Not many experts have openly endorsed the lab leak theory of Covid origins.
There are the ‘internet sleuths’ who make up DRASTIC (several of whom remain anonymous). There’s the science writer Nicholas Wade. And there’s Matt Ridley and Alina Chan – co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. (In a recent interview, Ridley told me that both he and Chan now think a lab leak is “more likely”.)
Few others have been willing to come out and say that, yes, the balance of evidence favours a lab leak. This may be because they’re genuinely undecided, or because they hold the opposite view (that the evidence favours a natural spillover).
However, I suspect that many experts are scared of endorsing an idea their colleagues have gone to great lengths to suppress – an idea the Chinese government has called “a lie concocted by anti-China forces”.
Which makes a recent blog post by the biologist Nick Patterson something of a bombshell. Patterson is highly respected for his contributions to mathematical and computational biology. He’s also a polymath.
After obtaining his PhD in mathematics from Cambridge, he worked as code-breaker for GCHQ. He then moved to the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, where he developed mathematics models for market prediction. And for the last 20 years, he’s been analysing human genetic data at MIT.
In his recent article, Patterson states that “by far the most likely cause of the pandemic was an accidental leak of an engineered virus”. So he not only believes that Covid leaked from a lab, but also that it was engineered beforehand.
According to Patterson, the “smoking gun” is a grant application by EcoHealth Alliance to DARPA (the research agency of the U.S. Department of Defence). “As far as I can make out,” he writes, “the plan here was for WIV to collect live virus, ship it to the USA, have US scientists genetically modify the virus, and then ship modified virus … back to China”.
Although the grant application was rejected, Patterson notes, “a dirty not-so-secret is that often a good slice of work proposed in a grant application has in fact already been done and for sure when a grant is rejected the scientists involved consider how they can proceed anyway”.
Patterson clarifies that he’s not claiming “the proposed research was directed towards biowarfare”, only that it had the effect of enhancing viral pathogenicity.
Will other experts now speak up? We’ll have to see. In the meantime, Patterson’s article is worth reading in full.
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The (accidental) lab leak always seemed to me the most plausible explanation for the insane panic coming from governments. They were scared of a bioweapon killing millions and them getting the blame.
It’s ironic then that following their panic they approved the worldwide deployment of an unnecessary, untested and unsafe vaccine which has killed thousands and injured millions, and they are going to get the blame for that instead.
“and they are going to get the blame for that instead.”
Not in my lifetime.
I don’t believe that they panicked: their drunken partying shows they knew it posed a trivial threat.
If I was never scared enough to alter my behaviour in any way, neither were they
Instead they seized an opportunity to do something they planned to do in a few years time after they’d got in place the legislation they’ve recently passed or intend to pass over the next year or so.
I think they may have panicked initially and then realised there was no serious threat but by then it was too late to admit their mistake, so they doubled down. Why would you admit you were wrong if you didn’t have to?
Because admitting you’re wrong early on would be accepted by the vast majority of people, who know that they themselves have have often made mistakes, and would prevent you from being responsible for the horrors of long-term lockdowns and experimental mass jabbing?
Well everyone else panicked too, and someone would have had to break ranks. There was an element of mass hysteria. There have been no adverse consequences for anyone involved in the lying and the madness and the evil – none. Name me someone has been paid a dear price for their complicity, or is likely to. The conspiracy involved every powerful institution on the planet more or less, either as an actor or just going along with it. Who is going to try to go against that?
“Accidental”.
In his paper he used the term: “From the Garden of Eden to today, humanity is very bad at deciding that there are some things it is better not to know.” Some of us might say that the political reaction was a significant cause of the troubles. Quite a lot of evidence from the varied outcome in different countries/states which demonstrates that. Thus there are better ways of dealing with any similar problems in the future.
I wonder why he omitted to mention the gp120 protein on the spike, which is even more damning and which was also alluded to in an Ecohealth Alliance grant proposal? The chance of that appearing on a coronavirus just in the right place through evolution is essentially nil, requiring 4 non-contiguous sequences of RNA. It’s a mechanism used by HIV to attack T cells. https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/absolute-proof-the-gp-120-sequences I’m surprised the lab leak theory is even controversial.
I’m going to walk this back partly by saying that there are people who maintain that it isn’t really gp120; the original preprint on which this theory was based was retracted. But there’s still the mention in the Ecohealth Alliance grant application and there’s the recent Nature paper in which Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli is a coauthor, showing that SARS-CoV-2 does indeed infect T cells in vitro, they suggest that it’s likely via the LFA-1 protein which is a route that HIV’s gp120 protein does indeed mediate.
Another argument that people have used against the natural origin theory is that the combination of a jump between species and high virulence is unlikely. Usually a jump between species reduces virulence; indeed, infecting a different species with a virus is one way that live attenuated vaccines are created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_passage#Use_in_vaccines
Very odd, especially as the article written in 1st person, that the PDF posted on the Substack site has no author name, date, etc.
Hmmm…
Spook.
So, unofficially official that it came from a lab (well who’d a thought?)
Of course not bioweapon/GoF research but-actually-all-for-our-own good, such selflessness in search of man’s survival eh?
The timing won’t be accidental, I reckon USA/China playing chicken as to who let’s on how high up the greasy pole this was all agreed between them.
With Taiwan kinda holding its breath..
The ranks of people willing to PUT THEIR NAMES OUT THERE in defiance of all this terror are GROWING.
More on this topic (from November 2021, summarising data that came to light through the course of the summer of 2021): https://www.hartgroup.org/a-grandee-exits-stage-left/.
Whether or not it is a lab leak or not is arguably less relevant than what was considered an appropriate response (kill the economy first, ask question later), and whether the likes of Jeremy Farrar and his organisation should have been funding this kind of research in the first place. Consider the words of US historian Thomas Frank, writing in the Guardian on 1 June 2021: “If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way”.