Nicholas Coulson

Nicholas Coulson

about 2 months ago

I’ve read everything I can find on the subject your article covers and yours is by far the most thorough, lucid and comprehensive analysis I’ve come across. Congratulations on such a formidable piece of journalism. I hope you turn it into a book which deserves to become a global best-seller.

Your article also makes it clear why the Biden administration has been apparently so reluctant to give much attention to the lab-leak thesis. The USA’s role seems much murkier than I had suspected. The embarrassing possibility that the NIH were funding GoF research that might just have caused or contributed to the pandemic is bad enough. The national security dimension that you refer to briefly is a very good reason for saying nothing and hoping the story dies for lack of oxygen.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

Many thanks for your kind comment! It may be that intelligent agencies don't want to make far-reaching statements without sure knowledge. I agree that the NIH funding of the WIV is a delicate matter, one that remains to be played out.

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Carlton Thomas

Carlton Thomas

about 2 months ago

A brilliant article hope it goes across the world. We have lost many of our loved ones and it's time these culprits are made to pay.

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Jess O’Connor

Jess O’Connor

about 2 months ago

Dear Nicolas, Is it too much to ask to have you do a deep dive into the vaccines? When the media immediately debunks the “lab-leak” theory then tells everyone the vaccines are safe and necessary, one can understand those who are hesitant. If virologists are keeping quiet because of funding, who can we trust before injecting our children with a vaccine based on a virus manipulated in a lab? If we have had Covid, why must we vaccinate? Why all of the conspiracy theories about the vaccine? Thank you for your incredibly thorough work!

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Matt

Matt

about 2 months ago

Hi Nicholas,

I would like to donate money to you for this invaluable information. This is Pulitzer Prize winning journalism.

I tried finding you on Twitter. No dice.

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Satishk

Satishk

about 2 months ago

Wade, beautiful exposition. Congrats. Should also mention another glaring conflict of interest. Dr Ian Lipkin, third author of Andersen paper, has received medals and awards from Chinese Communist Party and PLA! He was working for them for about 6 years at least.

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Saffron Sophia

Saffron Sophia

about 2 months ago

so how do the MRNA vaccines block the Covid virus? This is as much a mystery to me as where Covid came from. Great article. Thx!

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Ben Hekster

Ben Hekster

about 2 months ago

I'll second the suggestion of converting this into book form; similar to Bad Blood, this would make an amazingly good read. Thank you for the article.

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Jaye Bass

Jaye Bass

about 2 months ago

There is another similar article written for NYMag. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

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Jovita Castillo

Jovita Castillo

about 2 months ago

Great !!! Piece of journalism

Thank you, for your courage!

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Julia Raizen

Julia Raizen

about 2 months ago

Private funding agencies are private and quite distinct from NIH and NSF funding.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

12 days ago

Also, while this is indeed an extremely well written article which adds some needed perspective on the lab leak theory, it unfortunately skips over some huge holes in the lab leak theory. I think both sides are plausible, and certainly not as conclusive as presented.

https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

https://medika.life/debunking-nicholas-wades-origin-of-covid-conspiracy-theory/

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

12 days ago

Biden ordering an investigation into the origins (including possible lab leak) completely undermines your assertion that this administration is reluctant to give attention to this hypothesis. Not sure where you get your information to make a comment so at odds with reality?

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Mike Hearn

Mike Hearn

about 2 months ago

A science writer who understands science and is willing to be skeptical of scientists is a rare thing indeed. You're already aware of the tremendous nature of this piece of journalism, but let us praise it anyway!

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Center 4 Food Safety

Center 4 Food Safety

about 2 months ago

Just FYI to everyone on this comment section and the author, Center for Food Safety filed a FOIA lawsuit last week—we are suing NIH over its failure to release government documents related to the approval and issuance of NIH contracts and grants that fund research projects involving controversial gain of function/gain of threat studies. Press release: https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/6350/center-for-food-safety-sues-nih-over-unlawfully-keeping-secret-federal-funding-of-research-creating-new-more-virulent-pandemic-viruses

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John Le Fevre

John Le Fevre

about 2 months ago (edited)

Outstanding piece of long-form journalism. Congratulations. I have been saying since January 2020 it looks like a lab leak. The legal liability of the US in having funded the experiments, if ever proven to be part of the programme that spurned SARS-CoV-2, should also not be overlooked.

Thank you.

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Michael Schlabach

Michael Schlabach

about 2 months ago

As a biotech researcher myself who has made my own recombinant viruses, I found this a compelling read. I think one thing that's clear from reading it is that it almost doesn't matter whether the lab created SARS2 or not. They were playing with fire and easily *could have* created SARS2 even if they didn't this time. Focusing on the outcome and whether or not it's true to some degree almost gives them a pass on the terrible risks they were *definitely* taking. I'd almost rather ignore that question most are focusing on (is it true or not), and focus on the risk they were taking with all our lives. Making recombinant fully infectious agents shouldn't be allowed outside of serious containment facilities. If anything we got lucky the mortality was relatively low. An accidental SARS2 could have easily been an accidental MERS2 that could have killed 30% of infected people. Their containment precautions for these experiments were laughably inadequate and should have been BSL-4.

The stated goal of the research, to provide advance vaccine defense, is also hilariously flawed in retrospect. The mRNA vaccines took on the order of a week to design, and then 9 months of global pandemic to gain FDA authorization, and still don't exist in anywhere near sufficient quantities to vaccinate the world more than a year later. Unless they were going to make FDA-approved vaccines for diseases that didn't exist, this research was never going to allow us to beat a pandemic to the punch. Maybe oral antiviral drugs capable of using for prophylaxis of exposed people would have done the job, but I saw no evidence of them pursuing those lines of research.

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Greg James

Greg James

about 2 months ago

Absolutely great journalistic contribution to the world !!

You’ve peeled back the layers of the onion and weaved everything together perhaps better than anyone else to date.

Eventually “all the truth will come out” , but your article has significantly contributed to documenting “ the truth” comprehensively in one place !!

Thank you for your contribution to exposing and explaining this profound crime against humanity.

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Mmick

Mmick

about 2 months ago

This is the type of reporting that should be considered for a Pulitzer. However, everything is now politicized and worthy reporting is overlooked if it does not follow the party line.

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Angie at Work

Angie at Work

about 2 months ago

A big "thank you" for your audacity to stand up and lead us to seek truth! Yours is the most comprehensive and most analytical presentation I have ever read for the general public. I also follow Dr. Li-Meng Yan and many other Chinese dissidents on Twitter and on YouTube. The evidences they present support your analysis from different angels. As you said, without direct evidence from inside, the best one can do is deductively proof or disproof a hypothesis. That is exactly what you did. Wonderful.

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Alexis Baden-Mayer, Organic Consumers Association

Alexis Baden-Mayer, Organic Consumers Association

about 2 months ago

“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 s...

And then, as Dan Sirotkin has pointed out, when the government lifted the funding pause on gain-of-function research and established a review process for funding decisions on research involving potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs), they completely exempted vaccine research:

"C. To the extent that transmissibility and/or virulence of PPPs are modified in the following categories of studies, the resulting pathogens are not considered to be enhanced PPPs for the purposes of this Framework:

"Surveillance activities, including sampling and sequencing; and

"Activities associated with developing and producing vaccines, such as generation of high growth strains."

(Source: https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/P3CO.pdf)

This concerns me. If we are successful in our campaign to get an international ban on gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens, but it exempts vaccine research, we're right back where we started and no safer.

The Biological Weapons Convention also exempts vaccine research, providing an incentive for governments to fund their militaries to conduct this dual-use research.

As you point out, if SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, the accident may have taken place in the context of Chinese military research on a universal coronavirus vaccine, something the Pentagon has been working on, as well.

You don't mention that 40% of the $110M Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance has received from the government since 2003 has come from the Department of Defense or that Shi Zhengli's work has been funded/controled by both the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army.

(I wrote about that here: https://www.organicconsumers.org/blog/shi-zhengli-weaponizing-coronaviruses-pentagon-funding-chinese-military-lab)

Attempting to regulate the gain-of-function experiments of microbiologists engaging in academic or pure-science research is one thing. Taking on the military-pharmaceutical-industrial complex is another. But, we're unlikely to make the world safer if we don't acknowledge that this is what we must do.

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Hong Zhang

Hong Zhang

about 2 months ago

A masterpiece that can be used as a go-to reference for the Covid origin until new significant evidence is found.

If only 10% of journos published articles like this objective and thorough one, the world would be much better.

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R.Scott Morris

R.Scott Morris

about 2 months ago

Here’s a great read for you on that subject “Science Fiction” by Stuart Richie. I’m a chemist who began his research career in 1970. Since then I’ve witnessed the depressing deterioration in the quality of published scientific papers as the quantity increased geometrically. In short, there’s a phenomenal quantity of lab work being conducted that is poorly disguised as science.

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John Hoefer

John Hoefer

about 2 months ago

Saving to PDF since this will likely be pulled down. Looking forward to the read.

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R.E.A.L Human Rights

R.E.A.L Human Rights

about 2 months ago

R.E.A.L. has been following the novel coronavirus regularly since early January 2020, and it has been clear that the public is being told to ignore facts, and generally suspend disbelief on issues involving this pandemic from the beginning. Thankfully most have allowed survival of their family and loved ones to guide their logic, but many have suffered terrible losses and are continuing to suffer loss. What is most troubling here is how such a coherent, specific discussion of questions on the COVID19 origin is massively ignored. Now we can certainly find a voice for passionate debate and disagreement on the views of each other from the past (including this author), and on any other topic, but when it comes to life and death issues, we have shamefully consented to enforced silence.

The power to silence, marginalize, and make invisible people asking rational questions, is one of the most dangeous long-term outcomes of this pandemic. It is has cemented a second-class citizenry among our fellow human beings, whose freedom of expression to ask "why?" is forcefully silenced.

We are ordered to ignore everything we know about disease and pandemics. We are demanded that we must not be allowed to have any deductive thinking, unless it is "approved." We are told to deny what we see with our own eyes. We can see photos of Wuhan actually looks like, and we are told to believe that "wildlife farms" "near Wuhan" (imagine wildlife farms near NYC) caused COVID. Then we are told to imagine that bats flew from Zhoushan, then from Yunnan, and imagine they managed to just fly to Wuhan, and no intermediate infections were found in hundreds of miles in between. (And they are serious.)

Then NPR has an exclusive interview with Peter Daszak, telling them the COVID19 came from Yunnan bats, while ignoring at the end of March 2021, Yannan province had 9 cases (out of 48M people).

And of course, we are told to believe that the entire number of COVID19 cases in PRC China (with 1.4 Billion people) are about the same as Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. All of these reported with an earnest conviction and confidence we won't ask any questions. After all, how dare we ask questions.

The endless circus of blatant and obvious official lies on COVID19 is an obscenity. It is a foul obscenity to the victims who lost their lives and cannot speak for themselves. Now with over 3 million dead. We cannot dare to ask questions. And we earnestly have told the world "Never Again"? But here, well, it is just too inconvenient. Too inconvenient to urgenly ask hard questions as fellow human beings are dying around the world. And how dare we ask NIH and NIAID for an explanation. After all, it is "their" money, isn't it?

And of course it is not. It is the money of grandmother, grandfathers, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters. Who paid. for WIV to experiment to make more deadly coronavirus. And what are the consequences. Is anyone fired? Is anyone arrested? No. Zero consequences.

The failure to make the Rome Statute a requirement for international trade has left us in a globalist and lawless world. The goal was to prevent future conflict. But the reality is the ICC cannot bring individuals from DC or Beijing to trial. The world needs a way to settle global disputes, so that we can find trust and respect for others. Because this pandemic has completely broken bonds of international trust for some time.

But the USA public have no excuse. They don't have to "hide" behind manipulated statistics on COVID19, and they are well-aware of the costs in life and economy to their nation. If they allow those responsible to to be unaccountable, we can assure two things: (1) it will happen again, (2) global peace will be permanently shattered.

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Kiranavali N

Kiranavali N

about 1 month ago

Perfectly said!

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Dennis Boylon

Dennis Boylon

about 2 months ago

This is clearly what it is to live in a corrupt and dying empire. Think back to 9/11. The department of defense is obscenely funded. The US has by far the largest defense budget in the world. Nobody was held accountable. Nobody was fired. Instead the solution was they don't have enough money and power so we gave them more money and power. Only in the USA does massive failure bring success and rewards. Now we have billions and billions paid to big pharma and 18 months later we are being told to wear masks and isolate even if we are vaccinated. There solution is we need more billions for booster vaccines and vaccine passports with a massive database available to authorities to track everybody. Failure just brings more success. The world is in grave danger.

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Bioscience Resource

Bioscience Resource

about 2 months ago

Hi Nicholas,

One correction: the website where the Richard Ebright Interview was published is Independent Science News (not Scientific). Also you didnt mention our Mojiang Miners Passage Theory: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/

Perhaps you dont find it credible? Among its suggestions is that the furin site came, via recombination, from a human RNA. Humans have a gene called ENAC-alpha that contains an exact 12 amino acid match to the furin site and surrounding sequences. It is the best match known and this gene is expressed at high levels in lungs.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

Thanks for the catch - have corrected. Also for the link to the piece on the Mojiang mine which I will read with interest.

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David Kay

David Kay

about 2 months ago

The human gene doesn't have the same nucleotide sequence, though

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Blockwise

Blockwise

about 1 month ago

The Mojiang article is excellent. I would also recommend reading the pinned Twitter thread from @TheSeeker268 which they referenced. Many more gems in there!

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Where Richard Ebright is published makes no difference, the media has been squelching anyone suggesting this idea so only these "shady" websites will even publish anything. In other words, ad hominem on a source is not a valid dismissal of their information.

The chances of recombination with a human RNA makes little sense, and is highly improbable

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Gilles Demaneuf

Gilles Demaneuf

about 2 months ago

Hi Nicholas.

Please note that:

- The NIH grant 5R01AI110964-05 (start date: 1st Jun 2018, end date: 31st May 2019) to Echo Health Alliance (EHA) had a very specific objective #3:

"3. 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."

- However the EHA alliance subgrants to the WIV disbursed under that NIH grant, for a total of around $600K, were dressed in a much more innocuous language, with the stated purposes of:

■ conduct[ing] high-quality testing, sequencing, and analyses of field samples;

■ maintenance of cold-chains from field to lab;

■ ensuring quality control of sample storage and testing;

■ collaborating on scientific publications and programmatic reporting.

Basically magically nothing that could be risky, instead trying to reduce any risk. A bit of a joke seriously.

See:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GfLY9Ok9VcwVQUwQfxazLf3jTigAUPki/view

and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline

Tx,

Gilles

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

Hi Gilles, Thanks for this very interesting information.

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Thanks for posting, seems they hid their tracks?

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Scott Struthers

Scott Struthers

about 2 months ago

As someone who has read your work for decades, and who has experience in engineering proteins, this is incredibly well researched and hangs together. The only open hole I see is why publish here instead of a mainstream channel like the NYT? Can you comment?

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Matt

Matt

about 2 months ago

Because mainstream media like the nyt or lat are corrupt?

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Joe Cunningham

Joe Cunningham

about 2 months ago

With all due respect, the publishing venue doesn't strike me as a "hole" in Mr. Wade's article.

Prominent writers are increasingly looking to alternative venues to publish important research, analysis and commentary. Given the state of things these days I can think of lots of reasons why this trend is gaining traction.

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The Tranya

The Tranya

about 2 months ago

"Mainstream" would never publish this. They don't report for the common man, they propagandize for the global elite.

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Jay Hopkinson

Jay Hopkinson

about 1 month ago

I read this article a couple of weeks ago and today, to my surprise found it linked on a Politifact article that I found whilst giving Politifact a bit of well-earned abuse on Twitter. They'd Tweeted about deleting an earlier 'fact-check' where they arbitrarily decided that the claim that Coronaviruses could/were be manipulated in a lab was 'False'. Now that the 'gain of function' or 'manipulating coronaviruses viruses in a lab' is common terminology and common knowledge they are having to quietly distance themselves from that view.

They're linking to this article (and reporting its content very honestly without spin or smear) so maybe there's some glimmer of hope. I think as more evidence emerges on any given issue these media companies and 'fact checkers' just do what cowards without morals or convictions always do; slowly maneuver to remain in contact with whatever turns out to be the winning argument and then go all-in on the side of that argument.

But, back to your point, yes, I'd love to see this article in more mainstream places but, and here's a thought, maybe those places don't think their readership has the attention span??

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Kiranavali N

Kiranavali N

about 1 month ago

Mainstream media is paid to regurgitate whatever BS is fed to them by vested interests. They would NEVER consider a single honest piece on anything at this point as they lean left or right unabashedly abandoning their ideals of balanced and objective reporting.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Except this reporting is hardly balanced (citing Enright much more than anyone else) and certainly not objective (presenting evidence almost only to suit the leak view). It may have had lofty goals of presenting information in an unbiased way but it failed.

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Derrickhand

Derrickhand

about 2 months ago (edited)

This appears to be a superior, well researched article but if you only have a minute of your life to devote to solving the question, I suggest you need look no further than how the Chinese authorities reacted to the outbreak to know that they knew where it originated and how potentially dangerous it was. As always with those in power, watch what they do, not what they say. But the greater question is why are we as humans allowing this kind of research?

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Isabel Kinney Ferreira de Miranda Santos

Isabel Kinney Ferreira de Miranda Santos

about 2 months ago

Yes. And why were Dr. Zhang Li's lab books and data sealed and off limits to the WHO inspection team? As the saying in Brazil goes, if you are not in debt you need not fear the knock on your front door.

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Dennis Boylon

Dennis Boylon

about 2 months ago

Why was Dr. Daszak the only US member on the WHO team for the investigation? Who the hell appointed him? What a stunning conflict of interest.

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Steve Struthers

Steve Struthers

about 2 months ago

I agree. The swiftness and severity of the response is telling. To be able to respond

Iike that, they had to have known exactly what they were dealing with.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

For the counter argument, why did they wait almost two months from the first reported case to do lockdowns, when it had already infected thousands?

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Kevin Jon Williams

Kevin Jon Williams

about 2 months ago

Now we know why we get yelled at if we follow longstanding tradition and call this infectious agent by its place of origin: the CCP-Wuhan coronavirus. Remember that Lyme disease was named after Lyme, Connecticut, USA. Spanish flu, Marburg virus, and Ebola virus (after the Ebola river) are others on a long list of examples.

At the same time, it's somehow OK to call the Brazilian or UK or South African coronavirus variants by the places where they were first recognized.

Words matter. We're not supposed to connect this nasty virus with Wuhan or the CCP. Or with the NIH or NIAID, for that matter.

Thanks for a great, informative article.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

I agree. When the world returns to normal and people get tired of politicizing everything, Wuhan virus will be the obvious name. The reference specimen of the virus was named wuhan-hu-1 by its Chinese discoverers;

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Jasper Van Den Bosch

Jasper Van Den Bosch

about 1 month ago

Ridiculous nonsense. The reason those diseases received a name based on their place of origin was that they were unlike any seen before and formed a new category of viruses. Covid-19 or SARS-COV-2 was quickly identified to be a coronavirus and received a name based on its predecessor, although the simpler term corona stuck with the public because they hadn't heard it much before.

Your example of the Spanish flu, which is the example I've seen most in media calling for a name change, breaks down even more since it was neither the known origin of the virus (unknown), nor the place where it was first documented (the US). If we were to follow your logic, that pandemic should have been called the American flu and our current might be called the Italian coronavirus, or something similar.

The reason you get yelled at when you use terms like Wuhan/China/CCP virus is that they were deliberately made up by the Trump administration as part of their China trade war shtick. By using those names, you're really just showing yourself to be a gullible fool who bought into political propaganda.

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chekhov

chekhov

about 2 months ago

Brilliant work; the best so far. But why did you have to publish on Medium -- would no major media organization touch it?

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Vijay Govind Narayanan

Vijay Govind Narayanan

about 1 month ago

This article was also published in the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which I understand is a renowned academic journal. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

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Jimbo

Jimbo

about 2 months ago

My thoughts, exactly.

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Billy Bostickson

Billy Bostickson

about 2 months ago

Thanks, Nicholas, great review! Did you try to get this published elsewhere? Was it rejected for some reason? I published some reports (sections of a lengthy and previously classified report) that you may well find interesting: 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350409839_1_PROPOSED_FORENSIC_INVESTIGATION_OF_WUHAN_LABORATORIES 2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350515493_2_INVESTIGATION_OF_RaTG13_AND_THE_7896_CLADE 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350887648_3_WUHAN_LABORATORIES_BAT_RESEARCH_AND_BIOSAFETY

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

Hi Billy,

Thanks for your kind comment. Also for the links to these very interesting reports.

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Steve Struthers

Steve Struthers

about 2 months ago

A while back, around the time the pandemic began, I read something that indicated that in Wuhan, the authorities imposed severe lockdowns after just 17 cases of SARS-CoV-2 had been detected.

Normally, public health agencies tend to take some time to identify what kind of pathogen is causing an epidemic, and still more time to formulate a response.

To be able to respond as quickly and severely as they did, the authorities in Wuhan had to have known immediately what they were dealing with and what kind of response was required.

This small, but important piece of information is another bit of evidence that supports the argument that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

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James Jackson

James Jackson

about 2 months ago

And yet the Chinese authorities have also been criticized for acting too slowly. Sometimes in the eyes of anti-China critics, nothing China does is right.

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Conor Jacobs

Conor Jacobs

about 2 months ago

I noticed one error in the article. The publication date for the State Department fact sheet is given as January 21, 2021 but the actual date is January 15, 2021. It's a consequential detail because on January 15th Trump was still US president, whereas on January 21, Biden had taken office. It seems possible that the dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis by large segments of the scientific and journalistic community was due in part to a reflexive reaction against the Trump administration's endorsement of the theory.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

Conor, Many thanks for this catch. Have corrected the date. -Nicholas

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Godfree Roberts

Godfree Roberts

about 2 months ago

Wherever Covid-19 originated, it was almost certainly not China–for two reasons:

1. The CDC found the virus endemic in the USA in December, 2019. Approximately 6 million Americans carried the telltale antibodies and, by then, about 1500 people had died from it–some of whom were so-called 'vaping' victims.

See "Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020”. Sridhar V Basavaraju, MD, et al. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472

2. The WHO inspection team found no signs of Covid-19 prior to December 1, 2019.

Results similar to those obtained by the CDC have been found in Italy, France, Spain, and Brazil.

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Nicole Dumoulin

Nicole Dumoulin

about 2 months ago

The fact that some Americans already carried SARSCov2 antibodies in December 2019 has been established through the analysis of blood donations. Unsurprisingly, Wuhan city happens to also have a blood donation center, which provides a community-based blood donation service. About 200 000 donations are made annually in Wuhan. Blood donor aliquot portions (about 0.5 ml in blood pack tubing) are stored for two years.

Let see what the joint WHO-China mission report says about these stored samples:

"The joint team recommends a collaborative study with the Wuhan Blood Centre for the presence of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in blood samples from adult blood donors in Wuhan collected during the months of September to December 2019, and further back in time until there are two successive months without any evidence of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies among the tested samples. This could be expanded to include other blood centres in China and other locations world-wide, focusing on the six months (at least 3-4 months) period before the first cases in each location were identified and ideally using a common laboratory testing approach. Contemporary samples from blood donor populations in other regions of China where COVID-19 cases were not detected before the early months of 2020 could serve as a control group."

As you can see, a study similar to what allowed to identify early presence of SARSCov virus in the US was not made in China (or not published).

It is hard to find something when you are not looking for it.

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Emil Kaneti

Emil Kaneti

about 2 months ago

BS

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HarryDeedra Hodges

HarryDeedra Hodges

about 2 months ago

Other evidence I've seen, but can't cite, claimed that some in China were ill in August 2019. Given asymptomatic transmission and low viral loads, possible infections could exist in a lot of places.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Interesting article... However it clearly says there is evidence of cross reactivity from previous common coronaviruses in the 2% who tested above the cutoff, so its not smoking gun proof. At least one of the cases did seem to have covid-19 (Jan 10th).

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Hock-Kei Chau

Hock-Kei Chau

30 days ago

Yep if that's the case then it likely throws out the lab leak theory in wuhan.

That means we can't blame China for this like we seem to blame everything these days because people don't want to take responsibility. I think blaming china was a political move by Trump to help himself get re-elected.

The fort detrick theory seems more likely or some other lab in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J6zm6zgah0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKI5qOF_a8

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Terrykivlan

Terrykivlan

about 2 months ago

This controversy won't be settled until the bat lady sings.

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Weine

Weine

about 2 months ago

this is the best analysis i have read on covid. obviously, none of those with vested interests will want to hear anything about it. as a species, we probably rank below pathetic..

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Thomas Buckley

Thomas Buckley

about 2 months ago

Excellent article – Occam’s razor at its finest.

And it occurred to me that one aspect mentioned (section 2) may actually support even further the lab origin hypothesis.

You state that natural evolution from animal to people requires multiple steps, which would also include multiple missteps - I’m thinking of a million monkeys at a million typewriters – one may very well type out “to be or not to be” but along the way one will, a la The Simpsons, type out “it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times” – and that there would be some evidence (different variants, possibly) of this process somewhere.

But, if I followed the article correctly, there is none and it appears that this virus essentially appeared fit and ready to go from the beginning – I’m thinking Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’ head, that kind of thing.

Therefore, wouldn’t the recent emergence of variants tend to show that all of those stops and starts and changes one would have expected in a natural emergence are in fact occurring right now inside people, lending even more credence to the lab creation concept?

In other words, the virus is doing what viruses do just starting from a different primary (but not initial) host – us.

Oh and the joke about knowing the immediate species already – a mouse in a lab in Wuhan – is both hysterical and terrifying.

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Wendy Howard

Wendy Howard

about 2 months ago

About those mice ... https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12026-020-09152-6.pdf

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'PJ' Pamela JL Alexander

'PJ' Pamela JL Alexander

about 2 months ago

Thank you. A courageous, measured, deeply researched, clearly-reasoned piece of long form journalism that has implications for every human on the planet. As well as being a challenging yet satisfying read. Journalists: more of this, please. The world needs a free and dedicated press to support us through the complexity of this moment in history.

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Maria Sousa

Maria Sousa

about 2 months ago

I shared your article on FB and they added this bit of information: "Missing context. Independent fact-checkers say that this information could mislead people." Sad times when asking questions equates to misleading people.

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Dennis Boylon

Dennis Boylon

about 2 months ago

I quit facebook. I highly recommend it.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Also, what more context do you need that isn't covered in an article that takes almost an hour to read and doesn't have a catchy headline or taglines like corporate media would use:

e.g. "Are Chinese Labs Going to turn the World Into The Hunger Games??"

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Jasper Van Den Bosch

Jasper Van Den Bosch

about 1 month ago

Long read doesn't equal quality content.

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Maria Sousa

Maria Sousa

about 2 months ago

Exactly!

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Peacekitten

Peacekitten

5 days ago

Unfortunately...rather, dangerously, for us all, big tech/MSM have censored Or suppressed almost any and all wothwhile, important, or true information on any (anti-Desired narrative) Topic for years & it has only become worse. The reasons are indisputable; money, power, control...precedents of tyrrany.

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Madhavan Narayanan

Madhavan Narayanan

about 2 months ago (edited)

One important statistic that people miss is that China has so far reported only 0.1 million cases with a death count of 4846.

I simply refuse to believe that they have total control on the virus spread just by quarantine and isolation and their technical wizardry.

If it is just that they don't report their numbers and are not transparent, why should I believe that they are transparent with everything else?

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Boston Guy

Boston Guy

about 2 months ago

Multiple Asian countries (SKorea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, etc) have had extremely low rates of covid. It's believable that China's hard quarantines have worked. The censorship you speak of, appears to be more likely in places like Modi's India where it's widely acknowledged that the death count is 10X higher than what the government reports, where there are massive burning cremation fields everywhere...

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Aditya Gaonkar

Aditya Gaonkar

about 1 month ago (edited)

Yes, there's so much censorship of press in India that you could freely click pictures of funeral pyres and publicize it.

And no, it's not widely acknowledged that death count in India is 10x higher. A IHME projection said that it could be 3x higher and US deaths could be close to 2x times higher.

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Philip George Hayward

Philip George Hayward

about 2 months ago (edited)

Excellent informative essay, thank you. I think it is extremely important that SARS CoV 2 has been found in sewage sample archives from dates far too early - Barcelona in March 2019 seems to be the earliest one. It has also been discovered in sewage samples from Australian rural towns where there has been no Covid cases at all.

So unless these discoveries are outright false positives, there is a strong case to be made that SARS CoV 2 was out there in the environment quite widely and we don't yet know where.

I have been arguing for most of the last year that Covid is a very "multi-speed" illness - it cannot possibly have spread by contact, droplets and fomites; because if it spread so dramatically by this means, to have caused serious excess mortality in Wuhan, Bergamo, Barcelona, Teheran, and New York by April 2020, it would simply have to have gone everywhere that human travel patterns go. It is incredibly dramatic when it breaks out; and yet some geographic locations never experience the death rates that others do even if the government mitigation strategies are identical.

I am one of those who has been arguing for at least a year, that there is environmental explanations for a kind of "buffering" of the impacts of Covid - both natural environment and built environment. I say that this hypothesis is strengthened by obvious risk correlations for particular living and working environments. I say that in fact Covid is like a nuclear chain reaction; in a reactor, it is constantly moderated, but if there is a coincidence of unfortunate factors, you can get a meltdown or even a nuclear explosion. It is like "critical mass".

I say that it is quite likely that Covid could have been the cause of "flu like illnesses" that did not become the subject of a public health alert, because the numbers were not great enough, and ongoing transmission just "fizzled out", especially as summer came around again. People are not thinking of this because they have this absurd belief, not supported by the circumstantial evidence, that Covid is drastically contagious and deadly! I say the evidence is the complete opposite - it needs some particular factors to coincide before it does erupt into a local crisis.

I say it is blindingly obvious that the spread is via aerosols, not contact / droplets / fomites; and deadliness is all about inoculum dose of aerosols. There is obvious correlations between duration in an indoors environment, simultaneous with conditions in which virus aerosols can build up; and deadliness. When people live in such an environment, they are being infected continuously 24/7 by inhaled aerosols. We have been confused by the vulnerability of people who live in rest homes, into thinking that this alone is the problem; when in fact rest homes are the most dangerous environment! I believe that the rare "young healthy" victims of deadly Covid could be found to have been spending prolonged time under similar risk, perhaps in gyms, spaces where they hang out, and their own apartment or accommodation; all adding up to 24/7 exposure.

Prisons are another obvious case. Cold stores and meat packing plants involve people working long shifts every day but won't be as deadly as a 24/7 environment - however, if the workers also live somewhere there is aerosol buildup, this is obviously a problem. One distressing thing that has happened - I know of too much anecdotal evidence about this - is that people testing positive for Covid have been told to self-isolate, and the conditions under which they have done this have been ideal for aerosol buildup - even distancing and sanitizing, merely breathing the same air continuously, and other people also breathing the same air also become infected and then add to the viral shedding and buildup. Ducted air in apartment buildings has created superspreading.

Here are environmental factors that are present or absent, to mitigate or not mitigate, Covid 19.

Solar radiation kills viruses; it is not just vitamin D from sunshine that results in summertime being a time of less illness. UV light also kills viruses; the time taken varies from 3 minutes to 20 minutes depending on the location. 3 minutes in New Zealand, with high skin cancer rates. Solar radiation, however, affects indoors as well to some extent, which UV does not. Solar cycles correlate strongly with pandemics, and solar flares correlate with the subsiding of pandemics, even temporarily. New Zealand also has high solar radiation.

Humidity affects the duration for which aerosols will "float" in the air - above 40% humidity, aerosols precipitate downwards onto floors and surfaces, and the higher the humidity the faster the precipitation. Below 40% humidity, the aerosols may well float forever until the virus dies, which is how it can reach the opposite end and different floors, of a large building.

HVAC systems mostly dry the air as they heat it or cool it; air in indoors sealed environments (because of temperature or weather outside) will be tens of percent lower humidity than outdoors. Bear in mind that this is just one factor - yes, this pandemic has turned deadly in places with high humidity and little airconditioning use. But New Zealand has high humidity and a moderate range of temperatures most of the time, that means that ventilation with outdoors air is a significant contributor to "HVAC". Exchange of outdoors air for indoors air is an obvious mitigator of Covid risk. Rest homes are mostly fanatical about preventing chills and colds, and hence tend to be stuffy.

Modern "energy efficiency" standards for buildings and HVAC have disgracefully sacrificed old common sense "ventilation" requirements; and government policy forcing up the cost of energy also tends to incentivize the foregoing of fresh air which costs money to heat or cool when temperatures outside are high or low.

Relatively calm or windy conditions obviously affect "accidental ventilation" of buildings - Milan is notorious for weeks of calm during winter. New Zealand is famous for being windy almost constantly.

Urban crowding is an obvious factor that needs no explanation. By the way, there is a difference between "density" and "crowding" - you can have high density and low crowding if there is plenty of floor space built "upwards". Many cities with low-rise silhouettes are just as "dense" as some tall cities - the former are crowded. Britain's crowding is an outlier disgrace in the first world, and I predicted early on that they would be hard hit by Covid because of this. There are common rental housing arrangements where complete strangers are sharing single rooms, crawl spaces and ceiling cavities are "let out", and a "home" that one would expect to have 2 to 10 people in it, in most of the first world, might have 100. Even an apartment block like Grenfell Towers reported a death toll from the tragic fire that was two or three times greater than the official "capacity" of the apartments in it.

When you have large numbers of complete strangers sharing the same indoors space, there is obviously a risk of infection coming in, that is an order of magnitude higher than when normal civilized private space per person is the rule. And locking people down under these conditions increases the risk possibly more than it reduces it. Furthermore, the collateral damage of lockdown will be higher impact under these onerous living conditions.

New Zealand of course has low population density, and a preponderance of separate single-family housing, including even most "social housing". This social housing also tends to be heavily suburbanized, which is obviously a risk mitigator compared to places where vulnerable poor people are in apartment blocks in polluted, cosmopolitan and "vibrant" inner cities. I keep mentioning New Zealand, as the politicization of Covid has meant that their actually quite incompetent Prime Minister has become a global celebrity, when this is completely undeserved - nature did it. All the readily available evidence is that those people who did get infected at some high-risk event, mostly in the colder south of the country, did not infect anyone else, not even the spouse with whom they shared a bed. There has been numerous lapses of "security" (actually a failure to understand aerosols) that has led to this virus escaping from quarantine centers into the community; yet even when an infected security guard went to church, there was no further transmission! This is environmental luck that simply did not apply in, say, Bergamo in early 2020.

Lastly, it is well understood and yet overlooked by too many people who are supposed to be experts, that aerosols of viruses from sewage also act as infectiously as aerosols of viruses exhaled by infected people. In fact the concentration of virus aerosols from sewage can easily be many times greater than those from exhalation by infected people; if there is a stench of sewage, then you are inhaling aerosols of whatever is in the sewage. Arguably, this is the one thing that might make Covid infectious and even deadly, outdoors. Welcome to India. So why has it taken until now? Obvious. The high humidity and absence of airconditioning, making outdoors air the default "cooling" source, kept the initial transfer of infection via exhaled air from infected people, low. However, at some stage it reached "critical mass" in the sewage.

Seeing 2000 people per week die of dysentery in India as an ongoing "norm", one wonders if even admitting that sewage was a factor in Covid, will result in adequate public sanitation measures. There is far too much politicization and seeking of opportunity in this whole pandemic; apparently we are beholden to profit-making "Big Pharma" to such an extent that we cannot admit that fresh clean air is the answer anywhere, or that a misguided trend to the exclusion of it has had classic Hayekian "unintended consequences".

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Roland Benz

Roland Benz

about 2 months ago (edited)

This is very interesting and well argued, especially the importance of fresh air, but it does not answer the question, whether this virus was made by God's rules or by our own half-gods in some mircobiology lab. If it was the latter and they get away with it, they have not only created a tool that goes far beyond of Orwell's "1984", but also proven, that it works perfectly, if they team up and strictly follow some rules, like e.g. Omertà.

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Philip George Hayward

Philip George Hayward

about 2 months ago

I agree! Even if the theory that it came out of a lab in Wuhan late 2019, is falsifiable by proof of its existence months earlier elsewhere, that still does not mean it never came from any lab, anywhere, rather than evolving naturally. I am just suggesting that we may be completely missing the zoonotic pathway, it may be more prevalent in the environment than we think and we may be surprised when we discover where it was all along (kind of like Malaria and Mosquitoes).

Or, if we become absolutely certain that there is no zoonotic pathway anywhere, then Occam’s razor suggests to me that this has to have been an act of war by someone; the virus has been surreptitiously spread by someone according to a deliberate plan. It is not necessarily much of a “bioweapon”, it does not massacre people like some weaponized viruses could, but even if it is purely for sowing hysteria and making the target countries destroy themselves, it has been frighteningly successful. The other possibility is that it is rendering infected people hyper vulnerable to something else, quite simple, that could also be released or launched one day.

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Cosetliff

Cosetliff

about 2 months ago

Great article.

Now I wonder why in the heck am I paying $40 per month to read the Wall Street Journal online. Others may have similar questions about subscriptions to NYT or other "trusted" sources. This article is well sourced and well-reasoned, something I used to expect from WSJ. I guess I can save some money and realign where I'm getting my news.

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Patrick Lafferty

Patrick Lafferty

about 2 months ago

For that we can rely on the word of Dr. Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

wrap an argument in the radioactive claim of xenophobia and suddenly plausibility becomes secondary.

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Antanarive

Antanarive

about 2 months ago

Excellent article. When trying to share it on Facebook, Facebook is adding a link to a "fact-check" article in favor of the natural origin and dismissing any claim of a leak from Wuhan lab.

Here is the link:

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Facebook's team of "fact checkers" are so terrible they didnt even read this or that article. Its surprisingly short and uses appeals to authority "scientists largely reject this theory". Then they proceed to skip over all of the points here.

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Godzilla

Godzilla

about 1 month ago

Facebook and the elite network who launched the propaganda to serve lies (nature evolved virus theory) is doing their best to control information and truth.

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Jonathan Jaech

Jonathan Jaech

about 2 months ago

Better late than never. This is a well-written piece by a pro journalist, great! However...the underlying facts have been publicly known for about a year now, and are no more compelling now than last year. Why do you suppose the story is gaining traction only now?

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Because no one has written it in such a clear and balanced way like this till now. Most have been labelled as biased misinformation/conspiracy, the difference here is Wade is highly credentialed and thorough in exploring all possibilities, most push a one sided narrative, making its opponents dismiss it

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Christine Adhikari

Christine Adhikari

about 2 months ago

Great article. I think a lot of people discounted the theory just because "Trump suggested it". While I was never a fan of Trump the more I investigated the theory of a virus leak from the WIV lab the more plausible and disturbed I became. It's definitely something that deserves more scientific inquiry. The only thing I found missing from your article was the incident in Yunnan in 2012 in which six miners became sickened and three died from symptoms strikingly similar to Covid-19.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full

What are your thoughts on this? Does this not imply a direct jump from bats to people by a virus? Perhaps a less contagious form of the virus spread before the outbreak in Hunan?

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J McCabe

J McCabe

about 2 months ago

Reads like a novel, will be made into a movie.

I too believed natural pathogen over Trump's assertion. If Trump knew better, he did 0 to explain why.

Which leads to your conclusions, and acknowledgements ... the gist for we "unwashed masses". How the politics of the thing (what is a "reasoned" approach) runs head long into the science of the thing. (Knowledge is power, not different than "siegers" throwing infected corpses over castle walls.)

Time also allows hindsight. There is intent, gross negligence, negligence, simple negligence and, of course, causation in the legal sense. Clearly scientists are just as swayed (like everyone) by "who butters their bread".

Assigning blame is punitive. Better to encourage the "committees" to learn from experience. Of course, there's a difference between good / bad, good / evil. Bad is some unintended result. Evil thrives absent reasoned thinkers. Freedom to express reasoned opinions - it's the ball we balance on.

THANK YOU for excellent piece, forwarding to family.

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Kory Bobrow

Kory Bobrow

about 2 months ago

I shared your article in its entirety on Facebook a couple of days ago, and woke up today to find that it had been flagged as misleading and now appears with some type of warning and "clarification". Incredible.

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Hashirkareem

Hashirkareem

about 2 months ago (edited)

Easily the best article I’ve read in a long time. Balanced, nuanced, and intricately layered. After a while, I just stopped caring about which side of the argument I was on and kept on reading out of the pure joy of finding something so well written.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

Many thanks! — Nicholas

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Well written, yes. Even intricately layered, yes. But balanced? Nope. Read these articles to get the other side of the story, which the author should have presented as huge obstacles to the leak theory, but didn't.

https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago (edited)

In short, the leak theory relies on 2 options: A secret viral backbone, or serial passage through cell lines.

None of the existing backbones display any similarity, but fair enough it could have been secret right? But then why on earth would a scientist choose a backbone which is similar but not quite ratga13, with NO indication it would be better and spend years building this when there are perfectly suitable backbones more closely related to Sars1, which we knew to infect humans. And then, why would you combine it with an RBD from pangolin viruses (which were unknown at the time)? There is NO scientific rationale to do this, making it highly unlikely.

And then there’s the serial passage through cell lines theory, which fails miserably once you realize Sars-cov-2 has a specialized inmune system evader (glycan shield) which needs a live immune system (vs a cell line) to evolve.

But these holes are completely swept under the rug, much like the natural origin holes. If you’re gonna have a skeptical eye, do it for both.

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Eithan Haim

Eithan Haim

about 2 months ago

"Who does not look back on the great moral crises of our past and hope, had we been there, that our courage would have risen to meet the terrible moment? Who does not feel anguish at the almost universal salience which enabled the monsters of our shared history. Would we have just followed orders? Would we have risked everything? Would we have risked anything? We think: of course we would. Or at least that's what we would post on Facebook. And then we say a little prayer of thanks that our time is nothing like that. Except that once again it is like that. History is back" -Quote from some random guy named Chris Nathan (found on one of Beri Weiss's substack articles).

I included this quote because it seemed perfect for the situation at hand: the best, most thorough reporting is found on fringe mediums (i.e. Medium); the best, most insightful responses to those articles are written by random commenters (i.e. the Chris Nathans); honest journalism is seen as conspiracy theory; journalists who speak out against prevailing wisdom are those that will be targeted for cancellation; any brief search for the reaction to this article on major media outlets reveals an ostensibly "nothing to see hear" response.

History is indeed, back again.

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Dennis Boylon

Dennis Boylon

about 2 months ago (edited)

We all want to pretend we would be Sophie Scholl but looking back.. how many Sophie Scholls were there in Nazi Germany? They were easily targeted and taken care of. Ever read Milton Mayer's classic? You can read an excerpt here.

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

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Tony F

Tony F

about 2 months ago

You write "Dr. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. "

I cite the following:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755

Have these findings been discredited? I have previously noted with curiosity the lack of follow up to these rather important publications. I have also seen no published data regarding the ABSENCE of SARS2 virus and antibodies in human specimens conserved from 2019. It would seem this kind of data would be rather important in identifying the location of the earliest infections with SARS2.

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Paolo Giarrusso

Paolo Giarrusso

about 1 month ago

But those articles have not found variants of SARS2; they have found antibodies that react to it; could those antibodies be due to “common cold” coronaviruses? The 2nd paper is also under investigation: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620987756; that it was published in a journal on *cancer* research seems concerning. (Beware I’m no life scientist — I only have a PhD in Computer Science, so you should treat mine as questions).

The first paper says “Collectively, these data suggest that at least some of the reactive blood donor sera could be due to prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Even in context, this means the authors don’t have strong evidence — just a (weak?) reason for colleagues to look for more. They also claim that IgM antibodies that react to SARS2 aren’t caused by SARS2. In the 2nd paper, some cases in the other paper exhibit IgM, so should they be counted?

> Have these findings been discredited? I have previously noted with curiosity the lack of follow up to these rather important publications.

*If* these papers are the strongest evidence (which I don’t know), then likely there’s nothing to it. I remember these papers being in the news, but lots of scientific reporting isn’t great.

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Boston Guy

Boston Guy

about 2 months ago

Here is an important publication by the Italian Ministry of Health, showing 111 patients in Italy were POSITIVE for Covid-19 in Sept 2019. The author Dr. Apolone's own last sentence: "Our results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 circulated in Italy earlier than the first official COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Lombardy, even long before the first official reports from the Chinese authorities, casting new light on the onset and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755

This issue is so politicized. It's impossible to rule out an accidental lab leak after the US NIH funded gain of function research. It's also hard to dissociate the agenda from hardcore Trump xenophobes who deflect their poor covid response by dialing up anti-China rhetoric to 150% hate. It seems China was the only country to even have a covid surveillance network which is why they found it first. But it looks like it was going around the globe for months before it was detected in China.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/coronavirus-emerged-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-italian-study-shows-idUSL1N2I10EO

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

They were not positive for COVID19. They had Covid19 antibodies, and it was a 11% of the study participants, which seems high.

I honestly don't know what to make of this study.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Also, this later study found 0 individuals in Lombardy with COVID from October 2019 through February 2019.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921000430?via%3Dihub

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Marcia Rutherford

Marcia Rutherford

about 2 months ago

From the viewpoint of a 'non-science' person, this was an amazingly clear, interestingly presented, and well-researched piece! Although I didn't understand everything in the technical parts, your follow-up explanations for laypersons made it possible to get the gist of the information. I kept thinking, "He could be a teacher!"

I also appreciated that, although it seems a 'no-brainer' that this was a lab-created virus, with poor safety controls, and plenty of funding (!), you still presented the 'other side' well and (at least to me) gave us the option to consider the other arguments. But even the opposition to lab escape theory, and their other explanations, are carefully and fairly presented.

I heard Kirby Anderson, host of Point of View talk show, present an abbreviated report of your article and was inspired to check out the full report. I'm so glad I did! May this excellent piece be recognized in the "halls of science reporting;" any accolades are well-deserved.

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Lauren Anderson

Lauren Anderson

about 2 months ago

"And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new sars-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS" says Peter Daszak. Does he mean they "created" (not "found") those coronaviruses? That's the way I read it. Either way, Gain of Function research is indisputably one of the worst ideas ever. It has never produced a known benefit while risking a virulent, deadly pandemic that can kill millions or billions of people. The people who advocate and fund GoF research are wholly without morals, bordering on sociopathy.

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Mona Ahmad

Mona Ahmad

about 2 months ago

And Dr. Judy Mikovits was ridiculed and pilloried for saying the same thing.

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William Ganness

William Ganness

about 2 months ago

This is infuriating that to date no one is being held accountable. What the hell kind of banana republic do we live in? They (everyone including Scientists, The Lancet, the Media) used this story to blame Trump who actually saved the world by fast tracking vaccines. Why isnt Fauci in prison and facing indictments for crimes against humanity? In our twisted world he is seen as a hero. WTF kind of upsided world do we live in where Black is White, Wrong is Right, and Criminals are heroes ???!!!

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Zoe Grey

Zoe Grey

29 days ago

Also... if Trump did not create the black is white, up is down world, he certainly popularized it. Right is wrong. Good is bad. Trump is the consummate liar; a liar’s liar, if you will.

If you think TRUMP is a truth teller, I have a bridge in Arizona I’d love to sell you.

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Zoe Grey

Zoe Grey

29 days ago

Oh FFS. Trump didn’t “save the world” in any way, shape, or form. His unfamiliarity with the truth meant that he was the ultimate boy who cried Wolf — even if some things he said were true, it was IMPOSSIBLE to separate wheat from chaff.

Check your own biases, sir.

While Trump did remove done obstacles to quick approval of the various vaccines, he did literally nothing to “save the world.”

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Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

about 2 months ago

Proponents of lab leak have a simpler explanation.

It's at this point in the article that tears start falling. The logic and clues affect my emotions now. My gut conclusion is now fixed. What a horrible scourge humans have created if true. Imagining what could happen in this type of work next is utterly terrifying.

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Shang Rira

Shang Rira

about 2 months ago

As a Chinese, I knew from the beginning my government was covering the truth that the virus had human-to-human transition. A lot of us tried to warned the rest of the world, but our voice was weak and facebook and twitter even banned us from mentioning the lab-origin theory.

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Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

about 2 months ago

I disagree with the author at the end about where accountability lies. If true, it's USA money that financed it! US Dept. of State warned about poor security at the lab in 2018. Another reason why the finger comes back to USA. It's not clear how much the Chinese govt. knew and allowed, although I would guess a lot. Ethics lapses on Dr. Shi, as well, is significant. So she is largely to blame as well.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Funny he criticises conjectures, but then offers two humongous conjectures. Just read these other two articles for the other side of the story that he should have presented and didn't. Only then will you get both sides.

https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

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Dennis Boylon

Dennis Boylon

about 2 months ago

What? It isn't like they are trying to create immune resistant and vaccine resistant strains in labs... oh wait...S#$t

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/03/01/italian-scientists-create--live-sars-cov-2-neutralization-escape-variant/?sh=639c0f984b65

After 45 days of exposure, the virus sample developed a deletion to position 140 of the spike protein in the N-terminal domain (NTD). After 73 days, the substitution E484K to the receptor bind domain (RBD) developed, notably observed in the South African, Brazilian, Nigerian, and New York variants. After 80 days, an insertion to the NTD containing rendered the virus entirely resistant for the convalescent plasma sample.

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Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

about 2 months ago

And now we're in it for the "long haul" (pun intended).

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Calvin Beisner

Calvin Beisner

about 2 months ago

Science is supposedly a self-correcting 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 ful...

This could just as well have been written about why so few scientists are willing to question, publicly, the notion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

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Dana Ludwig, M.D.

Dana Ludwig, M.D.

about 2 months ago

Great work. This gain-of-function research really must end. The CDC proudly did it themselves just a few years ago for the same lame reasons - with the 1918 virus! - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html

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David Roodman

David Roodman

about 2 months ago

This article seems excellent. I'm surprised by the lack of mention of Nicholson Baker's earlier article in New York Magazine, which says many of the same things. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

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Sukanya Iyer

Sukanya Iyer

about 2 months ago

As a researcher myself, I am well aware of the implicit and explicit pressure of not exposing malpractices. Most of these "mal"practices involve glossing over data that does not fit cogently with the narrative the scientists want to write about in their paper. While in the short run it promotes self preservation of academics, in the long run, it erodes the already diminishing trust that the public has on academicians. However , it pales in comparison what this cover up has cost humanity. There has to be some line beyond which self preservation can no longer serve as a valid reason for hiding important information like this to the public.

I want to applaud Nicholas Wade beautifully unpacking the clues for origins of this virus .( But it is sad that this apparently had to be done on a self publishing platform.) But a public outrage is the only thing that would put an end to practices that may have led to the pandemic. There is too much money and influence at stake here for regulators to take meaningful action.

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Iggy Fayn

Iggy Fayn

about 1 month ago

As a Biology major in college and now a lawyer, your article, which I just finished reading today, not only opened up my eyes to the actual underlying evidence into the origins of this pandemic, but to the wider issue of mainstream media and its herd mentality of only covering stories they deem important and credible, without bothering to conduct elementary journalistic investigations that may point to more unorthodox directions.

I have long been skeptical of the natural emergency theory of the pandemic's origins, just as I have been skeptical from the very beginning of the notion of surface transmission, as I have long suspected aerosol based transmission.

But when major media networks, like CNN, spent weeks mocking the idea of wearing masks - only to reverse course completely weeks later; then spent months showing how to wash hands and disinfect cereal boxes, when there wasn't a shred of evidence that this was even a mode of transmission at all; and then kept dismissing Wuhan lab leak theory as just as a conspiracy theory like 9/11 being an inside job (an actual conspiracy theory) - one can become intellectually numb and just accept whatever horseshit the MSM feeds.

Great article, and the evidence presented was even more substantial and incriminating than I anticipated when I began reading it!

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

The author indeed wrote an excellent article., and your observations about the media are largely correct. However, since you seem like a thoughtful person, do read the 'equivalent' evidence on the other side to form a better opinion. Unfortunately the author presents the holes of the natural origins theory without presenting the equally gaping holes of the leak theory. Check out these articles for a more complete view of the other side https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

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Saurabh Shome

Saurabh Shome

about 1 month ago

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems i...

I am not so sure. Logically if it mutated to suit humans, probably it lost the ability to infect bats. I am a non technical reader. So if my logic seems simplistic, please pardon me.

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago

It is easy to wonder what the design of and rapidity of production of the vaccine, which is if I understand correctly entirely focused on the spike protein says about the origin of the chimeric quality of the virus. The spike protein is allegedly what was added to the virus to make it more able to enter human cells. The vaccine for this was probably already in the works. What are the implications of this, if any?

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Edith Z

Edith Z

about 2 months ago

Did anyone try to see if SARS2 can infect bat in high efficiency vs. human cells?

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago

I was wondering this, too.

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Mjany

Mjany

about 2 months ago

Somewhat big-brotherishly, Facebook posts this 'Fact check' a few days after I linked to this piece. https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/#End

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Joanna Kalisz

Joanna Kalisz

about 2 months ago

I have been informed by FB today that my post with a link to this article is "missing context" and they are adding a notice to my post...

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Well if you read the article it Actually does give a nice overview of the other side - especially the holes in the leak theory. I think both sides have to be considered.

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Stephen Borte

Stephen Borte

about 2 months ago

How much money is Nicholas making by spouting off his conspiracy theory? National Review and Fox News are touting his wisdom and promoting him as a truth teller and great scientist (reporting on science is not the same as currently doing science research). The advances Nicholas will get on future books plus the ready made audience of conspiracy theorists around the world will help him line his pockets.

That is more than enough evidence why he would promote a story which he acknowledge there is no direct evidence for. On the other hand many well respected scientists who have actually personally studied the virus (something Nicholas has not done) have stated that the virus did arise naturally and continues to mutate, adding more evidence that the most likely explanation is that it evolved and was not manufactured.

Saying that the virus existed before the wet market does not add credibility to the lab created theory, but actually makes it less likely. Rather than a leak in a Wuhan lab, it must have come from somewhere else to have been found outside of the Wuhan market first. But he doesn't dwell on that fact because it is counter to his case. In reality it is far more likely that the virus mutated from an earlier Coronavirus than that it mutated in Wuhan, a particular location rather than the untold number of places that it could have mutated. The Wuhan market was more likely just the place where the virus spread rapidly than that it was the place of origin.

My Wade claims that public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario. Where is his evidence of this? Right wing media, the Trump administration and numerous other like minded entities around the world certainly were not inclined to believe that it evolved when they could make money and promote their own political agenda by saying that it was manufactured in a Chinese lab.

Virologist who wrote an article in mid February had been studying and sharing information for well over a month. The entire genome had already been published by then. They had been exploring the origins and looking very carefully at the virus and they concluded overwhelmingly that the evidence supported a wildlife creation. These men were not being poor scientists by stating so, but presenting their conclusions based on the evidence they had at the time. His attempted debunking of their publication without having studied the same evidence and without providing better evidence to the contrary is poor journalism. His conspiratorial attack on Peter Daszak holds no water. Funding a very small part of critical virus research after two earlier Coronavirus outbreaks does not make him culpable, but rather one who more likely had better knowledge about how viruses in general and this one in particular mutate.

Likewise his statement that a letter had enormous influence was an opinion piece as if that automatically made it non scientific was disingenuous at best. The conspiracy theory that the Chinese government was behind the release of the virus was already widespread and these scientists were stating their opinion based on their personal research. Does Mr. Wade provide any evidence? No, just an opinion that he is more likely to believe that scientists would lie because they might have a personal reason for doing so. Use a mirror Mr. Wade.

Mr. Wade's non scientific conjecture about how spike protein design would happen in a lab which is based on evolution doing the heavy lifting supports the conclusion that it is more likely to have occurred in nature than in the lab. By his reasoning, the scientist started some arbitrary less optimal place and let nature do the rest. That is what happens in nature and is far more likely to occur in nature than in a lab where scientists would have to watch for mutations, test the effectiveness of the mutations and intervene to select these new traits until one sufficiently virulent was produced. The evidence shows that the COVID-19 virus mutation was different than what scientists had seen before and that is a reason to believe that it was not concocted by man (who would have used something they already had seen) but was created in nature.

Here is an excerpt from what the Anderson team found: "Some of the mutations, they noted, seemed to be the result of interacting with an animal’s immune system, while the part of the spike protein that binds to human cells via the ACE2 receptor was similar to sequences found in coronaviruses in pangolins. Together, this evidence suggested a natural origin, they concluded." This is not hard to grasp nor is it strained as Mr. Wade suggests.

HIs further argument that other scientists did not step in and correct the Andersen group's argument because these scientists would be subject to financial retribution is false. Fox News and the National Review would have gladly funded them at a higher level than they would otherwise be funded, just like they have supported Mr. Wade's writings and appearances to tout his conspiracy theory. Hold that mirror up Mr. Wade and see that you are arguing against your own veracity.

Saying that scientists to date have not found the original bat population does not in any way mean that the virus couldn't have originated in nature. It is possible that a SARS virus mutated in another animal, possibly mutated further after being passed to another species of animal or more before emerging in the human population. There is no definitive proof that the virus was created in nature and no definitive proof that it was created in the lab. However, that is not the same as saying that the two are equally probable. There were far more chances that the virus mutated in nature than in any lab. The virus has mutated many times already since it first appeared a little over a year ago. Does Mr. Wade believe that Chinese scientists are secretly releasing new variants in Great Britain, South Africa and elsewhere? Given a choice between two outcomes, Mr. Wade has chosen the less likely one and is making a lot of money by doing so. His next book advance will be much larger because of the followers he has gained supporting a politically popular view.

Speculation by Mr. Wade about the scientific research being conducted at the Wuhan lab is simply speculation. Aliens could have create the virus. Western scientists could have created the virus and planted it in China. Santa Claus might have spread the virus on his yearly rounds. Provide some evidence Mr. Wade.

Nicholas Wade states that the work of Dr. Shi was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was only partially funded by this, a very small part of the total funding. This lack of transparency by Nicholas Wade discredits him.

Mr. Wade clearly shows his bias when he says, "Natural emergence was the media's preferred theory...." Which media is that Mr. Wade? Fox News? The megaphone of the Trump administration on social media? The National Review? A non virologist claiming without evidence that he has the correct answer is one way for a person to get rich. Do you see the mirror Mr. Wade?

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

To answer your first question: None? Whatever journalists make for doing good journalism? You know fox news and the national review doesn't pay him, right?

And how can an "accidental escape" theory be labeled a "conspiracy theory". A conspiracy means intentional action. Do you mean the theory that the Chinese government lies about a lot of what they do and can't be trusted to evaluate the facts of this case? I don't think that's a "conspiracy theory" either.

Grow up.

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Stephen Borte

Stephen Borte

about 2 months ago

I agree with you that a journalist gets paid for good journalism. But a journalist can also get paid and sometimes even more from bad journalism. How? By free publicity expounding his reporting. Both the National Review and Fox News have provided lots of free publicity to him because they like his innuendo. Mr. Wade claims that the reason scientists don’t support his theory, for which he admits he has no evidence, is that they might lose future grants or other financial incentives. I am holding his article up to the same light he is shining on others. You do realize that he is an author and that authors make more money from a larger following both in what they are paid to write and in the proceeds from what they sell, don’t you? Is it more likely that lots of people in the scientific community would lie for fear of a little financial loss or that an author would spin an story that would greatly enhance his future earnings? Why listen to the non expert when the experts say the evidence points to a natural evolution of the COVID virus?

The accidental escape theory can be labeled a conspiracy theory not because the actions touted are intentional or not, but because the perpetuation of the theory is intentional. It is an intentional attempt to disparage China, Chinese scientists, and U.S. scientists and governmental officials that provided money to study the SARS viruses. The theory is filled with innuendo and not facts. Its logic is based on the same logic that your first paragraph attempts to dispel.

As for telling lies, the Chinese government did not tell as many lies as the Trump administration. We lost whatever moral high ground in comparison. Sad but true. World opinion of America declined under Trump. Why bring up Trump? He agrees with Nicholas on this issue.

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Kerim Yasar

Kerim Yasar

about 2 months ago

Furin cleavage sites aren’t a smoking gun.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165

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Will Cappelli

Will Cappelli

about 2 months ago (edited)

The paper is, in fact, based on easily tweakable cladistic modelling algorithms which are themselves derived from a dubious application of Bayesian statistical theory. I would not take it too seriously as an argument for the natural occurrence of the furin cleavage site. A measure of the impact of Mr. Wade's article will be to see how widespread citations of the 'cladistic' argument become.

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Chi-Sang Poon

Chi-Sang Poon

about 2 months ago

The reliability of that paper's claim from Chinese authors has been challenged:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0.pdf

"Therefore, RmYN02 should not be

used as evidence of the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS

until its claimed insertion is properly validated."

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Kerim Yasar

Kerim Yasar

about 2 months ago

https://twitter.com/florian_krammer/status/1390347972458725380?s=21

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Alexander Wong

Alexander Wong

about 2 months ago

"In any case, the first cases of the Covid-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation."

A quick glance at the climatological chart for Wuhan shows this assertion to be absurd: average September lows there are 68 F.

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R.E.A.L Human Rights

R.E.A.L Human Rights

about 2 months ago (edited)

So we are to believe bats with virus flew from Yunnan all the way (1600 km) to Wuhan just to infect humans THERE, but ignoring all the millions of humans along the way. It is really astounding that people can actually make such claims. But on the other hand, we will have detailed debates over the temperature at which bats hybernate.

By the way, horseshoe bats enter torpor for various reasons. One reason, but not only reason, is temperature. Bat biologists in study below referenced a torpor temperature of 16 °C (61 °F) and their metabolic rates slow.

https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/51/3/337/640694

But this is indicative of the logical challenge we have. We will be asking rational, easy to grasp issues, and end up down rat hole arguments on the temperature at which bats might go into torpor. Never mind entirely that we should believe they just flew 1600 km (1000 miles).

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Alexander Wong

Alexander Wong

about 2 months ago

No need to believe in any magical transportation, because because the author’s implied assertion that only a single Yunnan-based species of bat can carry beta-coronaviruses is flat-out false:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682217301009

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107427/

With that fallacy out of the way, the author’s geographical argument relies on the assertion that the closest known relatives to SARS-Cov-2 was found in bats in Yunnan. Even if true (and given the author's lack of attention to detail I'm getting more and more skeptical), this proves very little, particularly because there has apparently been quite a bit of search effort put into Yunnan so one would expect a lot of coronaviruses to be discovered there. There are plenty of bat species in Hebei Province, and I see no reason to think they are not capable of carrying beta-coronaviruses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat

The possibility of some bats entering torpor at highish temperatures is irrelevant: the author’s argument relies on the assertion that the temperatures in Hubei in the September- which are very similar to those of New York City in July- are cold enough to force all bats into hibernation. It’s a completely absurd argument that is, in fact, traceable back to the comically bad unreviewed paper he cites, which in turn relied on an erroneously copy-pasted climate chart from a tourism website.

Doing good science requires getting the details right. Climate charts and the details of bat ecology matter if you actually want to understand what happened.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Aren't you missing the point. Do bats start hibernating in Hubei province in September or not?

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Alexander Wong

Alexander Wong

about 2 months ago

The author is making an extraordinary claim: that bats hibernate at temperatures comparable to those in New York in the summertime. He needs to back such a claim up with evidence: the burden of proof is on the person making the initial assertion. Instead we get a link to an unreviewed paper entitled “A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived ”. (The title alone should raise some red flags). Anyway, on page 142 of the paper, there is a graph that reports average September lows in Hubei Province to be 4 C. I can find nothing anywhere suggesting temperatures in that region are anywhere close to that. None of this is remotely credible.

https://www.worlddata.info/asia/china/climate-hubei.php

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Hdjewel Lisa F

Hdjewel Lisa F

about 2 months ago

One more thing I wanted to add that I found terrifying about the CDC doing bioweapon experiments in India without their governments knowledge. Search for stories... Headline: U.S. government's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention funded training at Manipal laboratory without clearance.

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Johnny Davis

Johnny Davis

about 2 months ago

Hello,

You claim that "Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan."

Yet the ranges of several horseshoe bat species overlap Wuhan.

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/19517/21973253#geographic-range

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/41529/22005184

In addition, similar viruses have been found in multiple species of horseshoe bats, not just the intermediate horseshoe bat.

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Philip Khor (PK)

Philip Khor (PK)

about 2 months ago

To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although s...

There was this piece by 60 Minutes Australia last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgTeNFIY-b0

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Tom Young

Tom Young

about 2 months ago

There is so much wrong with this article it is difficult to know where to start. And given people are generally emotionally invested in the this question (presumably for the same reason that people used to blame the plague on Jews for poisoning wells) then their views are usually not amenable to rational debate. Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired. However, I will make one point.

People quote from the abstract of the Peter Daszak and the WIV NIH grant, beneath that abstract will be a detailed grant proposal with a lengthy outline of experiments. It should be amenable to FOIA, the reason no one requests it is that none of the proposed experiments would like anything like Sars-CoV-2 and no one wants to put their conspiracy theories to test with the almost certainty that the full grant proposal would leave them in a smoking ruin. If there was anything vaguely interesting in the grant proposal Mike Pompeo would have used it.

From the abstract it is fairly obvious that they would be using their first and only reverse genetics clone WIV1 (complete with numerous Bgl 1 restriction sites) to clone in various spike protein genes of interest. Initially this would be done using pseudovirus technology and cell culture, but as a final step they might make a recombinant virus using the WIV1 backbone and testing in humanized mice.

This gets back to Andersen et al's point: if this was an escaped transgenic experiment you would expect it to be using a known backbone. Of course, it is technically possible that the WIV created an artificial virus that was extremely difficult to distinguish from a natural virus, but there will be nothing in the Daszak-WIV NIH grant that would suggest they were intending to do that.

People who think this is an experiment gone wrong, should try to write an outline of the scientific paper they think it was intended for.

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Steevesna

Steevesna

about 2 months ago

You lead with equating a scientific debate with an irrational emotional equivocation. It seems you prefer to paint all who engage in this line of debate as "racists." That to me is the very mea culpa of some one who knows they are wrong.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

There's so much wrong with this article but you don't really mention anything specifically other than they must hate Chinese people?

Nice argument there. Are you proud of yourself?

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Mott Irregular

Mott Irregular

about 2 months ago

The specific contents of the grant are irrelevant. They merely point to the kind of research carried out in the lab funded by the NIH. They say nothing as to what other research was also being done, funded by other people, or under the table. I mean, I realize that the PRC is an entirely ethical organization who wouldn't harvest body parts from unwilling candidates for transplant, nor engage in ethnic cleansing, so this is rather a moot point, but maybe they could have fiunded something a little more "spicy", for the greater good, you understand, but the reknown health and safety standards the PRC are known for had a little hiccup. I mean, it's not like the US have had similar hiccups or anything with their top notch proceedures.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Except the contents of the grant are used as evidence... So if his interpretation is flawed, so is the argument. Saying it could have been more "spicy" is complete conjecture, which is what I thought the article was exactly against?

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Your response is full of projection and you make your own "emotionally invested" argument(lack of self awareness much?) based on your political views. Hypocrites never seem to realize what they are doing sadly. Then you try to confuse anyone reading using babble. Post the full grant text since you claim "its not possible" the techniques they used could have resulted in a sars2 like virus, even though the abstract CLEARLY says they were doing exactly that.

Furthermore, the behavior of covering up all the "innocent" research, lying repeatedly doesn't make a case for a virus that magically transmitted to the location of this lab. The probability of having no evolution of the virus, the fact that this virus does not infect bats, and that its structure has alarming similarities to an engineered ones completely slam your emotional response into "smoking ruin" . You also clearly didnt read the article since you claim there's only one technique that would have been detectible. Explain how serial passage would have been detectable. Here's a nice scientific paper I'll await for you to debunk as well:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/

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Gus Dunn

Gus Dunn

about 2 months ago

Good lord THANK YOU.

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Jallenapm

Jallenapm

about 2 months ago

Dear Nicholas, Thank you for this outstanding article on COVID. I have tried to read everything on the possible origins and this is the most balanced and insightful article I have seen. I hope others have a chance to read this. I was worried you would not mention Dr Fauci's role and you did a nice job of adding this at the end. Thanks again for writing this. JA

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Elephant City

Elephant City

about 2 months ago

Here is the lab leak case in a short video. Short, sweet and to the point. Please share it widely before Big Brother takes it down to protect Fauci et al: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Df8HXyhao

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Virginie Courtier

Virginie Courtier

about 2 months ago

Thank you so much for this very deep and thoughtful analysis.

Just two very minor comments:

>"Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkable uniform"

"remarkably"

>"To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces."

In France there was quite a big coverage in Le Monde in December 2020:

https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2020/12/22/a-l-origine-de-la-pandemie-de-covid-19-un-virus-sars-cov-2-aux-sources-toujours-enigmatiques_6064168_1650684.html

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Ssnbsattler

Ssnbsattler

25 days ago

Most interesting - it appears there was no human to human transmission of the virus once those surviving miners left the Yunnan caves. AND - there appears to be no human to human transmission even when 1300 bat samples were collected during the 8 visits. The 3 miners that died appeared to be suspect to a concentrated level within the cave (and we don't know their pre-existing conditions).

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Blake Helppie

Blake Helppie

about 1 month ago

The following lab leak article I wrote in April 2020 was literally censored by Medium via de-indexation on Google. There is tremendous evidence consistent with the lab leak theory and it’s unfortunate that this theory has been so widely dismissed on political and pseudo-scientific grounds:

https://link.medium.com/JfwuKvTaBgb

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Scott S. Manhart

Scott S. Manhart

about 1 month ago

All one had to do to realize the lab was engaging in high risk GOF research is to read the Nature article from 2015 where they pat themselves on on the back for merging the SARS1 geome with novel bat corona viruses. The article reads like a modern version of Frankenstein. The reserchers were blissfully ignorant of the risk they took and now we all pay for it.

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V. Nandakumar

V. Nandakumar

about 1 month ago

Sir

It is a brilliant ensemble of true scientific temper and responsible journalism. Sadly we see such works very rarely. Many icons are busted and the agencies who were supposed to do their duty failed to do so.

In other times it would have been enjoyable as an investigative story. Unfortunately this is not a story and is happening very much around us now. Very disturbing to get peace after reading this.

If you kindly permit, I would like to translate your article into my mother tongue Malayalam for wider public awareness.

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Dr Michael Heng

Dr Michael Heng

about 1 month ago

Here's some alternative evidence from my research, Nicholas - https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-origins-of-covid-19-not-wuhan-where-5f99f70109dc . Yes, the Origins are likely from a Lab, but not in Wuhan. Try looking at the other likely suspect - the Lab in the USA, or elsewhere in Spain or Italy maybe?

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Dr Michael Heng

Dr Michael Heng

about 1 month ago

Very detailed examination of the 2 main thoughts, Nicholas. Unfortunately, the esteemed authors cited failed to consider alternative evidence. You also did not even dent Feb 2021 WHO's findings that the virus origins are "extremely unlikely" to be from Wuhan Lab - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55996728 .

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Rita Marie Kelley

Rita Marie Kelley

about 1 month ago

Sir,

You have distilled very complicated material in a way that allows the lay person to understand. Thank You for this contribution to humanity.

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Ravi Shankar Satyan

Ravi Shankar Satyan

about 1 month ago

truly bipartisan article with readers deciding for themselves..

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Matthew Joseph Cohen

Matthew Joseph Cohen

about 1 month ago

Fascinating and insightful. I simply had to pass along my thanks for distilling these complex issues and the various scientific threads into a single disgestible article. And it's refreshing to see it done in a true journalistic objective fashion. Thank you!

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rajesh

rajesh

about 1 month ago (edited)

I have one big question. As a non-virus-expert, it strikes me that having the lab virus and the blueprint (protocol) of its design, it would tremendously help create any medicines (not only vaccines) to defend against it, and confirm how it is transmitted, etc. So unless, a virologist convinces me otherwise, if there was even 25% chance (seems like its at least 67%) that it was man-made, we needed to get to the origin and get a sample and the blueprints to help control the spread, and help the infected.

It would be worth it to storm a building in a foreign country for this. For all of humanity.

Of course, there is a sinister line in this thinking. By publicly not knowing how it spreads, one can institute lockdowns, mask-wearing, allow all kind of fear and panic to spread faster than any virus. And by privately having the blueprints one can create vaccines and gain profits and recognition as if it was invented from scratch.

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Lino Serrano

Lino Serrano

about 1 month ago

I've been convinced that the pandemic was due to a Chinese laboratory escape when I watched a youtube video of an Australian News channel in June 2020 that interviewed a virologist that mentioned the fact that the SARS2 virus was almost optimized for the human respiratory system. Your article echoes that same conclusion. Great job.

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Ash Alizadeh

Ash Alizadeh

about 1 month ago

Bat Lady

AFAIK, “Batwoman” is the more common monicker and draws from analogies to “Batman”, not “Bat Gentleman”.

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jen segal

jen segal

about 2 months ago

A tour de force of implacable logic. I’d heard hints and snippets along the path, but the comprehensive methodical detailing of point/counter point was remarkable. Thank you.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Please read the following for the counter arguments... It is actually fairly one sided (dismisses the holes in leak theory)... https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/

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jen segal

jen segal

13 days ago

Thank you - I’ll read up!!

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Ipatronius

Ipatronius

about 2 months ago

An incredible bit of writing that skillfully and fairly lays out the facts as known for others to draw their own conclusions. However, you made one statement not supported by any facts which screams of the need for its own article digging in deeper: "Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump" - Please substantiate with evidence how doctor Fauci "served with integrity" - the evidence that I have seen points very much in the other direc tion.

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GM Fuster

GM Fuster

about 2 months ago

Some of the things you explain are beyond my understanding so have to take your word for it, but I thank you for this article. Will also save it because it may be taken down. BTW, are you thinking about having it translated to other languages? Google translate is very good but people may not take the time.

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Brian Austin

Brian Austin

about 2 months ago (edited)

True, Dr. Shi was trained by French virologists, worked closely with American virologists and was following international rules for the containment of coronaviruses. But she could and s...

I doubt if ever, in the history of any virus research, that the scientists and virologists are capable of making and actioning sufficient assessement of the risks they are running. Why? They are almost certainly too focused on the minutae of their work.

One solution is that separate security authorities must 'directly govern' these virologists. The protection security must have the powers to prevent virologists and any other workers from leaving the facility, if they do not meet certain standards. No exceptions.

Another, not popular and maybe hardly possible solution is to only have these research areas deep underground, in space, or 'off planet Earth', and have the researchers live and work in 3-month or 6-month stints in the same research facility.

Getting out of the facility should be a lot harder than getting in. Checks, tests, double, triple, etc., by 'security protection' should help limit and reduce risk. These two groups won't like each other but maybe 3 - 25 million people - or even more, going forward - might still be alive if they had been in place.

Bottom line: we can't trust the labs doing the work, to check that what they're doing is being done safety. Has to be someone else.

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DeAngelo Starnes

DeAngelo Starnes

about 2 months ago

Thanks for this article. Very important read. Should be widely shared

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Chi-Sang Poon

Chi-Sang Poon

about 2 months ago

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells.

If this is true, then Fauci might have perjured himself in today's Senate hearing by asserting to Senator Rand Paul repeatedly that "the NIH and the NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology":

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rand-paul-fauci-covid-origins-funding-wuhan-lab

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/

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Chi-Sang Poon

Chi-Sang Poon

14 days ago

Fauci testified that NIH has not funded Gain-of-Function research in China's Wuhan Lab. This is as true as Bill Clinton saying he "did not have sexual relations with that woman".

https://twitter.com/ChiSangPoon/status/1392534776947560453?s=20

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Eileen

Eileen

about 1 month ago

She was assisted by our own Ralph Baric PhD......UNC Chapel Hill Gillings School of Public Health. Weird, that when I first found out about him in early March 2020 on my own research and visited his bio page multiple times, reading his research that is completely changed and was revised around May 2020. I published all of the articles and documentation of GOF research, Pause in Funding, Lifting of Funding on FB April 2020 and have a screenshot of all of these articles on him....Peeled the onion back out of the gate last year....maddening that it is JUST NOW coming out but glad it is.

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John La Barge

John La Barge

about 2 months ago

I wonder will this will be censored...

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Don Irvine

Don Irvine

about 2 months ago

I posted a link to this piece on Facebook, and a few days later woke up to find F/B had flagged the post as "Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." To this they tacked on a link to an article at a site called "Health Feedback" [https://healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-19-virus-originate-from-a-lab-or-nature-examining-the-evidence-for-different-hypotheses-of-the-novel-coronavirus-origins/?fbclid=IwAR1NAZCnxl6coSiProrNx3wDND1EXO2Txxg_WRXmNTzOqjAIFZPxniyD5QY#End]

It's a big piece that I haven't gotten too yet, but I'd be intrigued to know how Facebook came to pick it.

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

I skimmed the article and right away they say appeals to authority fallacies "This hypothesis began circulating in February 2020. To date, it has been largely rejected by the scientific community"

They then don't address almost any of the science whatsoever. 1984 here we go

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Don Irvine

Don Irvine

about 2 months ago

Who are these people, and why does F/B treat them as experts in the first place? Nobody at Facebook knows squat about the science; they just feel obliged to provide a contrary viewpoint

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NinjaAndy

NinjaAndy

about 2 months ago

based on several comments here FB is actively targeting this article and posting. Let's see how soon FB becomes thought police...

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rick horocholyn

rick horocholyn

about 2 months ago (edited)

In response to "to my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has provided readers ...", the fact is that there was one MSM article that addressed the basics of the case made here, and US complicity, in Newsweek.com on April 28, 2020 (which was entirely ignored by any other news service): https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago (edited)

Also worth reading, and supports the piece by Nicholas Wade very well--

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

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Kartick Srinivasan

Kartick Srinivasan

about 2 months ago

Very well written and researched. Seeking and curiosity is the basic need of any human being let alone a Scientist. How easily people are being made to belive something without facts and that too not even raising a doubt.

The might and power might be there, but truth will come one day and make them accountable for the 3 million innocent deaths..

Congratulations and please bring this to the limelight. I know it will be a long and dauting task but like any other quest for truth, it will be mocked, rejected and then will see the light!!

All the best!!

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Kerim Yasar

Kerim Yasar

about 2 months ago

This essay would have us believe that Chinese researchers are bumbling incompetents who let the virus escape, but also so diabolically competent that they left no trace, even in the viral genome. Classic conspiracy-theoretical contradiction.

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago

What does that mean? I think the theory is that someone got infected in the lab and then passed it unwittingly to others in the area. How would this leave a "trace in the viral genome"? I'm really asking because I don't know that would leave a trace.

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Kerim Yasar

Kerim Yasar

about 2 months ago

And if the theory is that it’s just a virus they collected that escaped, that also doesn’t work.

https://twitter.com/florian_krammer/status/1390347972458725380?s=21

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Kerim Yasar

Kerim Yasar

about 2 months ago

The theory is that the virus is a product of gain-of-function experiments carried out in the WVI. Such experiments would leave tell-tale markers in the genome, markers that have not been found in the circulating virus.

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Christopher Pelletiere

Christopher Pelletiere

about 2 months ago

What a great piece of logical, common sense, science based thought. The citations were also great to read through for the best understanding possible. As a physician, when you see horse footprints, you look for horses. However, depending on different factors, you may actually be looking for zebras. Based on your in depth assessment, it should be clear that we should be looking for both.

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Godfree Roberts

Godfree Roberts

about 2 months ago

This article’s thesis rests on the assumption that, because China raised the alarm about Covid-19, the virus originated in China, an odd inference if ever there was one, given that China was the only country with a Coronavirus detection network.

We also know that the CDC found that Covid-19 was in the US before it was in China, agreeing with findings in Italy, Spain, and France. Tests of archived Red Cross blood samples taken in the US from December 13, 2019, revealed high levels of Covid antibodies nationwide. Read "Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020", by Sridhar V Basavaraju, MD, et al. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472.

Here’s the summary data from that paper, with the boldfaced numbers calculated from the CDC’s percentages:

https://i.imgur.com/bfPH5I4.png

Since we know that Covid deaths double every 139 days in the USA, and that 70,000 Americans died from it in December, 2020, we can calculate the approximate arrival date of the virus here, 2015:

https://i.imgur.com/OjOhy8O.jpg

And since the WHO reported that there was no sign of the virus in China before December, 2019, we can be pretty confident that Covid is not a Chinese invention.

Two facts fortify that conclusion:

1. Wuhan was not a bioweapons facility–as attested by the French scientists who designed, built and supervised it and the American scientists who worked there.

2. The US has, in the past, launched many bio-attacks on China and other countries and maintains between 400 and 4,000 biowarfare centers around the globe.My money is on a natural origin, in India, around 2010. Place your bets.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Your citations are nonesense.

Are you saying the CDC says that millions of americans had COVID19 antibodies in December of 2019. This is patently false. Can you link to the CDC website instead of your own nonesense plots?

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

You've out conspiracied the conspiracy theorists. Congratulations. If you actually read the paper you cite, the CDC specifically measured blood samples from December 13th on, which is AFTER the earliest samples from China. But also, they explicitly say that most of the samples are likely cross reactivity from previously circulating common coronaviruses. Smh.

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Michael Tripper

Michael Tripper

about 2 months ago

Rejoice Nicholas, here journalists on Sky News, Australia just discovered:

Chinese Military Scientists published weaponizing SARS Coronavirus in 2015:

"A new era of genetic weapons"

"Can be artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyGdfTgyhaU

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Sairavela

Sairavela

about 2 months ago

Thank you for this outstanding piece -- the bat story simply defied any intuition and seemed along the lines of deny deny deny. Your excellently researched article needs to be heard. Maybe China does have blood on its hands.

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Barb MacLeod

Barb MacLeod

about 2 months ago

I'm an anthropologist with a long interest in epidemiology. I have also read everything I can find on this subject (including the translated MA thesis on the hospital case histories of the Mojiang miners), and find your article to be the best-yet summary of the evidence. I have one question: you said that RaTG13--one of two very close natural cousins to SARS-CoV-2 and the first identified genomically (Jan 2020) as a direct ancestor-- has low affinity for bat cells. You wonder whether it "ever saw the inside of a bat", and yet--as I understand the naming system-- Ra stands for Rhinolophus affinis, TG for TongGuan (the mine), and 13 for 2013, the year of its collection by the WIV. Did they not get this virus sample as an anal swab from a bat? Thank you for a stellar and comprehensive summary.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

Hi Barb,

There are serious suspicions that RaTG13 is not a real viral sequence but a concocted one. That is why it may never have met a bat.

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Barb MacLeod

Barb MacLeod

about 1 month ago

Yep, I thought about it, dug into it a bit and reached that conclusion. I am a bit rusty on this, but sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2020 there was a public call by a virologist (one or more)to discredit any publication mentioning RaTG13 until the WIV produced the whole genome. Well, they can’t find it now…oops. Do you know who issued that ultimatum? I know I saved it amid hundreds of links in that folder.

Thank you for your diligence. I’ll be watching this unfold.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

Have you considered the holes in the leak theory though? It can only be explained by either lab based recombination or cell line serial passage. If recombination, why develop such a strange backbone (even if ratg13 is fabricated) when you have the Sars-1 related wiv1 line? And why do you choose a pangolin coronavirus rbd which hadn't even been discovered? It makes no scientific sense. Also, if cell line, why does it have a glycan shield which could only happen with exposure to an animal's immune system? Those are real weaknesses that aren't addressed.

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Rodrigo Feijao

Rodrigo Feijao

about 2 months ago

The prime in alt-right, pseudo science conspiratorial writing. from the same author of 'I don't understand Culture OR biogenetics but I will write about anyway". Well, you got "the new eugenic activi$t" label, alright. You, sir, should develop self-criticism. You clearly lack.

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Candide III

Candide III

about 2 months ago

Mr. Wade, you write: "To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces." FYI: NYMag's Intelligencer ran a big story by Nicholson Baker on January 4th this year, covering the same ground in about the same detail (a bit more in one place, a bit less in another, e.g. less detail on furin cleavage site). However, it didn't make a big splash, likely because no one of the principal players are interested. Also, I find it curious that your blame list puts WIV's Dr. Shi first, then the Chinese authorities (whose degree of involvement with WIV GoF research is not obvious from your article), then the "worldwide virologist community", and finally Dr. Daszak and his USG funders in very last place. The principle of respondeat superior would dictate a reverse order. In the military, they punish a commander for his unit's screw-up even if his direct involvement was minimal, in order to encourage others to be more careful, improve unit training and so on. And in this case, your article argues persuasively that Dr. Daszak et al.'s direct involvement is very far from minimal.

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Thomas Burkhart

Thomas Burkhart

about 2 months ago

Why did you have to publish this on medium? No Newpaper willing to publish? Not even the Guardian?

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Andrew Purdy

Andrew Purdy

about 2 months ago

I agree that the virus almost certainly came from a lab accident, but my question is what were the Chinese trying to do with it when it escaped? Was it part of a pure basic research program, or were they developing it for some classified military purpose? The only way we will ever know is if some Chinese defector leaks copies of WIV records like lab notebooks, proposals, reports, statements of work, etc.. onto the internet.

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TJ

TJ

about 2 months ago

Mr. Wade:

The ONLY way gain-of-function research would EVER be permitted is if there is a 'known and proven cure' for the disease being studied. No principal investigator (PI), oversight board (IRB), or grant-issuing agency (NIH, NIAID) would ever permit experiments on a lethal virus, to alter it's RNA, to see if it has the potential for sustained human-to-human spread, (i.e. cause a pandemic), without FIRST stockpiling safe and effective treatments. The risk of GOFR is enormous: millions could die from a 'minor' lab mishap. How do we find out which medicine(s) were listed in this grant application (below, and similar), as the emergency treatment(s), in case the newly created virus accidentally escaped?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/pdf/41591_2015_Article_BFnm3985.pdf

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Elixir

Elixir

about 2 months ago

Did you miss the part where the grant wasnt reviewed by a board?

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George Wolff

George Wolff

about 2 months ago

Thank you for your excellent insight. The following is my brief summary attached to you article for my community of friends. I hope its simplified form doesn't distort your remarkable work:

"Where did COVID 19 come from?

This is a heavy, scientific read but it is convincing.

In short, there is little evidence that Covid came from animals, specifically bats, in Wuhan's "wet markets. In fact the existing evidence argues strongly against it. But there is mounting evidence that COVID escaped from very dangerous experiments (partly US-funded) conducted by Wuhan's Virology Institute.

The experimental procedures are called "gain-of-function" research. This is a kind of laboratory acceleration of evolution. The aim of "gain-of-function" is to evolve new forms of dangerous viruses - in this case new forms of the SARS-COVID virus which first terrified the world more than a decade ago. Wuhan scientists were clearly working to evolve a new virus, more infectious and lethal to human carriers than SARS.

The natural question is: Why would anyone in their right mind deliberately make anything so deadly?

The paper's author, Nicholas Wade, a respected science writer explains it this way:

"Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments."

It is a plausible goal, and there's no question that the NIH in the US plowed millions of dollars into Wuhan's gain-of-function research. These experiments involved mice with humanized cells analogous to human lung tissue.

Did the virus escape the lab? Wade argues that the level of biohazard protection in Wuhan was far weaker than the "Level Four" standard that should have been used.

The reaction of Chinese authorities makes the lab escape or accident theory more plausible. The Chinese certainly covered up initial cases of sickness in 2019. They severely punished every scientist who dared mention the virus. And when the epidemic broke into the open, they reacted with urgency and even ferocity throughout the city of Wuhan while admitting nothing. When W.H.O. investigators made an inspection this year, the Chinese flatly and firmly refused to open lab records to them...records that might have documented the know gain-of-function experiments.

One final note: Wade points out that the virus has shown little appetite for infecting bats...the supposed vector for its emergence into humans.

The truth will emerge in time. I dislike conspiracy theories but a conspiracy of silence by the Chinese is hardly anything new.

What will come of it if the virus did in fact leak from the lab? There are no villains to prosecute and jail for killing three million people - if they indeed did so. But the COVID pandemic will likely leave us with a healthy wariness of the dangers of playing God in biological laboratories. The stakes are far too high and there is no possible gain commensurate with the havoc and mass death COVID has caused and continues to inflict upon the world." Article by Wade follows

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Andrew Purdy

Andrew Purdy

about 2 months ago

I wonder if SARS2 was an early alpha-test version of a virus that China was developing for release a year later? It wasn't virulent enough to be a military weapon, but it has characteristics like presymptomatic spread that are on the right path to making an effective weapon. What if they were developing it for release in the USA in September 2020 in order to disrupt the US election and provide cover for a Taiwan invasion?

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Rob Still

Rob Still

3 days ago

The CAUSE? The USAdministration imposed strict SANCTIONS on the Chinese people.

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Liz Jenn-Avital

Liz Jenn-Avital

10 days ago

A fascinating read! Thank you.

As a clinical infectious diseases doctor, with some understanding of viral diversity, evolution and cross species transmission based on my clinical experience with HIV1/2 subtypes, I found your piece enormously informative and accessible to a non-virologist.

When you write the book, you must give it a name from Greek Mythology since the hubris of science and the human lust for power, prestige and money culminating in a shameful debacle really have the feel of Greek tragedy. Icarus? Daedalus? King Minos? Nothing has really changed.

Thanks again.

PS--My gripe with the official narrative, having nothing to do with your piece, is that there is no discussion of herd immunity through infection. There is no discourse on either the rate of adverse effects from or the need for COVID vaccine after natural infection. Not as grave a deficiency as what you describe but seemingly an uncritical embrace of vaccine since it is an easy metric to measure and achieve. How vaccine immunity compared with natural immunity is simply not discussed.

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Evelyn Uyemura

Evelyn Uyemura

11 days ago

I heard Katherine Eban being interviewed on Terri Gross (npr) today, and read her article, which included a link to this article--and I have to say that your article is clearer, easier to understand, and pretty much includes everything the new Vanity Fair article covered, but much more lucidly. I think the case is pretty convincing, per Occam Razor, that spread from a lab is the likeliest origin. I think "leak" is misleading, in that it probably "leaked" via the infected lungs of lab workers, not through sewer lines or air vents, as the word "leak" implies. This is beautifully written and argued.

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago

You know you could just search the articles on Google scholar. Scientific Journals don't delete published research. I for one would be interested in a bibliography... Not hard to make (just put first few authors, year and journal name).

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Carlos Zevallos

Carlos Zevallos

14 days ago (edited)

It's unfortunate that after raising some very important points, you discredit yourself through alarming displays of bias: jumping to conclusions, misrepresenting the data and arguments, and selectively citing sources favorable to your conclusion. Examples:

1) you claim "Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice." I watched it and he NEVER said any such thing. When he spoke of the work at Wuhan it was explicitly in connection to discovering and testing Cov strains. His next assertion about ANY manipulation was regarding Baric and then even more generally about chimeric strains. A serious journalist would never state so factually what can only be derived from stretched conjecture.

2) you present an incomplete account of the arguments by Anderson, 2020. You state that they don’t account for serial passage, when they explicitly devote an entire section detailing why serial passage is unlikely. "Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system18." While it is true their wording was likely too strong at times, your characterization misses a key point: although you cannot rule out a lab creation just because there is no reported viral backbone matching SARS-COV-2, this missing backbone does weaken the leak theory tremendously: Science always builds on previous work, and changes are incremental in order to promote reproducibility. If indeed it was created in a lab, we would also see evidence of proximal backbones in the literature, as it wouldn’t make sense to change the backbone so radically without a sound rationale.

3) Your constant reliance on Ebright as a source reeks of bias. There are many other highly respected virologists and even epidemiologists who in no way consider what was being done in Wuhan as gain of function. Your unequivocal assertion that they were doing gain of function belies even the grant description you cited. It is clear that the goals of the research were to test infectiousness, NOT to increase it. This is a crucial difference and was permitted by the moratorium,belying Ebrights claim they used an exception.

4) your description of a unified front of Virologists trying to cover up any investigation is simply false, and easily disproven by the team of virologists (including Baric !) and epidemiologists who recently wrote to Science asking for more investigation into the lab leak theory. This discredits your account of virologists covering things up.

5) finally the whole argument about furin cleavage being a tell-tale sign of human manipulation since it only shows up in Sars-cov-2 has been weakened by a recent paper finding furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses occurring naturally. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165. This points to the other big problem you barely mention: massive undersampling of coronaviruses... Just because we haven’t found others with peculiar features doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. And Sars-cov-2 is far from the only pandemic causing virus for which a proximal virus hasn’t been found, which you also fail to mention. Were those leaks also?

In short each of these are extremely important aspects you either misconstrue or overlook, which denote a high level of bias in your analyses... Which is unfortunate because they detract from other excellent points you raise. In the end, more investigation is indeed needed but the information given to the public has to be impartial, and this piece is far from it.

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Don Johnson

Don Johnson

20 days ago

Nicholas. Thank you for a superb piece. Question- why was a vaccine created that did not have a piece of the virus in it - meaning similar to vaccines of the past?

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Simon Moon

Simon Moon

21 days ago

I know the comments are not as active and Nicholas may not be reading them still, but would love to see a response to this response (if you can make it past the cringe inducing tone):

https://medika.life/debunking-nicholas-wades-origin-of-covid-conspiracy-theory/

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John Comeau

John Comeau

22 days ago

Very courageous of you to publish this. Thank you.

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Kaia Maeve Tingley

Kaia Maeve Tingley

23 days ago

Thank you for this. May the truth, when we do find it, lead us into a new day.

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Kaia Maeve Tingley

Kaia Maeve Tingley

23 days ago

It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand.

But that’s not how power secures its control.

I’ve begun to think anything rejected out of hand, especially reactively and prematurely, is probably worth a deeper look. Maybe even some thoughtful research and contemplation.

We should probably want to know what happened here to prevent future occurrences, yes.

AND, as Russell. Brand suggested in a recent video, perhaps we could also choose t0 examine the ideology that science and progress are the only metrics we should care about. Not to hate on science, but it’s sorely out of balance & missing the guiding wisdom of reverence that comes from the mystery traditions.

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Nick Staresinic

Nick Staresinic

23 days ago

Thanks for this. It's exceptionally informative, well organized, and particularly well written.

BTW, I was lucky to be led here by a comment in Jeremy Warner's 05-VI-2021 article in The Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/06/05/true-not-wuhan-lab-leak-story-looks-set-change-world/).

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Anna Guarnieri

Anna Guarnieri

26 days ago

Your article is well written, and as a scientist (but non virologist) I was swayed by what you reported here because even I do not know the details of furin cleavage sites, etc. But your story-telling here is not entirely accurate, and I believe you failed to get all of the virology correct. Coronavirus virologists do not consider the codons in the furin site to be rare, there's not much there. Also a "letter" in Nature Medicine is not an opinion, it's a short report of original research that is peer reviewed. I think it is important to note that the lab leak theory is not impossible, but just very improbable. Most of the data points to a natural origin, and articles like this take the oxygen away from that discussion. I don't disagree that the Wuhan lab should likely undergo a a full audit, but the research from that group uses a much different sequence for it's gain of function experiments, whereas bats in the region have much closer sequences to SARS-COV2. Of course you could reason that the lab is covering up the design of this virus, but if you talk to someone who studies coronaviruses, there is no logic to how SARS-COV2 was assembled. And computer algorithms do not predict the RNA binding domain in this virus. Nature always does the best job at this type of work. Lastly, it's not a coincidence that Coronavius research is happening in Wuhan. The Wuhan institute of virology was created after SARS1, and this is a likely place for a coronavirus outbreak due to the very large multi billion $ animal trade industry. It's the best place to study coronaviurs outbreaks and how to prevent them. The way you tell your story makes it very much sound like something dubious was going on, but I believe you left out many details to tell the other side. We all want to find the origins, so lets follow the science, and it's not pointing to a lab outbreak. That shouldn't be ruled out, but it's the least likely scenario at the moment.

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Arthur

Arthur

26 days ago

Three people working at a BSL3 lab at the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe symptoms that required hospitalization. This was “the first known cluster that we’r...

Hospitalisation is required in only some 5 to 10 percent of infections, and a bit less than 50 percent of infections are asymptomatic. That means that in the two weeks before these three fell ill, anywhere between 15 and 30 people should have come down with symptoms ranging from a runny nose to feeling run over by a garbage truck. That should have aroused suspicion.

I find the option unlikely that there was a SARS2 escape and the people it infected developed the most serious course of COVID-19 and no lesser cases were observed. I also find it unlikely that SARS2 may have already been in wider circulation at the time, no cases outside the lab were reported, but it just so happened that three of the people who caught it work at an institute that works with very similar viruses.

So my conclusion is that we’re either missing information on other early cases of COVID-19 inside or outside of the Wuhan lab, or there was an escape of a virus in the lab, but it wasn’t the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the pandemic.

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Mike Rolle

Mike Rolle

26 days ago

Nicholas,

What you have done here is what an investigative journalist should be doing; providing information that everyone needs. It's impossible to state how much I appreciate it.

I was concerned at first hearing a NYT writer was the author as I'm not accustomed to anything valid coming from that entity. This is just amazing. It's honest, detailed, and very well assembled. I will be following you now.

Thank you!

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mike magee

mike magee

27 days ago

Nicholas-

Remarkable piece of work here! As you lay out in your conclusion, this tragedy has "Medical-Industrial Complex" written all over it. As I revealed in "CODE BLUE: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex" (Grove/2019), our integrated medical science career ladder, dating back to the Vannevar Bush/George Merck WWII OSRD model, seeks profitability through collusion, going along, and getting along. Covid-19 is simply the latest stepchild.

Congrats! Mike

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Manel Heredero

Manel Heredero

28 days ago

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses

How many coronavirus research centres were out there? You know, to understand how much of a coincidence this was…

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Anna Guarnieri

Anna Guarnieri

26 days ago

Is it a coincidence when you realize that this lab started studying coronaviruses after SARS1 outbreak in the same region? The lab is there because it's a likely place for a cornavirus outbreak (due to the animal trade in Wuhan).

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Pam S

Pam S

28 days ago

your article clearly shows the level of deceit from ECO HEALTH ALLIANCE and Dr. Fauci, and will serve as an important turning point that ultimately leads to justice being served here. Nature and the world at large owns you a great deal of gratitude..

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Patrick Mathieson

Patrick Mathieson

30 days ago

One super crucial piece of information we need here is: How many coronavirus-focused virology research labs exist in the world & in China specifically? If there's an equivalent lab in every major city around the world, the fact that there's a lab in Wuhan becomes nearly meaningless and this entire argument falls part. Whereas, if there's only 5 of these on the entire planet, then we have a smoking gun.

Does anyone know the answer to this?

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Diane M

Diane M

30 days ago

In the Iranian Journal of Virology, L Hagan describes a possible hallmark of lab manipulation of SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinia virus and I wonder if it has been checked out by others. http://journal.isv.org.ir/files/site1/user_files_bc468b/larshaegen-A-10-245-1-04dcce4.pdf

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Marc Boswell

Marc Boswell

about 1 month ago

Mr Wade, thank you for your incisive investigation and your crisp(er) and clear explanation of the science and objective alternative hypotheses. Although I no longer hold in high regard the Pulitzer Prize, I believe that this transparent piece of investigative journalism merits consideration for that award. It is writing like this that would burnish the reputation of the Pulitzer.

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Steve Cobb

Steve Cobb

about 1 month ago

"The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a new BSL4 lab"

Wuhan didn't have just "a new" BSL4 lab--it had the only BSL4 lab in all of China.

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Larsson

Larsson

about 1 month ago

Wonderfully informative article. Well worth the time reading it twice!

One comment/question. You talked about the furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction. Can you comment on RmYN02, which has multiple natural insertions at the junction site of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike protein (from 10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.023). Does this in any way weaken this part of the argument for the lab leak hypothesis?

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Ramachandraiah Gosu

Ramachandraiah Gosu

about 1 month ago

Truely investigative journalism. I salute for your skeptism and clarity in scientific content. I happened to follow your article based on the news paper reading (column by S. Gurumurthy) from New Indian Express. Only one philosophical statement that I can say is that our human race is the worst on this planet!!

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Melinda Bowker

Melinda Bowker

about 1 month ago

This is one of the best written and researched articles that I have read on the origins of Covid-19. I appreciate how you also wrote it in an accessible way.

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Anuraj Bismal

Anuraj Bismal

about 1 month ago

Brilliant, informative writing. Well done.

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Henri Dumont

Henri Dumont

about 1 month ago (edited)

Many thanks for your comprehensive and interesting article!!

It does provide clear objective information and analysis.

Of course I was almost 100% sure that the research labs on SARS viruses in Wuhan were not mere coincidence. Hopefully the Chinese cover-up will be unmasked, the sooner the better!

When information on the research labs in Wuhan started to come out early 2020, everyone focused on the Level 4 lab deemed to far from Wuhan wet market area to have been the culprit. I was surprised at the time that Dr Shi, "Batwoman", working in another lab with much lower security level but much closer to the wet market was not highlighted as it should have been.. probably another piece of the Chinese cover-up drawing attention away from that specific reserach lab?

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Wulf Losee

Wulf Losee

about 1 month ago

The argument goes that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein *could have been* optimized in a lab to bind to human ACE2 receptors using a gain-in-function process (which virologists use to make more efficient—err, more contagious—viruses). has a big hole in it.

The trouble with that argument is that the initial SARS-CoV-2 variant’s spike protein *was not* the most optimal configuration for binding to human ACE2 receptors. Subsequent mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the wild improved its binding capability — for instance, B.1.1.7 (The British variant) and B.1.617 (the Indian variant) have proved to have better ACE2 binding capabilities than the initial wild variant.

So the WIV lab creation hypothesis requires that Chinese researchers be doubly klutzy. First they couldn’t run a gain-function process to completion, and then they accidentally released the non-optimally-gain-functioned version of the virus.

That's not to say the Wuhan lab didn't have some sort wild variant in its virus stash that it accidentally released. But that would add an extra step to the explanation for its origin.

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Marco Di Mauro

Marco Di Mauro

about 1 month ago

This is Journalism...

Thanks for such a formidable piece of writing.

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NETHRAPAL

NETHRAPAL

about 1 month ago

This is deadly. You have nailed it. This is the most comprehensive article till date on this. This is what journalist should be doing. Question the unknown and lead the world in the right direction..

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Gina Thomas

Gina Thomas

about 1 month ago

This is the best, most accurate, complete, honest and well-written account I have read about the origins of the covid-19. This also represents a tremendous amount of work, and we thank you. The truth will come out.

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Mallen Baker

Mallen Baker

about 1 month ago

Great to see this, and the attention it's getting. I made a video on my YouTube channel summarising these arguments three months ago - covered almost the exact same territory. That got little attention (and seems to have gotten my channel shadowbanned since YouTube has stopped recommending videos to non-subscribers). It takes mainstream science journalists like yourself to be able to get such questions taken more seriously, but it takes courage to do so in the current climate. So well done.

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Andre SK

Andre SK

about 1 month ago

Congratulations for the excelent work done here! As an Engineer, I like numbers, mainly when linked to the possibilities of something happening "naturally", which in my humble oppinion, in this case, are close to ... zero! This is one tip of the iceberg. The hidden part of it is, by the same probabilistic reasoning, explaining how, "naturally", a country with quite 1.5 billion people, had near zero percent deaths. After solving this side of the equation, one must start trying to discover why the virus hit so hard, "non" chinese people? Or did China simply hide the real figures? Regardless the findings, one thing is clear: messing with Mother Nature can be a tremendous risk! Either for humankind, either for the economies (except the Chinese one)

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Prashant Kalvapalle

Prashant Kalvapalle

about 1 month ago

explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans

how substantial of a change are you considering here? There have been many mutations in the spike protein which have gotten fixed in distinct sub-populations of variants in various regions/countries..

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Prashant Kalvapalle

Prashant Kalvapalle

about 1 month ago

It’s a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.

How strong is the evidence that the first case was in Wuhan and not anywhere else in China without the international community having knowledge of it?

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a lucientes

a lucientes

about 1 month ago (edited)

Forbes’ dismissive and ad hominem-laced article: “No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab" By Ethan Siegel, purports to debunk the facts laid out in this piece, yet fails so miserably from the outset, that it comes across as nothing but another transparently propagandist attempt at damage control, full of claims the hard data do not support.

Any serious challenge would begin by addressing the crux of the matter, namely, that no intermediary host has been found for SARS CoV-2, nor, has any other animal cells tested shown the virus to be as pathogenic as it is in humans. From there, Siegel goes on to make a series of straw man arguments that are as blatant as his omissions. The whole of it reveals nothing so well as the paucity of any actual evidence supporting the zoonotic spillover hypothesis, along with Siegel's ignorance of what constitutes a legitimate and cogent argument. A more accurate title would have left out the comma: 'No Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab'.

To quote from the preliminary paper by Dr Nikolai Petrovsky et. al.: “..the binding energy between SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and ACE2 was highest for humans out of all species tested, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is uniquely evolved to bind and infect cells expressing human ACE2. This finding is particularly surprising as, typically, a virus would be expected to have highest affinity for the receptor in its original host species, e.g. bat, with a lower initial binding affinity for the receptor of any new host, e.g. humans. However, in this case, the affinity of SARS-CoV-2 is higher for humans than for the putative original host species, bats, or for any potential intermediary host species. Although bats carry many coronaviruses including SARS-CoV, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, direct evidence for existence of SARS-CoV-2 in bats has not been found. As highlighted by our data, the binding strength of SARS-CoV-2 for bat ACE2 is considerably lower than for human ACE2, suggesting that even if SARS-CoV-2 did originally arise from a bat precursor it must later have adapted its spike protein to optimise its binding to human ACE2. There is no current explanation for how, when or where this might have happened. Source: “In silico comparison of spike protein-ACE2 binding affinities across species; significance for the possible origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” - May 2020.

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M Bond

M Bond

about 1 month ago

Outstanding article, well-researched, well-reasoned and very clearly written. I spent 35+ years in biotech, academia and industry, and know that articles like this are few and far between. Also, loved the wrap-up quote by Francis Bacon.

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William Fold

William Fold

about 1 month ago

"(W)hich the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel" is a statement that fundamentally suggests the author's apparently still unbroken ties to the likes of the radicall NYT where far left reporting and op-ed lines of separation are fully blurred. It is a pity because any fairminded person will admit that the MSM is far from helpless. In fact, they are complicit in perpetrating the "thick clouds." This weakens an otherwise interesting take on the subject.

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Manasi Saxena

Manasi Saxena

about 1 month ago

I read your artice and echo other comments saying it's the most lucid and comprehensible understanding I've seen. Thank you for this. I have a technical question about the furin cleavage site - I'm seeing articles like this https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdfExtended/S2211-1247(20)31243-2 which point to firun blockers such as remdesvir/favipravir - which in India we see have very minimal results and I'm wondering if I'm on the right track in understanding that the B.1.617 variant has additional mutations in the furin cleavage site that makes blockers like favipravir etc. less effective.

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Andrew Chapman

Andrew Chapman

about 1 month ago

Doesn't the paper by Sorensen & Dalgleish deserve a mention? https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf

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Chad Stratton

Chad Stratton

about 1 month ago

Point of Order- Neither Fauci or Collins needed to do anything re: the grant shared with WIV- that single grant over five years was awarded in June 2014, while the moratorium was applied in October 2014. Because the money was already awarded, it was neither affected by the moratorium* nor the lifting of that order in 2017. (My understanding is the waiver was only required to award new grants, not continuing to fund studies approved prior to the moratorium.)

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Chad Stratton

Chad Stratton

about 1 month ago

1. Re: the 12 Nucleo insert to create the furin cleavage- it appears that insert altered the codons immediately before and afterward. Did they alter the coded aminos relative to the original strain?

2. Are you referring to CRISPR regarding the invisible alteration of genomes, or are you speaking of some new or different technique?

3. Dr. Shi allegedly created multiple furin cleavages, and yet the How hasn't been stated. Is she using CRISPR or its analogues? Because if she's running generations and collecting variance to induce furin cleavages, that would be evidence that it can occur naturally, even with rare/unlikely traits, as well as provide a reservoir of b-coronas able to recombine and share it.

4. HAS good bioinformatics been done on specific codons relative to the same aminos in RNA virii? Is there any indication that the other 5% of arginine expressed by the "human favoring"(?) codon are in areas to suspect genomic manipulation?

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Godzilla

Godzilla

about 1 month ago

Thanks to Nicolas Wade. What a brilliant piece of journalism. This is by far the best news I have ever read in my life.

Now, I also wanted to add my thoughts here.

1. This was a mistake- The researchers and funders have good intent, (to save the world from diseases) but the virus escaped the lab.

2. This was a planned spill- a. mounting pressure on leaders and elite to control the global warming. b. China/US/Any other nation planned this to improve their political edge.

3. This virus is powerful to bring many countries to their knees as they depend on vaccine manufacturers to save their people.

Looks like Bill Gates is way ahead of the curve. Invested in Pfizer and other vaccine manufacturers and wants to make the most money out of this pandemic.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1021577629748680000

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Dean Hotop

Dean Hotop

about 1 month ago

Science is supposedly a self-correcting 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 ful...

This is what it boils down to: $

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Ash Alizadeh

Ash Alizadeh

about 1 month ago

9 December 2019

Was this interview on December 9th or December 19th as mentioned below?

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 1 month ago

December 9, 2019.

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Ash Alizadeh

Ash Alizadeh

about 1 month ago

his

His or her

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Eileen

Eileen

about 1 month ago

I was "following the clues" back in March. Found Ralph Baric PhD when I googled "covid 19" An article from Nature.com dateline 2015 came right up (sans the COVID disclaimer because it was well before websites began trying to get ahead of this). He had made a chimeric SARs virus able to infect human resp cells. I started sounding the alarm on my FB page......Have the NIH Gain Of Function documents that paused funding 2014 and lifting in 2017. For Anthony Fauci to say under oath that in no time did NIH ever fund GOF research is absolutely sinister. That's news for Ralph Baric,......he was cited in an article complaining about how the funding was pulled almost overnight and he arrived to his lab to find himself locked out when it was instituted. I have all of the articles and documentation and posted as much on my FB page date April 21, 2020........Glad you've written this article it's literally diabolical that this information has not been spoken to in the media before now.....Epoch Times did an excellent article timelining this information in April of 2020 as well........

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JarkDorkerberg

JarkDorkerberg

about 1 month ago

Basically, this Trump-supporting writer can't prove either. The proof is "This cannot have occurred naturally hence it must be from the lab". It is the same argument as "This cannot be from the lab so it must have occurred naturally".

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Bumpy J

Bumpy J

about 2 months ago

I have read this a few times now. Good article. I then read the article from 2015 and feel like I understand this a little now. I do hope you will write again on MEDIUM. I also hope you will be called to testify on this issue. It is worth pursuing. Your article is being used to spread conspiracy theories but it is well written and sourced. That's all we need. I can draw my own conclusions.

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Gabriel Tognella Poccia

Gabriel Tognella Poccia

about 2 months ago

viral family

Betacoronavirus is a genera, not a family. The family is Coronaviridae.

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Evelyn niklaus

Evelyn niklaus

about 2 months ago

Wow, I wish I could find more article as well researched and written as this. Thank you.

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DrViyatprajna Acharya

DrViyatprajna Acharya

about 2 months ago

Very elaborate analysis and seems quite plausible too. Being a Medical Biochemist I'd like to make a mention about a few mistakes in the codon section. Codons are read on mRNA and they do not contain T i.e. Thymine. Hence wherever you have mentioned about T, it should be changed to U (Uracil). Your article favours more towards the lab escape of the virus theory. Hopefully benevolent scientists find out a proper vaccine that'll cater to all future mutants too. May be AI can help.

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David March

David March

about 2 months ago

Nick: Very brave piece. So glad you wrote it. Will share widely. Cheers, David

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random_task

random_task

about 2 months ago

Excellent article. Some questions: do you know of any efforts after you've written this from Congress to reach out to you for more information, perhaps gearing up for a hearing (not that hearings have really helped much in the past, but I feel like somebody must look into this and investigate). In other words, is there any interest from those in oversight authority to hear more from you or about this story?

Also, when the NIH/NIAID director authorizes funding for a gain-of-function research (as stated on the footnote), isn't there some meeting minutes or memo that is signed that states the rationale for the authorization? Is this available by FOIA?

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Rocknroll

Rocknroll

about 2 months ago

great article and extremely well written, so much so that even a lay person could understand it well. i wish to distribute this widely as possible as it's a little distressing how little mainstream discussion there is on the source of the plandemic - pardon me for using that term - wishing to summarily just sweep it under the carpet. Like you say though the truth will take time to emergy.

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Sri Ramaswamy

Sri Ramaswamy

about 2 months ago

Sometimes you have to wonder if we have way too many scientists and so are creating work for themselves which is being misused. Thank you for an excellent article that is very well articulated. Great work Mr Wade!

I am pretty positive who ever do not want the truth to come out will find another distraction to hide this. All they care about is the economics and power....so people have to be smart and aware!

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L Baker

L Baker

about 2 months ago

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is...

Then, to further explore this theory - how many researchers on this project or in close proximity to them were early infectees? Which institute researchers/employees are the earliest infectees? This would seem to me to be the easist way to establish a direct link to the theory; alas, I'm sure that information has not been made available. But the principal researcher and her cohort of assistants and co-workers are known people; it would be relatively easy to find them and ask. The only question would be if they would answer.

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago

Early in this whole thing, there was talk of patient zero who worked in the lab, Huang Yan Ling, and I thought it was just a simple fact. Then her details were whisked away on the NIH website and an announcement was made that she was working elsewhere in China and healthy and fine. This is regarded as highly suspicious by many. Now the claim is that no one at the lab had the virus. I think even Chinese sources first said a lab worker had it and then did a 180. This is loosely paraphrased data. An attempt to deliver the gist of what went on.

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Eatmeimadanish

Eatmeimadanish

about 2 months ago

Obvious question time... Why is no one in jail for this? Why are we not at war with China? This virus killed more people then a nuclear weapon...

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

War? Hopefully cooler heads than yours will prevail....

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Jules Weberman

Jules Weberman

about 2 months ago

1. Daszak's father was a Nazi war criminal. 2. He is not a virologist - he is a zoologist. See https://peterdaszak.com

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Roland Benz

Roland Benz

about 2 months ago

Thank you Sir. Living in Switzerland/Europe I am under the constant impression of being fed with lies, disinformation and censorship by the Mainstream Media. I really appreciate your and Yuri Deigins work, as well as the courage of the former US President, the former US Secretary of State, some US Republican Senators as well as Fox News and others, some of which mentioned your article or argued in line with it. I hope you get a nice reward.

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Djheuermann

Djheuermann

about 2 months ago

This is diving a little deeper down the rabbit hole towards conspiracy theory craziness, but have you or anyone that you know of considered the possible methods for how virologists might engineer evidence to deflect blame in some way - given the hypothetical scenario that it actually was a lab leak. I'm wondering if the Chinese authorities have been and are currently scrambling to not just fabricate records, but actually engineer evidence to support the natural occurrence theory. They would certainly have no ethical issues with doing that. Hopefully that would be near impossible to accomplish, but I'd be curious to hear your opinion on that possibility.

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Mike CROGNALE

Mike CROGNALE

about 2 months ago

Well written. An erudlite piece in toto. The glaring ommission is that the virus was far more ikely to have been deliberately released as an act of war. The Chinese think in terms of century tactics while we in the west can't get past this afternoon.

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Fabio Mascio

Fabio Mascio

about 2 months ago

In Italy the public TV has made a journalistic investigation adhering to his article, but can see it. Regards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh96Ug1ooKo&t=1070s

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Johnabrehmjr

Johnabrehmjr

about 2 months ago

Not knowing much about bio, is it possible that the Wuhan lab had an accident and released a very deadly version of the virus.

Then, realizing what it would do to their own population, they released a less virulent strain (like a vaccination) in which many could/would only get a little or mediumly sick, but have antibodies against the very deadly strain thereafter?

So, maybe a less virulent strain and a deadly strain are milling around the world: get the first, you will be ok; get the second (before the first) and you are dead?

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago

Interesting comment... Are there two main types going around?

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Preda Mihailescu

Preda Mihailescu

about 2 months ago

Very well researched and written. I just wonder why the research of Prof. Luc Montagner, who found in March 2020 that the virus he had received, had 8-10% HIV strains, in nowhere mentioned or discussed. It is however the most elaborate explanation of the non-flu like compliocation some lethal pacients developed.

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Rob Gallagher

Rob Gallagher

about 2 months ago

The most comprehensive article on the topic. I would add that the fact China has NOT opened access to the lab or cooperated with the investigation suggests that the lab is culpable. If not, they would have cooperated. As far as I am concerned, case closed. Great job.

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Joel Hirschhorn

Joel Hirschhorn

about 2 months ago

I covered the Fauci-Whan lab connection months ago in my new book Pandemic Blunder; now available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Pandemic-Blunder-Public-Blocked-Treatment/dp/197723822X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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Dr Vaclav BAZATA

Dr Vaclav BAZATA

about 2 months ago

Congrats, indeed , this is the 1st ballanced analysis what was behind. Many thanks for this, it remains the only juristic question: CUI BONO? To communistic PRC, since all world is economically performing minuses (-%), only PRC (+%) /I am the industrial pharmacist refusing any vaccination, I have the clues that I have catched in January 2020 in Brussels, not knowing what it is, but survived!/

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M Readinger

M Readinger

about 2 months ago

I read your article; makes very good sense. I think that most people in the world believe it came from a lab regardless of what the media and the government tells them. If a reckoning comes, it will be something to see. Thank you for all of your work.

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Ashvin Mahajan

Ashvin Mahajan

about 2 months ago

Thank you for such a deep, insightful, scientific and thoroughly researched article! It is a gem! More people need to read your article to understand what has transpired! Thank you so much for your contribution!

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Irinafiruti

Irinafiruti

about 2 months ago

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the vir

Sorry for the quotation above, I wasn't able to erase and replace it with another one I wanted to pinpoint. So I will go like this just to make some points: first is that, created as it may have been, leaked as it may very well have been, this virus showed not to be by far as dangerous as it has been presented more than a year ago. ( with 1,9% of the population allegedly infected after 15 months and 2% death rate - which makes covid the 48th out of 50 deadliest infectious diseases). You say 3 mio deaths but in fact we will never know: reports have largely varied from country to country and as many countries have reported death WITH covid as a death FROM covid - not to say that the PCR tests provide 30-90% errors- odds are that this number is much lower. This is not to free from responsibility those responsible for this pandemic, it is just to put things in their right scale. That's why those planetar measures were and still are largely exagerrated - so I think we should rather discuss how long will we hold to those measures affecting the totality of world's population than the origin of a virus that affected a minor purcentage of it.

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Tomas Mitchell

Tomas Mitchell

about 2 months ago

This is a great article. Thank you. I do not, obviously, share your sentiments about Fauci. I would also say, watch your Wikipeida Bio, I'm sure your character is about to be totally assasinated. I hope you can handle it.

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Tomas Mitchell

Tomas Mitchell

about 2 months ago

Even if, IF, the U.S. was working with China/Wuhan, ostensibly to "keep tabs on their biological warfare program".... they would still be bound by some level of "code of conduct". For instance, you're an undercover cop, after years you've ingratiated yourself to whatever gang or mafia you are investigating, trying to get the goods on to put them away for good. Now, they want you to prove you're one of them, by killing a rival gang member. YOU ARE A COP. A GOOD GUY. There are lines you can NOT cross. Ever. Fauci and Co can NOT be absolved for the death of THREE MILLION INNOCENT CIVILIANS by claiming it was "for the greater good". It doesn't work this way. Fauci LIED and innocents DIED.

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NinjaAndy

NinjaAndy

about 2 months ago

This is the most compelling piece that deserves to be read and reread! It is more questionable now why the lab leak theory was never thoroughly reported.

We need science, don’t we? Here it is!

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John Hernlund

John Hernlund

about 2 months ago

Wow Nicholas, this work is the forging of a masterpiece. Thank you so much for sharing it with us in every venue possible.

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Josef Polák

Josef Polák

about 2 months ago

Dear Nicholas,

Thanks for the article. This "pandemic" has enabled the desired unleashed crisis that is moving the planet. It makes it possible to plunder state budgets with impunity. It destroys the inviolability of basic socially valued legal norms. It enables what was unimaginable a year ago. After all, there are a number of interest groups that benefit from this. And people are so manipulated by television and social networks that they voluntarily give up their own reason and sometimes no longer want logical answers to their questions. Why stop now? People will now let themselves be controlled, and then they will pay the high bill of destroyed public finances voluntarily with their work. It's a great situation for a lot of things.

I wish you a lovely day.

Josef

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Daniel Feldman

Daniel Feldman

about 2 months ago

Fascinating read! I particularly like the Francis Bacon quote. I looked it up and noted that he specifically sought to develop methods to guard against confirmation bias. So prescient! One point that I’m curious about, and wonder how to think about, is the cancellation of the US-funded GOF research in April, 2020: https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741

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Osvitneona

Osvitneona

about 2 months ago

I've just signed up on Medium after I have read your article. This a lucid piece of logic in this dark world filled with the shouts of an angry mob. Every critical opinion is called conspiracy. Only the dogmatic stances are called science. Paradox. It is a very sad discovery that such a large number of people all iver the world is deprived of logical thinking. On the other hand, this should not discourage anyone to stand up and enlighten the people. I will make sure to share this article in my country, Serbia. Many thanks for this great effort to bring us the arguments and truth about the issue.

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Chi-Sang Poon

Chi-Sang Poon

about 2 months ago (edited)

Congrats on an incredibly cogent, eclectic and penetrating masterpiece of investigative reporting.

To her credit, Dr. Limeng Yang has presented similar arguments (albeit in more technical terms) supporting a laboratory origin of SARS2, including the unique furin-cleavage site with tandem rare condons as well as other unusual features of the SARS2 genome:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344240007_Unusual_Features_of_the_SARS-CoV-2_Genome_Suggesting_Sophisticated_Laboratory_Modification_Rather_Than_Natural_Evolution_and_Delineation_of_Its_Probable_Synthetic_Route

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Julia Raizen

Julia Raizen

about 2 months ago

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest woul...

They are noting a previously unrealized mechanism that has nothing to do with the Spike protein.

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Julia Raizen

Julia Raizen

about 2 months ago

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In...

This is alarmist and you provide no references

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Chi-Sang Poon

Chi-Sang Poon

about 2 months ago

Daszak's conflict of interest is well-known. You can easily Google it yourself.

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Julia Raizen

Julia Raizen

about 2 months ago

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of h...

Your are criticizing them for a conservative conclusion. There was no proof of a lab breach at this time. You are scorning them twice for one decision which they did and then did not do.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

There's nothing conservative or scientific about coming to a conclusion with little data. It's the opposite of conservative.

The author is pointing out the false dichotomy between "consipiracy" and "natural origin". This is a logical fallacy the letter writers commit egregiously and with righteousness. They should be criticized, harshly, for resorting to something so obviously fallacious so publicly and vociferously.

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Julia Raizen

Julia Raizen

about 2 months ago

After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019

SARS viruses have been slowly emerging since much earlier in the 20th century.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-brief-history-of-human-coronaviruses-67600

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

That's called a non sequitur.

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Vandit Mehra

Vandit Mehra

about 2 months ago

Whats your point?

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Oliver D

Oliver D

about 2 months ago

Sorry, but many of the potential "smoking guns" do not hold up if you look more closely:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvheexn/coronavirus-was-it-made-in-a-lab

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Anna Donnelly

Anna Donnelly

about 2 months ago (edited)

There is a big difference between a virus created to be released intentionally and a gain of function virus leaking accidentally. This talk (in the link in this comment) seems to leave that out.

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Oliver D

Oliver D

about 2 months ago

Science Vs. debunks many things said in this article, like the role of the RaTG13, and that it is not conspiracy that the host animal group was not found. And it also presents information about the pangolins which is not described here, since it would make his whole case very weak.

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Zak Kohane

Zak Kohane

about 2 months ago

Really thorough article Nicholas. Do you a URL to https://report.nih.gov/ which shows the funding of that lab for gain of function. That would be important to surface for public transparency.

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Rohan Parkes

Rohan Parkes

about 2 months ago

A compelling analysis of the current thinking about the origins of the corona virus.

And as soon as it’s published on a reputable forum, as opposed to a self-publishing platform whose guiding principle is that it will publish absolutely anything, subjected to peer-reviewed scrutiny, stripped of tendentious and contradictory claims about omertà, snide characterisations of researchers as funding-driven charlatans, and provides references for the many unsupported factual claims that it makes, I’ll be sure to take it seriously.

Until then, not so much.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 2 months ago

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

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Ash Alizadeh

Ash Alizadeh

about 2 months ago

belonged a viral family

Belonged (to) a viral family

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Virginie Courtier

Virginie Courtier

about 2 months ago

Thank you so much for this very deep and thoughtful analysis. Just one very minor comment:

>"To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces."

In France there was quite a big coverage in Le Monde in December 2020:

https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2020/12/22/a-l-origine-de-la-pandemie-de-covid-19-un-virus-sars-cov-2-aux-sources-toujours-enigmatiques_6064168_1650684.html

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Shang Rira

Shang Rira

about 2 months ago

Some Chinese scientists have pointed out the lab-origin theory a lot earlier than the western media

https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.YJeA97UzaMo

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Marc Rousseau

Marc Rousseau

about 2 months ago

I have a bombshell of an addition to this which I intended to submit in a book (and still might) but you might be interested in publishing an article on medium in partnership with me based on the information I have to share. very few people in the world know about this. you can google me on researchgate if you want and reach me at marc.rousseau@gmail.com

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Andrew T

Andrew T

about 2 months ago

"...which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel" ~ I would argue that the mainstream press seems *unwilling* to dispel it, not helpless to do so.

They make no effort, because they like what's happening.

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David Tagge

David Tagge

about 2 months ago

Thank you, Mr. Wade, for this in-depth, well-researched article.

Expanding on what I see as a tangential but important point: "Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss."

I agree with this view. I understand some of the underlying reasons for this pressure, such as lack of time and expertise for science reporters to dig in and analyze research findings with a skeptical eye. Realistically, science reporters will in many cases write stories about fields of study where they lack a deep understanding. That's just the reality of the breadth of scientific research, and the number of science reporters employed by even large publications.

I unfortunately can't propose a great solution, but it is a real problem. I see many cases - on both COVID and other topics - where a news story (from large publication) about research findings appears to be, in practice, little more than a press release from the study's authors. Given the number of studies that don't replicate - as well as occasional instances of outright research malpractice and fraud - science reporters should, at a minimum, strive to be less definitive in the tone of their reporting. Also, while I do understand that science reporters can't be subject matter experts on every topic, I do think that the field would be well-served overall by a much better understanding of statistics, which should help provide a healthy dose of skepticism.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

Statistics would help. Also the realization that scientists are an interest group like any other, and these interests should when appropriate be pointed out to readers.

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Achim Domma

Achim Domma

about 2 months ago

Thanks for this great article. What's the best way to support your work? I have a question regarding vaccines: Assuming the virus was created in a lab and escaped. Then the involved people should - as far as I understood - be in a better position to develop a vaccine that the rest of the world. But to my knowledge there is no evidence for that. What do you think about this detail?

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David Tagge

David Tagge

about 2 months ago

While that might seem intuitively true under some circumstances, I don't see how it necessarily follows.

In this case, the full genome of SARS-CoV-2 was quickly sequenced and published - in January 2020, as I recall. So that information was quickly available to vaccine researchers around the world.

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Isabel Kinney Ferreira de Miranda Santos

Isabel Kinney Ferreira de Miranda Santos

about 2 months ago

Because the Shi Zheng Li lab was not expecting the virus to escape? Even generous funds have a limit and you must fulfill what you promised to your funder. She did not promise a vaccine.

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The Freedom Protocols

The Freedom Protocols

about 2 months ago

To me. This should have been handled forensically from the start. Some one outside the scientific community. With no skin in the game either way should have been given access to follow the evidence. Including looking into the early emergence in Northern Italy and Iran. A skilled detective could have done a much better job than we have seen so far. Someone with a lot of experience handling complex cases like this. The fact that was not done. And it seems even seriously considered. Indicates an unwillingness on the parts of governments to get to the bottom of this. Biological weapons are not supposed to be developed. But I suspect not everyone is in compliance. It is way too early. To say this was all an accident. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Only a thorough investigation can determine that.

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Edruykh

Edruykh

about 2 months ago

Wow, thanks for the information.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Amazingly comprehensive and well-written article.

One thing that I was looking to know more about was if there is any incriminating evidence of a cover-up? Can the workers at the lab be interviewed? What explanation has been given for sealing records from e.g. the NIH or other research funding bodies?

Also, is there any grounds for civil lawsuits? It seems like lawyers might be a good way to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.

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Theo Panayides

Theo Panayides

about 2 months ago

An excellent piece, reinforcing others I've read (notably Nicholson Baker's in New York magazine). I have a practical question for Mr. Wade: If we accept the hypothesis that the virus escaped from a lab, what could we plausibly expect it to do next? How might it behave differently from a natural virus? Would it (could it?) mutate more 'intelligently', and perhaps become much more deadly? Logic suggests that the vaccines will be effective against the virus, if only because they've been designed with input from the very same people who had a hand in creating it! Can we at least feel confident in that respect?

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Cliff Wirt

Cliff Wirt

about 2 months ago

What is your take on this: https://phys.org/news/2021-03-outbreak-recombination-algorithm-source-sars-cov-.html?fbclid=IwAR27fhxomxfKQHvHcAYYyFIqIm2V04aFkeOsTpR2XQ3iOlurBP02KoRi-WI If this result stands up, it would seem that the virus has been circulating in the wild for decades with the ability to infect humans. How good is the journal the author, Boni, published in?

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paul yan

paul yan

about 2 months ago

This, along with many other papers, is base on the assumption that RATG13 actually exists. In fact there is no sample of this virus as of today. Even Zhengli Shi (the one who discovered and published it) admits she does not have a sample. So this virus only exists on records, if it ever exists at all.

For a more technical treatment on why RATG13 does not exist, see https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

And the interesting thing is, if you look beyond RATG13, then all of a sudden, the 'lab-made' theory makes so much more sense.

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David Roodman

David Roodman

about 2 months ago

"Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents." What are the exact sources for this statement?

I think it would be better given the significance and contentiousness of this piece if sources for various assertions were fully documented.

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Mukundarajan V N

Mukundarajan V N

about 2 months ago

Your are a brave man. I salute you! Please dig out the truth and expose the rogue nation called China.

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Thomas G. Dietterich

Thomas G. Dietterich

about 2 months ago

Your article would be more convincing if you didn't use terms like "omerta". You are showing your biases, which is bad science, too.

I'm also surprised that you didn't make policy recommendations for the US. It seems this is a strong argument for ending all GOF research and for a top-to-bottom review of the safety classification of projects and the safety culture in high security labs.

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Hdjewel Lisa F

Hdjewel Lisa F

about 2 months ago

Thanks for the article. On December 10, 2019 a Harvard Professor and 2 Chinese spies where arrested. One of the Chinese spies was arrested at Boston Logan Int Airport with 21 vials of biologicals on him and he was headed to Wuhan University. About 1-2 weeks later we had our first 'known' case of a person infected with the Wuhan Virus at a Colorado ski resort. He had just came from California a few days earlier, and about 1 week earlier he flew in from Italy. You can read the trial information on the Department of Justice website, or do your own research: Harvard University Professor and Two Chinese Nationals Charged in Three Separate China Related Cases... / https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-and-two-chinese-nationals-charged-three-separate-china-related

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Boston Guy

Boston Guy

about 2 months ago (edited)

If the guy came from Italy that would make sense since Italy's Health Dept found 111 POSITIVE covid-19 patients in Italy in Sept 2019, many months before wuhan....publication below.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/coronavirus-emerged-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-italian-study-shows-idUSL1N2I10EO

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

You seem to link to something irrelevant and you provide no reference for your claim about a Colorado ski resort virus. You could try sounding less like a conspiracy theorist?

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paul yan

paul yan

about 2 months ago

Thanks for writing this article, it is the most comprehensive review of evidence from both sides I've read so far.

I'm not a scientist or someone who works in this field, just want to add a few points based on what I've learned:

1. The earliest Chinese whistleblower is Dr. Li-meng Yan (https://twitter.com/drlimengyan1), who on Jan 19th 2020 (yes, last January, when most people didn’t pay much attention to what was happening in Wuhan) revealed that SARS2 is a lab-made virus based on virus ZC45/ZXC21, which are exclusively owned by Chinese Military (Original Chinese video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLTjg03CPEs , or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxyIpk_Cd2M with English subtitle).

Dr. Yan also predicted (on this Jan 19, 2020 program!) that this virus is transmissible between humans (despite the Chinese authorities insisting otherwise), has the potential to lead to a wide-spread transmission, and that it mutates very rapidly.

This forced Chinese authorities to admit, 5 hours later, that there *is* human-

to-human transmission, and to lock down Wuhan city 3 days later (curiously, banning domestic travel, but not international flights, see https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how-china-locked-down-internally-for-covid-19-but-pushed-foreign-travel/)

2. After fleeing Hongkong in April 2020, Dr. Yan wrote 3 technical reports:

The first report examines the unusual features observed on SARS2 (much of which is covered in this article, including the furin cleavage site), and it’s possible lab-creation process, see https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.YJN17hITGV5

The second report explains why SARS2 is in fact a bioweapon, instead of just an accidental “super bad bug”: https://zenodo.org/record/4073131#.YJN2hBITGV5

The third report replies to review comments from some of the scientists in the field, who are possibly colluding with Chinese government to cover up the true origin of SARS2: https://zenodo.org/record/4650821#.YJN3SxITGV7

I don’t want to write too much about Dr. Yan’s background here and distract readers from the scientific discussion of SARS2 origin, suffice to say that SARS2 is not from natural origin, nor an accidental lab leak. It is the product of a multi-year bioweapon program from Chinese military, funded partly by US (see https://gnews.org/1171683/ ). One of the masterminds of this bioweapon program is Malik Peiris, who works Hongkong University, which has a BSL3 lab specializing in coronavirus research. This is also where Dr. Yan used to work before she fled Hongkong... so you can connect the dots.

Some of this might seem mind-blowing, but time will tell if it’s fact or fiction. As always, there are many false leads and misinformation online, so we should always "distrust, but verify".

You can find more info from https://gnews.org/1171683/ or other posts from this website.

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Tina Marie

Tina Marie

about 2 months ago

Why would Dr. Daszak; Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have access to the underlying data and sequencing we were funding these studies?I have yet to come across an interview with Ralph Baric. His insight and opinion might be helpful. Again, I believe his salary is mostly funded by residents of the state of North Carolina along with the federal grants. I can perceive he would not want the negative association/affiliation from potential lab errors. There has to be a human being out there with solid information that might see the potential to contribute to the good of all mankind.

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Jlim

Jlim

about 2 months ago

Really enjoyed reading the article. I am someone who believes in the natural origin theory, but have also never read much work from the lab theory camp that was this well done. You definitely give very strong arguments for a scenario in which the lab outbreak is probable. I do have one question which I should preface by saying that I am not actively research either theory. The origins of covid-19 is something that I will leave to the consensus of US experts (i.e. Dr. Fauci and friends) because I do not have the life sciences background to do my own detailed research. My question is: do you go into the strong points of the natural origin theory? You mention many arguments from the natural origin camp but dismantle them with relative ease. There must be some strong points from the natural origin theory that can't be easily dismantled. Do you have good resources for these? If so, I think there should have been a more detailed section on such arguments.

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

Hi Jlim,

All the evidence on the natural emergence side is data that establishes it as an uncontestably plausible hypothesis. But there’s no direct evidence, not a shred, that this hypothesis is in fact true. It may be, but we have no evidence so far.

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Jared M Johnson

Jared M Johnson

about 2 months ago

Jim, you admit to trusting a 'consensus' of those with a conflict of interest. That doesn't sound like a very good idea. Fauci himself has supported gain of function research and him admitting this could have come from a lab would cause incredible cognitive dissonance for him.

The natural origin hypothesis is so easily dismantled because there is no evidence for it as of yet, only speculation that has not born out with data.

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Vivek Bhatia

Vivek Bhatia

about 2 months ago

Your article is so good that when you travel by the subway, you should not stand close to the edge of the platform.

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David Lanier

David Lanier

about 2 months ago

This article is magnificent. This has clarified so very much of the debate on the Origins of Covid for me. I will be keeping a copy for future reference!

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Денис Румянцев

Денис Румянцев

about 2 months ago

https://www.facebook.com/vasiliy.vlassov.9/posts/4203172153026924?comment_id=4204137316263741

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David Woodward

David Woodward

about 2 months ago

I have to agree that this is by far the most comprehensive reasoning. Your disection of both theories and the plausible outcomes of each is brilliant. Thank you for presenting this and I agree, you must make this into a book.

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Wendy Howard

Wendy Howard

about 2 months ago

One more piece of the puzzle? https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12026-020-09152-6.pdf

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Mattplatoff

Mattplatoff

about 2 months ago

Incredibly well written and objective article. I hope your work helps other critically think about the facts we have and the truth of the matter. It reminds me of a quote from Chernobyl:

"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?"

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Harold Carmel

Harold Carmel

about 2 months ago

Mr. Wade,

Brilliant work!

fwiw, I've forwarded your piece to our regional newspaper (I live in. Chapel Hill, where Ralph Baric works).

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Jonathan Rosenblum

Jonathan Rosenblum

about 2 months ago

Of all the points, the fact that the furin Args are coded for by disfavored coronavirus codons seems weakest. Coronaviruses don't encode their own tRNAs, do they? So why would they "want" to have preferred codons. Seems most likely that the relatively small genome size just by chance gave rise to a codon usage different than humans (or other mammal hosts). If the new codons were somehow picked up from a host it's most likely that they'd use mammal-preferred codons.

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Conor Jacobs

Conor Jacobs

about 2 months ago

I don't think it has anything to do with tRNAs in this case. The observed codon usage preference of coronaviruses is most likely just an epiphenomenon stemming from the fact that coronaviruses are under selective pressure to minimize the number of CpG motifs in their genome. This is because CpG is recognized by Zinc-finger Antiviral Protein (ZAP) which recruits a nuclease that cleaves the RNA.I

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Rodolphe de Maistre

Rodolphe de Maistre

about 2 months ago

thanks for the good article; here some more info on the labs in Wuhan https://rdemaistre.medium.com/bsl-biological-laboratories-and-coronavirus-in-wuhan-china-simple-description-980d6545fc44

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Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade

AUTHOR

about 1 month ago

Thanks, Rodolphe, for the link to this excellent study of virology labs in Wuhan.