter Daszak.
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The US’s Deputy National Security Adviser, Matthew Pottinger, says the “most credible” theory about the origin of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is that it escaped from a lab in China, according to the Mail on Sunday.
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Here is a reading list about what is known and not known about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, accidents and leaks at biosafety and biowarfare laboratories, and the health risks of gain-of-function (GOF) research, which aims to increase the host range, transmissibility, infectivity or pathogenicity of potential pandemic pathogens. U.S. Right to Know is conducting research on these topics and posting the findings in our Biohazards Blog.
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for COVID-19 Origins
