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By Katherine Eban
For those following the debatable debate about the origins of COVID-19, several days have passed.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly stated that the Bureau considers an accidental biohazard leak from a lab in China to be the most likely maximum cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. The assessment was conducted in August 2021, as part of an intelligence review. In an interview aired by Fox News, Wray broke his silence on the matter, saying, “The FBI has been assessing for some time that the origins of the pandemic are likely a possible lab incident in Wuhan. He added: “Here he is talking about a possible leak from a laboratory controlled by the Chinese government. “
Wray’s comments follow a Wall Street Journal report Sunday that revealed that the U. S. Department of Energy is in the process of being in the face of the Wall Street Journal. The U. S. government had replaced its position on the origins of the pandemic, based on new information. The DoE now believes, albeit with “low confidence,” that COVID-19 “most likely emerged” from a lab leak. The new assessment was noted in a classified intelligence report that was recently provided to the White House and some members of Congress.
This stroke of revelations without delay replaced the optics, if not the ground-level reality, of the highly politicized and poisonous debate about the origins of COVID-19, which I began reporting on in 2021. True, there is still no transparent evidence that the virus escaped from a laboratory. But for the first time in at least two years, the option of a lab leak is being taken seriously, even among many who in the past thought it was an unfounded conspiracy theory.
For months, Democrats in Congress have refused to conduct a bipartisan investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and Biden’s management has not insisted on adding a plan for a bipartisan commission that would have investigated the factor in the most recent spending bill. The hesitation is perhaps understandable, given the vehemence with which Republicans embarked on a blatantly partisan crusade to shift the duty of the pandemic to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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by Bess Levin
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There is no guarantee that the events of the coming weeks will replace the Democrats’ calculus, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed to acknowledge that the option of an alleged lab leak deserves to be taken seriously. “The bottom line is we want to get to the bottom of this,” Schumer was quoted as saying by the Journal. “Biden’s management is committed to this. They have all kinds of people watching him, and we’ll wait to see his results. “A spokesman for Schumer would not say whether the senator now supports a bipartisan investigation.
For now, the notable questions go far beyond the answers. There is fragmentary and circumstantial evidence for two credible but contradictory hypotheses: first, that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread to humans from an inflamed animal. in the rainy Wuhan market where the disease first exploded; or two, that the virus originated in a nearby laboratory in Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was known for conducting diy studies on coronavirus, is about thirteen kilometers from the market. Even closer is the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. , which also operates laboratories.
The World Health Organization, which has been largely blocked by China in its efforts to investigate the origin of the pandemic, maintains that both scenarios remain on the table.
China has long denied that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, or even within its borders. On Monday, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry told a news briefing: “The origin of the novel coronavirus is a clinical factor and not being politicized. “
Last night, it was unclear what new data had led the Department of Energy to replace its assessment. This data, which remains classified, was allegedly shared with other intelligence agencies, which have not replaced their assessments.
But the replacement at the Energy Department is notable, as it budgets and oversees a network of 17 national laboratories, adding the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which has complex national security capabilities. Robert Redfield, former director of President Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the Department of Energy and FBI have a “large clinical workforce,” which makes their lab tests important.
Others reserve judgment until more main points emerge. “It’s very complicated to say anything until we see what data motivated this updated analysis,” says Stephen Goldstein, an associate of postdoctoral studies in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah, who co-authored an influential study paper linking the origin of COVID-19 to the humidity market. The power “has shown it to other agencies and they haven’t replaced their assessments, and confidence is low,” Goldstein adds. “If the knowledge exists and is declassified and I can update my own analysis, that’s wonderful. “
In May 2021, President Biden ordered the U. S. intelligence community to be able to do so. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security, adding the FBI, CIA and State and Energy Departments offices will conduct a 90-day review of the source issue. A declassified account of their findings reflected a broad consensus. on several key points: that SARS-CoV-2 likely made the first impression in Wuhan no later than November 2019, that it gave the impression without the Chinese government’s knowledge, and that it did not evolve as a biological weapon. Most agencies also agreed that the virus was “probably not genetically modified,” two agencies felt they didn’t have enough evidence to make a decision.
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However, agencies have been divided over how the virus made the leap to humans. The National Intelligence Council and 4 other agencies favored an herbal origin, although with “low confidence”, and another 3 remained undecided. An unnamed firm, which turned out to be the FBI: assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 is likely the result of a laboratory-related incident, likely involving testing, animal handling or sampling through the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the abstract said.
This sober investigation by intelligence professionals stood in stark contrast to the bitter debate that broke out in the press and social media. through marginal figures. Steve Bannon, a far-right adviser to President Trump, connected the guns with a Hong Kong billionaire to make far-fetched and unsubstantiated claims, such as the concept that the Chinese Communist Party had developed COVID-19 as a biological weapon.
In April 2020, after President Trump claimed, without offering evidence, from the White House rostrum that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, the lines of political war hardened. Xenophobic, unscientific and outright false claims emanating from the right.
Although more valid questions arose around the laboratory leak hypothesis, most mainstream media continued to provide the origin of the market as an established science that enjoyed consensus among scientists.
A number of studies, in particular, have led scientists and journalists to continue to argue that the fallout theory is much more likely than the laboratory alternative. In July, an organization of leading virologists published two peer-reviewed papers analyzing the first cases of inflamed patients in Wuhan, geospatial mapping. They concluded that SARS-CoV-2 “occurred through the live wild animal industry in China” and that the Wuhan market was “the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. “
On Monday, Fauci told the Boston Globe at a fitness and biotech convention that idea mapping research “quite suggests” that the virus emerged as a “natural event. “Stephen Goldstein, one of the paper’s co-authors, says that while he believes the evidence strongly affects the Wuhan market, “we acknowledge in the paper that there are still elements that are unknown. “
In the last two years, however, a more complex picture has emerged, little by little, due to the paintings of freedom of data organizations, a small number of scientists and journalists, and an organization of online detectives calling themselves DRASTIC.
It turned out that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) legalized a U. S. clinical trials nonprofit. The U. S. Department of Health is called EcoHealth Alliance to provide secondary federal investment grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which were used to conduct studies on the coronavirus. (The Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General recently decided that the NIH failed to adequately oversee the central grant in question. )
It also turned out that some of the oldest and most convincing arguments opposing a possible laboratory origin came from scientists who first suspected that a laboratory origin was likely, as revealed through emails received through freedom of information requests.
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by Bess Levin
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And it emerged that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with a University of North Carolina virologist and WIV’s smartest coronavirus researcher, applied in March 2018 for a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As part of their grant application, they proposed placing a feature known as furin cleavage in unidentified SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. not discovered in any other known SARS-like virus.
DARPA rejected the investment for the grant, realizing that the proposal had not properly assessed the dangers of the research. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak said that, to his knowledge, none of the grant’s participating partners have continued the research, but it’s unclear if it has nevertheless progressed in any way.
Lawrence Tabak, acting director of the NIH, recently testified at a hearing held through the House Commerce and Energy Committee that viruses studied through the WIV with his firm’s investment may have triggered the pandemic because they “have no connection to SARS-CoV. “-2; They are genetically distinct. But the full picture of the paintings that was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology remains out of public view. The WIV first removed its extensive virus sequence database in September 2019, and it remains offline today. .
With critical data still out of reach, scientists and detectives continually battled for the few clues available. Meanwhile, resentment has reached such a point that scientists on both sides of the debate have received death threats. Virologists who at the beginning of the pandemic begged the government, the NIH, to stand in front of hostile Republican congressional committees and the prospect of subpoenas.
Protesting the origin of the virus is important, Goldstein says. But “some of the rhetoric in those [Congress] letters is so hostile from the start that it alienates other people from participating in those investigations. “, however, some of its co-sponsors were.
For those who have seriously studied whether COVID-19 may have originated in a lab, the road has been complicated and lonely. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Boston, one of the first scientists to say COVID-19 may have come from a lab. She made her case on Twitter and co-published a book, Viral, exploring the factor with a British science writer, Matt Ridley. , who denounce her as a conspiracy theorist and a con artist.
“Some tough proponents of speculation of the consequences of weeds have gone to great lengths to degrade and intimidate those calling for a fair investigation into the theory of leakage from the lab,” Chan Vanity Fair said. “No matter what abuse they inflict on us, the leak from the lab has been a credible source of the pandemic. “
Amid the heated debate, bloodhounds investigating this have also been attacked. In October, critics demanded that ProPublica and Vanity Fair withdraw a research report on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, arguing that it relied in part on faulty translations of Chinese documents. A thorough review across any of the publications claimed that the reports were “robust” and that speculation of lab leaks is an “essential street for exploration. “
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Since Sunday’s Wall Street Journal article, even comedian Jon Stewart has expressed perplexity over the attacks he faced after joking with Stephen Colbert in June 2021 that COVID-19 apparently came from a Wuhan lab. As he noted on his Apple TV podcast on Monday. , “The biggest challenge with all this is the inability to talk about things that are within the realm of choice without falling into the realm at all and testing our political loyalties. “
Without the cooperation of the Chinese government, which virtually no one believes, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to say with certainty how the pandemic began. But U. S. efforts are not enough. As intelligence agencies compare data declassification and GOP-led congressional committees continue hearings, the Biden administration appears poised to move forward with stricter regulations for pathogen studies, despite opposition from many virologists.
“The fact that it is credible that a twist of fate in a laboratory has caused a global pandemic is a wake-up call for all of us,” said Jaime Yassif, vice president of global biological systems and policy at the Nuclear Threats Initiative. “If we don’t take ambitious action now to protect against fatal or planned misuse of biosciences and biotechnology, we may face catastrophic consequences in the future, which may be as severe as COVID or worse. “
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