Most Republicans and others at a House Special Subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic supported speculation that a lab leak caused COVID-19, with some citing “new evidence” of a cover-up.
While there is “no irrefutable evidence” to generate a laboratory leak hypothesis, “the developing framework of circumstantial evidence suggests a firearm at least hot to the touch,” said Jamie Metzl, PhD, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. The Democrat proclaimed at Wednesday’s hearing.
Was the magazine “guest”?
On March 5, members of the Republican subcommittee released a memo describing what they see as new evidence from their research on a paper published March 17, 2020, in Nature on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
In the memo, they noted that Anthony Fauci, MD, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Francis Collins, MD, PhD, former director of the NIH, held a convention call on February 1, 2020, with a dozen scientists, in which they were told that the virus had possibly leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. China, and that “it may have been genetically manipulated deliberately. “
Then, on Feb. 4, four of the scientists who spoke by phone produced a paper and shared a draft with Fauci and Collins.
The memo reported that Fauci “‘incentivized’ the writing of a publication that ‘refuted’ the laboratory leak theory” and that “Dr. Jeremy Farrar was not credited despite his significant involvement. “(Farrar is the World Health Organization’s lead scientist. )
Some Republican subcommittee members also argued that two co-authors of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen, PhD, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and Robert Garry Jr. , PhD, of Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, backed a theory of lab leaks, based on emails they had written.
As noted by a representative of subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup, DPM (R-Ohio), in his opening statement, Andersen first said that the genome is “not consistent with the theory of evolution,” and Garry said he “cannot think of a credible herbal scenario. “. . “
A month later, the journal Nature claimed “exactly the opposite. “
In May 2020, they won a nine-million-dollar grant from NIAID. “So, there are nine million reasons why they replaced their minds,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
The FBI and Department of Energy have also publicly demonstrated that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a laboratory.
However, Rep. Raul Ruiz, MD (D-Calif. ), a prominent member of the subcommittee, said “the evidence is inconclusive” and under pressure that intelligence agencies will have to continue their investigations.
For his part, Wenstrup agreed that the subcommittee will say with certainty that the virus leaked from the lab and will continue its investigation, holding more hearings and uncovering more documents.
Former CDC Director ‘Left Out’
During the hearing, Robert Redfield Jr. , MD, former director of the CDC, told lawmakers that he had lobbied other members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, adding Fauci and Collins, to the option of a lab leak. Redfield said he was “quite upset” to be informed much later, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests, that he had been excluded from the Feb. 1 convention call on the origins of COVID.
When asked why he felt “left out,” Redfield said, “I was told they were looking for an exclusive narrative and I clearly had another point of view. “When asked if he thought there had been a cover-up, he replied: ” I think there was an attempt to deceive [or] redirect the debate. But I wouldn’t use the word ‘concealment. ‘”
Redfield said that, based on his own investigation of the data, “I arrived and even today this indicates that COVID-19 was probably more the result of an accidental leak in the lab than the result of an herb overflow event. “Any of the hypotheses, that of an herbal origin and that of a laboratory leak, deserve to be followed “aggressively,” he added.
He said his conclusion “mainly about the biology of the virus itself, adding the upper immediate infectivity for human-to-human transmission, which would then wait for the immediate evolution of new variants,” in addition to other “unusual actions” that happened “in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019. “
Because of his views on the origins of the virus, Redfield advised a moratorium on studies on homework gain. Instead of helping scientists expand vaccines and “get ahead of viruses,” he argued that it had had the opposite effect, “unleashing a new virus. “globally without being impeded, and resulting in the deaths of millions. “
However, Metzl argued that “there are dangers if we don’t adopt this kind of research, which leaves us off guard,” and that “impartial bodies” with adequate clinical expertise oversee such projects. He also called for a bipartisan commission to read on the Origins of COVID.
Laboratory leak argument
Metzl noted that he says no scientist or proponent of a theory of the origin of herbs had discovered an “intermediate host” guilty of transmitting the virus to humans. It is very significant that this has not been discovered,” he said. “We have that capability. “
However, Paul Auwaerter, MD, MBA, former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the only witness for the Democrats, noted that there are other examples of viral outbreaks in which no intermediate host has been found, adding Ebola. believes it’s due to a lab accident,” he added.
In his opening remarks, Nicholas Wade, former editor-in-chief of Nature and Science, and former science and fitness editor of The New York Times, laid out the 3 reasons why he supports a laboratory leak theory.
First, he noted that the outbreak broke out in Wuhan, China, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where he said scientists were producing coronaviruses under genetically harmful laboratory conditions.
Metzl also pointed out this fact: that the outbreak began, not in subtropical southern China, northern Laos or Burma, home to horseshoe bats (known as carriers of SARS-CoV-2’s closest relatives), but “more than 1,000 miles away,” an “indication of importance that may simply not be ignored in the implicit call of opportunism or political sensitivities. “
Second, Wade said researchers at the Wuhan lab applied for a $14 million grant in 2018 for the Pentagon’s DEFUSE project, which included a plan to insert a furin slit into the S1/S2 junction of the virus genome. The Defense Ministry rejected the proposal, it said, however, a year later, a SARS2 virus emerged with a furin cleavage at junction S1/S2.
In his written testimony, Wade said he was skeptical that evolution would produce a virus exactly like the one described in the proposed DEFUSE allocation. “It’s actually much easier for the Wuhan researchers to do exactly what they proposed and generated the SARS2 virus. in his lab,” Wade wrote.
Third, viruses acquire new pieces of genetic tissue through a recombination procedure, when two similar viruses, belonging to the same circle of relatives, enter a mobile at the same time. SARS is part of a circle of coronavirus relatives called Sarbecoviruses, and the only one to have a furin cleavage site is SARS2, Wade noted.
Proponents of natural speculation say there may be other Sarbecoviruses that also have a furin cleavage site, but none have been found, he noted.
Wenstrup focused on Wade’s point about the “unique features” of COVID, which were a component of why it’s so infectious in humans and “never noticed before” among those virus types.
In addition, unlike SARS, which inflamed about 8,000 people worldwide (and only 8 in the United States), and MERS, which inflamed another 2,000 people, SARS-CoV-2 “prepared for human transmission” and inflamed more than 750 million people. international, he said.
It should be noted that Democratic members of the subcommittee had asked the majority to withdraw the invitation to Wade, with Ruiz claiming he harbored “discredited, unscientific and destructive views,” which were captured in his e-book, A Problematic Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The e-book, Ruiz said, was “applauded by white supremacists. “For his part, Wade said his e-book was “decidedly non-racist. “
The House is expected to vote on a bill to declassify similar COVID-19 data this week.
Shannon Firth has been reporting on fitness policies as a Washington correspondent for MedPage Today since 2014. He is a member of the Enterprise team.