Until just today, or yesterday, my take on where the deadly coronavirus came from conformed to the standard one: it originated in the wild animal market in Wuhan, probably by transferring naturally from bats to pangolins or some such exotic animal prized by the Chinese for food and medical purposes. But a few articles, and then a search of several more, have opened me to the possibility that perhaps the virus did originate in a lab—not intentionally released as a bioweapon, necessarily, but perhaps accidentally released by a careless worker at a viral research lab in Wuhan, of which there are two. But first, it is important to know about the kind of research that could be key to the origin of the pandemic.
Viral researchers have long been interested in investigating how dangerous, flu-type viruses could pass from avian species to mammals; that is, which genetic sequence might have made this possible, and particularly how this ‘transmission capability’ could be either naturally enhanced or even engineered in the laboratory. Indeed, in 2009, the U.S. government initiated a program to look for viruses that can cross from animals to humans, and funded this project it called PREDICT to work with labs in some thirty-one countries, all under the auspices of USAID—the U.S. Agency for International Development. A major breakthrough came in 2011 or so, when Ron Fouchier, a researcher at Erasmus University in Holland, wondering about what would be required for a bird virus to mutate into a plague virus for humans, developed a technique to infect ferrets with an avian flu virus, and then pass it through other ferrets. Why ferrets? Because they respond much like humans: if a virus could jump between ferrets, it was likely to be able to jump between humans as well. Fouchier passed the virus through ten ferrets, the virus slightly mutating each time, until he noticed that ferrets in nearby cells were becoming infected, even without close contact. He drew the immediate conclusion: the virus had become highly capable of transmission in ferrets (and thereby in humans)—precisely the quality needed for a pandemic. The research process became known as “animal passage,” and it was increasingly used after that in labs far and wide. The common term for this type of virus-mutation work became gain-of-function (GOF)—in this case, the virus gaining the new function of being capable of rapid transmission in mammals.
Now the stage was set for increased work in labs to find out everything that could be known about viruses, how they become contagious, and how they jump from animals to humans, and then from one human to another—all valuable in possibly heading off future viruses and pandemics, and, it was hoped, in creating vaccines. Security agencies were also keenly interested in knowing what nefarious regimes might be doing to weaponize viruses. But this research set off alarm bells as well. In fact, soon after Fouchier’s work was published in 2011, Obama administration officials worried that a dangerously-enhanced virus might leak from one of these labs and set off the very pandemic the research was seeking to prevent; and so, they urged that government agencies place a moratorium on such research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did just that in October of 2014, mandating a funding pause on any such research that could make flu, SARS, or MERS more transmissible, and thereby more dangerous. In the debates pro- and con-GOF that ensued, one of the most outspoken critics of such research was epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, who wrote in Nature in 2015 that the work pioneered by Fouchier entails a unique risk that a laboratory accident could spark a pandemic, killing millions (cited in Newsweek, 4.27.20).
Despite such criticism, the moratorium was not to last. The NIH eventually sided with Fouchier, and in 2017 lifted its restrictions on GOF research. It reasoned that the risks were worth the potential gain in the preparation of anti-viral medications and preventing pandemics, and in surveillance of what potential enemies might do. This meant that after 2017, countless labs sprung up, doing the animal-passage experiments that Fouchier had pioneered to create “gain-of-function” or GOF—the mutation that would enhance the ability of deadly viruses to spread through a human population, i.e. their transmissibility. In Wuhan, the Institute of Virology was one of the labs to receive PREDICT funding from USAID for this kind of research. These labs engaged in this research in spite of the many mishaps that had already occurred, literally hundreds of them, including a release of anthrax from a U.S. lab in 2014 that exposed 84 people, and the release of a SARS virus from a lab in Bejing in 2004 that resulted in four infections and one death. Indeed, the U.S. embassy warned in January 2018 that the lab in Wuhan had serious deficiencies in trained personnel and could be primed for just such an accident. Nonetheless, the funded research in Wuhan went on, its researchers focusing especially on bats and the viruses they carry, especially in their feces, which were routinely collected and tested in the lab. In 2015, for example, the lab worked on a GOF experiment precisely designed to insert a SARS-type RNA snippet of natural virus into another coronavirus to make it capable of infecting human cells. It is precisely this kind of research that many experts had warned about. Richard Enbright of Rutgers University, put his warning in another way, alleging that since the PREDICT program “had produced no results” useful for preventing or even combatting outbreaks, it was essentially playing with fire for no good reason.
Still, in spite of all these warnings, the research was allowed, and also encouraged to go on. And it did. Now we have a pandemic which has taken over 200,000 lives and infected more than 3 million humans, with no end in sight. And the majority opinion among scientists seems to be that the lethal coronavirus evolved naturally, and made the transition from bats to humans via a natural mutation. This was the conclusion of both the WHO and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in January, when they originally investigated. However, in a revised report, the DIA on March 27 has now judged that the origins of the outbreak remain unknown, and now admit the possibility that the outbreak could have occurred due to an “accidental” release from the Wuhan lab, whose practices are described as “unsafe.” Still, the report dismisses the idea that the disease was genetically engineered, and the related, but by no means synonymous, idea that it was intentionally released as a bioweapon. So the DIA now admits what many critics have warned about all along—the possibility of an accidental release—but still denies the theory that Covid-19 was genetically engineered.
This becomes a critical point. The origin of the deadly virus that is Covid-19, that is, though it could have come from the Wuhan lab, is said to have most likely originated and mutated naturally in animals. The WHO report takes this position. So does a report by Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, which performed a genetic analysis of the virus, reported March 17 in Nature Medicine. Looking for signs of “manipulation,” Andersen and his colleagues concluded that the signs indicated it was most likely the product of “natural selection,” i.e., not from a lab. But strong objections have been raised to this point. The aforementioned infectious-disease expert Richard Enbright maintains that Andersen’s analysis does not rule out a human-manipulated “animal-passage” as the origin of the Covid-19 virus. Jonathan Eisen, evolutionary biologist at UC Davis, though he believes that the evidence favors the theory that the virus evolved from nature, admits that there is “wiggle room” for the theory that it was created in the lab using ‘animal-passage’ techniques. More telling, perhaps, is the recent opinion voiced by Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Dr. Luc Montagnier. Montagnier won the Nobel for his discovery of the HIV virus. He is firm in his opinion that the coronavirus was created in a lab by molecular biologists, and he cites evidence that the virus actually contains “genetic elements of HIV,” with which he is obviously familiar. On April 27, he said, “There’s a part which is obviously the classic virus, and there’s another mainly coming from the bat, but that part has added sequences particularly from HIV—the AIDS virus” (Dr-rath-foundation .org, 4/27/20). He added that such an addition could not have arisen naturally. He also noted that an Indian research group had, in late January, come to a similar conclusion about virus parts that had “uncanny similarities” to HIV. That research paper was then retracted, he noted, apparently due to government pressure.
At this date, no one can really prove which of the existing theories about the origins of Covid-19 is true, or which the evidence shows cannot be true: natural origin from bats, through some intermittent carrier animal like the pangolin, or a manipulated virus created in the lab via “animal passage” experiments. One thing is certain, though. Reputable scientists have been warning for years that the GOF research in creating new, more deadly forms of virus in the lab bore the risk of creating an unstoppable pandemic—this through accidental, not intentional release of the newly-created pathogen. That dire scenario has now occurred. And though most of the world’s agencies have tried to discourage the speculation that human interference, albeit for reasons meant to be helpful to humanity, might have caused this pandemic, that awful possibility refuses to disappear. In short, it is clear that tinkering with nature, especially at the genetic level where we can now manipulate deadly pathogens, carries serious risks. These risks no longer remain speculative. They have been realized in one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen. At the least, they suggest that the ‘Cassandras’ among us, experts who had reason to know whereof they spoke, should have been listened to, their counsel for caution heeded.
They were not, it was not, and the entire world is now paying the price.
Lawrence DiStasi
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