Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning.... - Ja

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/...a-vanity-fair-story-on-a-covid-origins-report

Editor’s Note: A Review of Criticisms of a ProPublica-Vanity Fair Story on a COVID Origins Report
by Stephen Engelberg
Nov. 30, 11 a.m. EST


On Oct. 28, ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a story about an interim report on the origins of COVID-19 released by the Republican oversight staff of a Senate committee. The interim report was the product of a far-reaching investigation into the question of how the pandemic began, and we wanted to give readers an inside view of the team’s work and share independent experts’ views of its findings.

The debate over COVID-19’s origins has been contentious from the start, and the report’s conclusion that the pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident” triggered criticism. Scientists, China observers and others questioned the Senate team’s findings and our reporting about them.

Over the past several weeks, reporters and editors at both publications have taken a hard look at those criticisms.

Our examination affirms that the story, and the totality of reporting it marshals, is sound...

 

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.city-journal.org/emails-cast-more-doubt-on-the-official-covid-story

Proximal Orchestrations
Newly released emails cast more doubt than ever on the official story of Covid-19 as a naturally occurring virus.
Nicholas Wade
December 4, 2022 Covid-19

The scientists who assured the world that the Covid-19 virus could not have been engineered in a laboratory based their pivotal decision on a single piece of flawed evidence. Their discussion of the scientific facts was interspersed with frequent speculation about the public impact of their findings. Theirs was no openminded search for the truth; one scientist expressed his determination from the start to disprove the possibility of a lab leak. In the rush to publish their predetermined conclusion, they ignored a critical viral feature that points to manipulation.

These departures from customary scientific procedure are evident from a new batch of emails released to Jimmy Tobias, a freelance writer, after litigation to block the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from making extensive redactions. The emails were exchanged principally between Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the NIH, and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, a large medical research foundation in London. Other participants were Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientist to the British government, and two groups of virologists, one largely U.S.-based and the other from Europe.

The new emails date from the first nine days of February 2020. They record the participants’ discussions of how to frame a report discrediting the idea that the Covid virus, SARS-CoV2, could have escaped from a lab. Just such a proposal had been outlined by the American virologists in a January 31 email to Fauci. Strangely, two of the American group soon began to lead the charge against their own proposal. Their efforts led to preparation of an article, overseen by Farrar, Fauci, and Collins, in which the American virologists reversed themselves entirely, declaring it impossible that the virus could have been engineered. The article, known as the Proximal Origins paper, was posted in near-final form as soon as February 17. It was published in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, and proved widely influential in promoting the view that SARS-CoV2 had evolved naturally.

The emails begin with vigorous statements by the American virologists explaining their initial view that the virus had indeed been concocted in a laboratory. Mike Farzan of Scripps said that he was “bothered by the furin site” and had “a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab.” The SARS-CoV2 genome, some 30,000 nucleotide units in length, contains a 12-nucleotide insert, known as a furin cleavage site, which greatly enhances its infectivity. Closely related viruses frequently exchange genetic material, so it would be easy to see SARS-CoV2’s furin cleavage site as having a natural origin if any other viruses in its group possessed one. But none does. Hence Farzan’s perplexity and his inference that the furin site must have been engineered into the virus...

 

[sharon sanders]

Government source.

Beijing releases specific rules on COVID-related experiments to enhance lab biosafety

By Global Times
Published: Feb 01, 2023 07:24 PM
Updated: Feb 01, 2023 08:32 PM

Beijing released specific rules on experiments relating to COVID-19 and banned any activities that fall beyond regulatory approval, the capital's health authority said in a newly released notice, in a move to further strengthen COVID-19 laboratory biosafety.

Activities such as novel coronavirus cultivation, experiments on animal infection and nucleic acid testing can only be carried out after receiving approval from the National Health Commission (NHC) or Beijing Municipal Health Commission, the capital's commission said in the notice.

Special storerooms shall be set up to store COVID-19 strains and samples and those storerooms should be guarded by at least two personnel and two locks and equipped with monitoring equipment, the notice read.

more...

zhttps://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202302/1284608.shtml

 

[Emily]

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-other-lab-in-wuhan/
The Other Lab in Wuhan: The German-Chinese “Laboratory for Virus Research”
By Robert Kogon December 19, 2022

The “lab-leak” theory is enjoying a strong revival at the moment, thanks in part to Elon Musk having obliquely endorsed it in a Tweet while clearly point the finger at Anthony Fauci: “As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people.”

This despite the fact that an article in Science appeared to have already put the theory to rest over a year ago by showing that the initial cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan was located on the opposite (left) bank of the Yangtze River from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is commonly supposed to be the pandemic’s epicenter according to the “lab-leak” theory.

But unbeknownst to most observers, there was in fact another infectious diseases lab in Wuhan, the German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity, and it is located on the same side of the river in the cluster...

 

[Pathfinder]

14 February 2023

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation

Sensitive studies in China were intended to pinpoint the source of the pandemic virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”.
...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y

 

[sharon sanders]

14 February 2023

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation

Sensitive studies in China were intended to pinpoint the source of the pandemic virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”.
...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y

Apparently WHO denies....

Video rebuttal at twitter link.......

Maria Van Kerkhove

@mvankerkhove
·
53m
As said earlier, @WHO has not abandoned studying the origins of
#COVID19. We have not, we will not.
We owe it to the people who died, families who have suffered, for all of us
so that we are better prepared the next time. More from
@DrTedros
and me

 

[Pathfinder]

Translation Google

Covid-19: WHO boss promises to do everything to get "an answer" on the origin of the virus

By SudOuest.fr with AFP
Published on 02/15/2023 at 6:12 p.m.

As of February 14, the WHO dashboard, which counts the victims of Covid-19, showed 6,841,152 officially recorded deaths and 756,135,075 confirmed cases.

The head of the World Health Organization personally pledged on Wednesday to do everything to obtain "an answer" on the origins of Covid-19, firmly denying reports that the organization has given up its investigation.

"There is a scientific and moral dimension to this problem and we must continue to push until we have the answer" on the origins of the pandemic which started in China at the end of 2019, declared Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during the the organization's weekly press briefing in Geneva.

He pointed out that he had recently sent an official email to a senior Chinese official again asking for Beijing's collaboration in trying to find where and when the Covid-19 virus started to spread until it became the worst pandemic in a century.

An article in the scientific journal Nature published this week claimed that the WHO had given up pursuing the second phase of the origins investigation because of the lack of cooperation from the Chinese authorities.

“Discreetly Suspended”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly suspended the second phase of its long-awaited scientific investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges with attempts to conduct crucial studies in China,” writes Nature.

Quoted in the article, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who has been in charge of the fight against the pandemic at the WHO since its inception, affirmed that this information was erroneous and the result "of an error in the way of reporting information”.

"The WHO has not abandoned the study of the origin of Covid," she said during the press conference; and to insist: “We have not abandoned any plan. We won't stop until we understand the origins… and it gets harder and harder because the more time passes, the harder it is to really understand what happened in these early stages of the pandemic ".

“We continue to ask for more cooperation and collaboration from our colleagues in China, to advance the studies that need to take place in China,” she added.

...

https://www.sudouest.fr/sante/coron...e-reponse-sur-l-origine-du-virus-14072628.php

 

[Emily]

Viral origins studies cancelled

Dr. John Campbell

2.68M subscribers
39,283 views Feb 18, 2023

 

[sharon sanders]

From my perspective China will never admit responsibility. I have thought since the beginning that this pandemic was started by a lab escape and I have not changed my mind. https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...dna-manipulations-cloning?p=855271#post855271

 

[Mary Wilson]

Three years on, Covid lab-leak theories aren’t going away. This is why

Are they just fringe conspiracies—or could they be something more?

January 25, 2023
By Philip Ball

In retrospect, a news story published by the science journal Nature in 2015 makes for chilling reading. It reported that scientists in the US had transferred a small piece of the genome from a coronavirus found in bats in China into a variant of Sars-CoV, the virus responsible for the outbreak of the lethal respiratory infection Sars between 2002 and 2003. The added genetic material encoded a so-called spike protein that enabled the Sars-like virus, which had been adapted to infect mice, to infect cells of the human respiratory tract too. “Our work”, wrote the scientists, led by epidemiologist Ralph Baric, “suggests a potential risk of Sars-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”

“The virus in wild bats would need to evolve to pose any threat to humans,” Nature wrote—“a change that may never happen, although it cannot be ruled out.”

It is now generally accepted that Sars-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid pandemic, is a bat coronavirus, closely related to Sars-CoV and able to infect humans—a so-called zoonotic virus, capable of jumping host species—because of its spike protein. Had more attention been paid to the risk that Baric and colleagues identified, might the catastrophe have been avoided? ...

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/three-years-on-covid-lab-leak-theories-arent-going-away

_____________________________________________
(This may be the Nature 2015 study that is referred to in the above post.?)

Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research

Published12 November 2015
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.18787

Declan Butler

Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

In an article published in Nature Medicine[SUP]1[/SUP] on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them.

Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so. In 2013, researchers reported this ability for the first time in a different coronavirus isolated from the same bat population[SUP]2[/SUP]. ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

 

[Pathfinder]

Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

U.S. agency’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence

By Michael R. GordonFollow
and Warren P. StrobelFollow
Updated Feb. 26, 2023 10:44 am ET

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
...
U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.
...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?st=cwnnavokr2i1d2e

 

[Emily]

Basically the story is that the project that led to the sars-cov-2 lab escape was an ill-conceived intelligence operation to learn more about what was going on at the Wuhan lab. The Baric expertise in engineering coronaviruses was given to researchers in China to gain access to the lab.

https://thehighwire.com/videos/ex-ec...whistleblower/

Former Senior Executive at EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Andrew Huff, joins Del in studio to discuss his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, his firsthand account of the overwhelming corruption that led to the emergence of COVID-19, and the alleged cover-up orchestrated by the highest levels of US health regulators.
#TheTruthAboutWuhan #AndrewHuff #EcoHealthAlliance
POSTED: February 6, 2023

 

[Pathfinder]

China's response:

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning’s Regular Press Conference on February 27, 2023
...
AFP: The US Energy Department said on Sunday that they have new evidence indicating that COVID most likely arose from a laboratory leak from China. What’s your response?

Mao Ning: The origins-tracing of SARS-CoV-2 is about science and should not be politicized. China has always supported and participated in global science-based origins-tracing. “A laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely” is a science-based, authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission after field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers. It was accurately recorded in the mission’s report and has received extensive recognition from the international community.

Certain parties should stop rehashing the “lab leak” narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicizing origins-tracing.
...

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/202302/t20230227_11032204.html

 

[Mary Wilson]

U.S. RIGHT TO KNOW
Pursuing truth and transparency for public health

Key articles on origins of Covid-19, gain-of-function research and biolabs

Posted: February 3, 2023
by Gary Ruskin

Here is a reading list about what is known and not known about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, accidents and leaks at biosafety and biowarfare laboratories, and the health risks of gain-of-function (GOF) research, which aims to increase the host range, transmissibility, infectivity or pathogenicity of potential pandemic pathogens.

https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/...gain-of-function-readings/#Mostrecentarticles

 

[sharon sanders]

U.S. RIGHT TO KNOW
Pursuing truth and transparency for public health

Key articles on origins of Covid-19, gain-of-function research and biolabs

Posted: February 3, 2023
by Gary Ruskin

Here is a reading list about what is known and not known about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, accidents and leaks at biosafety and biowarfare laboratories, and the health risks of gain-of-function (GOF) research, which aims to increase the host range, transmissibility, infectivity or pathogenicity of potential pandemic pathogens.

https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/o...recentarticles

I would add this thread including post #80 dated April 28, 2020, 07:21 PM

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/...271#post855271

I was warned several times in 2020 that this thread was going to ruin FT's reputation. I replied that we were not going to stop posting and not publishing this thread would ruin FT's reputation.

 

[sharon sanders]

video at link

Allegations that China is warning Musk to stop promoting Wuhan lab leak theories.


Squawk Box

@SquawkCNBC
Ahead of the Select Committee on China's first congressional hearing tonight,
@onlyyoontv
reports on the China Communist Party's warning to
@elonmusk
:
8:44 AM · Feb 28, 2023
·
22.8K
Views

 

[Pathfinder]

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing – 3 March 2023

3 March 2023
...
Over the past few days there has been renewed attention on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we have said before, if any country has information about the origins of the pandemic, it is essential for that information to be shared with WHO and the international scientific community – not so as to apportion blame, but to advance our understanding of how this pandemic started, so we can prevent, prepare for and respond to future epidemics and pandemics.

I wish to be very clear that WHO has not abandoned any plans to identify the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrary to recent media reports and comments by politicians.

In 2021, WHO established the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, or SAGO.

In its report last year, SAGO identified key studies that must be done in China and elsewhere to verify or eliminate the various hypotheses for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

WHO continues to call for China to be transparent in sharing data, and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results. To that effect, I have written to, and spoken with, high-level Chinese leaders on multiple occasions, as recently as just a few weeks ago.

Until then, all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table.

At the same time, the continued politicisation of the origins research has turned what should be a purely scientific process into a geopolitical football, which only makes the task of identifying the origins more difficult.

And that makes the world less safe.

Understanding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remains a scientific imperative, to inform measures to prevent future epidemics and pandemics, and a moral imperative, for the sake of the millions of people and their families who have lost their lives to COVID-19, and those who continue to live with post-COVID-19 condition.

===

https://www.who.int/news-room/speec...-remarks-at-the-media-briefing---3-march-2023

 

[Pathfinder]

14 February 2023

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation

Sensitive studies in China were intended to pinpoint the source of the pandemic virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”.
...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y

NEWS 14 February 2023 Update 03 March 2023

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation
...

EDITOR’S NOTE 3 March 2023


Nature stands by the accuracy of this article, which representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) have publicly disputed. Nature has carefully reviewed e-mail exchanges and recordings of on-the-record interviews with WHO spokespeople between November 2022 and February 2023. We can find no inaccuracy and have engaged in good faith with representatives of the WHO over their concerns.

We would like to highlight the following information for clarity: as stated in the article, phase two of the SARS-CoV-2 origins investigation is no longer being pursued by the WHO; the WHO continues to investigate the origins of the virus through the establishment of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) and other diplomatic efforts.

...
UPDATES & CORRECTIONS

Update 03 March 2023: An editor’s note was added to this article after initial publication to affirm the article’s accuracy in response to a dispute.

...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y#correction-0

 

[sharon sanders]

I do not think I have ever seen something like this. Interesting.

 

[Pathfinder]

OPINION

New emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci commissioned scientific paper in Feb. 2020 to disprove Wuhan lab leak theory

By Miranda Devine
March 5, 2023 7:07pm Updated
...
New emails uncovered by House Republicans the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

“There was a study recently,” he told reporters on April 17, 2020, when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.

“So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”
...
The question of why Fauci went to such an effort to obscure the origins of COVID-19 is a major focus of the GOP-led committee.
...
https://nypost.com/2023/03/05/new-e...oned-paper-to-disprove-wuhan-lab-leak-theory/