Covid-19 > Were there two lab leaks at Wuhan triggering the Covid pandemic?

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Senate GOP report raises possibility of two lab leaks triggering COVID

By Steven Nelson, NYPost

April 17, 2023 6:04pm  Updated

WASHINGTON — The COVID-19 pandemic may have started with two separate leaks at Chinese labs doing risky “gain of function” research, a Republican senator said Monday.

A report released by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) raises the prospect that millions of lives could have been saved — including those of more than 1 million Americans — if not for a “coverup” by the Chinese government during a theorized initial outbreak.

“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks [including] a lab leak in the September-October [2019] timeframe, even as early as July or August,” the medical doctor turned senator told a small group of journalists ahead of the release of the 301-page document.

“We’ve concluded that [China] started vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be most sensible explanation,” he said. “There are key data points that are being held back that could help us prove that.”

Dr. Robert Kadlec, a cofounder of the Operation Warp Speed program that rapidly developed US COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, drafted the report titled “Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19” with about a dozen Republican aides on the Senate Health Committee and additional outside consultants.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

AFP via Getty Images

The theory that there were two lab leaks, with the first one’s effect going unrecognized by the global community as the Chinese government raced ahead with early vaccine development, is unproven and Marshall says he welcomes debate and the exploration of other possibilities.

The theory rests on scientific conjecture about some previously reported details — including an assessment of the amount of work that would have had to predate a Feb. 24, 2020, vaccine patent filed by Dr. Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military scientist who later died under mysterious circumstances. Investigators concluded that the vaccine development would have had to start in November 2019, using Operation Warp Speed’s course as a benchmark.

A pre-November series of additional events adds weight to the theory, Marshall said, including the deaths of 11 Iranian athletes, publicly reported in 2020. Some of the athletes reportedly attended the Olympics-style World Military Games in held Wuhan, China, in October 2019.

There are additional scientific clues, according to the report.

There is much more on this story at the NY Post.

Covid_19 > US Dept. of Energy Blames Covid Pandemic on Leak from Wuhan Lab

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Chinese lab leak likely behind COVID outbreak: US Energy Department

By Bruce Golding, NYPost

February 26, 2023 12:17pm  Updated

The virus that causes COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory, according to a classified report based on new intelligence and recently sent to the White House and key members of Congress.

The stunning assertion by the US Energy Department comes more than a year after the FBI concluded a lab accident in China was the origin of the disease, which has killed more than 6.8 million people around the world, including 1.1 million in the US.

The FBI’s decision was made with “moderate confidence” and remains the bureau’s opinion, said The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Energy Department’s own finding on Sunday.

By contrast, the Department of Energy made its determination with “low confidence,” sources who’ve read the classified report told the Journal.

A research group sent bodily samples from bats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to search for the coronavirus.

ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE

But the judgment is considered important because the Energy Department — which oversees the American nuclear weapons program — runs a network of national labs and has a great deal of scientific expertise, the Journal said.

Both agencies reportedly arrived at their conclusions for different reasons, with the sources declining to detail the new intelligence cited by the Energy Department.

The assertion comes more than a year after the FBI concluded a lab accident in China was the origin of the coronavirus.

AFP via Getty Images

In response to the Journal’s report, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “There is a variety of views in the intelligence community” and that the origin of COVID-19 remained under investigation.

“Here’s what I can tell you: President Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question,” Sullivan told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“And if we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people. But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.”

The FBI’s decision was made with “moderate confidence” and remains the bureau’s opinion.

REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

The Energy Department’s assessment came in an update to a 2021 document from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ office, the Journal said.

It reportedly reaffirmed a consensus in the intelligence community that the emergence of COVID-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological weapons program.

The update was prepared in light of new intelligence, additional study of academic literature and consultation with outside experts, a senior intelligence official told the Journal.

The update is reportedly less than five pages long, and it’s unclear whether an unclassified version will be made public.

The National Intelligence Council and four unidentified agencies still believe with “low confidence” that the virus first spread to humans as the result of natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the Journal.

Right! It just happened that the extraordinary transmission from bat to human happened just down the street from Wuhan labs (of all the places in the world...), where they were deliberately trying to find a way to make the virus jump from bats to humans. This is called "gain of function" in biolabs. Its purpose is to create new viruses so they can create vaccines for those viruses. If that's not insane enough for you, the other possibility is that its purpose might be to reduce the population of the world. 

The Central Intelligence Agency and another unidentified agency reportedly remain undecided on the lab leak and natural transmission theories.

Last year, Senate Republicans released an interim report that found the virus most likely leaked out of a Chinese lab and that ”the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of accuracy.”

Avril Haines, US Director of National Intelligence, addresses a panel session during the 53rd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. GIAN EHRENZELLER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

On Sunday, US Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told NBC’s “Meet The Press” that Congress needs to hold “public hearings on this and really dig into it.”A lot of evidence that [COVID came] from the Chinese, and when other countries even raise it, like Australia, the Chinese use their coercive economic activities to shut people up,” he said.

“Look, this is a country that has no problem coming out and lying to the world. We just saw that with this Chinese spy balloon,” Sullivan said, referring to the orb that drifted over parts of the US before famously being shot down by the US military earlier this month. It’s the nature of a Communist dictatorship to lie to their own people, to lie to the world,” the pol said.

“I think that we need to make sure every country knows that and then look at what the consequences could be,” he said. “Obviously millions of deaths, huge economic impacts, and it would once again show that the Chinese Communist Party is not only a menace, but the nature of these regimes is to lie to the world. And we need to make that clear to people.”

Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, who’s served on several federal advisory boards, told the Journal he is glad US officials “were willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about COVID origins.

“My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency,” he said.

The Energy Department declined to discuss details of its assessment but said in a statement that it “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

Biden ordered US spy agencies to probe the source of the disease — including whether it came from a Chinese lab in Wuhan– in May 2021, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the center of suspicion since US intelligence learned that three researchers there fell ill and had to be hospitalized in November 2019, shortly before China confirmed the COVID-19 outbreak.

Now, I have done dozens of reports on the pandemic and this is the first time I have heard of 3 researchers being hospitalized in Nov 2019. Why is that? I have heard that at least one researcher has disappeared from the lab and that there may have been an emergency shutdown of the lab in 2019:

Wuhan P4 Lab ‘Had Emergency Shutdown’ Last October; People Disappear

Some former US officials previously told the Journal that the workers were involved in coronavirus research.

On Aug. 1, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to share records of its investigation but the bureau declined to comply in November, citing a Justice Department policy on preserving “the integrity of ongoing investigations.”

Integrity! Right!

Covid19 Origins - Another CDC Director Suggests Wuhan Virus Leak a Possibility

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Biden’s CDC Director seemingly gives credence to Wuhan lab leak theory,

says ‘lab-based’ Covid-19 origin a ‘possibility’

20 May, 2021 05:11

FILE PHOTO: Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by a World Health Organization team, in Wuhan, China, February 3, 2021. ©  Reuters / Thomas Peter

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky suggested that Covid-19 may have originated in a laboratory, acknowledging a lab leak as one among several possibilities during testimony to lawmakers.

Asked about how the Covid-19 pandemic began at a Wednesday hearing, Walensky initially said that while she lacks the data to comment, most known coronaviruses have an “animal origin.” But pressed by Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) on “other possibilities,” the agency head accepted that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory. 

Republicans have taken particular interest in the lab-leak hypothesis, with party members on the House Intelligence Committee releasing a report on Wednesday claiming the theory is supported by “significant circumstantial evidence.” The report also argues that experts “have failed to identify the original species that allegedly spread the virus to humans, which is critical to their zoonotic transfer theory.”

The lab in Wuhan – the Chinese city where Covid-19 was first detected in December 2019 – is China’s sole fully operational Biosafety Level-4 facility, making it one of only a few laboratories in China equipped to study the most dangerous pathogens. 

Though the World Health Organization deemed the lab theory “extremely unlikely” in a report released in March, an open letter by 18 infectious disease experts published in the journal Science last week argued that “accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable [theories].” 

The WHO's investigation was severely limited by Chinese authorities. Their assumption is nothing more than a guess, with no data to support it.

Walensky is not the first US official – nor the first CDC director – to acknowledge the lab theory. In March, her predecessor Robert Redfield (2nd story on link), who served under President Donald Trump, outright endorsed the idea in an interview with CNN, saying he believes it is the “most likely” explanation.

Other ex-Trump officials have also continued to discuss the lab-leak theory, with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo stating that “every piece of evidence” he had seen “points to a leak from this laboratory” during an appearance on Fox this week, though he added that he “can’t prove it.”

A tiny bit of common sense is enough to 'prove it'. There were probably only a very few virology labs in the entire world that were studying the coronavirus at a Level 4 capability. That Covid19 happened to break out just down the street from one such lab is so far beyond a mathematical probability as to be absurd. It takes some kind of stupid to not make the correlation.

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Military Madness: Worrying New Clues About the Origins of Covid

Chinese citizen journalist under 'constant torment' after Wuhan, lawyer says

Man-Made Coronavirus Leaked from Wuhan Lab - Ex-MI6 Boss

LAB LEAK Coronavirus pandemic started as ‘an accident’

when man-made virus leaked from China lab, ex-MI6 boss says

Alex Winter

THE coronavirus pandemic "started as an accident" when the engineered virus escaped from a Chinese lab, a former MI6 chief has said.

Sir Richard Dearlove says he's seen an "important" new report which claims the virus didn't emerge naturally.

A former spy chief claims Covid-19 didn't occur naturally in the wild, but may have been created instead

by Chinese scientists  Credit: AP:Associated Press

Instead, it was created by Chinese scientists before it accidentally leaked, Sir Richard told The Telegraph.

And he claimed the report could force China to pay 'reparations' to the rest of the world for the death toll and economic hardship wrought by the virus.

International scientists believe the virus emerged in animals - most likely bats or pangolins - before jumping to the human population.

But Sir Richard says a scientific paper published this week by a Norwegian-British research team suggests key elements of Covid-19's genetic sequences were "inserted" and may not have evolved naturally.

He said: "It raises the issue, if China ever were to admit responsibility, does it pay reparations?

"I think it will make every country in the world rethink how it treats its relationship with China."

Sir Richard suggested scientists may have been conducting secret gene-splicing experiments on bat coronaviruses when Covid-19 somehow escaped through a lapse in biosecurity.

"It's a risky business if you make a mistake," he said.

It's an insane business and ought to be a crime against humanity.

Sir Richard, who was the head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004, said he's read peer-reviewed research produced by top academics at St George's Hospital at the University of London and Norwegian virologists.

The paper claims that there are 'inserted sections' in the DNA of the virus, and warns that current efforts to develop a vaccine are doomed - because the virus has been misunderstood.

Some have claimed the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology  Credit: AFP or licensors

Sir Richard called the study a "very important contribution to a debate which is now starting" about how the virus evolved and then turned into a pandemic.

Sir Richard says it could raise questions about how China will compensate affected countries Credit: Reuters

The paper has been rewritten several times, and an earlier version apparently claimed coronavirus could correctly be called the "Wuhan virus".

The earlier version, seen by The Telegraph, claimed to have proven "beyond all reasonable doubt that the Covid-19 virus is engineered."

One of the authors, John Fredrik Moxnes, asked for his name to be withdrawn from the research, throwing its credibility into doubt.

London academics have also dismissed its conclusions, it is understood.

But the remaining authors claim the virus has "unique fingerprints" that cannot have evolved naturally.

The paper has not yet been accepted for publication in any scientific journal.

The Chinese government has always insisted that the outbreak began in a "wet market" in the city of Wuhan late last year.

Coronavirus: Chinese CDC Now Says The Wuhan Wet Market Wasn't The Origin of The Virus

The truth, it seems is slowly emerging. It is just too much of a coincidence to believe that the very coronavirus the Wuhan Lab was working on began naturally in a wet market just down the street! 

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Who Discovered HIV Says Coronavirus Was Created In Lab (second story on link immediately above)

Wuhan P4 Lab ‘Had Emergency Shutdown’ Last October; People Disappear

Coronavirus is 'Uniquely Adapted to Infect Humans'

Coronavirus is 'Uniquely Adapted to Infect Humans'

Top vaccine scientist says it could only have come from an animal through a 'freak of nature' - and the possibility it leaked from Wuhan lab MUST be investigated

By IAN BIRRELL FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

A team of scientists has produced evidence that the pandemic virus is ‘uniquely adapted to infect humans’, raising fresh questions over whether its origins were natural or could have occurred in a laboratory.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, a top vaccine researcher who headed the Australian team, said the virus was ‘not typical of a normal zoonotic [animal to human] infection’ since it appeared with the ‘exceptional’ ability to enter human bodies from day one.

He said the virus should have emerged from an animal through ‘a freak event of nature’ but the possibility that it had leaked from a laboratory could not be ruled out.

Petrovsky, professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide, runs a biotech research unit that will start human trials for a Covid-19 vaccine next month.

‘I haven’t seen a zoonotic virus that has behaved in this way before,’ he said.

A team of scientists has produced evidence that the pandemic virus is ‘uniquely adapted to infect humans’

He told The Mail on Sunday that new viruses crossing over from animals normally strengthen as they adapt to human hosts, but for unexplained reasons, this new coronavirus seems perfectly adapted to infect humans without the need to evolve.

He pointed to the ‘coincidence’ that the most closely related known viruses were being studied in a laboratory in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic erupted, and insisted that the possibility of a leak, however remote, should not be ignored in the search for its origin.

‘The implications may not be good for scientists or global politics, but just because the answers might cause problems, we can’t run away from them,’ he added. ‘There is currently no evidence of a leak but enough circumstantial data to concern us. It remains a possibility until it is ruled out.’

Prof Petrovsky has gone further than any other expert in raising the idea that the virus escaped from one of two laboratories researching bat viruses in Wuhan.

Richard Ebright, one of the world’s top biosecurity experts, also told this newspaper that the odds of this new virus containing such unusual features and occurring naturally were ‘possible – but improbable’.

Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, said scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were creating chimeric coronaviruses (new hybrid micro-organisms) and seeking funding to test their ability to infect human cells while using procedures that leave no sign of human manipulation.

Asked about the chance of a leak, he replied: ‘There definitely is a possibility. But there is no basis to say a high probability.’

Last week, the MoS revealed details of a key study challenging China’s claims that the pandemic emerged from a Wuhan animal market in December. The researchers were ‘surprised’ to find the virus ‘already pre-adapted to human transmission’, contrasting its stability with another coronavirus that evolved rapidly as it spread around the planet during the 2002-04 SARS epidemic. Their findings are backed by the Australian team’s study into the ‘spike protein’ that binds Sars-CoV-2 – the new strain of coronavirus that causes disease – to cells in human bodies. The research, posted on Cornell University’s website but not yet peer-reviewed, used computer modelling to test the spike protein’s ability to bind to humans and 12 possible animal hosts.

It found the ability to bind to human cells far exceeded its ability in other species. ‘This indicates Sars-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen,’ it said, ‘raising questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins lie elsewhere.’

Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, said scientists at the

Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) were creating chimeric coronaviruses (new hybrid micro-organisms)

Prof Petrovsky said it seemed ‘very unusual’ for an ‘exquisitely human adaptive virus’ to have suddenly crossed from an animal host to humans last year.

‘This is either a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention,’ he said. ‘It is possible the virus was a fluke event and it turns out humans were the perfect host.

‘But we don’t have evidence for this because no one has found this virus in an intermediate host animal [for example pangolin] yet.

‘No one can say a laboratory leak is not a possibility.’

He claimed that scientists were reluctant to discuss the possibility of botched lab experiments or leaks since any backlash could lead to research restrictions and threaten crucial research. However, he added, it was vital to discover the source of the virus.

Prof Petrovsky said that if Sars-CoV-2 was a natural event, another related virus could erupt again from the same source with even more devastating consequences. 

‘Next time, it could have far worse mortality rates,’ he warned.

He also highlighted the ‘furin cleavage site’, which allows the spike protein to bind to cells in human tissues including the lungs, liver and small intestines.

Previous studies have noted the efficiency of this cleavage method, which does not exist in the most similar coronaviruses – although researchers in 2009 modified the SARS virus to introduce a furin cleavage site in a similar position to Sars-CoV-2 and found this increased the infectivity of the virus.

In the latest study published on Friday, three German scientists highlighted how this cleavage site was essential for the infection of human lung cells. One US expert in biomedical sciences, who did not wish to be named, said there was no direct evidence to support the idea that the virus was engineered or leaked from a lab, although ‘the location of the acquired furin mutation is quite surprising’.

Another leading research scientist said a member of his team ‘went a bit pale when he looked at this’.

A paper earlier this year by Yong-Zhen Zhang, the Chinese diseases expert who published the first genome sequence for Sars-CoV-2, said this was ‘arguably the most important’ difference between the new virus and its closest known relative, which was derived from a bat by Wuhan researchers.

Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said the ‘body of evidence’ suggested this was a natural virus. ‘You would see signatures if this was an engineered virus and I don’t see any evidence that it is engineered,’ he said.

Last week Chinese health officials confirmed they had ordered some labs to destroy samples of the coronavirus to ensure work was not being carried out in units that did not meet global biosafety rules.

Wuhan P4 Lab ‘Had Emergency Shutdown’ Last October; People Disappear

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus