This past week Vanity Fair published a very interesting article on the connections between COVID, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the NIH, CDC, Fauci, and a non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance. If one was inclined to think COVID-19 wasn’t the result of a lab leak, there are interesting details about how the Chinese lab requested some particular genetic sequences be removed from public data bases, previously open sequencing databases for the lab being suddenly hidden and access denied, as well as Fauci and others actively colluding to suppress evidence.
This behavior is roughly the equivalent of asking the police to remove finger print records of prime suspects from their files right when they are investigating a murder, then getting really defensive about being asked why you wanted to remove those specific finger prints. Could someone be hiding something? Maybe involvement in creating and releasing a tailored virus that resulted in a global pandemic, all while taking in millions of dollars of federal grant money?
Preposterous, you say? Well… I recommend reading the article. There are many official documents and transcripts that do not paint a pretty picture. What does emerge is a lot of money being funneled into questionable research, in part due to influence mongering among connected scientists and government officials, lots of downplaying of risks and looking the other way by those who should have known better, questionable ethical practices among American and Chinese officials and scientists, and then a flurry of coverups to protect those involved when things got ugly. All defended by a scientific and medical community’s leadership pulling the equivalent of a three year old holding something behind her back and refusing to let you see. Only instead of a cookie it was a origin of a virus that killed millions and costs trillions of dollars. A virus they apparently paid to have created.
This might be one of the most fun bits:
Maureen Miller says the human blood samples that were collected in China as part of the surveillance strategy she designed at EcoHealth Alliance could hold clues to COVID-19’s provenance. But they went into the WIV and are now out of reach. Why would a database supported by U.S. tax dollars to help prevent and respond to a pandemic be made “inaccessible exactly when it was needed to fulfill its intended purpose?” asks Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who was among the first to call for a full investigation of COVID-19’s origins.
I don’t even know, there is so much to choose from, I want to just quote the whole thing.
Another interesting bit came from the DARPA review process. People have often said to me “Sure, they do virology research in Wuhan at the WIV, and that is where the virus broke out, but that doesn’t mean it came from there. Those places are super serious about containment and biosafety.” Well… some places are better than others.
Inside DARPA, the grant application was met with immediate skepticism. The contract was “never awarded because of the horrific lack of common sense” it reflected, said a former DARPA official who was there at the time. EcoHealth Alliance was viewed as a “ragtag group” and a “middle guy,” a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels, said the former official.
Likewise, the WIV was also viewed as subpar, especially when compared with the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, which operated China’s only other high-containment laboratory with the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4. Harbin was China’s Harvard, said the former DARPA official. The WIV was more like a safety school. EcoHealth Alliance had “bolted on” a serious scientist, Ralph Baric, and “podged” the proposal together. Having the nonprofit serve as the prime contractor for a global project with national security risks was like “having your rental car agency trying to run an armada,” said the former DARPA official.
Though two of three DARPA reviewers deemed it “selectable,” the third, a program manager in the Biological Technologies Office, recommended against funding it. He wrote that the application did not adequately mention or assess the gain-of-function risk or the possibility that the proposed work could constitute dual-use research of concern (DURC), the technical term for science that can be repurposed to cause harm or endanger security.
The DARPA proposal was “basically a road map to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus,” says virologist Simon Wain-Hobson, who is among the scientists calling for a fuller investigation of COVID-19’s origins. If the research had the blessing of a top coronavirus scientist like Baric, then it is possible the WIV would have wanted to copy what it viewed as cutting-edge science, he said. “That doesn’t mean they did it. But it means it’s legitimate to ask the question.”
Ralph Baric appeared on This Week in Virology in 2015 talking about the work they were doing with gain of function corona viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and how they managed to avoid getting shut down due to the moratorium on gain of function research. It contains some lines that are horrifically funny in hind sight, like “I think that if we weren’t allowed to do this research it would have been a tragedy for humanity.” Highly recommended, particularly if you have a dark sense of humor, because this man did not seem the least bit concerned. About all the interview is missing is Dr. Baric saying “Hold my beer.”
I also love this part about China’s containment efforts and transparency:
On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S. outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things that proved to be spectacularly wrong. “I’m very optimistic…that this outbreak will begin to slow down,” he said. “We’re seeing a small amount of human-to-human transmission in other countries, but it’s not uncontrollable.” He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was taking all necessary steps “to be open and transparent, and work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world, and where necessary, bring them in to help. They’re doing that. It’s exactly what needs to happen.”
In fact, the opposite was true. The virus was spreading uncontrollably and the Chinese government was busy crushing anyone who spoke out: It ordered laboratory samples destroyed, punished doctors who raised alarms, and claimed the right to review any scientific research about COVID-19 ahead of publication, a restriction that remains in place today.
Emphasis mine. I have an earlier essay about why I don’t think the Chinese case numbers are likely to be true. Sound familiar? I wonder if all that suppression had something to do with the Chinese military’s projects at WIV. Could it be?
To Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, it seemed not only possible but likely that the virus had originated in a lab. “I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans,” he told Vanity Fair. Neither the 2002 SARS virus nor the 2012 MERS virus had transmitted with such devastating efficiency from one person to another.
What had changed? The difference, Redfield believed, was the gain-of-function research that Shi and Baric had published in 2015, and that EcoHealth Alliance had helped to fund. They had established that it was possible to alter a SARS-like bat coronavirus so that it would infect human cells via a protein called the ACE2 receptor. Although their experiments had taken place in Baric’s well-secured laboratory in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who was to say that the WIV had not continued the research on its own?
In mid-January of 2020, Vanity Fair can reveal, Redfield expressed his concerns in separate phone conversations with three scientific leaders: Fauci; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust; and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO). Redfield’s message, he says, was simple: “We had to take the lab-leak hypothesis with extreme seriousness.”
It is not clear whether Redfield’s concerns are what sparked Fauci’s own. But on Saturday night, February 1, at 12:30 a.m., Fauci emailed the NIAID’s principal deputy director, Hugh Auchincloss, under the subject line “IMPORTANT.” He attached the 2015 paper by Baric and Shi and wrote, “Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on.” He instructed Auchincloss to read the attached paper and added, “You will have tasks today that must be done.”
February 1 proved to be a critical day. With the death count in China passing 300 and cases popping up in more than a dozen countries, Farrar convened a group of 11 top scientists across five time zones. That morning, he asked Fauci to join. “My preference is to keep this group really tight,” Farrar wrote. “Obviously ask everyone to treat in total confidence.” Fauci, Francis Collins, Kristian Andersen, and Robert Garry all joined the call. No one invited Redfield, or even told him it was happening.
I probably shouldn’t quote anymore. The article is long, and filled with fascinating little tidbits like that. Mid-January you say? Important phone calls on February 1st? All talk of a Chinese lab leak possibility quashed by high ups in the US and China? Huh… how about that.
Not suspicious at all!
Vanity Fair did a great job on this article, and I applaud them for their work.
… and if Jesse D. Bloom dies, we need to be sure it is investigated as a murder and not a suicide…