[uupretirees] This appears to be a neutral evaluation of the COVD pandemic from Vanity Fair
- From: Eric Russell <ericprussell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Uupretirees Yahoogroups <uupretirees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2021 03:29:27 +0000
Information from both sides is presented and it explores theories about
possible origins.
Who was messing with the message, who tried to maintain integrity in the face
of obfuscation?
The article is long and it tries to present as muh factual information as
possible.
Eric
The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was
off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and
hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
BY KATHERINE EBAN<https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/katherine-eban>
JUNE 3, 2021
[The LabLeak Theory Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID19s Origins]ILLUSTRATION
BY MAX LÖFFLER.
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<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins#>
I. A Group Called DRASTIC
Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland.
He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives
him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when
other people see nothing,” he says.
Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of
COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the
virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped
from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in
China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan
wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling
seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild
animals—a possible source of the virus.
How Jared Kushner Let the Markets Decide America’s COVID-19
Fate<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate>
[https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5f63a0ecff5dee9bb494a50d/1:1/w_200%2Cc_limit/undefined]<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate>
That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost
coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections
of bat samples and bat-virus strains. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead
coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, was among the first to identify horseshoe
bats as the natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV, the virus that sparked an outbreak
in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally. After SARS,
bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and Shi
became known in China as “Bat Woman” for her fearless exploration of their
caves to collect samples. More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have
performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such
research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among
virologists.
WATCH NOW:
<https://www.vanityfair.com/video/watch/historian-reviews-civil-rights-movements-in-movies-and-tv>
Historian Reviews Civil Rights Movements in TV & Film, from 'Selma' to 'Malcolm
X' | Vanity Fair
To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global
pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has
strenuously denied.
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On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential
medical journals in the world, published a
statement<https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext>
that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a
xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27
scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health
professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn
conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins
before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was
as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin
theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That
set the tone.”
The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to
contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry
in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.
[Image may contain Clothing Apparel Human Person Helmet and Face]
Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, is
frequently pictured in a full-body positive-pressure suit, though not all the
labs there require one.BY JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.
Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long
before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with
safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries.
But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related
lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to
overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had
been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it
in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab
Escapes<https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-a-review-of-sars-lab-escapes-898d203d175d>.”
By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de
Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously
studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the
Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed
numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the
highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body
pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even
BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.
Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a
comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their
findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some
were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were
science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for
Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their
stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.
State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a
“Pandora’s box.”
At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were
crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against
China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for
instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to
fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and
purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong
scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise
doomed the charade.
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With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the
other, the DRASTIC researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the
wilderness, working on the world’s most urgent mystery. They weren’t alone. But
investigators inside the U.S. government asking similar questions were
operating in an environment that was as politicized and hostile to open inquiry
as any Twitter echo chamber. When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis
last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not
less, challenging for those seeking the truth.
“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” says
David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State
Department.
The question is: Why?
II. “A Can of Worms”
Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected
more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million.
To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared
in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic
pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the
right steps to prevent a recurrence.
And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald
Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian
violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question
remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.
Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and
officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in
high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made
public.
A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people,
and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including
internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts
of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting
controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into
COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials
seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were
explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s
gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S.
government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting
assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control,
Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and
the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders
within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19”
because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long,
well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when
the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months
and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the
SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.
[Dr. Robert Redfield former director of the CDC said he received death threats
from fellow scientists after telling CNN...]
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, said he received death threats
from fellow scientists after telling CNN he thought the virus likely escaped
from a lab. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,”
he said.BY ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES.
But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as
unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former
Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats
from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had
originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed
another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from
politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his
xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the
outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most
extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?
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Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical
biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel
bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a
picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two
other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three
places.”
Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but
organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government
grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function
research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the
Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins
inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function
bureaucracy” inside the federal government.
As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the
questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal
health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by
American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then
there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually
honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.
And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent
investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying,
obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan
Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak
from her lab even if she’d wanted to.
On May 26, the steady crescendo of questions led President Joe Biden to release
a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had “coalesced around
two likely scenarios,” and announce that he had asked for a more definitive
conclusion within 90 days. His statement noted, “The failure to get our
inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any
investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” But that wasn’t the only failure.
In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the
East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as
curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”
III. “Smelled Like a Cover-Up”
On December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four
different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an
upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the World Health
Organization. The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough,
credible, and transparent investigation, with unfettered access to markets,
hospitals, and government laboratories. The conversation then turned to the
more sensitive question: What should the U.S. government say publicly about the
Wuhan Institute of Virology?
A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and
Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had
recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers
conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill
in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started.
As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public,
they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s
Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and
Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s
own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the
meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.
Only two other labs in the world, in Texas and North Carolina, were doing
similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” Dr. Richard Ebright said. “It’s
three places.”
Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with
the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument
that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe,
was…shocking and disturbing.”
Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on
funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the
State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the
group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were
repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State
Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like
a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.”
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Reached for comment, Chris Park told Vanity Fair, “I am skeptical that people
genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.” He added
that he was simply arguing that it “is making an enormous and unjustifiable
leap…to suggest that research of that kind [meant] that something untoward is
going on.”
IV. An “Antibody Response”
There were two main teams inside the U.S. government working to uncover the
origins of COVID-19: one in the State Department and another under the
direction of the National Security Council. No one at the State Department had
much interest in Wuhan’s laboratories at the start of the pandemic, but they
were gravely concerned with China’s apparent cover-up of the outbreak’s
severity. The government had shut down the Huanan market, ordered laboratory
samples destroyed, claimed the right to review any scientific research about
COVID-19 ahead of publication, and expelled a team of Wall Street Journal
reporters.
In January 2020, a Wuhan ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang, who’d tried to warn
his colleagues that the pneumonia could be a form of SARS was arrested, accused
of disrupting the social order, and forced to write a self-criticism. He died
of COVID-19 in February, lionized by the Chinese public as a hero and
whistleblower.
“You had Chinese [government] coercion and suppression,” said David Feith of
the State Department’s East Asia bureau. “We were very concerned that they were
covering it up and whether the information coming to the World Health
Organization was reliable.”
As questions swirled, Miles Yu, the State Department’s principal China
strategist, noted that the WIV had remained largely silent. Yu, who is fluent
in Mandarin, began mirroring its website and compiling a dossier of questions
about its research. In April, he gave his dossier to Secretary of State Pompeo,
who in turn publicly demanded access to the laboratories there.
It is not clear whether Yu’s dossier made its way to President Trump. But on
April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an
ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around
the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the
wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or
genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began
through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at
a laboratory in Wuhan.”
[State Department official Thomas DiNanno wrote a memo charging that staff from
his bureau were warnednot to pursue an...]
State Department official Thomas DiNanno wrote a memo charging that staff from
his bureau were “warned…not to pursue an investigation into the origin of
COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”SOURCE: U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
“It was pure panic,” said former deputy national security adviser Matthew
Pottinger. “They were getting flooded with queries. Someone made the
unfortunate decision to say, ‘We basically know nothing, so let’s put out the
statement.’”
Then, the bomb-thrower-in-chief weighed in. At a press briefing just hours
later, Trump contradicted his own intelligence officials and claimed that he
had seen classified information indicating that the virus had come from the
Wuhan Institute of Virology. Asked what the evidence was, he said, “I can’t
tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
Trump’s premature statement poisoned the waters for anyone seeking an honest
answer to the question of where COVID-19 came from. According to Pottinger,
there was an “antibody response” within the government, in which any discussion
of a possible lab origin was linked to destructive nativist posturing.
The revulsion extended to the international science community, whose “maddening
silence” frustrated Miles Yu. He recalled, “Anyone who dares speak out would be
ostracized.”
V. “Too Risky to Pursue”
The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists
but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as
early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two
Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a
preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus
get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of
winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t
sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?
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The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market
and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The
first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just
280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat
samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer
coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may
be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other
densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the
internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.
By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC
directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A
longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the
team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly
discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was
impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either
received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted”
status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and
contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”
[Image may contain Human Person and Windshield]
Peter Daszak, who repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated the funds to
research institutes including the WIV, arrives there on February 3, 2021,
during a fact-finding mission organized in part by the World Health
Organization.BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.
As they combed open sources as well as classified information, the team’s
members soon stumbled on a 2015 research paper by Shi Zhengli and the
University of North Carolina epidemiologist Ralph Baric proving that the spike
protein of a novel coronavirus could infect human cells. Using mice as
subjects, they inserted the protein from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat into
the molecular structure of the SARS virus from 2002, creating a new, infectious
pathogen.
This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors flagged the
danger themselves, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar
studies…too risky to pursue.” In fact, the study was intended to raise an alarm
and warn the world of “a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses
currently circulating in bat populations.” The paper’s acknowledgments cited
funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and from a nonprofit called
EcoHealth Alliance, which had parceled out grant money from the U.S. Agency for
International Development. EcoHealth Alliance is run by Peter Daszak, the
zoologist who helped organize the Lancet statement.
That a genetically engineered virus might have escaped from the WIV was one
alarming scenario. But it was also possible that a research trip to collect bat
samples could have led to infection in the field, or back at the lab.
The NSC investigators found ready evidence that China’s labs were not as safe
as advertised. Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the
pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like
viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories.
In 2018, a delegation of American diplomats visited the WIV for the opening of
its BSL-4 laboratory, a major event. In an unclassified cable, as a Washington
Post columnist
reported<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/>,
they wrote that a shortage of highly trained technicians and clear protocols
threatened the facility’s safe operations. The issues had not stopped the WIV’s
leadership from declaring the lab “ready for research on class-four pathogens
(P4), among which are the most virulent viruses that pose a high risk of
aerosolized person-to-person transmission.”
[Click to see the full document]
Click to see the full
document<http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/State_Dept_Cables.pdf>
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On February 14, 2020, to the surprise of NSC officials, President Xi Jinping of
China announced a plan to fast-track a new biosecurity law to tighten safety
procedures throughout the country’s laboratories. Was this a response to
confidential information? “In the early weeks of the pandemic, it didn’t seem
crazy to wonder if this thing came out of a lab,” Pottinger reflected.
Apparently, it didn’t seem crazy to Shi Zhengli either. A Scientific American
article first published in March 2020, for which she was interviewed, described
how her lab had been the first to sequence the
virus<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/>
in those terrible first weeks. It also recounted how:
[S]he frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to
check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during
disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the
sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.
“That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for
days.”
As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising
them flagged one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23
coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese
army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as
CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied
their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from
the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear
that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the
pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese
military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which
might be infectious to humans?
Believing they had uncovered important evidence in favor of the lab-leak
hypothesis, the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s
when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the
NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response
was very negative.”
VI. Sticklers for Accuracy
By the summer of 2020, Gilles Demaneuf was spending up to four hours a day
researching the origins of COVID-19, joining Zoom meetings before dawn with
European collaborators and not sleeping much. He began to receive anonymous
calls and notice strange activity on his computer, which he attributed to
Chinese government surveillance. “We are being monitored for sure,” he says. He
moved his work to the encrypted platforms Signal and ProtonMail.
As they posted their findings, the DRASTIC researchers attracted new allies.
Among the most prominent was Jamie Metzl, who launched a blog on April
16<https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/> that became a go-to site for
government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. A
former executive vice president of the Asia Society, Metzl sits on the World
Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome
editing<https://www.who.int/ethics/topics/gene-editing/committee-members/en/index2.html>
and served in the Clinton administration as the NSC’s director for
multilateral affairs. In his first post on the subject, he made clear that he
had no definitive proof and believed that Chinese researchers at the WIV had
the “best intentions.” Metzl also noted, “In no way do I seek to support or
align myself with any activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest,
nationalistic, racist, bigoted, or biased in any way.”
On December 11, 2020, Demaneuf—a stickler for accuracy—reached out to Metzl to
alert him to a mistake on his blog. The 2004 SARS lab escape in Beijing,
Demaneuf pointed out, had led to 11 infections, not four. Demaneuf was
“impressed” by Metzl’s immediate willingness to correct the information. “From
that time, we started working together.”
“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to
virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”
Metzl, in turn, was in touch with the Paris Group, a collective of more than 30
skeptical scientific experts who met by Zoom once a month for hours-long
meetings to hash out emerging clues. Before joining the Paris Group, Dr.
Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, had pushed back
online against wild conspiracies. No, COVID-19 was not a bioweapon used by the
Chinese to infect American athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan in
October 2019. But the more she researched, the more concerned she became that
not every possibility was being explored. On May 1, 2020, she published a
careful assessment in the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists<https://thebulletin.org/2020/05/natural-spillover-or-research-lab-leak-why-a-credible-investigation-in-needed-to-determine-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic/>
describing just how a pathogen could have escaped the Wuhan Institute of
Virology. She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the
director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety
deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had
written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or
in some cases none at all.”
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Alina Chan, a young molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad
Institute of MIT and Harvard University, found that early sequences of the
virus showed very little evidence of mutation. Had the virus jumped from
animals to humans, one would expect to see numerous adaptations, as was true in
the 2002 SARS outbreak. To Chan, it appeared that SARS-CoV-2 was already
“pre-adapted to human transmission,” she wrote in a preprint
paper<https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1> in May 2020.
But perhaps the most startling find was made by an anonymous DRASTIC
researcher, known on Twitter as
@TheSeeker268<https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268>. The Seeker, as it turns out,
is a young former science teacher from Eastern India. He had begun plugging
keywords into the China National Knowledge
Infrastructure<https://oversea.cnki.net/index/>, a website that houses papers
from 2,000 Chinese journals, and running the results through Google Translate.
One day last May, he fished up a thesis from 2013 written by a master’s student
in Kunming, China. The thesis opened an extraordinary window into a bat-filled
mine shaft in Yunnan province and raised sharp questions about what Shi Zhengli
had failed to mention in the course of making her denials.
VII. The Mojiang Miners
In 2012, six miners in the lush mountains of Mojiang county in southern Yunnan
province were assigned an unenviable task: to shovel out a thick carpet of bat
feces from the floor of a mine shaft. After weeks of dredging up bat guano, the
miners became gravely ill and were sent to the First Affiliated Hospital at the
Kunming Medical University in Yunnan’s capital. Their symptoms of cough, fever,
and labored breathing rang alarm bells in a country that had suffered through a
viral SARS outbreak a decade earlier.
The hospital called in a pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan, who had played a
prominent role in treating SARS patients and would go on to lead an expert
panel for China’s National Health Commission on COVID-19. Zhong, according to
the 2013 master’s thesis, immediately suspected a viral infection. He
recommended a throat culture and an antibody test, but he also asked what kind
of bat had produced the guano. The answer: the rufous horseshoe bat, the same
species implicated in the first SARS outbreak.
Within months, three of the six miners were dead. The eldest, who was 63, died
first. “The disease was acute and fierce,” the thesis noted. It concluded: “the
bat that caused the six patients to fall ill was the Chinese rufous horseshoe
bat.” Blood samples were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which found
that they were positive for SARS antibodies, a later Chinese dissertation
documented.
[Image may contain Furniture Chair Human Person Glasses Accessories Accessory
Animal Dog Mammal Pet and Canine]
A memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, who was celebrated as a whistleblower in China
after sounding the alarm about COVID-19 in January 2020. He later died of the
disease.BY MARK RALSTON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.
But there was a mystery at the heart of the diagnosis. Bat coronaviruses were
not known to harm humans. What was so different about the strains from inside
the cave? To find out, teams of researchers from across China and beyond
traveled to the abandoned mine shaft to collect viral samples from bats, musk
shrews, and rats.
In an October 2013 Nature study, Shi Zhengli reported a key discovery: that
certain bat viruses could potentially infect humans without first jumping to an
intermediate animal. By isolating a live SARS-like bat coronavirus for the
first time, her team had found that it could enter human cells through a
protein called the ACE2 receptor.
In subsequent studies in 2014 and 2016, Shi and her colleagues continued
studying samples of bat viruses collected from the mine shaft, hoping to figure
out which one had infected the miners. The bats were bristling with multiple
coronaviruses. But there was only one whose genome closely resembled SARS. The
researchers named it RaBtCoV/4991.
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On February 3, 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak already spreading beyond China,
Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the SARS-CoV-2
virus’s genetic code was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, which caused
the 2002 outbreak. But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a
coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously
detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known
relative to SARS-CoV-2.
In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known
bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered
shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and
when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic
sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon
realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the
shaft where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.
In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab
had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise
looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine.
Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their
colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled
between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC
researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that
were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina
Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial
puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.
In October 2020, as questions about the Mojiang mine shaft intensified, a team
of journalists from the BBC tried to access the mine itself. They were tailed
by plainclothes police officers and found the road conveniently blocked by a
broken-down truck.
Shi, by now facing growing scrutiny from the international press corps, told
the BBC: “I’ve just downloaded the Kunming Hospital University’s student’s
master’s thesis and read it…. The conclusion is neither based on evidence nor
logic. But it’s used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me. If you were me, what
would you do?”
VIII. The Gain-of-Function Debate
On January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, got a phone call from his counterpart Dr.
George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gao described the appearance of a mysterious new pneumonia, apparently limited
to people exposed at a market in Wuhan. Redfield immediately offered to send a
team of specialists to help investigate.
But when Redfield saw the breakdown of early cases, some of which were family
clusters, the market explanation made less sense. Had multiple family members
gotten sick via contact with the same animal? Gao assured him there was no
human-to-human transmission, says Redfield, who nevertheless urged him to test
more widely in the community. That effort prompted a tearful return call. Many
cases had nothing to do with the market, Gao admitted. The virus appeared to be
jumping from person to person, a far scarier scenario.
[Image may contain Tie Accessories Accessory Clothing Apparel Suit Coat
Overcoat Human Person and Man]
Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said the “conflicted”
status of leading experts who had either approved or received funding for
gain-of-function research “played a profound role in muddying the waters and
contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE
WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES.
Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A team could
rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing
researchers there for antibodies. Redfield formally reiterated his offer to
send specialists, but Chinese officials didn’t respond to his overture.
Redfield, a virologist by training, was suspicious of the WIV in part because
he’d been steeped in the yearslong battle over gain-of-function research. The
debate engulfed the virology community in 2011, after Ron Fouchier, a
researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, announced that he had
genetically altered the H5N1 avian influenza strain to make it transmissible
among ferrets, who are genetically closer to humans than mice. Fouchier calmly
declared that he’d produced “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you
could make.”
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In the ensuing uproar, scientists battled over the risks and benefits of such
research. Those in favor claimed it could help prevent pandemics, by
highlighting potential risks and accelerating vaccine development. Critics
argued that creating pathogens that didn’t exist in nature ran the risk of
unleashing them.
In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding
for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS
viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement
announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed “urgently
necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and
replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential
Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety
of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left
the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not
released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely
secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy
against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. (An NIH
spokesperson told Vanity Fair that “information about individual unfunded
applications is not public to preserve confidentiality and protect sensitive
information, preliminary data, and intellectual property.”)
Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met
with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban
gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the
moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research
anyway.”
British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New
York City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of
emerging diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before
the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a
NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various
entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing
gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to
humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework.
By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant
money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International
Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York
State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S.
government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae:
$665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period
from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into
smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway
within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of
omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In
response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on
behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)
As the pandemic raged, the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV
wound up in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. At a White House
COVID-19 press briefing on April 17, 2020, a reporter from the conspiratorial
right-wing media outlet Newsmax asked Trump a factually inaccurate question
about a $3.7 million NIH grant to a level-four lab in China. “Why would the
U.S. give a grant like that to China?” the reporter asked.
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Trump responded, “We will end that grant very quickly,” adding, “Who was
president then, I wonder.”
A week later, an NIH official notified Daszak in writing that his grant had
been terminated. The order had come from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci
later testified before a congressional committee. The decision fueled a
firestorm: 81 Nobel Laureates in science denounced the decision in an open
letter to Trump health officials, and 60 Minutes ran a segment focused on the
Trump administration’s shortsighted politicization of science.
Daszak appeared to be the victim of a political hit job, orchestrated to blame
China, Dr. Fauci, and scientists in general for the pandemic, while distracting
from the Trump administration’s bungled response. “He’s basically a wonderful,
decent human being” and an “old-fashioned altruist,” said the NIH official. “To
see this happening to him, it really kills me.”
[Image may contain Text Document Letter and Page]
Click to see the full
document<http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/Daszak_7_8_20_Reactivation_and_Suspension.pdf>
LAUER, MICHAEL (NIH/OD) [E]
In July, the NIH attempted to backtrack. It reinstated the grant but suspended
its research activities until EcoHealth Alliance fulfilled seven conditions,
some of which went beyond the nonprofit’s purview and seemed to stray into
tinfoil-hat territory. They included: providing information on the “apparent
disappearance” of a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, who was rumored on
social media to be patient zero, and explaining diminished cell phone traffic
and roadblocks around the WIV in October 2019.
But conspiracy-minded conservatives weren’t the only ones looking askance at
Daszak. Ebright likened Daszak’s model of research—bringing samples from a
remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting
to genetically modify them to make them more virulent—to “looking for a gas
leak with a lighted match.” Moreover, Ebright believed that Daszak’s research
had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing pandemics through
its global collaborations.
It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group
called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the
influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and
creating the impression of scientific unanimity.
Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the “Statement” Ralph!!,” he
wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated
with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus
capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this
statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a
counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that
doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
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Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose
impact.”
Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other
signers had either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The
statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: “We declare no competing
interests.”
Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: “If zoonosis was
the origin, it was a validation…of his life work…. But if the pandemic started
as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile
Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.” It could mire the field
indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.
IX. Dueling Memos
By the summer of 2020, the State Department’s COVID-19 origins investigation
had gone cold. Officials in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and
Compliance went back to their normal work: surveilling the world for biological
threats. “We weren’t looking for Wuhan,” said Thomas DiNanno. That fall, the
State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was
likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed. In
November, that lead turned up classified information that was “absolutely
arresting and shocking,” said a former State Department official. Three
researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with
gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and
appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three
government officials told Vanity Fair.
While it is not clear what had sickened them, “these were not the janitors,”
said the former State Department official. “They were active researchers. The
dates were among the absolute most arresting part of the picture, because they
are smack where they would be if this was the origin.” The reaction inside the
State Department was, “Holy shit,” one former senior official recalled. “We
should probably tell our bosses.” The investigation roared back to life.
An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified
channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was
plausible. It had been written in
May<https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-study-found-covid-19-could-have-originated-in-chinese-lab>
by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs
national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to
have been buried within the classified collections system.
[Image may contain Face Human Person Head Photo Photography and Portrait]
Jamie Metzl’s blog became a go-to site for government researchers and
journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. In his first post on the
subject, he wrote, “In no way do I seek to support or align myself with any
activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest, nationalistic, racist,
bigoted, or biased in any way.”BY ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES.
Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding
materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to
pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when
Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab
unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking
to the report’s authors.
Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford,
acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so
hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on
whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in
nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair
that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s
origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like
the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.
There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the
investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself,
and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of
“creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable
investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?
He was not the only one with concerns. As one senior government official with
knowledge of the State Department’s investigation said, “They were writing this
for certain customers in the Trump administration. We asked for the reporting
behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the
report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not
something you could go back and find.”
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After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of
the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” Ford
recalled.
The State Department team, for its part, believed that Ford was the one trying
to impose a preconceived conclusion: that COVID-19 had a natural origin. A week
later, one of them attended the meeting where Christopher Park, who worked
under Ford, allegedly advised those present not to draw attention to U.S.
funding of gain-of-function research.
With deep distrust simmering, the State Department team convened a panel of
experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The idea was to
pummel the theory and see if it still stood. The panel took place on the
evening of January 7, one day after the insurrection at the Capitol. By then,
Ford had announced his plan to resign.
Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that
lasted three hours, according to meeting minutes obtained by Vanity Fair. The
scientific experts included Ralph Baric, Alina Chan, and the Stanford
microbiologist David Relman.
Asher invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a
biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the
probability of a lab origin versus a natural one. Scissoring Quay’s analysis,
Baric noted that its calculations failed to account for the millions of bat
sequences that exist in nature but remain unknown. When a State Department
adviser asked Quay whether he’d ever done a similar analysis, he replied
there’s “a first time for everything,” according to the meeting minutes.
Though they questioned Quay’s findings, the scientists saw other reasons to
suspect a lab origin. Part of the WIV’s mission was to sample the natural world
and provide early warnings of “human capable viruses,” said Relman. The 2012
infections of six miners was “worthy of banner headlines at the time.” Yet
those cases had never been reported to the WHO.
Baric added that, if SARS-CoV-2 had come from a “strong animal reservoir,” one
might have expected to see “multiple introduction events,” rather than a single
outbreak, though he cautioned that it didn’t prove “[this] was an escape from a
laboratory.” That prompted Asher to ask, “Could this not have been partially
bioengineered?”
Ford was so troubled by what he viewed as the panel’s weak evidence, and the
secretive inquiry that preceded it, that he stayed up all night summarizing his
concerns in a four-page memo. After saving it as a PDF so it couldn’t be
altered, he emailed the memo to multiple State Department officials the next
morning.
[Image may contain Text Document Word and Page]
Click to see the full
document<http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/1821COVIDemail.pdf>
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In the memo, Ford criticized the panel’s “lack of data” and added, “I would
also caution you against suggesting that there is anything inherently
suspicious—and suggestive of biological warfare activity—about People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) involvement at WIV on classified projects. [I]t would be
difficult to say that military involvement in classified virus research is
intrinsically problematic, since the U.S. Army has been deeply involved in
virus research in the United States for many years.”
[Click to see the full document]
Click to see the full
document<http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/Response_to_Former_Asst_Sec_Ford.pdf>
Thomas DiNanno sent back a five-page rebuttal to Ford’s memo the next day,
January 9 (though it was mistakenly dated “12/9/21”). He accused Ford of
misrepresenting the panel’s efforts and enumerated the obstacles his team had
faced: “apprehension and contempt” from the technical staff; warnings not to
investigate the origins of COVID-19 for fear of opening a “can of worms”; and a
“complete lack of responses to briefings and presentations.” He added that Quay
had been invited only after the National Intelligence Council failed to provide
statistical help.
A year’s worth of mutual suspicions had finally spilled out into dueling memos.
The State Department investigators pushed on, determined to go public with
their concerns. They continued a weeks-long effort to declassify information
that had been vetted by the intelligence community. On January 15, five days
before President Joe Biden’s swearing in, the State Department released a fact
sheet about activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, disclosing key
information: that several researchers there had fallen ill with COVID-19-like
symptoms in autumn 2019, before the first identified outbreak case; and that
researchers there had collaborated on secret projects with China’s military and
“engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on
behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The statement withstood “aggressive suspicion,” as one former State Department
official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. “I was very
pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,” said Chris Ford, who
personally signed off on a draft of the fact sheet before leaving the State
Department. “I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had
been vetted and cleared.”
X. A Fact-Finding Mission to Wuhan
In early July, the World Health Organization invited the U.S. government to
recommend experts for a fact-finding mission to Wuhan, a sign of progress in
the long-delayed probe of COVID-19’s origins. Questions about the WHO’s
independence from China, the country’s secrecy, and the raging pandemic had
turned the anticipated mission into a minefield of international grudges and
suspicion.
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Within weeks, the U.S. government submitted three names to the WHO: an FDA
veterinarian, a CDC epidemiologist, and an NIAID virologist. None were chosen.
Instead, only one representative from the U.S. made the cut: Peter Daszak.
It had been evident from the start that China would control who could come and
what they could see. In July, when the WHO sent member countries a draft of the
terms governing the mission, the PDF document was titled, “CHN and WHO agreed
final version,” suggesting that China had preapproved its contents.
Part of the fault lay with the Trump administration, which had failed to
counter China’s control over the scope of the mission when it was being
hammered out two months earlier. The resolution, forged at the World Health
Assembly, called not for a full inquiry into the origins of the pandemic but
instead for a mission “to identify the zoonotic source of the virus.” The
natural-origin hypothesis was baked into the enterprise. “It was a huge
difference that only the Chinese understood,” said Jamie Metzl. “While the
[Trump] administration was huffing and puffing, some really important things
were happening around the WHO, and the U.S. didn’t have a voice.”
[Image may contain Human Person Clothing Apparel Finger Crowd Zhong Nanshan
Electrical Device and Microphone]
In 2012, the prominent pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan consulted on a case of
miners who fell ill after digging bat feces out of a cave in Mojiang county.
Their symptoms of cough, fever, and labored breathing recalled the 2002 SARS
outbreak but also foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic.FROM TPG/GETTY IMAGES.
On January 14, 2021, Daszak and 12 other international experts arrived in Wuhan
to join 17 Chinese experts and an entourage of government minders. They spent
two weeks of the monthlong mission quarantined in their hotel rooms. The
remaining two-week inquiry was more propaganda than probe, complete with a
visit to an exhibit extolling President Xi’s leadership. The team saw almost no
raw data, only the Chinese government analysis of it.
They paid one visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi
Zhengli, as recounted in an annex to the mission report. One obvious demand
would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and
sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London
organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a
request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took
down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely
reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a
lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically
know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to
SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”
In fact, the database had been taken offline on September 12, 2019, three
months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail uncovered by Gilles
Demaneuf and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.
After two weeks of fact finding, the Chinese and international experts
concluded their mission by voting with a show of hands on which origin scenario
seemed most probable. Direct transmission from bat to human: possible to
likely. Transmission through an intermediate animal: likely to very likely.
Transmission through frozen food: possible. Transmission through a laboratory
incident: extremely unlikely.
On March 30, 2021, media outlets around the world reported on the release of
the mission’s 120-page report. Discussion of a lab leak took up less than two
pages. Calling the report “fatally flawed,” Jamie Metzl tweeted: “They set out
to prove one hypothesis, not fairly examine all of them.”
The report also recounted how Shi rebutted conspiracy theories and told the
visiting team of experts that “there had been no reports of unusual diseases,
none diagnosed, and all staff tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.” Her
statement directly contradicted the findings summarized in the January 15 State
Department fact sheet. “That was a willful lie by people who know it’s not
true,” said a former national security official.
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[Image may contain Text Page Document Advertisement Poster Brochure Paper and
Flyer]
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document<http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/USG_Analysis_of_COVID-19_Origins%20Report_April_5_2021.pdf>
An internal U.S. government analysis of the mission’s report, obtained by
Vanity Fair, found it to be inaccurate and even contradictory, with some
sections undermining conclusions made elsewhere and others relying on reference
papers that had been withdrawn. Regarding the four possible origins, the
analysis stated, the report “does not include a description of how these
hypotheses were generated, would be tested, or how a decision would be made
between them to decide that one is more likely than another.” It added that a
possible laboratory incident received only a “cursory” look, and the “evidence
presented seems insufficient to deem the hypothesis ‘extremely unlikely.’”
The report’s most surprising critic was the WHO’s director himself, Dr. Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. With the credibility of the World Health
Organization on the line, he appeared to acknowledge the report’s shortcomings
at a press event the day of its release. “As far as WHO is concerned all
hypotheses remain on the table,” he said. “We have not yet found the source of
the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone
unturned as we do.”
His statement reflected “monumental courage,” said Metzl. “Tedros risked his
entire career to defend the integrity of the WHO.” (The WHO declined to make
Tedros available for an interview.)
By then, an international coalition of roughly two dozen scientists, among them
DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf and EcoHealth critic Richard Ebright at
Rutgers, had found a way around what Metzl described as a “wall of rejections”
by scientific journals. With Metzl’s guidance, they began publishing open
letters in early March. Their second letter, issued on April 7, condemned the
mission report and called for a full investigation into the origin of COVID-19.
It was picked up widely by national newspapers.
A growing number of people were demanding to know what exactly had gone on
inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Were the claims in the State
Department’s fact sheet—of sick researchers and secret military
research—accurate?
Metzl had managed to question Shi directly a week before the release of the
mission report. At a March 23 online lecture by Shi, hosted by Rutgers Medical
School, Metzl asked if she had full knowledge of all the research being done at
the WIV and all the viruses held there, and if the U.S. government was correct
that classified military research had taken place. She responded:
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We—our work, our research is open, and we have a lot of international
collaboration. And from my knowledge, all our research work is open, is
transparency. So, at the beginning of COVID-19, we heard the rumors that it’s
claimed in our laboratory we have some project, blah blah, with army, blah
blah, these kinds of rumors. But this is not correct because I am the lab’s
director and responsible for research activity. I don’t know any kind of
research work performed in this lab. This is incorrect information.
A major argument against the lab-leak theory hinged on the presumption that Shi
was telling the truth when she said the WIV was not hiding any virus samples
that are closer cousins to SARS-CoV-2. In Metzl’s view, if she was lying about
the military’s involvement, or anything else, then all bets were off.
XI. Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology
In January 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a press release hailing
Shi Zhengli’s “distinguished and pioneering achievement in discovery and
characterization of important bat-borne viruses.” The occasion was her election
as a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Microbiology—just the latest
milestone in a glittering scientific career. In China, the celebrated “Bat
Woman” was easily recognizable from photos showing her in a full-body
positive-pressure suit inside the WIV’s BSL-4 lab.
Shi was a fixture at international virology conferences, thanks to her
“state-of-the-art” work, said James LeDuc, the longtime director of the BSL-4
Galveston National Laboratory in Texas. At the international meetings he
organized, Shi was a regular, along with Ralph Baric from UNC. “She’s a
charming person, completely fluent in English and French,” said LeDuc. Sounding
almost wistful, he added, “This is how science works. You get everyone
together, they share their data, go out and have a beer.”
Shi’s journey to the top of the virology field had begun with treks to remote
bat caves in southernmost China. In 2006, she trained at the BSL-4 Jean
Merieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon, France. She was named director of the WIV’s
Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2011, and its BSL-3 lab director in
2013.
It’s hard to think of anyone, anywhere, who was better prepared to meet the
challenge of COVID-19. On December 30, 2019, at around 7 p.m., Shi received a
call from her boss, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according
to an account she gave to Scientific American. He wanted her to investigate
several cases of patients hospitalized with a mysterious pneumonia: “Drop
whatever you are doing and deal with it now.”
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The next day, by analyzing seven patient samples, her team became one of the
first to sequence and identify the ailment as a novel SARS-related coronavirus.
By January 21, she had been appointed to lead the Hubei Province COVID-19
Emergency Scientific Research Expert Group. At a terrifying moment, in a
country that exalted its scientists, she had reached a pinnacle.
But her ascent came at a cost. There is reason to believe she was hardly free
to speak her mind or follow a scientific path that didn’t conform to China’s
party line. Though Shi had planned to share isolated samples of the virus with
her friend James LeDuc in Galveston, Beijing officials blocked her. And by
mid-January, a team of military scientists led by China’s top virologist and
biochemical expert, Major General Chen Wei, had set up operations inside the
WIV.
Under scrutiny from governments including her own, with bizarre conspiracy
theories and legitimate doubts swirling around her, she began lashing out at
critics. “The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment from nature for humanity’s
uncivilized habits,” she wrote in a February 2 post on WeChat, a popular social
media app in China. “I, Shi Zhengli, guarantee on my life that it has nothing
to do with our lab. May I offer some advice to those people who believe and
spread bad media rumors: shut your dirty mouths.”
Though Shi has portrayed the WIV as a transparent hub of international research
beset by false allegations, the State Department’s January fact sheet painted a
different picture: of a facility conducting classified military research, and
hiding it, which Shi adamantly denies. But a former national security official
who reviewed U.S. classified materials told Vanity Fair that inside the WIV,
military and civilian researchers are “doing animal research in the same
fricking space.”
While that, in and of itself, does not prove a lab leak, Shi’s alleged lies
about it are “absolutely material,” said a former State Department official.
“It speaks to the honesty and credibility of the WIV that they kept this
secret…. You have a web of lies, coercion, and disinformation that is killing
people.”
Vanity Fair sent Shi Zhengli and the director of the Wuhan Institute of
Virology detailed questions. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment
by email and phone.
As officials at the NSC tracked collaborations between the WIV and military
scientists—which stretch back 20 years, with 51 coauthored papers—they also
took note of a book flagged by a college student in Hong Kong. Written by a
team of 18 authors and editors, 11 of whom worked at China’s Air Force Medical
University, the book, Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made
Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, explores issues surrounding the development of
bioweapons capabilities.
Claiming that terrorists using gene editing had created SARS-CoV-1 as a
bioweapon, the book contained some alarming practical trade craft: “Bioweapon
aerosol attacks are best conducted during dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather
because ultraviolet rays can damage the pathogens.” And it cited collateral
benefits, noting that a sudden surge of hospitalizations could cause a
healthcare system to collapse. One of the book’s editors has collaborated on 12
scientific papers with researchers at the WIV.
[University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric collaborated with Shi
Zhengli on a gainoffunction coronavirus...]
University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric collaborated with Shi
Zhengli on a gain-of-function coronavirus experiment in 2015. In February 2020,
he privately expressed support for Peter Daszak’s Lancet statement dismissing
the lab-leak theory. More recently, he signed a letter calling for a
transparent investigation of all hypotheses.BY CHRISTOPHER
JANARO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES.
The book’s dramatic rhetoric could have been hype by Chinese military
researchers trying to sell books, or a pitch to the People’s Liberation Army
for funding to launch a biowarfare program. When a reporter with the Rupert
Murdoch–owned newspaper The Australian published details from the book under
the headline “Chinese Held Talks on Bioweapons Benefits,” the Global Times, a
Chinese state-owned media outlet, ridiculed the article, noting that the book
was for sale on Amazon.
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The inflammatory idea of SARS-CoV-2-as-bioweapon has gained traction as an
alt-right conspiracy theory, but civilian research under Shi’s supervision that
has yet to be made public raises more realistic concerns. Shi’s own comments to
a science journal, and grant information available on a Chinese government
database, suggest that in the past three years her team has tested two novel
but undisclosed bat coronaviruses on humanized mice, to gauge their
infectiousness.
In April 2021, in an editorial in the journal Infectious Diseases & Immunity,
Shi resorted to a familiar tactic to contain the cloud of suspicion enveloping
her: She invoked scientific consensus, just as the Lancet statement had. “The
scientific community strongly dismisses these unproven and misleading
speculations and generally accepts that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin and was
selected either in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, or in humans
following zoonotic transfer,” she wrote.
But Shi’s editorial had no muzzling effect. On May 14, in a statement published
in Science Magazine, 18 prominent scientists called for a “transparent,
objective” investigation into COVID-19’s origins, noting, “We must take
hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have
sufficient data.”
Among the signers was Ralph Baric. Fifteen months earlier, he had worked behind
the scenes to help Peter Daszak stage-manage the Lancet statement. The
scientific consensus had been smashed to smithereens.
XII. Out of the Shadows
By spring of 2021, the debate over COVID-19’s origins had become so noxious
that death threats were flying in both directions.
In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under
Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think
the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you
know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident,
not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first
calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a
source, and it hadn’t been.
After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came
not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also
from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he
should just “wither and die.”
Peter Daszak was getting death threats too, some from QAnon conspirators.
Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the
transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence
Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two “plausible
theories” were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence.
Even so, lab-leak talk was mostly confined to right-wing news outlets through
April, gleefully flogged by Tucker Carlson and studiously avoided by most of
the mainstream media. In Congress, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s
Republican minority had launched its own inquiry, but there was little buy-in
from Democrats and the NIH didn’t provide responses to its lengthy list of
demands for information.
The ground began to shift on May 2, when Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times
science writer known in part for writing a controversial book about how genes
shape the social behavior of different races, published a lengthy essay on
Medium.<https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038>
In it, he analyzed the scientific clues both for and against a lab leak, and
excoriated the media for its failure to report on the dueling hypotheses. Wade
devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of
SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it
to efficiently enter human cells.
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Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one
of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he
believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the
virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about
as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to
get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene
manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
With questions growing, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins released a statement
on May 19 asserting that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant
that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that
would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
On May 24, the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, kicked
off a virtual edition of its annual conference. In the weeks leading up to it,
a parade of high-profile stories broke, including two front-page reports in The
Wall Street Journal and a long Medium post from a second former New York Times
science
reporter<https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d>.
Not surprisingly, China’s government fired back during the conference, saying
that it would not participate in further inquiries within its borders.
On May 28, two days after President Biden announced his 90-day intelligence
review, the U.S. Senate passed a unanimous resolution, which Jamie Metzl had
helped shape, calling on the World Health Organization to launch a
comprehensive investigation into the origins of the virus.
Will we ever know the truth? Dr. David Relman of Stanford University School of
Medicine has been advocating for an investigation like the 9/11 Commission to
examine COVID-19’s origins. But 9/11 took place in one day, he said, whereas
“this has so many different manifestations, consequences, responses across
nations. All of that makes it a hundred-dimensional problem.”
The bigger problem is that so much time has gone by. “With every passing day
and week, the kinds of information that might prove helpful will have a
tendency to dissipate and disappear,” he said. “The world ages and things get
moved, and biological signals degrade.”
China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it
did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide
is, and may always be, unknown.
The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their
unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies
had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via
cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of
interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.
Now, at least, there appears to be the prospect of a level inquiry—the kind
Gilles Demaneuf and Jamie Metzl had wanted from the start. “We needed to create
a space where all of the hypotheses could be considered,” Metzl said.
If the lab-leak explanation proves accurate, history may credit Demaneuf and
his fellow doubters for breaking the dam—not that they have any intention of
stopping. They are now knee-deep in examining the WIV’s construction orders,
sewage output, and cell phone traffic. The thought driving Paris Group
cofounder Virginie Courtier forward is simple: “There are unanswered
questions,” she says, “and a few human beings know the answers.”
Additional reporting by Lili Pike, with research assistance from Stan Friedman.
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