NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE S lowly but surely, new cracks are appearing in the wall of silence denying Chinese culpability in causing the nearly 7 million deaths attributed to Covid. In a classified intelligence report on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded, based on new but still secret intelligence, that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. The DOE — which runs biosecurity labs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a biological-safety program, and the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program to fund research into organisms’ genetic codes and how to “reengineer” them — now agrees with the 2021 assessment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak.
From the start of the pandemic many highly respected scientists raised the possibility that the virus was the product of gain-of-function research in which naturally occurring coronaviruses collected from bats were manipulated in a laboratory to acquire an enhanced ability to infect humans. The alternative hypothesis was that SARS-CoV-2 was a naturally occurring virus that passed from bats through an intermediate host to humans. There were multiple reasons to suspect that SARS-CoV-2 was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and then leaked, either intentionally or accidentally.
The WIV is a leading center for research on bats and coronaviruses and was actively engaged in gain-of-function research to genetically engineer bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. U.S. State Department inspectors reported that the lab was conducting this research with sub-par safety controls. The WIV is located in Wuhan, China, where the first reported cases of Covid-19 occurred. Moreover, U.S. intelligence sources and the State Department reported that several WIV researchers were hospitalized with Covid-19-like symptoms months prior to the Chinese government’s announcement of the first cases.
In previous cases of animal-to-human transmission of respiratory illnesses, researchers had uncovered intermediate animal hosts and serologic signs of infections in animal traders within months of the outbreak. But such evidence remains elusive for Covid-19. Three years into the pandemic, no one has found a bat-source population, SARS-CoV-2 circulating in an intermediate species that functioned as a conduit between bats and humans, or evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was present anywhere else before it appeared in Wuhan.
Finally, SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin cleavage site (FCS) in its spike protein that augments its pathogenicity and transmissibility relative to related viruses, none of which have the cleavage site. The spike protein is what enables the virus to recognize, attach to, and enter the cells lining human airways. It has two sub-units: S1, which recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) on the surface of airway cells; and S2, which allows the virus to fuse with the cell and inject its genetic material that instructs the cell to make more viruses. Furin is an enzyme expressed by human cells that separates the two spike-protein sub-units at the cleavage site, enabling the virus to bind more efficiently to human cells and release its genetic material into them. The unexpected presence of the FCS suggested that SARS-CoV-2 might be a product of laboratory manipulation. Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore called it a smoking gun.
But the scientific establishment and the media were determined to dismiss the possibility of viral manipulation and a leak from the Wuhan lab. When Senator Tom Cotton and such conservative newspapers as the Daily Mail and the Washington Times raised the possibility of a Chinese lab leak early in the pandemic, the Washington Post dismissed their concerns as a debunked conspiracy theory. The New York Times labeled it a “fringe theory.”
Many scientists who initially favored the lab-manipulation-and-leak hypothesis rapidly and inexplicably changed their tune. Virologist Kristian Andersen emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci on January 31, 2020, with concerns that features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered; he noted that he and other scientists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” The following day, eleven virologists who had concerns about lab manipulation held a telephone conference with Fauci and National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins.
Then, just three days later, four of the participants on the call sent a draft of a proposed letter to Fauci and Collins. That letter, published online on February 16 and subsequently in an updated version on March 17 in the journal Nature Medicine, with Andersen as lead author, concluded that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Yet it was never clear what made Andersen and his co-signatories change their minds so rapidly. Their published letter did not present hard evidence supporting the natural-evolution theory. Instead, it relied on two speculative theories of why lab manipulation was unlikely. Neither was reasonable. As evidence against laboratory manipulation, Andersen cited the fact that SARS-CoV-2 did not bind as tightly to the ACE2 receptor on human cells as the optimal binding solution in a modeling study for the earlier SARS-CoV virus. But computational prediction and modeling are not needed to generate a novel, pathogenic virus. Anderson’s second claim was that no similar viral genetic sequence had ever been published, and this made manipulation unlikely. This claim was also unconvincing, since SARS-CoV-2 could have been engineered from an unpublished viral backbone.
Another early influential letter from virologists appeared in the Lancet on February 19, 2020. Relying in part on Andersen’s letter, the authors “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and they claimed that scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The letter included no scientific evidence or references to directly refute a lab-origin theory of the virus.
More significantly, the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, which had funded and collaborated in coronavirus research at the WIV for many years. EcoHealth had submitted a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018 to partner with the WIV in constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses by inserting FCSs into their spike proteins (DARPA turned them down). This obvious conflict of interest, along with the fact that four other co-authors of the Lancet letter were associated with EcoHealth, was not disclosed. The letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”
The Lancet letter not only failed to reveal its primary author’s association with WIV — the organization most likely to have manipulated the virus — it also lauded Chinese health authorities for “transparently” sharing data with the global health community. This too was misleading.
A March 2021 World Health Organization report whitewashed the lab-leak-versus-natural-origin question. It found no definitive proof of either hypothesis yet concluded that natural spread through an intermediate host was “likely to very likely” and that a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely.” Yet all the data and samples for the investigation were collected and summarized by Chinese scientists who withheld raw epidemiological data on the first cases. The 313-page report devoted just four pages to the possibility of a lab accident.
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus questioned the report’s validity and called for additional investigations. Fourteen countries including the U.S. and the United Kingdom expressed “shared concerns” that the WHO report “was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples” and asked for “independent experts to have full access to all . . . data, research, and personnel involved in the early stages of the outbreak.” The experts are still waiting. In a May 14, 2021, letter in the journal Science, an international group of 18 prominent scientists including Ralph Baric criticized the WHO report and concluded that accidental lab release remained a possibility. Baric is the world’s leading authority on gain-of-function research: In 2015, he published NIH-funded gain-of-function work that he had performed with WIV researchers to enable SARS-like bat coronaviruses to replicate in human airway cells.
We will probably never know for sure whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus is the product of the WIV lab because the Chinese government will not share the data. The U.S. intelligence community remains split on the question. The FBI and now the DOE favor a lab-leak origin, four other unnamed agencies and a national intelligence panel still assess with “low confidence” that natural transmission was the source, and two other agencies (the CIA and an unnamed agency) remain undecided.
But we are getting a pretty good idea of why the U.S. scientific community and its media enablers might have been so keen on suppressing the possibility of a lab-leak origin. Chinese researchers were conducting gain-of-function research as “part of an active and highly collaborative US–China scientific research program funded by the US Government.” The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Fauci, has been funding the EcoHealth Alliance since 2014, with annual grants through 2020 for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” totaling $3,748,715. The principal investigator was EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, and he directed the money to the WIV and other Chinese researchers.
A letter from Lawrence Tabak, then the NIH’s principal deputy director, to Representative James Comer (R., Ky.) confirmed that, during 2018–19, the NIH funded research at the WIV through EcoHealth that manipulated a bat coronavirus called WIV1. WIV researchers grafted spike proteins from other coronaviruses onto WIV1 to see whether the modified virus could bind to human ACE2 receptors in mice — the same receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds in humans. The modified virus reproduced faster and made infected humanized mice sicker than the unmodified virus. Tabak later testified that the NIH complied with Chinese scientists’ request to conceal early genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2, information that might shed light on the origins of Covid-19.
If it turns out that Covid-19 resulted from U.S.-funded research at the WIV, it would be highly embarrassing for Daszak, Fauci, and Collins. Moreover, it is possible that Fauci was trying to skirt guidelines regulating gain-of-function research by shipping such research overseas. If so, it is no mystery why they have been downplaying the lab-manipulation/leak hypothesis.
And quite a few may conclude that it is no great mystery why scientists who first entertained the lab-leak hypothesis recanted almost immediately. They function in a research system that is heavily dependent on the grant-making largesse of NIH bureaucrats, headed, until recently, by Fauci and Collins.
Major publications have science writers who are presumably intelligent and inquiring. Their acquiescence in shutting down the lab-leak hypothesis is probably best explained by an uncritical admiration of Dr. Fauci and disdain for former President Trump, who raised the prospect of Chinese responsibility. They were willing to “follow the science,” regardless of how shaky it was — if it furthered their ideological biases.
The big losers, of course, are the American people who may have suffered through three years of a pandemic caused, in part, by their own government. We must make sure this never happens again.