White Coat Waste Project, the group that exposed the involvement of United States grant-approved projects in horrific experiments on beagles last month, has claimed to have uncovered more evidence of the involvement of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance in previously unreported bat coronavirus research.
They have accessed emails between EcoHealth and federal funding agencies that appear to show that viral samples bats infected with a coronavirus, Banal-52, with a 96.8% match to the Sars-CoV-2 genome, were taken from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2017 and 2019.
While the initial discovery of Banal-52 seemed to bolster a natural origin, perhaps in Laos rather than China, the fact that the infected samples were brought to Wuhan where the first outbreaks are claimed officially to have taken place may equally point to a laboratory leak.
Determining all of this is made more difficult, and perhaps impossible, due to the confirmed fact that samples held on the Wuhan database were removed in September 2019. Viscount Ridley, the author of a book which examines the various theories around the origins of Covi-19 told the Telegraph:
Other scientists have suggested that the transportation of the bat samples from Laos raises the possibility that either a field worker collecting the samples may have become infected, or that the transmission occurred in Wuhan during experimentation on gain of function on the bat samples from Laos rather than the infected bats found in China.
The leaked emails published by Drastic earlier in the year show that funding proposals submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were specifically linked to gain of function research into bat coronaviruses that would make them easier to introduce into humans. That is not proof that there was any intent on the part of those involved to actually do so, but certainly raises the possibility that such a transmission may have taken place accidentally.
White Coat Waste have also hosted a response from Dr. Steven Quay to the piece in Science which we referred to on Saturday which claimed to add weight to both the natural origin theory and that the first identifiable cases date to no earlier than December 2019, rather than the “no later than November 2019” favoured by the American intelligence community, and a considerable body of scientific researchers.
Quay testified before the US House Sub Committee on Covid-19 in June. In that testimony he presented what he believes is evidence of a “lab acquired infection.” There is little point in speculating as to how that then came to be transmitted into the general population but the possibility of an accidental leak from a laboratory in which gain of function research is strongly believed to have been conducted can certainly not be dismissed.
Quay’s questioning of the Worobley paper in Science is based on evidence that three of the first four people reported to have Covid-19 had no connection to the Wuhan market. Indeed, Quay claims that Worobley’s own earlier papers pointed to an earlier date (October – November 2019) and that the Wuhan food market acted as a sort of “super spreader” rather than it being the site of the original source of infection.
Quay also refers to a Chinese research paper, which he claims have never been “modified or retracted”, that identified the earliest infections as September 28, 2019. One of Quay’s conclusions is, as others have pointed out, that the “uncritical media response” to the Science piece suggests nothing more than “a desire to close the debate on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and to undermine the extensive evidence which is most consistent with a non-spillover event as the origin.”
That bears repeating, as the very core of all scientific investigation – especially when related to such a serious history altering event – is to consider all plausible theories. Because as things stand, that is all any theory is. A theory. Not an established irrefutable fact.
It may turn out that there was a natural origin for Covid-19. It may turn out to have been a laboratory leak of a coronavirus originally found in bats. It may even have entered the human population through ethically questionable experimentation, even if that experimentation did not have a malign purpose.