War Against Lab Leak Grinds On, Beyond Laughable Now

Fifty-one percent of Americans favori lab leak origins of
SARS-CoV-2 virus, causing Coronavirus disease COVID-19,
Morning Consult

The explanation SARS-CoV-2 virus, (causing Coronavirus disease COVID-19), originated through accidental release from a research laboratory became the majority view of Americans in February 2023, according to polls in Morning Consult.

Democrats lead the nation in believing Covid 19 naturally occurred, instead of spilling over from a virology research laboratory — with only some 42 percent of Democrats favoring lab leak origins, 51 percent of all Americans favoring lab leak origins, and 72 percent of Republicans favoring lab leak origins. Morning Consult

Democrats have been obstinate in their refusal to publicly acknowledge the proposition an engineered lab leak that caused Coronavirus disease COVID-19 as an origins explanation is not only plausible, but now is clear and convincing and climbing.

However, as government leaks continue, it is becoming less politically palatable for Joe Biden and the Democrats to continue the Big Lie that Covid 19 must have not have come from a lab. [For a continuing dose of evidence, reason and facts on SARS-CoV-2 origins, see Alex Washburne @Ayjchan @JamieMetzl, Nicholas Wade, DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), and especially all the folks at BiosafetyNow who are embarrassing the deluded and dishonest.

Virologists, clumsy at politics, to this day often sound like dead-enders in the origins debate. And not just virologists.

Writes Justin B. Kinney, Quantitative Biologist. Associate Professor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Co-founder, Biosafety Now, http://biosafetynow.org, "Not just virologists—public health experts and biosecurity experts too. Really seems like many in this extended science/policy community reflexively circle the wagons at any mention of a 'lab leak.'"

A recent exchange on social media exemplifies some public pronouncements and an unsettling ideology of many virologists, (noone is sure how many).

Marburg virus of 1967

The exchange concerns the infamous Marburg virus of 1967, one of the most famous lab leak tragedies, in which a deadly virus causing hemorrhagic fever leaked from lab workers to families and caregivers, resulting in 31 deaths.

One Krutika Kuppalli, a reputable bio-health expert, using perverse reasoning, voices her personal view that because a virus can infect human beings from animals, zoonoses, this virus capability disconfirms  possibility that researchers in a lab were studying that virus and that the virus subsequently could have leaked from the laboratory through lab workers, such as what happened in Marburg, Germany.

Writes Kuppalli on March 24, "If we can believe that #Marburg and many other infectious diseases (e.g. Ebola, Plague, Mpox etc) is the result of zoonotic transmission why is it so hard for us to believe that it was the same with COVID-19."

In reply to Kuppalli, Justin B. Kinney, Quantitative Biologist. Associate Professor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Co-founder, Biosafety Now (http://biosafetynow.org, @BiosafetyNow) in muted, apparent disgust, writes, "Fun fact: Marburg virus is named after Marburg, Germany—where the virus does not naturally occur—because the first documented outbreak was caused by a lab leak at the Behringwerke industrial plant there. @BiosafetyNow."

In reply to Kinney's simple and, what one would guess, is an uncontroversial narrative of a historical fact of a lab leak comes the following exchange:

This is absolutely false and why on earth would you make that up?

— Gigi Gronvall (@ggronvall) March 26, 2023

The following exchanges take place that ought merit Kinney be given a Nobel Peace Price for his patience in dealing with utter stupidity.

What I wrote is true. I thought you’d know this history.

— Justin B. Kinney (@jbkinney) March 26, 2023

I’m astounded by the disdainful reaction of public health and biosecurity experts to my *accurately* calling the 1967 outbreak of Marburg virus a “lab leak”. Their reaction makes me even less inclined to believe what they say about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. https://t.co/cfC1HdJCgu

— Justin B. Kinney (@jbkinney) March 26, 2023

Lesson going forward is: If an anti-lab leak stooge speaks, he or she is lying.

These state-sponsored propagandists are so transparent & vile.

— Dana Parish (@danaparish) March 26, 2023

Marburg was not a lab leak? It was lab workers infected by monkeys. That's a lab leak. In 2019, a US biolab was shut down because necropsies were performed on monkeys and the door to the room wasn't closed, exposing lab techs outside who weren't wearing respiratory protection.

— Laurence (Larry) Boorstein (@LarryBoorstein) March 26, 2023

It’s more than semantics/insults, the scientific community (of which I am a member) is by and large treating the public like they are stupid children that need to be punished for questioning their authority. I feel it’s the scientific community that needs to be held accountable

— Bryce Nickels (@Bryce_Nickels) March 26, 2023

>

It's troubling how many virologists seem more concerned about the potential for new rules and regulations on their own research than the possibility that the research of their respected colleagues might have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. https://t.co/KhuBSYFAiq

— Justin B. Kinney (@jbkinney) March 25, 2023

Yes, it is troubling that virologists seem more concerned about the potential for new rules and regulations on their own research than the possibility that the research of their respected colleagues might have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even more troubling are the facts that the Democrat Party is not concerned that bio-research might have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, and that Biden and the Democrats continue to block open investigations into the COVID-19 pandemic origins.

The attacks and lies will go on for a very long time.

It may seem subtle for people outside the field, but for anyone who's been paying attention throughout COVID, Dr. Gonsalves has been one of Dr. Fauci's attack dogs.

His attack on Dr. Redfield's far superior virological credentials is a transparently bad-faith defense of Fauci. https://t.co/WzdpWidaWk

— Alex Washburne (@WashburneAlex) March 26, 2023

Where, dolt, did Kinney suggest gain-of-function research was involved in the laboratory accidents with Marburg virus?

Why, dolt, do you limit the definition of "laboratory accident" to include only gain-of-function research?

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) March 26, 2023

“In over 1,000 years of evolutionary time, we see no evidence of a furin cleavage site in any SARS CoV, except for the SARS-CoV that emerged in Wuhan 1.5 years after researchers proposed to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS CoV in Wuhan.” Mmmm… https://t.co/rz4B1K2JHP

— Frank Visser (@ReusVisser) March 26, 2023

Unsurprisingly, virologists want the public to believe up is down, wet is dry, day is night, and that they care about lab safety. That journalists keep pretending AR and cohorts are experts in anything other than misinformation peddling is a joke. https://t.co/aXLV3Nw5Ar

— Bryce Nickels (@Bryce_Nickels) March 26, 2023

Kuppalli's statement, and similar statements over the last 24 hours by Eckerle, Gronvall, Rasmussen, and Pease are a public declaration of an inability to read, an inability to reason and/or a desire to deceive.

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) March 26, 2023

I want everyone to observe how confidently "science journalist" @Laurie_Garrett states something as epidemiological fact, pointing to her book

And then read @R_H_Ebright, an actual scientist.

If you just read Garrett, your understanding of science would be wrong. https://t.co/4dqu1GfUzs pic.twitter.com/VCoG9RMVQc

— Alex Washburne (@WashburneAlex) March 27, 2023

We Need COVID 19-Origins Hearings, ala Kastenmeier Vietnam War Hearings

Madison, Wisconsin — March 8, 2023, a House Committee held an anticipated hearing on investigating the COVID-19 origins.

But House Democrats performed shamefully, exemplified by Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Maryland), a lightweight non-entity, who launched pathetic ad homium attacks again science writer and hearing witness, Nicholas Wade. 

Wade penned a brilliant piece on COVID-19 origins, reason and thought control, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?, at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists some two years earlier.

But Wade's COVID-19 origins work never came up under questioning by Mfume.

Instead, Mfume spent his time trying to vilify Wade for writing A Troublesome Inheritance
Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin Random House, 2015) that has absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19 origins, the mission behind the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Mfume's ad homium offered no clarity beyond the fact Mfume did not read and is not equipped to understand Wade's thoughtful work.

Mfume and congressional Democrats wanted to subvert the hearing, and clearly millions dead did not weigh on this Party of liars and sheep.

Mfume does exemplify Democrat refusal among Congress and Joe Biden to probe what is almost certainly a lab leak origin of COVID 19 as the world is over three years into one of the most spectacular mass gas-lighting projects in U.S. history after the most deadly Pandemic in modern history.

In the face of U.S. government lying led by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), U.S. intelligence, censorship across the media,  (see Cleveland. Washburne. Leon. Hibbett and Grim. Taibbi. Greenwald,), it is time for citizens to bypass the media, Congress, Democrats and Biden and hold grassroots hearings on COVID-19 origin.

Robert W. Kastenmeier Vietnam War hearings

This COVID-19 origins hearing can be modeled on the Robert W. Kastenmeier Vietnam War hearings in 1966 when citizens replaced so-called leaders who refused to face facts in the midst of lies and death, and massive government duplicity.

Today, congressional Democrats and @POTUS will never accede to honest probes of #COVID19 origins. This is why we need the #COVID19 origins akin to Kastenmeier's.

Honest scientists, intellectuals and victims could testify. Citizens can offer statements on what lying about Covid 19 means to them.

Concerned folks such as @Ayjchan @JamieMetzl , Nicholas Wade, DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), among those burdened only by a commitment to truth, can offer candid summaries of evidence, reason and facts.

Kweisi Mfume and his dependable Party of liars need not attend.

Even as Biden promises to release Covid 19 origins information, these is absolutely no reason to trust this president and his party to begin telling the truth now.

We citizens of the United States and world must lead against Democrats.

Anthony Fauci Lied about COVID 19 Orgins, U.S. House E-mails Reveal

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed," wrote the great journalist, I.F. Stone.

I first encountered I.F. Stone's admonition on a large wall poster in a hall some feet away from Erwin Knoll's office at The Progressive Magazine in 1985.

Stone's statement seemed both inspiring and obvious.

This week, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), is revealed as having self-consciously lied about how the Pandemic began. 

Emails released by members of a U.S. House committee reveal Anthony Fauci worked with virologists  and U.S. government officials in early 2020, musing on formulating strategy to examine COVID 19 origins, and the efficacy of ways of countering "voices of conspiracy" asserting the possibility of an accidental Chinese lab leak of the COVID 19 virus.

"Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum," read a Feb. 4, 2020 email from former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Fauci and other NIH officials.

The conspiracy theory is the contention that Chinese government scientists secretly bio-engineered a Coronavirus that subsequently was unintentionally released into the world to catastrophic consequences.

Help put down is the not the same as explain what the science says.

Currently, there are 312,173,462 confirmed cases and 5,501,000 deaths and climbing, according to the World Health Organization.

This is not to assert that public health advice and measures advocated by United States public health officials are not valid. We should, roughly: Get vaccinated and boosted, wear a mask, and get tested.

The emails do reveal Fauci and public health officials disregarding the fact the Chinese government is a hyper-secret State that routinely acts destructively, brokering no dissent as it veers into totalitarianism, emitting routine lies. 

Further, the obvious plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis was acknowledged in the same emails in which Fauci and his colleagues decided to publicly dismiss what likely occurred in China.

Reports Maia Hibbett and Ryan Grim in The Intercept:

The [U.S. House Members] letter, signed by James Comer, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, but were heavily redacted when published in June 2021. The redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020, telephone conference between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci; his then-boss, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins; and several of the world’s leading virologists. The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden at the time.

Oversight Committee staff were able to view the full emails 'in camera,' which means they could physically look at them and take notes but couldn’t take copies with them. The information released Tuesday for the first time reveals the content of notes taken on the February 1 call.

On that call, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry told Fauci and Collins the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan lab. It might have been genetically engineered, the transcription of Garry’s notes suggests, but this now seems unlikely. Another possibility, put forward by Farzan, was that it could have been evolved in the lab through a process known as serial passage.

Work since Feb. 2020 by independent intellectuals and scientists around the globe on COIVD 19 origins devastates the Chinese-American government public consensus that natural, non-man-made explanations must account for the emergence of the Pandemic. (Vanity Fair; Origins of SARS-CoV-2; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

To disagree with the consensus is to engage in "conspiracy" talk, an elite U.S. research community now led by Fauci assures us in well-publicized statements in The Lancet (Feb 2020) and Nature (March 2020), an effort referenced in the emails released this week.

A May 5, 2021 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists feature, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, suggests looking closer and considering the evidence, without apology to the moment's consensus, and Fauci's dismissal.

Writes Wade:

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

Now, even Fauci tacitly admits publicly that dismissal and dishonest ridicule of the lab leak hypothesis is no longer a sustainable position, as Jack Brewster details in a chronology of Fauci statement in Forbes, published June 16, 2021.

See also Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti in Breaking Points below:

---
The work of DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), an independent group of itinerant intellectuals and scientists, instructs as an example of promoting rational examination of hypotheses on the origins of COIVD 19.

An outline follows.
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SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis

Laboratory Hypothesis Leak Overview

Guest Post by Andrew Tuntable, Ph. D. atuntable@gmail.com @atuntable

DRASTIC and other groups have uncovered substantial evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by the leak of the virus from a laboratory in Wuhan.  This evidence together with many references is described in this paper:

SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis

In summary, the evidence is:-

    The bat coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the world’s leading bat coronaviruses laboratory.  (Not proof, but certainly of interest.)
    Wuhan is over 1000 km from the relevant bats.  The bats were not traded in the Wuhan wet markets.
    The virus arose suddenly, fully functional, with no known human or animal precursors.  This is unlike SARS-1 and MERS.
    The virus is a chimera (a mixture) of two different viruses.  Chimera’s can arise naturally, but are also often engineered in laboratories.
    The virus also contains two different powerful adaptations at the same time, an effective spike protein and a furin cleavage site.  This is why it is the most infectious coronavirus in 100 years.
    The WIV and the Eco Health Alliance proudly published their earlier results on genetically engineering chimeras based on coronaviruses.  They have also submitted grant proposals to add furin cleavage sites to coronaviruses.
    It was discovered that in 2013 six bat guano miners became ill with a SARS-like virus, samples of which were sent to the WIV.  This could have been the precursor to SARS-COV-2.  The WIV had said the miners had a fungal infection.
    The WIV conducted coronavirus research at biosecurity levels 2 and 3, not high security BSL-4.  A US government report had raised concerns about their biosecurity practices in 2017.
    Lab leaks are not uncommon and have happened in many laboratories around the world.
    There is some evidence that workers at the WIV became ill in late 2019.
    More importantly, the Chinese government has removed data and has angrily thwarted any proper investigation.  They refuse to disclose whether the WIV was studying a SARS-COV-2 like virus.
    There does not appear to have been any attempt to trace the contacts of the earliest cases by looking for long lived antibodies.
    The Chinese government has still not found any natural precursor after an extensive search testing over 80,000 samples.
    There are no credible rebuttals.

The weight of this evidence shows that the virus escaped from the WIV beyond reasonable doubt.

This is important because this technology has become much more accessible to laboratories around the world, often with minimal oversight.  Advances in technology could enable future genetically engineered viruses to be far more infectious and virulent than SARS-COV-2.

(Permission to use this cartoon is granted with attribution.)

This is what must not be allowed to happen.  Students from existing laboratories setting up their own laboratories around the world and conducting dangerous Gain of Function research with inadequate safety precautions.

The next engineered virus could be even more infectious, have a longer incubation period, a higher mortality rate and, like HIV, attack the immune system.  It could be far more dangerous than SARS-COV-2.

Full Paper here.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Magazine Shatters Thought Control on COVID 19 Lab Leak Hypothesis

Update: See also The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins, and Origins of SARS-CoV-2, (Jaime Metzl).

In 2020 to suggest that Wuhan Lab Leak hypothesis should be investigated and interrogated was considered heresy in elite circles. This was non-permissible thought, a forbidden topic, hence a media blackout.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  — the venerable journal that has long criticized government duplicity on major safety concerns  — has published major features in 2020-2021 that, in sum, reveal research scientists and U.S. and Chinese public health officials conducting themselves akin to dishonest politicians on the topic of the origin of COVID 19.

The COIVD 19 origin conversation has appeared often an exercise in thought control and propaganda, a situation made worse by the presence of a lunatic in the White House throughout 2019- Jan 2021. 

On the one hand, there was a prominent research community promoting disingenuous statements on the lab leak hypothesis that were marked by misleading characterizations, deceptions, omissions and a failure to declare conflicts of interest by statement authors and organizers; on the other hand — the lunatic.

To disagree with the consensus is to engage in "conspiracy" talk, an elite research community assures us in well-publicized statements in The Lancet (Feb 2020) and Nature (March 2020).

A May 5, 2021 Bulletin feature, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, suggests looking closer and considering the evidence, without apology to the moment's consensus. Wade's piece has reignited journalism on the origin topic.

Writes Wade:

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

Wade has written a brilliant analysis and it is crucial reading for those demanding transparency and candor from their governments during this unprecedented crisis.