Weekly lab leak news
Baric vs Drosten, mice vs hamsters and Fauci vs truth
Sachs on lab leak
Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs’ latest opinion piece linked to 15 facts. “The sum of the evidence – and the absence of reliable evidence pointing to a natural origin – adds up to the possibility that the US funded and implemented a dangerous GoF research program that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and then to a worldwide pandemic.”
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/covid-19-gain-of-function-us-research
Two of his fifteen facts are the links between NIH and DARPA combined with links between Rocky Mountain Lab and UNC. He’s previously discussed Ralph Baric experimenting with Egyptian fruit bats in Montana.
More hit pieces
The professional lab leak debate is getting very unprofessional. The latest flareup is between two tenured Rutgers professors versus 12 natural origin scientists. They claim social media attacks violate Rutgers policy and could incite physical harm.
4 year anniversary of the Proximal Origins paper
On March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine Tweeted: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
If you ignore the mud in this 2024 debate, and look closely at 4 of those 12 scientists early in the 2020 pandemic, the debate will make more sense. Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry and Andrew Rambaut did not suspect SARS2 was engineered from Jan 10, 2020 until Jan 24, 2020. The SARS2 genome was publicly available for all to see on Jan 10th. But all four suspected engineering after Shi Zhengli of Wuhan published RaTG13 on Jan 24th. The RaTG13 sample was mentioned 60 times in their private Slack channel (searchable version here). This allowed them to do an alignment of the two sequences, which exposed the inserted (PRRA) furin cleavage site in SARS2.
And one week after Shi published RaTG13, the group of four evolutionary virologists emailed Tony Fauci on Jan 31st to say “we find the SARS2 genome inconsistent with expectations of evolutionary theory.” Fauci was then up until 3 AM on Feb 1st covering his biological tracks, because he funded DARPA Defuse. Fauci then added Bob Garry and Kristian Andersen to his ongoing CREID project, which was basically DARPA Defuse II.
The Proximal Origin paper then started to evolve from Kristian’s lab leak ‘report’ into a lab leak coverup. Just read the first draft, on PDF pages 1 and 2 and the first page of the final draft for Nature Medicine on PDF page 204.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SSCP-Drafts-of-Proximal-Origin.pdf
Eddie Holmes, a British evolutionary virologist, asked in April 2020, “why would Dr. Shi’s group then publish RaTG13 that would only help point the finger at them? Makes no sense.” Eddie ironically wrote the final draft of the March 2020 Proximal Origin paper, because he was collaborating with the Wuhan CDC BSL2, which was next door to the Wuhan wet market. He was also bidding for Fauci’s CREID project in 2019. Eddie called Substack post #6 “utter rubbish,” because it all makes sense after DARPA Defuse leaked in September 2021.
NIAID’s CREID = DARPA Defuse
This is from Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS in Singapore. He is presumably emailing Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric, about revising their failed 2018 DARPA Defuse grant for NIAID’s CREID (aka EIDRC). The grant was due June 29, 2019.
Fauci was personally involved in choosing the winner of this $82M CREID grant in November 2019.
Gary Ruskin of U.S. Right to Know, who chased down all of these great FOIA’s, is scheduled to testify in Congress tomorrow.
Never ending Mojiang miner theory
Some claim the 3 dead Chinese miners in 2012 directly led to the creation of SARS2 in 2019. But those dead miners were also mentioned in NIAID’s 2019 CREID documents.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/the-future-of-the-lab-leak-theory/
Another NIAID FOIA
U.S. Right to Know uploaded a 509 page NIH FOIA with 500 pages redacted, but the first page was interesting. Syrian golden hamsters are one of five transmission models for SARS2, but this was apparently well known for two decades.
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NIH-FOIA-Request-55351-October-Production_Redacted.pdf
This is the exact same species of pet you had as a kid growing up, but they are also kept in Rocky Mountain Lab’s BSL4. Vincent Munster proposed to use Syrian hamsters in his winning 2018 DARPA Preempt project. There was a SARS2 outbreak in a Hong Kong pet shop called “Little Boss” in early 2022. It was the holy trinity of infection + transmission + spillback outside of a laboratory setting. Those Hong Kong hamsters were imported from the Netherlands (Munster’s home) and they are basically found everywhere, except Wuhan.
mGFT > Bayesian analysis?
https://www.newsweek.com/covid-lab-leak-theory-resurfaces-controversial-study-1877997
They used an ‘established risk analysis tool’ for differentiating natural and unnatural epidemics called the modified Grunow–Finke assessment tool (mGFT) to study the origin of SARS-COV-2. The mGFT scored 41/60 points (68%) indicating a greater likelihood of an unnatural than natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. “This risk assessment cannot prove the origin of SARS-CoV-2 but shows that the possibility of a laboratory origin cannot be easily dismissed.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.14291
“As aerosol transmission has been identified as the dominant mode of transmission, this does not help with identification of the origin.” Actually it helps since we can see which American lab animals were used to aerosolize SARS2.
A reader question: why do you exclude Shi & Baric’s humanized mice as an intermediary species for creating SARS2?
Ralph Baric’s pre-pandemic statements are coronavirus gospel. He gave a 2014 NPR interview defending his risky research. "No. 1, mice don't sneeze," says Baric, so they don't transmit these diseases through the air. And he says the process of adapting these viruses to mice actually makes the germs less able to infect human cells." Is he making it more dangerous? "If you're a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to," said Baric in his dry humor!
This line was repeated in a separate scientific blog: "if anything, adapting SARS2 to mice would make the virus less dangerous to humans but more dangerous to mice. The fact that it spread slightly more rapidly in mice was entirely due to its adaptation in mice."
https://www.randombio.com/n501y.html
All lab mice, including HFH4-hACE2, have to be dosed with the same amount of virus as raccoon dogs, so it's not really a SARS2 animal model. Lab mice were not a SARS2 infection model early in the pandemic, but notice Syrian hamsters (which sneeze) are “an excellent model.” To put it bluntly, Baric’s furin cleavage site, in his humanized mouse model, is perfectly safe. You could eat the mouse and it wouldn’t infect you. How do we know? There have been 6 mice accidents at UNC, but no technicians were ever “sickened.”
The American Baric versus the German Drosten
latest piece narrows down his list of suspects to Ralph Baric of UNC versus Christian Drosten from Germany. Somehow Baric got a good name in this lab leak debate, even though he lied (by omission) to the US military and Congress. And Drosten has been dragged through the mud, but he’s been open to the lab leak debate.https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/14/baric-vs-drosten-on-lab-leak/
Turning on the Bat Signal
A good bat immunology 101 article on a Duke med student recruited by Linfa.
https://www.the-scientist.com/turning-on-the-bat-signal-71700
Dozens of US lab leaks every year
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13170559/data-lab-leak-incidents-us.html
White Coat Waste Project
The non-profit project is running Twitter ads bringing attention to the “Wuhan west” Chinese bat breeding lab being built in Colorado.
Russia sanctions EcoHealth
The Russian sanctions included Peter Daszak, Billy Karesh, Jon Epstein and Kevin Olival of EcoHealth Alliance. Kevin ran a Western Asia Bat program funded by the US government. It involved countries bordering Russia, such as Afghanistan, Armenia and Georgia. Russia even listed EcoHealth’s competitor/collaborator Metabiota.
https://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1938555/
EcoHealth + Georgetown
A new $3M EcoHealth grant runs through Fauci’s retirement home at Georgetown University.
70 seconds that shutdown America
4 long years ago
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-70-seconds-that-shook-the-world/
William Briggs on (non) scientific models
biological interviewed
Hi Jim, Thanks very much for your analysis, reporting and weekly updates.
In July last year I made a big page with links to SARS-CoV-2 documents and websites etc. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ I haven't been able to keep updating it, so I have made a prominent link, at the start, to your Substack.
I had not realised that the drafts of the Proximal Origin article were available: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SSCP-Drafts-of-Proximal-Origin.pdf .
You wrote: "Just read the first and last page of the 216 pages of drafts." Perhaps you mean something like "the first draft, on PDF pages 1 and 2 and the first page of the final draft for Nature Medicine on PDF page 204".
World law enforcement agencies must arrest Walensky, Birx, Fauci, Daszak and all DOD, CIA, CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA and big pharma and big tech. executives involved.
Fraud and homicide are not included in the total immunity from legal liability agreement under the PREP Act for the big Pharma criminals!
Nuremberg Code and RICO laws apply now! The DOJ better wake the Fk Up and get busy!