Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 5 -- CNN Makes Some News

I've been posting on the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis since March 2021. If interested, you can click on the links for those blog posts (Part 1,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). 

Recently, CNN came out with some news that Joe Biden's administration shut down (the administration argues the work was completed) a State Department effort that was started under the President Trump administration to look into that hypothesis. 

CNN (May 26) reports:

But the inquiry quickly became mired in internal discord amid concerns that it was part of a broader politicized effort by the Trump administration to blame China and cherry-pick facts to prove a theory.

. . . The decision to terminate the inquiry, which was run primarily out of the State Department's arms control and verification bureau, was made after Biden officials were briefed on the team's draft findings in February and March of this year, a State Department spokesperson said. Questions were raised about the legitimacy of the findings and the project was deemed to be an ineffective use of resources, explained a source familiar with the decision.

Okay, here's a nice summary of the above: both President Biden's team and those at the State Department during the Trump Administration discounted this hypothesis, because of President Trump's position on the topic; therefore, causing harm due to time delays on if this is the reason for the pandemic.

Below is a likely reason for why CNN dug deeper into what Washington DC's efforts were on the lab leak hypothesis.

. . . One US intelligence report, which CNN and the Wall Street Journal recently reported on, found that several researchers at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized, a new detail which has fueled the continued debate about the virus's origin. The exact nature of their symptoms remain unclear.

CNN (May 26) had another article up that same day the looked into the United States' potential role should this lab leak become fact.

The US had actually provided some funding for the study of coronaviruses and their transmission through bats, which had made it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

On Capitol Hill Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it would have been a "dereliction of duty" not to fund earlier coronavirus research in bats in China.

"You don't want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species," Fauci said, adding the US had to go "where the action is."

I've read tweets, articles and comments saying that promoting the lab leak hypothesis is racist. Well, if the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be true, it isn't all on China. Our own US government was involved and should share part of the blame. 

The fact that Dr. Fauci is now more open to the lab leak hypothesis isn't sitting well with the Chinese. CNN (May 26) reports that China is saying the following:

"US elites degenerate further in morality, and Fauci is one of them," was the headline of a blistering opinion piece penned by Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times this week.

In the article Hu accused the top US infectious disease expert of "fanning a huge lie against China" by hyping the theory that the coronavirus was leaked from a Wuhan lab. Another article in the Global Times declared that Fauci had "betrayed Chinese scientists."

The Telegraph via Yahoo (May 27) reports on how this hypothesis started to gain acceptance and a nice timeline. 

But first there is a clue on why this could be a lab leak.

Geneticists who claimed they had found evidence of man-made inserts in the virus were shunned, and journals refused to publish their work.

Wait, geneticists stated they found evidence of a man-made insert? Now this isn't the first time I've heard this. Chris Martenson has been making this argument since May 2020.

Beyond just the WSJ report about Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology getting ill, I suspect that the below also helped get the press interested in the topic.

In a letter to the journal Science earlier this month, 18 of the world's top epidemiologists and geneticists from institutions including Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford called for an independent inquiry.

Crucially, one of the authors was Prof Ralph Baric, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has worked with Shi Zheng-li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, enhancing bat viruses so they can infect humans.

The article then has a nice time line of events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Increasingly, some scientists now believe lab escape may actually be a simpler solution than the virus jumping from a bat, particularly as the infected bat population – or intermediary host – have never been found despite huge efforts.

2008: ability to switch the receptor binding domains for bat and human Sars viruses (not going to say I know what that means).

2010: gain of function research commences on how Sars could impact humans.

2016: a virus is created that targeted the human upper respiratory tract

2018 / 2019: research into humanized mice.

Then here's the kicker:

Shortly before the first cases of coronavirus were reported, Dr Daszak gave an interview, saying the work had been going on for six or seven years, and warning that they had created "untreatable" Sars viruses which could infect humanised mice.

"You can't vaccinate against them," he said. "So these are a clear and present danger."

As a reminder, Dr. Daszak was on the WHO team that went to China to research the origins of the virus and also worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He's saying that they were working on viruses that you couldn't develop a vaccine against. Wait, what? Either that was hyperbole and we were able to come up with vaccines against COVID-19 or there are more deadly viruses in that laboratory.