Nowhere is the lab-leak debate more personal than among the experts investigating the origins of COVID.
that both “hypotheses are plausible.” The debate isn’t settled in the government, and most of the agencies looking at relevant intelligence consider natural origins more probable. Still, the news is the sort of imprimatur Sachs has been looking for. “The truth is coming out step-by-step,” he said. “It is being ‘allowed’ out in part because of the anti-China spin put on it. Yet this is heavily a U.S. affair. That truth will also emerge.
Scientists like Roberts say Sachs’s rhetoric around COVID’s origins may jeopardize funding for virus research that they believe could one day prevent or mitigate future pandemics. But Sachs sees the origins investigation as part of an essential check on that work, specifically on so-called “gain of function” research on viruses that sometimes makes them more transmissible or deadlier — which he thinks is dangerous and risky. “We have had more than 1.
Two weeks earlier, the Trump administration had prematurely ended an NIH grant supporting EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit funding research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute. EcoHealth was run by the British American disease ecologist Peter Daszak, a leading researcher of bat coronaviruses who, like Sachs, worked at Columbia University. Soon after, Sachs reached out to him.
Meanwhile, Sachs was in a tug-of-war with the rest of the task force over whether he could sit in on their interviews with experts. Daszak and the rest of the group pushed back, saying any legitimate scientific study needed independence from its sponsor.
To Sachs, what started as a Daszak problem became a task-force problem when he realized other members of the group seemed to have their own hidden conflicts of interest. After Daszak stepped down as chair that summer, the task force nominated Keusch as its new chair, but in early September, The Intercept published documents showing four task-force members, including Keusch, were listed as partners on an EcoHealth grant proposal to NIH.
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