Those pursuing the investigation into COVID-19’s origins at the State Department say they were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box”—especially as it pertained to the U.S.’s own research funding. Read the full report from KatherineEban now:
, a website that houses papers from 2,000 Chinese journals, and running the results through Google Translate.
A memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, who was celebrated as a whistleblower in China after sounding the alarm about COVID-19 in January 2020. He later died of the disease.But there was a mystery at the heart of the diagnosis. Bat coronaviruses were not known to harm humans. What was so different about the strains from inside the cave? To find out, teams of researchers from across China and beyond traveled to the abandoned mine shaft to collect viral samples from bats, musk shrews, and rats.
Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.
Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said the “conflicted” status of leading experts who had either approved or received funding for gain-of-function research “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies.
In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework . It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr.
EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influentialstatement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.
Jamie Metzl’s blog became a go-to site for government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. In his first post on the subject, he wrote, “In no way do I seek to support or align myself with any activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest, nationalistic, racist, bigoted, or biased in any way.”Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation.
After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” Ford recalled. Asher invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the probability of a lab origin versus a natural one. Scissoring Quay’s analysis, Baric noted that its calculations failed to account for the millions of bat sequences that exist in nature but remain unknown.
The statement withstood “aggressive suspicion,” as one former State Department official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. “I was very pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,” said Chris Ford. “I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had been vetted and cleared.”In early July, the World Health Organization invited the U.S.
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