Coronavirus originated in a lab requires investigation

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Presumably, your friend believes the "97% of scientists agree about global warming" people.
It was found to be 97% of *political activists* agree.
"Mickey Mouse" was one of the participants, btw.

Last I checked that number it was about 98% of climate scientists; are you sure you're talking about the same survey?

“I totally resent the lie you are now propagating.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20. You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right, up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.

The immediate target of Dr. Fauci’s wrath was Senator Rand Paul, who was pressing the nation’s top doctor to say whether the National Institutes of Health had ever funded risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Based on new information disclosed by the National Institutes of Health, however, Paul might have been onto something.

On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold.

I read through this article. I should point out that this DRASTIC group seem sketchy and it's clear some choose to hide their identities (for corroboration I recommend Google).

Far from a damning indictment of Fauci.

The editor of one of the world's most prestigious medical journals has admitted it took more than a year to declare the conflict of interests of a scientist who denounced the Covid lab leak theory and called anyone who questioned the official Chinese narrative a conspiracy theorist.

Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Peter Daszak had links to the Wuhan laboratory at the centre of the spillover theory.

Dr Daszak organised the letter in February 2020, co-signed by 26 other leading researchers which condemned 'conspiracy theories' that Covid did not arise naturally.

The move is claimed to have shut down any debate over whether the virus could have escaped from a lab last year. But the zoologist, a Lancastrian who now lives in New York, had ties to Wuhan Institute of Virology stretching back 15 years.

During a grilling from MPs on the Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday, Dr Horton was forced to defend the 16-month delay before Dr Daszak's important conflicts of interest were finally published in a memorandum in the journal this June.

Dr Horton, who was honoured at The Great Hall of the People in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2008, to mark an 'unprecedented' collaboration between Peking University and The Lancet, admitted to MPs: 'A hundred per cent, I completely agree, the information that we published in June as an addendum should definitely have been included in the February letter.'

But he told the committee it took longer than a year to persuade Dr Daszak to formally record his links with China.

[...]

Dr Horton faced comparisons with The Lancet's notorious publication of a paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism, by disgraced academic Dr Andrew Wakefield, which was only retracted 12 years later.

Labour MP Graham Stringer said: 'Was nothing learnt about trust in The Lancet from the experience with Wakefield?'

During the session, Harvard scientist Dr Alina Chan said the Wuhan lab leak is now the most likely origin of the coronavirus pandemic because China tried to cover it up and because experts still haven't found an animal host despite extensive searching.

She said the idea that the virus may have been genetically engineered is 'reasonable'.

She highlighted a number of coincidences in the Covid timeline and said the state-sponsored Chinese cover-up of the early stages of the pandemic added to suspicion.

Speaking to the Science and Technology Select Committee, Dr Chan said: 'I think the lab origin is more likely than not.

'Right now it's not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward.

'But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.

'We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin is reasonable and that includes virologists who made modifications to the first Sars virus.'

Dr Chan, who wrote a book on the origin of the virus, added: 'We know this virus has a unique feature, called the furin cleavage site, and without this feature there is no way this would be causing this pandemic.

'A proposal was leaked showing that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites.

'So, you find these scientists who said in early 2018 'I'm going to put horns on horses' and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.'

Viscount Matt Ridley, who co-authored the book with Dr Chan, also said a lab leak is now the most likely theory because experts have still not found the animal host that would support a natural origin despite two years of extensive searching.

Recent revelations of China's attempted cover-up have forced British and US intelligence officials to take seriously the lab-leak hypothesis, once dismissed as a crank conspiracy theory.

Lord Ridley said: 'I also think it's more likely than not because we have to face the fact after two months we knew the origins of SARS, and after a couple of months we knew MERS was though through camels, but after two years we still haven't found a single infected animal that could be the progenitor, and that's incredibly surprising.

'We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic. We need to know whether we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations related to wildlife markets. At the moment we are really not doing either.

'We also need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with.'

A May 2021 report from The Wall Street Journal cited an undisclosed intelligence report detailing how three scientists from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care in November 2019, months before China disclosed the Covid pandemic.

The lab specialised in engineering dangerous coronaviruses and is the only level four biochemical lab in China.

[...]

Previously, the theory had been dismissed as conspiracy by most experts, partly because of its association with Donald Trump.

An early version of Covid-19 that appears to have been grown in a laboratory has been discovered in samples from a Chinese biotechnology firm.

The finding lends weight to claims that the virus may have started life as a lab experiment that accidentally leaked out.

Bioinformatics experts from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, made the discovery by accident while examining genetic data from soil samples collected from Antarctica in late 2018 and early 2019.

The samples were sent to Sangon Biotech in Shanghai for sequencing in Dec 2019, where they became contaminated with a previously unknown variant of Covid-19.

The variant has mutations that bridge the gap between bat coronavirus and the earliest Wuhan strain, so it may be an ancestral version of the virus.

The samples also contain DNA from hamsters and monkeys, suggesting that the early virus may have been grown in animal cell lines.

Viscount Ridley, author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said: “The unique mutations hint at it being an ancestral variant. So if it was sequenced in say mid-December, before anybody had identified the virus in people and started trying to grow it in labs, then it points to secret samples in labs in 2019.”

Commenting on the animal DNA discovered, he said: “These are not from seals or penguins but from African green monkeys and Chinese hamsters. Both species are the source of commonly used laboratory cell lines.”

Sangon Biotech in the spotlight

Sangon Biotech is frequently used by Chinese scientists for sequencing, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some experts think is the most likely location for a leak.

The exact date at which the DNA extraction took place is uncertain. However, researchers say that if it took place in December 2019, the virus could be the ancestor of the original human Wuhan strain.

If it was sequenced in early 2020, it may have been contaminated from experiments carried out by researchers trying to learn more about the emerging virus.

Dr Jesse Bloom, a virologist from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, re-ran the data and confirmed that the Antarctic samples did contain Covid-19 which had three key mutations which brought bat coronaviruses closer to the first human Wuhan strain, Wuhan-Hu-1.

[...]

Describing the significance of the discovery, Dr Bloom said: “Those three mutations are intriguing because they are all ancestral mutations that move the sequence ‘closer’ to the bat coronavirus relatives RaTG13 and Banal 20-52 relative to first reported Wuhan-Hu-1 sequence from the Huanan Seafood Market.”

In May 2021, a team of US evolutionary biologists published research on what an ancestor to Covid-19 should look like, and came up with two options. One had the same three mutations found in the samples.

“A virus with those three mutations relative to Wuhan-Hu-1 is one of the two plausible progenitors for all currently known human SarsCov2s,” added Dr Bloom.

“The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it’s exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31.

[...]

The Hungarian team say that when it first pointed out the discrepancy in the sequencing data, the samples were immediately removed from the genetic database by the Chinese, although have since been restored.

hat is the thing about conspiracy theories

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It could have been a simple negligence. They were studying a virus and meant to keep it inside the lab, but someone was negligent and it accidentally leaked out.

It will be interesting to see who was believing a conspiracy theory: Those who believed that the virus may have come from a lab, or those who asserted that such a claim was "bogus" or a "conspiracy theory"...

Of course it came from a lab, and some random autistic dude can prove that one to you. They'll get away with it, much like they did back in 1977 (I'm sure there's more), as people would rather argue about my side versus your side stuff that the talking heads behind it all whisper into the minds of either side to divert their eyes.

The question I have is what was its purpose. Spillover potential of a single virus or quasispecies on what's needed to make that jump or vaccine research? I guess that's fundamentally a moot question. I can't find an answer to a question I have that might make me favor either one.

and the concerted efforts of many (including (led by) Dr Fauci) who were intentionally working to divert\prevent people from looking into the possibility it leaked from a lab, attacking anyone who disagreed as making "bogus" claims and being "conspiracy theorists".

Of course it came from a lab, and some random autistic dude can prove that one to you. They'll get away with it, much like they did back in 1977 (I'm sure there's more), as people would rather argue about my side versus your side stuff that the talking heads behind it all whisper into the minds of either side to divert their eyes.

The question I have is what was its purpose. Spillover potential of a single virus or quasispecies on what's needed to make that jump or vaccine research? I guess that's fundamentally a moot question. I can't find an answer to a question I have that might make me favor either one.