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The Lab Leak Hypothesis Revisited

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Elderberry:
Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 5/17/2021

If you’ve been following the blog since 2020, you know that we’ve looked at

the lab
leak
hypothesis
several
times.
(links at site)

Now Nicholas Wade, a science writer who’s worked on the staff of Nature, Science and the New York Times has taken a long look at the possibility the Wuhan Coronavirus did indeed leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Early on, several actors did their best to push the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis off the table:

    From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

    “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

    Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

    It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

    Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

Next came another attempt to declare that the Wuhan coronavirus couldn’t have been the result of a lab due to certain characteristics.

    A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

More: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=48107

mystery-ak:
May 16, 2021
A Review of ‘Origin of COVID - Following the Clues,’ by Nicholas Wade
By Marilyn Wright

The article “Origin of COVID - Following the Clues” by Nicholas Wade is a comprehensive investigation into the COVID19 pandemic.  Wade is a science journalist who has written articles for the big publishers.  His Origin of COVID article is a clear-eyed analysis of what we do and don’t know.  He tells us the details that lead a reasonable reader to conclude that the Wuhan Virology Institute created the COVID19 virus and through sloppy techniques released the virus.  The disease spread rapidly, killing millions and attacking elderly populations in particular.

There are two main theories of how the COVID19 virus developed:

1.  Nature-Made:  the virus developed naturally in bats and spread by a wet market (live animals slaughtered on the spot) in Wuhan.  Darkly referred to as the ‘bat soup theory’.

2.  Lab-Made:  the virus was manipulated in the Wuhan Virology Institute laboratory to make it more infectious and more dangerous to humans.  It then escaped from the lab.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/a_review_of_origin_of_covid__following_the_clues_by_nicholas_wade.html

PeteS in CA:
As long as players in the Wuhan lab work were the sources of "information" - and equally important, IMO, Trump was still President - the MSM were not going to admit even the possibility of a lab leak.

DefiantMassRINO:

It's odd that a bat beta corona virus that's usually found in bat excrement and urine in isolated, remote caves in Yunnan Province just happens to make its way to Wuhan China to start a global pandemic.  It's also odd that same city also happens to have (2) Chinese government bio-research facilities, one of which is world-renowned for its research into bat beta corona virus.  One other thing, how did the Chinese lab just happen to sequence the Covid-19/SARS-2 genome so quickly if the virus was so novel?

PeteS in CA:
Nicholas Wade's https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038 is a careful consideration of available evidence as to SARS2's origin. Unless China has an unexpected outbreak of the Honesty Virus, I doubt a better evidence-based summation will be available soon.

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