It is not yet clear how the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged, but for many scientists it is very likely that an herbal transmission will occur. Online publications have cited anonymous resources to claim that scientists in Wuhan, China, were the first to fall ill with COVID-19. But U. S. intelligence agencies are not allowed to do so. U. S. officials say the researchers’ symptoms were neither express nor inconsistent with those of COVID-19, and that the data have no bearing on the origin of the pandemic.
The exact origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, remains unknown. Many scientists believe the virus likely originated in bats and then spread to humans directly or indirectly, through contact with an animal. Such zoonotic transfers have already happened with the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS.
A paper published in Science in July 2022 analyzed the available evidence and implicated the wildlife industry and the Huanan seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China, as the site of the overflow. The first cases of COVID-19, even those that are not known. Market link: They are clustering around the market, and animals vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs, are known to have been sold on the market in late 2019.
However, no intermediate animals have been identified. In the absence of evidence of animal-to-human transfer, some scientists say further investigation is needed and that there may have been an accidental leak in the lab, either from an herbal virus or from a lab-enhanced virus.
U. S. intelligence agencies The U. S. government is divided over the origin, with 4 entities plus the National Intelligence Council landing on an herbal origin, and the FBI and Department of Energy reportedly concluding that a laboratory origin is “very likely. “Two others are undecided. There is no evidence left for either hypothesis.
However, there is agreement that the coronavirus “evolved as a biological weapon. “
Many coronavirus scientists say that a lab is unlikely to escape and that a leak of a modified virus is highly unlikely, if not impossible.
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, other people have been wondering how SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, came to be. Could it come from a wild or farm animal, inflamed upriver by a bat, as recommended? Past pandemics and early case links to a rainy market? Or did it come from a lab, specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, that is on the other side of the market researching coronaviruses?
Scientists investigating the origins of COVID-19 have argued in favor of an herbal origin, given that early cases, adding those with no known link to the market, cluster geographically around the market, and genetic evidence that vulnerable animals were sold there illegally. A genomics research also indicates that there were two early lineages of the virus that spread, a much more difficult situation to reconcile with a lab leak. However, without a documented intermediate animal, the evidence does not exclude the option of a laboratory origin.
A rumor that one or more WIV staff members may have possibly become ill with a COVID-like illness in the fall of 2019 has long supported claims supporting the lab leak theory. But as we explained earlier, the veracity and significance of those alleged reports are unclear. , as Wuhan was experiencing a flu wave at the time. In October 2021, U. S. intelligence agenciesThey indicated that such claims had not been proven and, in any case, the data “are not a diagnosis of the origins of the pandemic. “
But ahead of the planned release of more declassified documents related to the WIV, social media is buzzing with new claims about alleged substandard health workers.
On June 10, The Times of London published an article mentioning staff and selling the unfounded claim that the coronavirus is the result of biological weapons research. Intelligence does not give credibility to the idea. An excerpt from Ingraham’s show, which attracts more than a million viewers, has been viewed more than 100,000 times on Facebook.
Then, on June 13, a Substack article, citing unnamed government sources, claimed to know with “100 percent” certainty the identities of 3 “zero patients” who treated viruses in the lab. (The Wall Street Journal later published an article that said it had “independently confirmed” the names, but provided no evidence other than anonymous sources. )A few days later, a Facebook post said that the “first user with health problems was running in the Wuhan Lab. “
In a June 18 interview on Fox News, excerpts of which were shared on Facebook, Republican Senator Rand Paul repeated the intended findings of Substack’s post, calling them a “big deal. “
“In the article, they reveal that the first other people who had health problems with COVID were 3 scientists, who were working in the Wuhan lab with bat scientist, Dr. Shi,” he said. “Actually, one of them. . . The first user to have health problems, one of those who created those new viruses, viruses that are not found in nature. It is the pursuit of function gain. And that necessarily closes the deal.
Paul, who has been a fierce critic of studies that can be interpreted simply as an enhancement of function, warned that the data could be displayed the next day, when the director of national intelligence releases more declassified data, as mandated through the COVID-19 Original Act of 2023.
But in its report, which came due on June 23, the U. S. intelligence community said it was due to do so. The U. S. Census Bureau, or IC, does not corroborate any of those details.
“While several WIV investigators became mildly ill in the fall of 2019,” the report says, “they showed a diversity of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms that are not relevant to COVID-19, and some of them were shown to be sick with other similar illnesses unrelated to COVID-19.
The 10-page report, which does not call anyone, says the ICR “continues to assess that these data do not refute or disprove any of the hypotheses about the origin of the pandemic, as the researchers’ symptoms were possibly due to a number of diseases and some of them. “The symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.
On the same day as publication, Science reported that two staff members accused of WIV denied having health problems in the fall of 2019, with one calling the allegations “ridiculous. “In this scenario, Extra told Science that none of the three accused employees worked with even live viruses, and that antibody tests in March 2020 showed that no one in his lab had evidence of a past infection.
Some scientists have noticed that for the 3 named scientists, their calls do not stick to the same classification conference. While two are written with the nickname second, one is written with the nickname first, as is the norm in China. The individual with the opposite conference was a student who had published a thesis with the call for him in that order; The thesis has once been fodder for proponents of online lab leaks. This suggests, according to the scientists, that the calls were taken from documents of other people who do not know Chinese.
Several of the rumors of “sick” lab technicians have been circulating for at least 3 years.
As French biologist Flo Débarre detailed in a Twitter thread, the first mention of an employee with health issues came in April 2020, when Fox News’ John Roberts said in a coronavirus report that “several sources tell Fox News” that the pandemic began with a WIV trainee, who inflamed her boyfriend and then visited the rainy market. (Débarre co-authored an unpublished report that analyzed images of the rainy market, demonstrating that animals vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 were available at the time. )
The first official acknowledgment of the rumors came in January 2021, when, in the final days of the Trump administration, the State Department issued a “fact sheet” that said the government “has reasons to explain why several WIV researchers became ill in the fall of 2019, prior to the first known case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and non-unusual seasonal illnesses.
Some Republicans and Trump administration officials had been peddling the concept of a lab leak since the spring of 2020, claiming there was transparent evidence of it, but offering no support.
Since then, the maximum iterations of the “in poor health” employee story, adding an influential Wall Street Journal report in May 2021, reference 3 WIV employees, although other main points have been replaced and replaced over time. Sometimes it is specified that everyone has worked on the search for gain of function, or all in the same laboratory, but other times not. Sometimes they have health problems in November 2019; In other versions, it is October. Illnesses are variously described as respiratory or COVID-19-compatible illnesses, but they come with main points that may be more diagnostic of COVID-19, such as patients who lose their sense of smell and have ground glass. Opacities in your lungs. Some versions say staff were hospitalized or went to the hospital for their symptoms, while others were not. And some raise other main points without foundation, such as the death of a family member of an employee or the presence of frame bags outside doors the WIV and the disappearance of personnel.
The provenance of all those claims is unclear, yet some former Trump officials appear to offer facts to journalists, adding David Asher, a former State Department adviser, and John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence.
While Asher referred to foreign resources, neither he nor others explained exactly what those resources said, who would likely be or would not be credible. Nor was evidence of the rumors provided.
However, many facets of the stories about staff are refuted through the most recent IC report, and others are unconfirmed. In addition to the primary challenge of express non-COVID-19 symptoms, the report says there is “no indication” that WIV in poor health researchers were hospitalized “due to symptoms consistent with COVID-19,” and that only one researcher “may have been hospitalized” at the time, but for a non-respiratory condition.
The report also does not mention that staff have conducted studies on task gain. “Although some of those researchers have traditionally conducted studies on respiratory viruses in animals, we can’t verify whether any of them treated live viruses as part of their paintings before they got sick. “” the report said.
Claims that there is evidence or even near certainty that WIV scientists triggered the COVID-19 pandemic are not only baseless but false.
Even after the ICR report failed to corroborate claims about lab workers, social media posts circulated misinformation.
Two YouTube videos, one falsely titled “Wuhan lab leak theory CONFIRMED” and another referring to “explosive revelations” and “explosive hotspots about patient zero,” were still receiving thousands of perspectives a day on Facebook days after the report was published.
Some proponents of lab leaks have also distorted what the ICR report says. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump when the State Department promoted allegations of “sick” WIV workers, said in a June 24 tweet that the IC report “confirms what we knew all along: The logical explanation is that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
The report did not verify such a thing. In particular, it states that it “does not address the merits of the two maximum probably pandemic hypotheses” and that all agencies continue to have an herbal and laboratory origin to be “plausible. “
However, the contents throw bloodless water on some of the tactics in which proponents of lab leaks have warned that a lab leak has occurred. states that the ICR is not aware of a “WIV-specific biosecurity incident that spurred the pandemic and WIV biosecurity education seems routine,” rather than an emergency reaction from China’s leadership. This contradicts claims made in a questioned ProPublica-Vanity Fair article.
The report states that “there is no indication that the pre-pandemic WIV studies budget included SARS-CoV-2 or a close ancestor, nor any direct evidence that an incident involving the pre-pandemic WIV workforce that may have caused the COVID pandemic occurred.
“The information available for the ICR indicates that WIV first possessed SARS-CoV-2 in late December 2019,” when researchers took viral samples from patients, the report adds.
Finally, it is worth noting that the firm’s opinion is largely opposed to any type of function gain situation. “Almost all CI agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 has not been genetically modified,” the report says. , adding that “[m]ost” agencies also don’t know that the virus has adapted in the lab. Everyone agrees that the pandemic is not the result of a biological weapon.
Editor’s note: SciCheck articles that provide accurate fitness data and correct erroneous fitness data are made imaginable by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Foundation has no control over the editorial decisions of FactCheck. org, and the perspectives expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the perspectives of the Foundation.
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