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

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Mike Hogan
@mike_hogan
JUST POSTED: an epic, 11,000-word report from @KatherineEban on the COVID-19 lab-leak investigations inside and outside the U.S. government, complete with spine-tingling discoveries, furious infighting, and scoops and documents galore

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
vanityfair.com
3:03 AM · Jun 3, 2021

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

I. A Group Called DRASTIC

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild animals—a possible source of the virus.

That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections of bat samples and bat-virus strains. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as the natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally. After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and Shi became known in China as “Bat Woman” for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples. More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.

To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has strenuously denied.

*snip*

[underpants]

1. Vanity Fair once again with great reporting

That’s why I subscribed to it. Wow great read so far.

[soothsayer]

2. Does it cover this?

Link to tweet

?s=21


Rocinante
@ramonferrandis
·
Jun 1, 2021
Welp. Turns out Michael R. Gordon, one of the authors of the WSJ's piece on the Wuhan Lab Leak hypothesis, also co-wrote the infamous NYT "Aluminum Tubes" piece with Judith Miller. Why has no one in the MSM mentioned this?

Lead author of WSJ “Wuhan lab” story wrote lies about Iraqi “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
wsws.org

Rocinante
@ramonferrandis
Someone asked "how is this relevant." It is, inasmuch as an explosive article written by someone with a history of prevarication calls for *even more* skepticism than usual for such an article. So yes, relevant.

[dalton99a]

3. The lab-leak hypothesis is viable but will remain unproven.

China will never allow the "full access" that is being demanded, i.e., investigators roaming the place searching for any evidence to convict

(What are you going to do? Invade China and seize control of Wuhan?)

[soothsayer]

4. This. Will remain murky.

[FreddyWhite]

17. there is plenty that can be done

its always better to get all the facts. if it were a biological weapon, then there can be more clues for vaccination choices and treatments.

also, it helps to but stricter protocols in place and accountability for this dangerous type of experimentation.

[Initech]

5. What if the lab leak were proven true? Would that lead to war?

A war with China is impossible, even if every country on earth joined forces against them, and that's an improbable scenario in and of itself. It's a war we will not win under any circumstances. So what could be done if this were proven true?

[Sympthsical]

7. Nah

We helped fund the lab and the research. And that's not a condemnation. We fund a lot of virus research all over the world. Wuhan was nothing special in that regard. It was more of a cooperative medical thing.

[Sympthsical]

6. I got two hides because of this topic

We'll see how this thread goes.

More and more, I believe there was an accident or breach of safety protocols at the lab. I think it got out into the population, took a bit for anyone to notice, and by then it was too late.

I don't believe in conspiracies. I believe in evidence. More and more evidence is piling up that something happened. American intelligence was suspicious something happened when all cell phone activity in the lab disappeared in (IIRC) late October - meaning the lab had been evacuated.

Zhengli herself noted that she was working on gain-of-function areas with coronaviruses. A guy testifying to Congress a few weeks ago (I forget who) denied this, even though Zhengli herself has admitted to it.

There are things in the Fauci e-mails where, if you're not at least raising an eyebrow about what was going on in that lab, you're actively not wanting to investigate the situation. Very early on, a major funder of the lab was actively planting and paying for stories in the media to claim a lab leak was conspiracy theory, and promoted the idea that it was a random species jump.

This was a crazy potent virus, it spread fast, and it originated in an area near a lab that just so happens to be tinkering with gain-of-function on coronavirus?

We owe it to our dead to learn what happened here. And if it was the lab, we have to do our damnedest to ensure it never happens again.

We do not definitively know it was the lab. Not yet. But the evidence is beginning to pile. To dismiss the idea completely out hand is dangerous.

[underpants]

13. We seem to be tracking this at the same time

From the Fauci thread yesterday.

Once again outstanding reporting from Vanity Fair.

Stated in this thread is that China will never let us have all the information. I don’t thing WE will let us have all the information. This is the kind of thing that gets slammed shut and hidden away.

Most likely is that it was a mistake but with all these people involved I can’t believe anything like this as being done in such a concentrated population.

[Sympthsical]

16. There are two major problems that people will fight to cover up

First, the funding. Part of it is the NiH grants. Now, I don't think the grants are a nefarious thing. We give grants all over the place. But when you have a few million dead, and you were funding it, it's a real bad look to people who don't understand how we do these things.

The second is how the media played this. I read about the Daszak connection to the February 2020 article in the Lancet a few days ago, just before this VF piece.

That one totally blew my mind.

The public was actively misinformed. I mean, it's so egregious. An active, behind the scenes campaign to shield the lab from any scrutiny whatsoever.

And it worked.

Anyone who questioned if the lab was the origin of virus was called a conspiracy theorist. We're still getting hides on DU for discussing it. This is crazy to me.

I don't think we'll ever definitively know what happened. There's absolutely no way with the CCP. But I think there will be enough circumstantial evidence coming to light where we will have more or less a basic idea. I think we're just about there.

I'm so glad Vanity Fair finally brought this into the mainstream. I've long admired their investigative pieces. This should've been mainstream a year ago, but here we are.

I agree with you. I think in all probability this was an accident, too.

[Klaralven]

22. EcoHealth Alliance smells like an intelligence operation

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development,

Most likely we were funding Chinese work in order to keep up on what they were doing.

Note that China has had multiple problems with viruses - outbreaks of bird flu causing extensive losses of poultry, African swine fever causing loss of one third of their hogs, and the first SARS outbreak. They must have a keen interest in how such epidemics occur.

[Sympthsical]

23. Did you see our "investigation"?

We literally only sent Daszak. And he officially said he didn't even see any of the data.

All this while a coterie of CCP minders accompanied him and the other investigators.

On January 14, 2021, Daszak and 12 other international experts arrived in Wuhan to join 17 Chinese experts and an entourage of government minders. They spent two weeks of the monthlong mission quarantined in their hotel rooms. The remaining two-week inquiry was more propaganda than probe, complete with a visit to an exhibit extolling President Xi’s leadership. The team saw almost no raw data, only the Chinese government analysis of it.

They paid one visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi Zhengli, as recounted in an annex to the mission report. One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”

In fact, the database had been taken offline on September 12, 2019, three months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail uncovered by Gilles Demaneuf and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.

After two weeks of fact finding, the Chinese and international experts concluded their mission by voting with a show of hands on which origin scenario seemed most probable. Direct transmission from bat to human: possible to likely. Transmission through an intermediate animal: likely to very likely. Transmission through frozen food: possible. Transmission through a laboratory incident: extremely unlikely.

On March 30, 2021, media outlets around the world reported on the release of the mission’s 120-page report. Discussion of a lab leak took up less than two pages. Calling the report “fatally flawed,” Jamie Metzl tweeted: “They set out to prove one hypothesis, not fairly examine all of them.”

Just, what? The more I read, the more I think I agree with your analysis.

[Klaralven]

24. There is also this about LLNL...

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.

Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.

There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself, and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of “creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?

Or more likely Ford was trying to deflect some loose cannons from the State Department that were poking around in stuff above their pay grade, as it were.

[Sympthsical]

25. Trumpers had a vested political interest in proving the lab leak

I can absolutely imagine political appointees blitzing through the various agencies trying to get any information possible to fit the narrative they wanted and felt they needed to deflect political heat from Trump. The problem being, they were probably lazy and feckless (and ignorant) and perhaps didn't even know what they were looking for. I agree with Ford in that sloppiness would be the bane of truth and taint any information that came to light.

That last paragraph supports your idea, and I'm inclined to agree.

[Klaralven]

26. Trump was definitely a problem for people managing classified information

Then, the bomb-thrower-in-chief weighed in. At a press briefing just hours later, Trump contradicted his own intelligence officials and claimed that he had seen classified information indicating that the virus had come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Asked what the evidence was, he said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

He undoubtedly had been briefed on classified assessments.

He quickly proved himself too dumb to understand them and too indiscreet to be trusted with them.

[Sympthsical]

27. And it's creating problems now

I'm only interested in knowing the truth of what happened, as much as any of us can in such a classified, national security environment. However, any questioning regarding the lab is not only seen as conspiracy, but as a "right-wing talking point." In another thread, someone posited that questioning the lab stuff was "helping the racists."

How is any nonpartisan search for facts and truth supposed to move forward in that kind of environment? The Right desperately wants and needs the lab theory to be true for their political purposes. And some on the Left won't even allow it to be discussed . . . because they think it will help the Right.

What a mess. Hyper-partisan times.

That's why I am so blown away VF published what they did. It was cathartic to read after months of people shouting it all couldn't possibly be true.

[FreddyWhite]

18. We owe it to our dead..

beautifully said.

[WHITT]

8. I Could Make A Long List

of problems with the conspiracy story that's been Trumped-Up, but their 'three people were hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in November', thus supposedly pinpointing the "leak" a month earlier than the WHO had documented cases in China, is all rendered moot by the documentation of cases in Italy in September. The rest is a hamster wheel.

[Yavin4]

9. Get the data out. We need to get the truth out.

The entire world was put into lockdown and 3.5 million people died. The world deserves to know the truth. The entire truth.

[hunter]

10. It's likely the Spanish Flu of 1918 wasn't Spanish.

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

The origins of AIDS are equally clouded.

[lagomorph777]

11. Trump weaponized it.

He's the one responsible for most of the deaths, with his policies designed to deliberately promote the spread of the disease.

It's relatively unimportant whether there was an accidental release from medical research.

It's vanishingly unlikely that this was tied to weapons research. Such a weapon would be impossible and foolish to use.

It only really matters to somebody who is pushing a racist, xenophobic agenda, typical of actors on the right.

[underpants]

12. It seems to me that the production of this would be for prevention

understanding, and possibly planning treatment. I don’t see my one producing this as a weapon in a place with so many international eyes and purse strings attached.

[Downtown Hound]

14. Exactly.

The odds that we'll ever find out are next to none. If it really did evolve naturally, there's millions of fools out there that will never believe it, no matter what the evidence. And if it did come from a lab, the Chinese will see to it that no one can ever prove it.

And at the end of the day, it was Trump's and the GOP's lying about it, downplaying it, calling it a hoax, and pushing lies like masks and lockdowns are tyranny, and bleach will cure it that caused it to be much worse than it needed to be.

Where it came from isn't going to change any of that, except to try and give more ammo to the racist idiots who screwed this up in the first place.

[lagomorph777]

15. Apparently there are some who want to give more ammo to the racist idiots.

Curious.

[roamer65]

20. Yes. You are right on all counts.

If it was from a military laboratory, its death rate would be MUCH MUCH higher. Akin to the Captain Tripps virus from Stephen King’s “The Stand”.

Accidental laboratory leak? Good luck on ever proving it.

Dump absolutely weaponized it.

[Johonny]

19. Given the nature of China politics. At such time as the current leader shows weakness

or in fact dies. In the power struggle to come, the eventual winner will likely willingly release the cover up if it does exist. And use it to purge the government. Until such time of a leadership change, China will guard such evidence (if it exists).

However, it is possible Taiwan, India, South Korea or Japan has better intell than us and with Biden in office we will try to get it from them.

[Klaralven]

21. The most likely outcome will be to classify gain-of-function and associated research

Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: “If zoonosis was the origin, it was a validation…of his life work…. But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.” It could mire the field indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.

This is incorrect. Biology is to the 21st Century as Physics was to the 20th Century. And gain-of-function research is to Biology as nuclear physics was to Physics.

The most likely outcome is that research is moved out of academic labs and into "national laboratories" where it can be shrouded in deep secrecy. Funding, rather than being restricted, will increase greatly.