Silencing The Lab Leak Hypothesis!

The Fedora Chronicles Radio Show · Silencing The Lab Leak Hypothesis!

Jason Cousineau and Eric Renderking Fisk | February 14th, 2021

Jason Cousineau and Eric Renderking Fisk discuss organizations and individuals' efforts to shut down the conversation about The Lab Leak Hypothesis and the dangers of Gain Of Function experiments on deadly pathogens. Why do these people try to discourage and even ban discussions about where SARS-COVID-2 originated? Why is there an effort to squelch conversations about the implications to the world if this was indeed a genetically modified virus?

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Show Notes and Links

I DO NOT think this virus is 100% brand new. I know that this is most likely a variant of the virus that was harvest and cultivated by scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology from an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, which is 1,803.8/1120.3 miles km away.

Between the space between Mojiang Hani and Wuhan, and from the time between 2014 and 2019 there were no cases of the disease or infection that's caused by this virus. The first cases of infection were reported to have originated literally across the street from the bio lab. Coincidence?

Also, leading up to the Fall of 2019 there were safety concerns about this specific institution. I do not believe this is the "secure facility" we've been lead to believe.

I am also sadly convinced that this variant or strain is genetically modified. I believe that it has been made more virulent due to "gain of function" experiments and modifications. There was a valid and legitimate reason why The Obama Administration and The National Institutes of Health put a moratorium on such experiments and it was a mistake to lift the ban here in The United States, and it was a mistake for other countries to allow those experiments to continue within their borders.

 

New York Times: "C.D.C. Details Anthrax Scare for Scientists at Facilities," by By Sabrina Tavernise and Donald G. McNeil Jr. | June 19, 2014

As many as 75 scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria after potentially infectious samples were sent to laboratories unequipped to handle dangerous pathogens, a spokesman for the federal health agency said Thursday.

The agency was testing a new way to kill anthrax, which it discovered did not work as well as expected.

None of the potentially infected scientists have any symptoms, but a number of them are being treated with antibiotics “out of an abundance of caution,” the spokesman, Thomas Skinner, said.

The lapse occurred sometime between June 6 and June 13. Workers in three labs who were not wearing protective gear moved and experimented with samples of the highly infectious bacteria that were supposed to have been deactivated, the agency said.

The Scientist Magazine: Moratorium on Gain-of-Function Research In the wake of a handful of biosafety lapses at federal research facilities, the US government is temporarily halting funding for new studies aiming to give novel functions to influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses." Jef Akst | October 21, 2014

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Department of Health and Human Services last week (October 17) announced it was launching a detailed review into so-called gain-of-function research, in which pathogens are manipulated to alter their capabilities. Such research made headlines in 2012 after two groups instilled the avian influenza virus H5N1 with the ability to transmit between ferrets through the air—a feat that prompted a year-long moratorium on H5N1 research. Now, in the face of threats like influenza, SARS, and MERS, which have killed scores in the Middle East and Asia, the government is instituting a pause to gain-of-function funding for experiments involving these deadly viruses...

... Even those who actively advocate for gain-of-function research seem to agree with the move. Boston University microbiologist Paul Duprex, a leader of Scientists for Science, a group that favors such research, told ScienceInsider that there is “precedent” for a pause and that he is looking forward to “the presentation of hard evidence and the discussion of the data.” Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch agrees: “I think the deliberative process is exactly what we and also Scientists for Science have called for.” Both Lipsitch and Duprex will speak before the NSABB this week.

PubMed Central (PMC): "Moratorium on Research Intended To Create Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens," Marc Lipsitch and Thomas V. Ingles.| December 12th, 2014

Vox: "Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop. The pandemic should make us question the value of gain-of-function research." By Kelsey Piper May 1, 2020,

Washington Post: "Opinion: State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses," by Josh Rogin Columnist | April 14, 2020

New York Post: "The doctor who denied COVID-19 was leaked from a lab had this major bias," By Steven W. Mosher | January 16, 2021

US Right to Know, an investigative public health nonprofit group, decided to look into the matter further. Through a public records request, they were able to obtain emails that show The Lancet statement was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has close ties with the Wuhan lab. 

How close? So close that EcoHealth Alliance has received millions of dollars of US taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

This is the same kind of research that I have long suspected escaped to cause COVID-19. 

The drafter of The Lancet statement was none other than the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. Which means that the very statement that, for many months, shut down open debate on the possible laboratory origin of the China Virus, was actually the product of an organization that was collaborating with the Wuhan lab in the genetic engineering of coronaviruses. 

Daily Caller: " Did Coronavirus Come From A Lab In Wuhan? Ten Takeaways From A Shocking New Report,"Dylan Housman | January 4th, 2021

The New York Mag: "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis: For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?" By Nicholson Baker | January 4th, 2021

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003,While the first documented case of SARS was in November 2002, it became a pandemic in 2003, and the WHO issued its first alert about the virus in March of that year. and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some.

And we were warned, repeatedly. The intentional creation of new microbes that combine virulence with heightened transmissibility “poses extraordinary risks to the public,” wrote infectious-disease experts Marc Lipsitch and Thomas Inglesby in 2014. “A rigorous and transparent risk-assessment process for this work has not yet been established.” That’s still true today. In 2012, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lynn Klotz warned that there was an 80 percent chance, given how many laboratories were then handling virulent viro-varietals, that a leak of a potential pandemic pathogen would occur sometime in the next 12 years.

A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe.

Daily Caller: "US Has Evidence Researchers In Wuhan Lab Fell Ill Before Coronavirus Outbreak, State Department Says," Chuck Ross | January 16, 2021.

The agency said that it was releasing previously undisclosed intelligence about WIV, including that researchers at the lab became sick in Fall 2019, just before Chinese authorities say that the virus began to spread in Wuhan.

“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

The State Department says that the intelligence “raises questions” about comments from WIV researcher Shi Zhengli, who has said publicly that there was “zero” coronavirus infection among WIV staffers and students.

Tennessee Star: "U.S. Scientist Who Led Charge Against COVID Lab Leak Theory Admits He Was Trying to Protect Chinese Scientist," by Andrew Kerr | January 20, 2021

The U.S. scientist behind an effort to stymie debate surrounding the possibility that COVID-19 could have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology admitted through a spokesman that he did so to protect Chinese scientists from online criticism.

Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, orchestrated a statement published in The Lancet medical journal in February, prior to any serious research on the origins of COVID-19, condemning “conspiracy theories” that suggest the virus doesn’t have a natural origin.

Daszak has worked directly with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying bat-based coronaviruses prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and he allegedly played an influential role in directing two taxpayer-funded grants from the National Institute of Health to the Chinese research center.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "WHO: COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab. Also WHO: Maybe it did," By Filippa Lentzos | February 11, 2021

Taken as a whole, the lab-leak theory remains a serious possibility; the World Health Organization’s investigative team will need to present any new evidence it used to rule out the theory when it releases its mission report. Additionally, the mission’s own terms of reference notes that there is currently no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 transmission on food products. At the press conference Ben Embarek said, “we don’t really understand if the virus can transmit to humans and under which conditions this could happen.” On what basis, then, is the team assessing the likelihood of a food-chain origin for COVID-19 as being higher than a lab-leak origin?

... Indeed, scientists, funders, and publishers with heavily vested interests in potentially pandemic virus research—like work on coronaviruses—could well use the World Health Organization’s investigation to stifle any further discussion of risky virus studies. That would be a real lost opportunity, because beyond whether the pandemic resulted from natural spillover or laboratory research, the origins question feeds into bigger societal debates that we still need to have about the sorts of risks we’re willing to take in the name of research.