Striking new evidence of a zoonotic origin

Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen et al. may have been right all along!

April Fools!

It remains the case that evidence points towards a lab origin as the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers in 2018 proposed a grant (DEFUSE) aiming to modify a bat SARS-related coronavirus in highly specific ways: insert a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of a bat sarbecovirus cloned in a reverse genetic system in Wuhan.

SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 as a bat sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction and a restriction map consistent with a reverse genetic system assembled with enzymes only used together on a CoV once before in 2017, by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the PI of DEFUSE.

The odds of these coincidences in the natural evolution of a virus are infinitesimal. Each anomaly under zoonotic origin theory is expected by the lab origin theory.

While DEFUSE wasn’t funded by DARPA, the DEFUSE PI’s, who had never before all co-authored a document prior to DEFUSE, received funding from Anthony Fauci’s NIAID in 2019 at the time of emergence. Their prior collaborations also received support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, The Wellcome Trust’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, and other sources.

The PI of DEFUSE, Peter Daszak, proceeded to withhold “China Genbank Sequences” from the public, explaining these sequences would bring “unwelcome attention” to his collaboration. He and fellow DEFUSE PI’s, alongside many leaders of The Wellcome Trust, conspired to write an article to The Lancet calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories” yet not sign the article to not look self-serving. Indeed, DEFUSE PI’s (namely, Ralph Baric) contributed to the letter without authoring it and Daszak did not disclose the conflict of interest of his work proposing to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan in 2018, nor did Daszak disclose his active collaboration with those same authors in 2019, nor did Jeremy Farrar and others at The Wellcome Trust who co-authored the letter disclose their own involvement through the Global Virome Project. Daszak didn’t disclose his major conflicts of interest when being appointed as the US emissary to the WHO investigation on COVID origins, nor when appointed to lead The Lancet investigation on COVID origins. DEFUSE was pried from his unwilling hands by a group of sleuths known as DRASTIC, along with whistleblower reports from someone affiliated with DARPA who believed DEFUSE was the blueprint to making SARS-CoV-2.

Anthony Fauci, whose NIAID funded DEFUSE PI’s in 2019, prompted several scientists to call a lab origin theory “implausible”. These scientists - Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes (who also studied SARSr-CoVs with the Wuhan institute if virology and initially concealed this fact), Robert Garry, and Andrew Rambaut (to a lesser extent, Ian Lipkin) - did not disclose the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s funders (Fauci, NIH head Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar) in helping them write their manuscript and usher it into prestigious journals, a research ethics violation referred to as “ghostwriting”. The now disproven Proximal Origins article called a lab origin “implausible” yet it is now known to have been written at a time when its lead author Kristian Andersen believed a lab origin was “so friggin likely” - put simply, Proximal Origin reads to a subject matter expert like a scientific lie. These authors proceeded to pave a trail of flawed science claiming to have attributed the virus’ spillover to the Huanan seafood market, only to have every single paper they’ve written debunked immediately for fatally flawed statistics (Worobey et al.), buggy code (Pekar et al.), or cherry-picking one sample with both raccoon dog DNA and a single snippet of SARS-CoV-2 RNA (which could have been an artifact of the sequencing methods, or even a contaminant) only to have missed the negative correlation between raccoon dog DNA and SARS-CoV-2 RNA (Crits-Cristoph and Debarre et al.). Despite the scientific flaws that invalidate each of these papers, every utterance of these authors has received enormous press attention, leading one to hypothesize that the active roles of funders of Wuhan’s labs in prompting & promoting this article may have continued in helping expand the media reach of these authors’ flawed papers.

Many virologists continue to ignore the mounting evidence of a lab origin. When a study was conducted surveying what the study called “experts” on their beliefs of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, 78% of the scientists they interviewed had never heard of DEFUSE, raising questions about the expert-status on a lab origin for a population that has never examined the research activities of the lab, akin to surveying experts of steam engines on evidence of wrongdoing in an accident at a nuclear power plant.

The general public is correct in believing a lab origin is more likely, and academics are currently inhabiting a bubble of what is at best considered misinformation. However, the actions of Daszak, Fauci, Farrar, Andersen believing a lab origin is “so friggin likely” while publishing papers calling it “implausible”, Holmes concealing his work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and People’s Liberation Army scientists, and others warrant giving the information these people peddle the dishonorable title of disinformation. A small coterie of scientists is misleading a larger number of scientists who live in a state of willful disbelief, possibly fearing retribution from their funders or regulatory consequences on their research as they parrot Daszak’s claims that a lab origin is a conspiracy theory without ever knowing of the grant Daszak wrote aiming to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2, nor the “China Genbank Sequences” Daszak withheld to avoid “unwelcome attention”.

SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in a lab as a consequence of risky research whose risks were actualized, resulting in a global geopolitical incident causing over 20 million deaths. The consequences of such an accident, and the strength of evidence supporting the lab origin theory, embroils scientists who advocated for risky research, scientists who funded risky research, scientists who conducted risky research, and nuclear-armed countries like China that have refused to share lab notebooks, who have shifted their narrative from zoonotic to blaming India to blaming the US, and have retaliated against anybody who claims the virus did not originate in their labs instead of simply sharing their research activities and deleted databases of SARSr-CoVs to absolve themselves in the event this virus truly was zoonotic.

The true fools this April are those who believe such an obvious truth can be suppressed by falsely claiming there is “no evidence”. The true fools this April are those who diminish the value of their expertise by calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories” without ever reading DEFUSE, or who manufacture false beliefs of virological innocence without disclosing their involvement with the labs by calling a lab origin “implausible” while believing it’s “so friggin likely” and not disclosing the role of the lab’s funders in prompting, editing, and promoting their articles.

Happy Monday, folks.