Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out” months after publishing a paper closing down the possibility, newly released messages show. The Telegraph has more.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as ‘The Proximal Origins of Covid‘, concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US Senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans.
Three months after the paper was published, one of the authors, Professor Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Institute, California, wrote on Slack, the communication platform: “At the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other – and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there.
“That’s obviously not to say that somebody ‘did’ but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”
In the Nature Medicine paper, the authors had argued that bat coronavirus manipulation was carried out across the world, so it was unfair to point the finger at WIV, but Prof Andersen privately admitted that was not the case.
“That isn’t true, it has exclusively been going at WIV,” he wrote, adding that he believed both a natural and a lab-origin scenario were “equally probable”.
He also warned that the paper had claimed manipulation of viruses was hard, and that the virus could not emerge through cell evolution experiments. But he said both those arguments had been proven untrue.
Prof Andersen said that a lab leak was 30% likely while co-author Prof Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney put the probability at between 10 and 20%.
Viscount Ridley, the author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, said: “These messages confirm that the ‘Proximal Origins’ authors continued to believe a lab leak was possible.
“So why did they not correct or retract the paper that misled the world?”
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi Zhengli – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Zhengli had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made COVID-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
Prof Holmes added that it was “striking” that a bat-derived coronavirus with a furin cleavage site turned up in a city with a lab “proposing to muck around” with FCSs in bat coronaviruses.
WIV planned the bat research in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, founded by British zoologist Peter Daszak and the American virologist Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina.
Prof Rambaut told his co-authors they would need to talk about the “Baric/Daszak s—show” and come up with a strategy “so we don’t get associated with these f—ers”.
He also warned colleagues to “stay off email” or “carefully curate some emails” in case of Freedom of Information requests.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Read Dr Robert Malone’s summary of the newly released emails on his Substack page.
Discussion
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Surely it was in the interests of the pharma industry to deny a lab leak, especially when same bods would be/were the ones delivering a vaccine to ‘save’ us from said virus. Rather like being accused of making a problem one then gets paid to solve.
Or is the lab leak story just a clever second-stage cover for the intentional release?
What on earth could they have done with all those billions of vaccine doses if not…
The whole covid thing is so absurd. Tucker Carlson broke the news of the lab in Feb’ 2020.
Anyone who doesn’t think it was an engineered virus probably also believes the BBC is impartial.
You can’t engineer something that hasn’t first been proven to exist.
“Carefully curate” is highfalutin for “delete and deny”. Dishonest cheats.
The great unwashed fell into two camps: those who readily accepted what they were told and the sceptical among us for whom the idea of majority or even herd decision making in science has been anathema since MMGW first reared its costly, damaging head.
I, for one, never believed the bag theory.
If it existed at all, Covid was a deliberate leak from a lab carrying out gain-of-function research. Event 201 sponsored by the Gates Foundation in September 2019 war-gamed the precise scenario, including the naming of the variants.
In January 2020, I was out with a friend who is a police superintendent, and all forces had been warned to prepare for a lockdown coming in March. How did they know? In public, Johnson was ruling it out until the very last minute.
On the eve of lockdown, the government quietly downgraded the threat to medium from high, because a high rating meant they were legally obliged to use any medication available, whereas medium allowed them to wait for the clot shots. They then removed the need for a second doctor to certify cause of death, and allowed unqualified care home managers to issue death certificates stating cause of death. The final nail in the coffin was blocking autopsies.
It was all planned, right down to the coordinated Build Back Better messaging.
Removing the need for an independent approval for a cert was unwinding the changes made after the late Harold Shipman case, so I suggested they should be labelled “Shipman Certificates”. He would have carried on during the C-19 panic if it had happened while he was at large – they would never have caught him.
On a slightly similar note, my brother, who used to be a farmer (farming family) told me he was seeing all the telltale signs of the mitigation and countermeasures used for “Foot and Mouth Disease”, weeks/months before the last outbreak when Neil Ferguson had all those millions of cows and sheep slaughtered.
DEFRA, or whoever, knew it was coming, and did nothing to stop it, the mass slaughter was “probably” the plan all along, for the shocking images if nothing more! It did also put a lot of farmers out of business.
Basically, they were all lying
Don’t know about you folks, but it all seemed quite obvious from the start.
So who leaned on them to shut up about it and toe the Approved Line in public…?
Know any whistleblowers who died suddenly. Professor Luc Montagnier for one. Professor Raoult Didier silenced by the French gov’t. Many US scientific experts now quiet after threats to their medical licenses, Pierre Kory, Ryan Cole, Mary Bowden, Zev Zelenko(rip),and dozens of others.
With reference to the photograph accompanying the article, those “scientists” really need to update themselves with “The Science” regarding PPE. Instead of spending a lot of their budget on fancy looking hazmat suits, they could have been using homemade cloth masks. Job done.
Still seeing worryingly paranoid individuals (wanted to phrase it reasonably) wearing cloth and blue medical masks (usually badly) in these so-called deadly heatwaves!
Surely, at this stage, if you are still really that concerned, why would you ever leave the “safety” of your home.
I saw a few at Wimbledon tennis – 1st week, a bazillion people there, stark raving bonkers.
This is a classic false dichotomy that no one wants to admit. With all the certainty surrounding virology, vaccines and ‘germ theory’ why is it that top scientists can’t be certain of its origin, quote
“… both a natural and a lab-origin scenario were equally probable”.
And, quote;
“At the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other”.
Indeed, the second quote is absolutely correct and very revealing. There is zero hard (direct) scientific evidence of the existence of pathogenic viruses. They simply are a product of circular reasoning, assumptions and ones imagination.
Toxic insults to the body (vaccines and other toxic medications, recreational drug use, lack of sunlight, poor hygiene, poor diets, pesticides, fluoridation, excessive EMF exposure, sleep deprivation, stress, anxiety etc) combine and accumulate to cause ‘dis-ease’.
The sooner this is exposed the sooner we’ll end this catastrophic public health clown-show.
Won’t rule out a lab leak…?
I mean, let’s be reasonable:
A new variant coronavirus infection emerges a few miles from a biomedical research laboratory where there is active research going on about genetical modifications to coronaviruses. Which lab has demonstrably weak biohazard measures.
But the idea that there could have been a lab leak…?
Racist conspiracy theory!
Boy, these guys really think we are stupid.
For a lab leak to be true one needs to provide direct (hard) evidence… there is none. There’s also no direct evidence for the zoonotic theory. Thus, an alternative theory (see my other post) must be true until direct evidence is presented to support others.
Those down voting are down voting the scientific method, reason and logic.
Perhaps some/all the “scientists”
were lying/not telling the whole truth at the beginning. Thus adjusting their stance as the evidence leaked out.
I like your viewpoint and have done a little reading on the idea, but I still think that it came out of the lab. There’s too many really dodgy people involved in it, and a lot of evidence connecting them all, and the money trail of course. The arse covering has been far too obvious. Even to the final covering of shite that was the Covid Enquiry.
Where is the direct evidence of ‘it’?
Assuming you think ‘it’ is what the medical establishment named SARS-CoV-2, there is no direct scientific evidence of the isolation and purification of any pathogenic virus.
It matters not how many people believe in Santa Claus, Big Foot or the Tooth Fairy, only direct evidence of existence in nature passes the logic test and the strict objectivity of the scientific method.
Things don’t exist just because people say it does – it has to be proven.
No.
A lab leak is true or not regardless of the evidence. In fact the evidence was strongly against the wet market from the beginning. Read Ridley’s excellent but understated book
Yes, they are.
A lab leak requires direct scientific evidence of a pathogen.
If you or anyone else has any, please share.