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Zeynep Tufekci
By Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion columnist
Three researchers at a lab in Wuhan, China, who converted in November 2019, experimented with SARS-like coronaviruses under insufficient biosecurity conditions, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing existing and former U. S. officials.
The Journal reported in 2021 that some researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had requested hospital care in November, when evidence suggests Covid began spreading between people. However, the public did not know that those scientists had experimented with SARS—like coronaviruses—that is, pathogens connected to those that cause SARS and Covid.
His role in these paintings is not evidence that the virus first escaped from a lab and then spread from animals in a city market, the other theory about the beginning of the pandemic. There is also no evidence of this pathway, as known cases of market epidemics had passed too long to be the cause, and no inflamed animals were discovered there.
But this is yet another demonstration that at most all the most important information we have had about the imaginable dating of Covid in clinical studies in Wuhan has been leaked from the harsh paintings of independent researchers, journalists, open case advocates and others, not directly from our government opting to act transparently.
The names of the researchers who allegedly became ill, which have not been publicly released by the U. S. government, have been released publicly. The U. S. and yet-to-be-verified U. S. and their paintings were revealed last week via the news site Public. One of the named researchers, Ben Hu, is a prominent scientist who has worked on SARS-related bat coronaviruses. Some of Hu’s works were funded by the U. S. government. he opposes taxpayer-funded animal research as well as The Intercept. who discovered U. S. investment for potentially harmful lab paints in Wuhan.
Another researcher who allegedly became ill, Yu Ping, had written a thesis in 2019 on the Institute of Virology’s investigations into SARS-related bat coronaviruses, a thesis he discovered through an organization of independent researchers calling themselves DRASTIC. on those harmful viruses made in laboratories with the lowest biosafety point of the moment, BSL-2.
In September 2021, DRASTIC also received an investment proposal that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s US collaborator, EcoHealth Alliance, submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The proposal called for genetic engineering to conduct experiments with SARS-like coronaviruses from bats and modify them by placing features that can develop their ability to infect humans. The U. S. government. The U. S. rejected the proposal. One of the things the scientists proposed to do was to insert into those SARS-like viruses what’s called a “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the Covid virus, but of no other known member of its subgenus.
The feature may have evolved naturally as well, and many scientists have downplayed its importance as evidence that the studies triggered the origins of the pandemic. In a September 2021 newspaper article, published just before the grant application was made public, 21 scientists wrote that there was no evidence of studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “involving the synthetic insertion of entire furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses. “The request for a subsidy, which challenges this claim, is significant.
Thanks to numerous requests for public documents from the nonprofit U. S. Right to Know, we also know that as early as February 2020, many scientists who were publicly dismissing any role the studies might have had in the pandemic, privately expressed their fear that such a link existed and, indeed, They were involved in the La Furina division site. (Some of the scientists said they then replaced their minds. )
What’s remarkable about all this is that it rarely necessarily indicates that the Wuhan researchers were doing anything wrong that their Western counterparts weren’t. By all accounts, some of the most vilified people, including Shi Zhengli, the lead bat researcher in Wuhan, were committed scientists. Their paintings raised safety concerns, but they were not alone.
A recently published e-book by investigative journalist Alison Young shows cases in the United States, adding very recent cases, in which laboratories and universities have downplayed or concealed significant biosecurity deficiencies, adding those involving fatal viruses designed to cause pandemics. If Chinese scientists were putting the world at risk, so would American scientists.
By keeping secret evidence that gave the impression of providing ammunition to proponents of the lab leak theory and resisting disclosure, U. S. officials helped make the issue of the pandemic’s origins more toxic and open to manipulation by acting in bad faith.
Treating data as a dark secret empowers those who cruelly and unfairly accuse public fitness officials and scientists of profiting from the pandemic. sow it. “
Yet the American public has rarely heard the refreshing honesty of their leaders or even scientists, and this narrow-minded denialist technique turns out to have only reinforced confidence that the pandemic was born out of neglect during studies or even, in less reality. -based on narratives, anything deliberate. According to an Economist/YouGov ballot released in March, 66% of Americans (accounting for a majority of Democrats and independents) were caused by research activities, a higher number since 2020. Only 16% of Americans think it’s probably or definitely wrong that the emergence of the Covid virus was similar to studies in a Chinese lab, while 17% weren’t sure.
Worse still, biosecurity, on a global scale, remains insufficiently regulated. Making biosecurity a moot point makes it more complicated to advance regulation and foreign effort.
For years, scientists and government officials haven’t talked much publicly about the fact that a 1977 “Russian” flu pandemic that killed thousands of people at most likely began when a vaccine trial went wrong. In a 2014 report by the Center for Arms Control Nonproliferation, Martin Furmanski explained that one reason for the relative silence was concern about disrupting nascent cooperation on flu surveillance and treatment between the United States, China and Russia.
The global no longer looks like that. Some other people cannot participate in the public conversation, especially after tens of millions have died, and attempts to do so will only backfire.
The public deserves to know this information. So far, some of the main points about the Wuhan scientists who have been sick, adding their names, come from news reports mentioning anonymous sources, so some skepticism is needed. But why hasn’t the Biden administration shown or denied those main points??
Despite President Biden signing a law in March requiring the declassification of data on the origins of Covid-19 until last Sunday, his administration has yet to release that data. You want to temporarily declassify as much as imaginable what you know about origins. of the pandemic. In addition, the National Institutes of Health, which is said to have funded some of the studies in China under review, will also need to open up, rather than waiting for more leaks or legislation to force its hand.
When other people lose acceptance as truth in institutions, misinformation seems more credible. The antidote is more transparency and accountability.
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Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a professor at Columbia University of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a columnist for The New York Times Opinion. @zeynep • Facebook
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